Is there any invention in history more important than pickled food?

Agriculture.

Not inventions.

Military tactics could only be seen as advantagous to humankind if you think they benefit from survival of the fittest.
I respect that opinion.

Best post.
Look at civilizations that haven't picked it up, yet. They are definitely disadvantaged.

But imo the most influential invention is language. It's what seperates us from animals and is an incredibly efficient way to transmit and preserve Information.

But my pov might be a little biased because I study linguistics.

>the ability to create fire is not an invention

>Fire
>Not an invention

Ok how about the ability and tools to make fire you pedantic faggot.

It isn't because fire occurs naturally. You don't create something new - you just replicate what's already there.

spear

That is an invention.
But by creating the fire drill you don't invent fire - you just invent a way to produce it.

>language
>an invention
>I study linguistics
...

I guess the lightbuld wasn't an invention because photons already existed?

>pedantic faggot

Pretty spot on.

You know exactly what was inferred by the phrase 'creation of fire' but you just want to split hairs and sit back smuggly congratulating yourself

You got me.

Alright, then let me specify.
The systematic use your vocal cords to transmit Information is the biggest invention.
The only aspect of language that occurs naturally is the ability to create sounds via vocal cords. The system to use this ability for expressing information came from human creativity and therefore it's an invention.

The lightbulb was an invention.
It allowed the conversion of electrons into photons.
I think it was an important invention but not the most important.

But that's wrong, dude.

Nobody knows exactly how language first developed, so we're both talking a little bit out of our asses here, but it MOST LIKELY came about gradually, with our ears, brains, and larynxes all developing together, and our capacity for symbolic language developing with them. It's not like J. Random Hominin woke up one morning with a fully-formed voice box and realized, "Holy shit, I can say stuff."

Again, nobody knows for sure, but it's very unlikely it was a conscious process -- more of an evolutionary development, really. I think it's a big stretch to call it an invention.

>but it MOST LIKELY came about gradually
And by that you mean over several generations?
If yes, how could language even develop in the first place? Those pre-humans would have no need to use the same 'words' like the last generation did.

I mean there are certain apes and other mammals who use specific cries to indicate certain predators - so you could say that the most basic vocabulary develops naturally depending on their environment.
But the combination of vocabular to express more complex things must be a concious process e.g. cry for predator + water or mountain (so a distinguishable geographical Item) to indicate the direction of the danger.
This combination of concepts in the mind is definitely a concious process - the spread of language then might be due to social dynamics and evolution (as it provided an advantage in survival).

And also: I guess if you think this through till the end it depends if you believe in free will or not.

No, I mean over the course of hundreds of thousands or millions of years.

Great apes & other animals vocalize and use gestures to communicate. The jury's out on whether any of them are capable of anything that could reasonably be called language, or even proto-language, or whether they're just instinctive cries -- after all, for a long time we thought that tool use, self-awareness, and culture were exclusive to humans, but it turns out they're indisputably present in certain other great apes, so primatologists and linguists are understandably leery of making definitive statements about their capacity for language. It doesn't help that there are many different competing definitions of "language."

Anyway, if you look at the fossil record, you can trace the development of the hyoid bone, the cervical vertebrae, the ear canal, in tandem with our expanding cranial capacity, all clearly growing more sophisticated, more suited to verbal communication, from our very distant ancestors through Homo erectus, H. ergaster, H. heidelbergensis, to Neanderthals and H. sapiens. At each step the skeletal structure suggests a body more able to produce something we'd recognize as speech, something less like the cries of chimps etc, and all the while their material culture became more complex. It all strongly suggests that there was no "eureka!" moment, no line you can draw and say "this is when humans developed language", and it was a biological, evolutionary process every bit as much as a cultural one.

>It allowed the conversion of electrons into photons.

Is this what you think a lightbulb does?

>Anyway, if you look at the fossil record
This only proves that these apes were using language and that it helped them survive.

>It all strongly suggests that there was no "eureka!" moment
Where exactly does this rule out the possibilty of a first complex thought expressed by a proto-language or even just a combination of two distinct animal cries?

As I understand you you suggest that language would have come about eventually - not depending on individuals. That if the ape who could use his vocal cords to express a certain complex thought had been eaten then maybe a few generations after another would have done it in his place.
I just don't see that. Why would evolution take the same path twice? If it didn't work out the first time wouldn't that mean it is of no use and the mutation, whatever it was that allowed the ape to use this protolanguage, would have died out?

>and it was a biological, evolutionary process every bit as much as a cultural one
I agree that this is true for the development and spread of language - but I definitely think it all started with a creative moment, an invention.

>That if the ape who could use his vocal cords to express a certain complex thought had been eaten then maybe a few generations after another would have done it in his place.
Yes, that's how evolution works. You know Darwin's famous finches? With the highly-adapted beaks? It's not like one single ancestor bird was born with a weird beak and that spread over many generations til the whole population was like that, genetics doesn't work that way. Rather, lots of finches were born, some with beaks that were slightly more suited to their environments, some with beaks that were slightly less so, and the ones with more suitable beaks were *very slightly* more likely to survive and breed, and over the course of *millions of years* they predominated.

That's how it would've been with our ancestors -- that's just how evolution works. There was no one ape who first expressed complex thought with his vocal cords. There wasn't even any one GENERATION of apes who first expressed complex thought etc etc. The difference between one generation of apes and another generation 100, 200 years down the line would have been miniscule.

On an evolutionary timescale -- that means hundreds of thousands of years ... really, millions -- apes that were a LITTLE bit smarter than their parents, a little bit more able to think complex thoughts, a little bit more able to express them (vocally and through gestures) survived SLIGHTLY more often. And so language developed. It's not like hominins developed the ability to think complex thoughts and then evolution suddenly scrambled for a way they could express them. Complex thought AND the capacity to express it developed TOGETHER (along with bipedalism and tool use), the product of literally billions of mutations, each one random and independent from all the others, but which together were selected for and produced a sentient creature capable of language.

Please stop repeating Dawkins-tier pre-1970s evolutionary dogma.

Gradualism is dead and buried and there was never and serious evidence for it. Evolution occurs in quick bursts from stable equilibrium to stable equilibrium.

t. biologist

*never any serious evidence for it

>t. biologist
You're an undergrad, right?

Punctuated equilibrium isn't incompatible with gradualism, and gradualism is by no means "dead." The former misconception, in particular, is carried by people who're new to the field -- stereotypically, anyway.

Regardless, a debate on punctuated equilibrium vs. gradualism isn't even *relevant* here -- it has nothing to do with the description I posted, which is entirely compatible with either (or both!) and which is an accurate description of the evolutionary process, the fossil record and the timescale within which the development occurred.

t. archaeologist

Body pillows.

>Is there any invention in history more important than pickled food?
the invention of glass
the invention of jars
the invention of the liquid used for pickling.