The third course of the specialization CREATING INNOVATION will teach you what is at the core of all innovations that solve complex problems and how to foster methods to make big breakthroughs possible. It advances your knowledge of your own field by teaching you to look at it in new ways. CREATING INNOVATION is constructed in the following way: Week I. “What is Innovation?” – What lies at the core of all innovations. Week II. “The Evolution of Human Creativity” – How humans developed the ability to innovate and think creatively. Week III. “Innovation in a Complex Global Network” – How innovations emerge from human networks. Week IV. “Planning Innovation” – How organisations seek out and create the right conditions for new breakthroughs. Week V. “Market Innovation” – What makes innovations more likely to emerge in a market setting. Week VI. “Innovation in the Anthropocene” – How innovations are crucial to meet the problems of the 21st century.
Innovation and the Holocene
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Do curso por Macquarie University
Creating Innovation
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The Evolution of Human Creativity
In this module we will look at the main drivers of human innovation and how they have shaped the entirety of human society and history.
Conheça os instrutores
David BakerAssociate Lecturer
Big History Institute
David ChristianProfessor
Big History Institute
Shawn RossAssociate Professor
Big History Institute
The big question for this segment is why did innovation accelerate after
the end of the last Ice Age and what is new about agriculture?
[MUSIC]
The transformation from foragers to farmers,
the Neolithic Revolution was one of the two great transformations in human
society, alongside the Industrial Revolution.
Both revolutions ultimately brought dramatic changes to most peoples' lives.
14,000 years ago, there were about 5 to 10 million people in the world and
all of them were hunter-gatherers.
By 1800, world population had reached a billion people and
the vast majority of them were agriculturalists.
By 1960, there were about 3 billion people in the world,
and some 99,999 out of every 100,000 depended upon agriculture for
survival, even if many lived in industrial societies.
The amount of food and energy more broadly available to each person also increased.
It is worth acknowledging that the term Agricultural Revolution is,
however, something of an oversimplification.
Agriculture was independently invented many times
at many places around the world.
Also, the transition from foraging to farming took time,
with both conducted side-by-side for many thousands of years.
Finally, it is becoming clearer that no one purposefully invented agriculture, but
that it instead emerged unintentionally from intensification strategies
employed by various foraging societies around the world.
Agriculture is part of a story of accelerating innovation at the end of
the last Ice Age.
By that time, humans had almost certainly attained modern cognition.
That is, they were as intelligent as people today and
were capable of similar behaviors.
They had been faced by a difficult cold, dry Ice Age environment for nearly 100,000
years, and had developed a range of subsistence strategies through social or
collective learning.
Then, after the last glacial maximum ended some 18,000 years ago,
the climate began to warm.
It improved dramatically after about 12,000 years ago when the world entered
the current interglacial period known as the Holocene.
Applying and extending the hard-won knowledge of the Pleistocene to a more
amenable environment, people around the world intensified and
diversified their foraging practices.
As biomes became more productive,
people learned to extract more food from the same amount of territory.
An unintentional outcome of that intensification repeated many times around
the world was the advent of agriculture Agriculture is
more than just the cultivation of plants or the raising of animals.
Pre-agricultural societies manipulate their environments in profound ways,
such as burning large areas to foster the growth of desirable plants and animals.
They even manually reseed plants in, for example, Australia or the Middle East.
These activities are not, however,
considered agriculture because they did not involve plant domestication.
Domestication is defined by changes in plants and animals at the genetic level.
Domesticated plants are not simply cultivated, and
domesticated animals are not merely tame.
Their genes differ from their wild relatives.
They are adapted to thrive with human assistance and
most survive poorly without it.
At least in the beginning,
these genetic changes were not the result of intentional manipulation, but
rather the result of symbiosis between certain plants or animals and humans.
Indeed, association with domesticated species influenced human evolution and
changed our genetics.
Lactose tolerance, for example, is a mutation that became widespread on more
than one occasion in response to animal domestication.
Once plants and animals became domesticated, the amount of food that can
be extracted from the environment increases substantially.
In temperate areas, populations could increase by one or
two orders of magnitude even under the most primitive agricultural regimes.
Note, however, that the quality of life often
deteriorated under early agricultural systems, with a poorer and
less varied diet, less free time, and more disease.
The demographic advantage, however, was paramount and
agriculture spread as agriculturalists outreproduced or
displaced foragers, or foragers preemptively adopted agriculture.
If enough food can be extracted from a compact area,
people need no longer move around.
Sedentism allows larger families
since women no longer need to space child births widely to maintain mobility.
While sedentism emerged in some foraging societies like native Americans in
the Pacific Northwest, and agriculture emerged amongst mobile groups
as in Mesoamerica, agriculture allowed sedentism in more and more places.
Even with growing populations,
many early agricultural societies produced surpluses, supplies of food and
other goods beyond what was strictly needed to keep their populations alive.
These surpluses facilitated specialization as some people no longer needed
to farm but could spend their time doing other things,
like making stone tools or ceramics, exchanging these goods for food.
These specialists could become much better at what they did
than subsistence farmers who only engaged in such activities when time allowed.
Some even specialized in warfare, cult, administration, or
political leadership with far-reaching consequences.
When specialists could interact with one another in larger communities, and
as larger communities exchanged goods and
ideas with one another, collective learning accelerated dramatically.
Innovation is a social process, and
with more people involved, it progressed faster than it ever had before.
The Neolithic in Europe and
West Asia was, indeed, first identified by new stone tool technologies.
Ceramics, monumental architecture, metal work, new social organizations, and
innovations in religion all followed.
These developments led to the emergence of complex urbanized early agricultural
states in Mesopotamia, for
example, about 6 or 7,000 years after the invention of agriculture.
All those millennium might sound like a long time, but this rate of change is
astonishing compared to the previous 200,000 years, the time between
the evolution of anatomically modern humans and the invention of agriculture.
During which the complexity of society changed comparatively little.
Innovation accelerated at the end of the last Ice Age due to increased population,
sedentism, and specialization.
Which together led to much more rapid collective learning.
Although these phenomena occurred in non-agricultural societies,
agriculture proved to be a powerful new technology that facilitated them.
It allowed densely populated, sedentary,
complex societies to emerge in many places, not just
in exceptional environments where suitable resources were naturally abundant.
[MUSIC]
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