The Stone Age: How Technology Has Changed Our Society

“… and yet a true creator is necessity, which is the mother of invention.” (Plato 390c). It’s this ‘need’ that fueled are inventions and innovations to reduce the difficulty of all those scenarios deemed impossible. Over the centuries, mankind has progressed by leaps and bound. Starting from being cavemen who hunted animals by sticks and stones to survive, mankind is now able to live luxurious life with well-built homes, stable food and water supply and efficient communication and travel methods. Just picturing the Stone Age and our current lives side by side will make us realize how technology has changed our society. It has changed how we produce our food, communicate with others and how we travel.
The foundation of our modern civilization

that we live in and know of, began in the fertile crescents in eastern Mediterranean in 10,000 BC. It is here, where mankind first started planting seeds instead of eating them. This major turn in the history of mankind resulted in people giving up their traditional hunter lifestyle and opted a lifestyle of permanent settlements and reliable food supply through the crops. This marked the beginning of Neolithic Revolution. So it can be easily said that farming sowed the seeds of permanent settlements, the establishment of social classes, and the eventual rise of civilizations. Because crops and animals could now be farmed to meet demand, over the centuries these settlements grew into civilizations which grew into cities leading to empires and then countries, the global population rocketed from some five million people in 10,000 BC to around seven and a half billion in present times.

It is this technology, more precisely new ideas, small innovation and new methods through the period of time that has so far helped us feed this massive population. This meant that old farming methods were replaced as soon as a new technique or instrument came to make farming more efficient. For example the old farming methods included working on fields using hands or with animal drawn equipment. This meant that farms were smaller because farmers could work so much land. Moreover, these old farming methods meant that the crop is still high at risk of getting damaged from a disease, face some weather related mishap or the soil isn’t nutrient enough to support a good yield of the crop. Technology have brought in improvements that have made a large impact on the way and amount farmers are able to farm. One of them is the introduction of farm machinery such as tractor, harvester and other motorized equipment that allowed farmers to work on far greater land in smaller amount of time with less labor and yet produce far greater yield. One of the major advancement made in agriculture is through seed technology. New seed technology introduced farmers to genetically modified seeds that are able to withstand harsh weather which means that even in

bad weather conditions farmers are able to harvest the crop and provide food to the market. These genetically modified seed are able to adapt to different conditions helping farmers to add diversity in their produce. Moreover pesticides and fertilizers help farmers to fend off pests and regain nutritional value of the soil leading to lower crop losses and better yield. Lastly all this technology has even ensured that farm animals are raised in scientifically proven conditions and are fed proper diet so they could provide better quality meat or more amount of milk and eggs. In short this is how technology over time has effected and improved our food supply to ensure that our ever growing society is fed.
Mankind was, is and always will be in need of communicating, sending messages, sharing information and providing alerts. It started from Stone Age when people started babbling a more complex sound than other animals to communicate and indicate what they mean to say. Over the period this communication introduced pictorial representation or also known as cave painting on cave walls for means of a more permanent indication system which was for communication, religious or ceremonious purposes. Moving forward a couple of centuries, these communication methods were perfected by mankind. The spark in this journey to perfection was the work of “Wizard of Menlo Park”, Thomas Edison, who laid down the first ever electrical grid system. This grid grew exponentially over the entire globe in just a few 100 years and it not only served as an inspiration or a foundation to modern communication but also was crucial to running the devices that made it possible for us to stand where we are. The printing press was the first ever communication system, delivering news and publishing information to the masses. But this system was still just as fast as the speed they were carried on and was still restricted in terms of distance. The first ever electrical telegraph brought us into the realm of our modern communication mediums. The telegraph's long-distance application with the introduction to speed of light marked the beginning of a new era of communication, in which information can travel faster than any human or by any means of conveyance. Down the road of inventions this led to the creation the World Wide Web we know today. The World Wide Web, or in short WWW has allowed us to communicate anywhere in the world within seconds. It is this same society that was babbling limited idea that has now progressed to communicating much more than just words to anywhere around the globe at the speed of limit. This modern technology has truly showed its capacity in way it has connected us. Before all this, our world comprised of thousands of civilizations but now it has bind us together in what we know today as a global village, where there are no racial, cultural, religious or physical boundaries from stopping an idea, information or news to travel to the opposite end of the world.
The society, or more precisely the global society we know, couldn’t have been possible without the ability of mankind to achieve great feats in the field of transport. The need to move from one place to another have been of equal significance as the need to communicate or grow our own food. The beginning of the transportation on land was from the first tracks ever made by humans just by passing a specific route to carry goods. On water, boats were introduced to help in fishing. With growth of trade and domestication of animals to help with trade, these tracks become more obvious. The transportation technology was significantly boosted during the industrial revolution. It was during the industrial revolution. In which the cars, first steam and then later diesel powered mechanized boats and much of modern rail transport system appeared. As time passed, mankind perfected air flights and even made successful space flights. Advances in transport technology have made huge impact on our society. It has made it possible to decrease travel time while increasing the ability to travel farther, explore more territory and move much more and much larger loads.
Indeed technology has shaped our society to be much more advanced but it has come at a price. The new innovations brought its own set of problem. Lives became much easier due to stable food supply, efficient transport and fast communication and these in turn acted as catalyst in an exponential population growth. The world population is expected to grow up to nine billion people by 2050. This massive increase of people means there is an increased strain on our finite resources. This world’s energy mainly runs on fossil fuels, a finite resource, which will not be able to outlast the ever growing demand. The use of fossil fuel itself is a problem because it causes air pollution. Other finite resources are the cultivatable land and fresh drinking water and increase in population will result in less land available for farming and more consumption of fresh water. Although modern communication has helped in forming a truly global village, it has also resulted in isolation, lack of social skills, lack of privacy, higher level of deceit, lack of social and sexual boundaries, obesity, depression, increased bullying and increased stress amongst individuals.

In conclusion, technology has impacted the society for both better and worse. But are the technological advancements made by human worth the trouble it’s causing? Is technology boon or bane for our society? And has our ingenuity come at an unpayable price? The answer to all this is simple. Yes, it has come at a price but it is the same ingenuity and need-driven innovation and invention, that has brought us from babbling cavemen to highly advanced human race will help us through this crises. Yes, these advancements were completely worth it because our world is now oozing full of advanced tech that’s experimenting on new substitute renewable energy resources, researching on modern farming techniques and working on ways to reduce air pollution.