Our Technological History

How technology propelled us into the future.

The Road to Sapiens ended on the single most important technology in our history: fire, the first time any organism harnessed an energy source outside its own body. This page follows that thread forward, because the whole of human technological history can be read as one continuous story: the capture of ever-greater flows of external energy, put to work in service of a single ape’s survival and reproduction. From the campfire to the power grid, it is all the same move, scaled up. And as the Index warned, scaling it up has consequences, some of them only now coming due.

Life accelerates the dispersal of energy; a human accelerates it more than most animals; and a human civilisation, burning through the stored sunlight of hundreds of millions of years, accelerates it on a scale the planet has never seen.

I. Capturing External Energy

For two billion years, every living thing ran on internal energy alone, the calories it could process within its own body. Fire broke through the ceiling, letting our ancestors burn wood to do work their bodies could not. Everything since has been an extension of that break: finding new external energy sources and new ways to put them to work.

This reframes “technology” away from gadgets and toward energy capable of doing “work”. A stone blade lets you focus your body’s energy along an edge. A domesticated animal is a living engine converting grass you cannot eat into work and food you can use. A waterwheel captures the energy of a flowing river. A fossil fuel releases the stored sunlight of ancient organisms. A solar panel captures sunlight directly. Each is a way of commanding more energy than your own metabolism could supply, and the trajectory of human history is, in large part, the steepening curve of how much external energy each of us commands. Keep that curve in mind, because its shape (flat for a very long time, then suddenly near-vertical) is the shape of almost everything that now both sustains and threatens us.

II. Domestication: Engines of Flesh

The first great leap past fire was the domestication of other species, beginning around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, and it is best understood as the capture of biological energy.

We took wild plants and, over generations of selective breeding, manipulated their metabolisms to divert energy into the parts we could eat: the starches, sugars, and oils. The fruits and vegetables in a modern market are grotesque, energy-packed exaggerations of their wild ancestors, bred to pour their resources into feeding us. We did the same to animals, protecting them from predators and controlling their breeding so they grew faster, fattened more, and produced more milk, turning them into reliable, docile engines for converting grass and forage (inedible to us) into meat, milk, and blood (edible to us).

Some animals became engines in a more literal sense. A draught horse is a machine for turning fodder into mechanical work. As James Watt worked out at the dawn of the industrial age, a horse can sustain roughly 640 kilocalories of work per hour for a ten-hour day, which is the origin of “horsepower.” That output is more impressive than it sounds, because muscle is at best around 25 percent efficient at turning fuel into work, so to produce that work the horse burns several times that in food energy, on top of everything its body needs just to stay alive. For thousands of years, domesticated muscle (animal and human, including the muscle of the enslaved) was the main engine of civilisation beyond fire, wind and water.

Domestication transformed us in turn. The extra, reliable calories meant mothers could wean earlier and recover faster, and birth rates climbed; family sizes in early farming cultures grew by roughly two additional children per mother compared to foragers. We can still see the gradient today: a forager in a hunting-and-gathering society has fewer children than a woman in a farming society with its caloric surplus. More energy, more people.

III. The Mixed Blessing of Agriculture

It is worth pausing on the conventional story that agriculture was simply progress, because the evidence is genuinely mixed, and this is where the section’s subtitle (delusion and delayed consequences) starts to hurt.

Farming produced more food per acre and so could support far larger populations, which is why it spread and now feeds us all. But for many of the individuals living through the transition and after it, life arguably got worse, not better. Early farmers, compared to the foragers who preceded them, often show signs of poorer nutrition (a narrower diet built on a few staple crops), more disease, and more physical wear. Crowding people and their domesticated animals together created the conditions for epidemic disease: communicable illnesses that would have burned out quickly in sparse foraging bands became devastating plagues in dense farming towns. Most of the infectious diseases that have scourged humanity jumped to us from our domesticated animals and thrived in our crowded settlements. Agriculture also brought, for the first time, large storable surpluses, and with them concentrated wealth, entrenched hierarchy, and the stratification into rulers and ruled, owners and labourers, free and enslaved.

The point is not that agriculture was a mistake; it plainly enabled everything that followed, and there is no path back. The point is that a development can massively increase a species’ numbers and power while degrading the lives of many of the individuals within it, and while setting up problems that take millennia to surface. That pattern (a powerful short-term win carrying a long-delayed, often invisible cost) is the recurring shape of our technological history, and recognising it is part of seeing our trajectory clearly rather than as a triumphant march.

IV. The Collective Brain

Larger populations made us collectively smarter, but individually more dependent on the whole.

The anthropologist Joseph Henrich calls it the collective brain. The crucial insight is that human capability lives not mainly in individual genius but in the networked, accumulated knowledge of connected groups. No single person knows how to make a pencil from scratch, let alone a smartphone; the knowledge is distributed across thousands of people and inherited from thousands more. The more people who are connected and exchanging ideas, and the better they can store and transmit what they learn, the faster innovation compounds, because more minds are combining, refining, and building on each other’s contributions. Innovation is less a matter of lone brilliant inventors than of population size, connectivity, and the ability to pass knowledge on. This is why technological progress accelerated as populations grew and connected: not because individuals got cleverer, but because the collective brain got bigger and better networked. It also explains a sobering historical fact: isolated populations that lost connections, or fell below a critical size, have sometimes lost technologies, forgetting skills their ancestors held, because the collective brain shrank below what was needed to maintain them.

This connects straight back to Our Social History: language and cumulative culture are what make the collective brain possible, and the collective brain is what turns a large cooperative population into an engine of accelerating innovation. The story of technology is inseparable from the story of our sociality.

V. Harnessing the Elements

With surplus food freeing some people from food production, specialists could spend their lives on other problems, and the external-energy curve kept climbing. Over three thousand years ago, cultures learned to harness the wind to drive ships. Watermills appeared more than two thousand years ago, capturing a river’s flow to grind grain and lift water; windmills followed. Each invention expanded the external energy a society could command beyond its muscle and its fires.

Then, a few centuries ago, we found the motherlode. Fossil fuels (coal, then oil and gas) are the stored energy of uncountable ancient organisms, the collective metabolism of prehistoric life compressed and buried over hundreds of millions of years. Burning them releases all that ancient captured sunlight at once. Commercial coal, then oil drilling from the mid-1800s, gave us access to an energy supply of staggering density and scale, and the curve went nearly vertical. Today, fossil fuels alone supply on the order of 35,000 kilocalories of energy per day for every person on Earth, around 80 percent of our species’ external energy use, according to the figures in Herman Pontzer’s Burn. We had found a way to draw down hundreds of millions of years of stored sunlight in the span of a few generations.

VI. The Energy Economy, and the Nine-Ton Human

A wild mammal gets roughly 40 calories of food for every calorie it spends finding food. Hunter-gatherers do a bit worse, around 10 to 1. But the modern industrial food system, once you count the fossil fuel poured into machinery, fertiliser, processing, and transport, actually inverts this: we burn roughly 8 calories of fossil energy to put 1 calorie of food on the plate. We are, in energy terms, running agriculture at a loss that only made sense because the fossil fuel was so cheap and abundant. Our food system violates the basic ecological rule that you must not spend more energy getting food than the food contains, and it does so by quietly burning ancient sunlight to cover the difference.

Step back to the whole economy, and the picture is stranger still. The average person in an industrialised country commands external energy on the order of 210,000 kilocalories per day, the daily energy throughput of a nine-tonne mammal. Each such person uses more energy than dozens of hunter-gatherers combined. Globally, our species burns energy as though there were many times our actual number of people. We have, in effect, each become enormous, not in body but in the energy we command and disperse. For an animal whose internal metabolism runs on roughly 2,000 to 3,000 kilocalories a day, this is an almost incomprehensible amplification, and it is the entropy-accelerator idea made literal: we are dissipating energy at a rate utterly out of proportion to our bodies.

VII. The Delayed Consequences

The external-energy strategy that built civilisation is now generating costs on a timescale our short-term-tuned minds are poorly equipped to feel.

Climate: Burning hundreds of millions of years of stored carbon in a few generations returns that carbon to the atmosphere, and the planet is warming as a result. Pontzer’s book noted warming of around 0.8°C since the late 1800s; the figure has continued to climb since, and the broad scientific consensus is that continued large-scale fossil-fuel burning drives further warming with serious consequences. The precise magnitude of future warming depends on what we do next and carries genuine uncertainty, but the direction and the mechanism are well established. This is the ultimate delayed consequence: the bill for the energy bonanza, arriving slowly, displaced onto the future and onto people far from those who burned the most. Build up tension here, release it there.

Our own bodies: The same abundance turned inward. We evolved, as The Road to Sapiens described, for a world of energy scarcity and high physical activity. We then built a world of energy superabundance and minimal physical demand, and our ancient appetites and bodies are mismatched to it. The result is the global rise of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiometabolic disease, which now kill more people worldwide than violence. These are, in large part, diseases of the mismatch between the animal and the world it built. The detailed mechanisms and what to do about them belong to Nutrition, Movement, and Physical Health; the point here is that they are technological consequences, the predictable result of an energy-scarce animal succeeding wildly at capturing energy.

Our social and psychological world: Modernity also pulled us indoors, scattered our families, shrank our communities, and (as Our Social History explored) scaled our social machinery far past its design limits. Loneliness has become common enough to be treated as a health condition in its own right. And the stresses of the steep socioeconomic hierarchies that technology and surplus created (the anxiety about money, the felt sense of being left behind, the daily indignities of low status) make people genuinely ill: those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder suffer markedly worse health and shorter lives, by a margin larger than diet and exercise alone can explain. The technological world solved the problem of scarcity and created a suite of new problems of abundance, mismatch, and inequality.

VIII. Building a Better Zoo

The framing Pontzer offers for the way out is worth preserving because it avoids both despair and naive techno-optimism. We are, in effect, animals living in a zoo of our own making, an environment we designed, and like any zoo, it can be designed well or badly for its inhabitants. The diseases of modern life are not moral failings or inevitabilities; they are largely the predictable result of a poorly designed environment, and environments can be redesigned.

Making healthy, unprocessed food cheaper and more available and calorie-dense processed food less so. Building walkable, cycle-friendly cities that fold movement back into daily life, as places like Copenhagen have done. Taking the socioeconomic determinants of health seriously rather than treating health as purely a matter of personal choice, since the gradient of poverty and marginalisation shapes health more powerfully than most interventions. Designing our information environment so it does not relentlessly exploit our social instincts. The lesson, which runs into Part V, is that because so much of modern dysfunction is environmental, the most powerful interventions are environmental too: not just exhorting individuals to try harder against a hostile environment, but changing the environment. We built the zoo; we can build a better one. Instead of “productivity” and “convenience”, we should be looking at antifragility and quality of life.  

IX. What We Do Not Know

The long-term consequences of our newest technologies (digital, computational, and biological) are genuinely unknown because they are still unfolding and have no historical precedent. Whether our species can deliberately redesign its environment fast enough to manage the consequences of its own success is an open question we are living inside. The greatest uncertainty is the one we raised on the intro page: whether the steep curve of energy capture can be sustained or redirected, or whether, as the second law might suggest, the built-up tension finds its release regardless of our intentions. Nobody knows. We are running the experiment in real time.

X. The Takeaway

Human technological history is one long act of energy capture, from the first controlled fire to the global fossil-fuel economy, and its curve is flat for almost all of our existence and then suddenly, recently, near-vertical. Each step let us command more external energy than our bodies ever could, and each step let us grow more numerous and more powerful. We are, in pure energy terms, the most spectacular entropy accelerators the biosphere has produced, dispersing energy at a rate wildly out of proportion to our modest bodies.

There is no clear separation between our technology and our biology: the external engines, from fire to fossil fuels, are extensions of the same metabolic strategy that built the animal, and the diseases and disruptions of modern life are the friction between that ancient animal and the superabundant world its technology created. We are animals in a zoo of our own making, suffering largely from how badly the zoo is built, and the same capacity for cumulative innovation that built it badly could build it better. Finally, we need to stop listening to those championing the success of this system, when they are the ones who benefited the most from it. The “elites” cannot relate, and their gaslighting should be acknowledged as such. 

XI. Cross-Links

• The Origin of Sapiens for the section overview
• The Road to Sapiens for fire, the first external engine
• Our Social History for the collective brain and the social machinery
• The Alien’s Guide to the Human for the outside view
• The Sapiens Rabbit Hole for contested theories
• Resources for the reading list