One of the most puzzling aspects of prehistory is in accounting for why civilisation only occurs very recently, essentially within the last 8000 years, when modern humans have been around for much longer. Archaeologists like Colin Renfrew place modern humans in Europe as early as 40,000 years ago and in other parts of the world even earlier.
How can we account for this period of over 30,000 years when our forefathers seemingly made little strides in technological and societal development compared with the more monumental changes that have occurred relatively recently such as the Agrarian Revolution and the development of metallurgy. How can we understand what Renfrew terms the 'sapient paradox', the transition to a modern style of life?
Well, perhaps it is precisely because technology develops through little strides that this seeming discrepancy maybe accounted for. Technology develops in a chaotic manner, with small events or perturbations within a dynamical system building over time to produce much greater effects. Kurzweil often observes that the exponential nature of technological development means that while little change may at first be observed in such a system, eventually small alterations will lead to great paradigm shifts where innovation builds on past innovation and where the pace of acceleration is itself accelerating vis a vis the law of accelerating returns.
It may have taken many years or even centuries for new ideas and innovations to filter through Palaeolithic society, however because today's society is built upon those innovations and many innovations that came after them, the entire system and mechanism for communicating that information has evolved too and in fact that process of evolution has itself been evolving or accelerating. Indeed it now takes mere minutes or seconds for a new idea or innovation to spread globally.
As Kurzweil has noted: 'A primary reason that evolution - of life-forms or of technology - speeds up is that it builds on its own increasing order, with ever more sophisticated means of recording and manipulating information. Innovations created by evolution encourage and enable faster evolution'.
The vast time period of the Palaeolithic (the early Stone Age), in contrast with the later and quicker Neolithic and later metallic ages, would seem to fit within this picture. As the complexity of technology increases, the gaps between paradigm shifts decreases. While the leap from flint napping to producing copper took many tens of thousands of years, the leap from producing copper to smelting bronze was measurably shorter, just a few thousand years.
In the light of exponential growth it is unsurprising to find comparatively small changes across large spaces of time and large changes across small periods of time. If technology does indeed develop through paradigms of exponential growth we should expect the fossil record to bare testimony to relatively small technological changes for most of modern man's existence and some very profound changes occurring very quickly and latterly over a small fraction of that time.
From the almost static seeming pace of the Palaeolithic welcome to the hyperspeed of the twenty-first century!
Source: http://www.kurzweilai.net/mindx/show_thread.php?rootID=170109#id170109 (see particularly sub-thread 'Order out of Chaos: Innovation and the Environment'
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