Ideas About Technology
Tool use remained relatively unchanged for most of early human history, but approximately 50,000 years ago, a complex set of behaviors and tool use emerged, believed by many archaeologists to be connected to the emergence of fully-modern language. My last contention is that thinking about scale offers a way of reinvigorating the history, sociology and even philosophy of technology in ways that also directly invite the work of historians of science. Historians of science have paid attention to many things which scale , although it is telling that we do not have a word for the general category, suggesting that there is an opening for more general and deeper analysis. Likewise, historians of technology have gravitated to descriptions of scale – think for example of accounts of global systems, or the Tensions of Europe project , or studies of nanotechnology – without explicitly and comparatively examining a key term. Technology, the application of scientific knowledge to the practical a