A History of Our Future

Some 40,000–50,000 years ago, a group of Middle Eastern people developed a type of tool that seems to have precipitated a radical expansion of the human mind. Or to put it more cautiously, the tool alone may not have done this—the critical factor may have been a new way of thinking about tools. Or maybe even a new way of thinking in general. Whatever it was, these Stone Age, preagricultural people apparently touched off the first episode of rapid, large-scale social change in the history of our species. ¹