ABSTRACT
Now the development of human technology is very commonly presented as though it could be arrayed on a continuum from the earliest stone tools to modern machinery and electronics. It would appear that once a recognisably human level of competence had been achieved, all subsequent technological change – from Palaeolithic hunting and gathering to modern industry – could take place without any significant further change in the basic biological endowment of the species. Though technology had broken free from the bonds of genetic constraint, and could henceforth undergo unlimited development without entailing any enhancement of innate human capacities. All the necessary conditions seem to be present, in the technological domain, to support the analogy. Anthropologists often treat technology as an aspect of a cultural system that has a dynamic of its own, undergoing progressive development without entailing any further change in the basic biology of the species.
