Robin Derricourt's "Five Innovations That Changed Human History"

Robin Derricourt is an honorary professor of history at the University of New South Wales and a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His books in archaeology and history include Inventing Africa, Antiquity Imagined, Creating God: The Birth and Growth of Major Religions, and Unearthing Childhood: Young Lives in Prehistory, which won the 2019 PROSE Award in Ancient History and Archaeology.

Derricourt applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Five Innovations That Changed Human History: Transitions and Impacts, and reported the following:

The reader of page 99 will encounter there a key stage of a major development in human history. That is the point at which, five millennia ago in the urban civilisation of ancient Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq), symbols used to show objects were developed into symbols to represent sounds – the invention of writing!

So page 99 gives us an image of revolutionary innovation, an excellent example of what I engage with in this book. My goal there was to examine some major transitions in human culture, drawing on archaeology and history to consider what were their impacts, and exploring how many changes can be brought about by one single discovery or invention.

Writing developed from geometric patterns to mark ownership or show numbers in a traded agreement, to pictographic symbols which represented sounds to those trained in reading them. An origin in economic arrangements would lead to writing used for administrative, legal and military roles, religious rituals, political propaganda, and the transition of literature from an oral to a written form, used in the training of a literate elite.

Writing is one of five major introductions in human history I examine in the book: the taming and control of fire, the domestication of the horse (and its later association with the wheeled vehicle), the invention of writing in early civilisations, the creation of the printing press and the printed book, and the revolution of wireless communication with the harnessing of radio waves.

I also use these to raise some broader questions of what we mean by progress and innovation. Until the 18th or 19th century in much of the world innovation was regarded with suspicion by religious and political authorities. Are we now confident that change always beings us benefits? Are we dominated by a “presentist” perspective than biases our understanding of the past and our expectations of the future? Studying the deep past can illuminate our present – and our future.

Visit Robin Derricourt's website.

The Page 99 Test: Creating God.

--Marshal Zeringue