At the official opening plenary session of Techonomy, Kevin Kelly--a co-founder
of Wired, and author of the
forthcoming book What Technology Wants--made what I considered a pretty profound remark. “The first animal we domesticated was humans,”
Kelly said. He went on to describe how we “physically changed ourselves through
agriculture, through cooking…we’re both masters of technology and also the
children of technology.”
Kelly sounded, in this statement, as though he’d read a book
that I recently recommended and blogged about, and whose author I interviewed
for BBC 2’s “The Culture Show”: Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. It’s hard to think of a better example than cooking if you want to show how human beings and technology are “co-produced,” which I take to be Kelly’s argument.
In Wrangham’s account, our ancestors discovered fire and
cooking at some hard-to-fix point in the past—but farther back than most scientists had previously assumed. At this point, the power of this innovation then dramatically
drove human evolution.
Cooking food was a game changer.
