Last week, I was able to hear a wonderful presentation by our friend, P.D. Lawton, on ‘High Speed Railways and Hieroglyphics’, where in the first part, she spoke about the future - the progress of the ‘African Integrated High Speed Railway Network’, and in the second part, she spoke about the past -
“how the old Welsh language of Coelbren perfectly translates hieroglyphics because it is the same language”!!!
And it reaffirms the idea, that if you want to see your future, you need to know your past!
And then I read a story from ‘The Civilizations of Africa’ by Christopher Ehret, a scholar and professor at UCLA, that:
“Around 2.6 million years ago, a development fundamental to the future course of hominin history took place – one species began deliberately to fashion tools out of stone. The earlier members of our human subfamily had been little different from the other great apes in their intelligence or skills. No doubt, like our nearest modern-day relatives, the chimpanzees, they picked up sticks and sometimes stones and used them to pry up or strike out at things. To that extent, the earliest hominins were tool users. But they were not tool makers.
The first toolmakers, of 2.6 million years ago, appear to have belonged to a hominin that, in terms of physical appearance, was just another Australopithecus species. But because the shift to tool-making was of such momentous importance, scholars use that event to mark the evolution of a new genus, Homo, out of the Australopithecine genus, and so they call the first tool making hominin, Homo habilis ...
Then around 1.6 million years ago, another breakthrough took place. The first making of an entirely new type of tool, to which we give the misleading name ‘hand ax’, appears in the archeological record of that time in eastern Africa. The hand ax, actually an all-purpose instrument for scraping, digging, and cutting, was the first hominin tool made to a regular preset pattern that must already have been present in the mind of its maker.”
I really like this story, because it seems to say that the history of man, and the thing that separates us from the other beasts, begins first with the use of tools, and then decisively with the invention of tools – the creation of a tool ‘that must already have been present in the mind of its maker’.
Now, some people have claimed that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’, but … the necessity for the invention of that needed tool had been there for a million years, but it did not become an invention until it was ‘present in the mind of its maker’ before they made that tool, when they gave their idea a purpose, and that’s when we became truly human!!!
And so, I think that we should say that ‘intention is the mother of invention’ !!!
In order for a person, and a nation, to successfully become independent, that person or nation, must master that crucial ability of ALL humans to make new tools - to make new ideas. And, to properly understand this principle as it applies to human economics, we should please read “Return to the Machine-Tool Principle” [EIR, vol. 24, no. 7, 1997] by another friend, Lyndon LaRouche.
And then, I read a bit further from ‘The Civilizations of Africa’, that:
“Sometime before 1.6 million years ago, another first in hominin history was recorded – for the first time, one of the hominin species migrated out of Africa and made itself at home across southern Asia.”
So it seems that around the same time as man invented his first tool, he also made his first voyage out of Africa!
Now, that makes total sense to me. I mean, if you had just invented something, wouldn’t you want to go and tell everyone about it!!!