What do you consider the most important invention of all time?

[MyWarmOchreHare]

Have been pondering this and wondered what others thought. I know many stand on the shoulders of others, but what do people think?

The internet? Radio or TV? Cars, planes, steam engines? The flushing toilet? Clocks or watches? Wheels? Washing machines? Ships? Paper? Mobile phones? I keep coming back to the wrist watch.

Wasn’t it train travel that brought about standardization of time for timetable purposes

Its interesting how things change all of a sudden because I'm 41 and have never really needed to use a watch. And just as I might have been getting to an age where a watch might have been handy that's when mobile phones came in and we all used those. Although you talk about using a wrist watch to make sure your kids werent late for school whereas my mother just used the wall clocks for that. She never wore a watch at home. Today I do the same I just look at a wall clock to check the time for leaving the house.

Is it? This is from Wikipedia but that's not where I first came across this. I was very surprised indeed which is why I remembered it.

Pre-modern times
Certain ancient human populations were quite tall, even surpassing the average height of the tallest of modern countries. For instance, certain hunter-gatherer populations living in Europe during the Paleolithic Era and India during the Mesolithic Period averaged heights of around 183 cm (6 ft 0 in) for males, and 172 cm (5 ft 8 in) for females.[63]
Human height worldwide sharply declined with the advent of the Neolithic Revolution, likely due to significantly less protein consumption by agriculturalists as compared with hunter-gatherers.

Just googled it and yes train travel standardised time, maybe that's what the other poster was trying to say when they said wrist watches standardised time- the watches helped to make train travel safer.

I'm more than 20 years older than you and I would hate not having a watch. When I was a little girl getting a watch was a sign that a child was old enough to be trusted to look after it, tell the time and (probably) go about independently without adult supervision. Primary age back then.

We no longer have any wall clocks, but we do have the clock on the cooker. I don't want to have to keep checking my phone to see the time. My husband has a Garmin which records all sorts of running data which he uploads to Strava.

Humans have gradually increased in height we are not shorter now than say 10,000 years ago. When agriculture was first introduced it may have shortened height temporarily due to the change in lifestyle and diet initially but that soon corrected itself. We have greater choice of food and most importantly we havent spent our lives constantly trying to find food ourselves which has allowed us to live as we have and advance as we have.

What?! Confused as to what this means.

I am not an expert in this area, but I'm not so sure about this either. Agriculture made it possible to feed far more people reasonably reliably (although famine then becomes a risk if there's a bad harvest, poor growing conditions etc and people have become totally dependent on one crop). The human population soared once we started farming and that meant a lot of people had to work very hard indeed to grow crops and tend animals to support this huge population. They may have had time to ponder things while working but the hunter gatherers could do that while wandering about looking for food and sitting round the fire in the hours of darkness. They were certainly studying the night sky and beginning to think about what we now call astronomy. There are quite a few ancient monuments which seem to be linked to the phases of the moon and the solar calendar. Here's one, dating from around 10000 years ago, believed to be the oldest calendar known.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Field

I’m older than you, have never worn a watch and am always on time. There were enough clocks around (from the one on the oven in the kitchen to the one outside of Marks and Spencer) to know the time without a watch.

Writing and the printing press for the dissemination of ideas and information are the crucial ones for me.

Some on this thread might want to check out the classic "Ascent of Man"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b00wms4m/the-ascent-of-man

which along with James Burkes "Connections" and "The Day the Universe Changed" are among some of the finest TV ever made in Britain. Bronowski (buried in Highgate cemetery in a nod to a recent thread) explains how agriculture arose and it's implications on how humans lived as part of the story.

You'll have to scour for DVDs of the latter two. However if you have kids of a pestering question age who can sit through 50 minute chunks of whistle stop history and technology you will thank me. "Connections" in particular (1978) pretty much predicted 2025 without the hysteria some commentators required.

It is interesting to try and picture how we might have developed if we were always hunting for food. How would society and life be different today. Would we have achieved everything we have. Would it have delayed progress or would everyone have been happier without progress anyway. But i guess with the population being as big as it is now would gathering our own food have kept working or would something have inevitably changed anyway.

I don't think it's as simple as that. Studies of immigrant communities show that when they move from one culture to another and change their eating habits it can have a marked effect on health in various ways and children growing up in a culture where they eat a lot more protein than their parents would have done back home are likely to be taller than their parents. It's only three or four generations ago (my grandparents' time) that the ruling class in the UK were aghast to discover how small and malnourished many working class men were - not fit enough to be conscripted into the military. Even now the diets of the poor are not good - look at the epidemic of obesity, type 2 diabetes starting to be seen in children (unknown until recently) and the recent increase, still not really understood, in bowel cancer in younger people.

Plenty of civilisations prospered without the wheel. To make use of the wheel you need some other things too - mainly a substantial beast of burden and roads or plains/steppes. Without anything to pull the cart and no suitable land to traverse, shipping by water is much more efficient.

You see, I think we are all still hunting for food and shelter, it's just that it takes the form of working long hours to earn the money needed to pay for the essentials of life. But that's probably enough pontificating for now!

Yes there is a big difference between the diets of the poor and wealthy and of course the health of developed countries compared to developing countries. I don't know what the answer is on how to solve the problems.

Thanks, I should do this. I think I have seen Ascent of Man, but not recently. There's a promising new series on the BBC at the moment - Human. First episode wasn't bad, although a bit mannered in its presentation.

Yes I need to get going instead of trying to picture humans today gathering and hunting food 😂

Good grief you’re all way off by thousands of years. It’s things like

writing
the plough
iron

ian Mortimer wrote a vv enjoyable book called centuries of change about this.

The problem is if you stay still and farm, you are then at risk of people who don't, but simply turn up and nick what you have grown. With (or initially without) your consent.(we've all seen "The Magnificent Seven").

Of course eventually some genuis(es) suggest the marauding baddies protect the farmers in return for food ... and the seeds of civilisation - city living - are sown.

I'm old enough to have watched it when it was first broadcast.

If you watched the Ascent of Man you will be aware of how pisspoor modern BBC documentaries are. 15 minutes of facts breathlessly squeezed into a full hour. Ideally with some folksy stories about the scientists and their cats.

You can't get rid of cats without being overrun by rats.

Wine, tea and HRT. 'Nuff said.

Agree totally, although Profs Brian Cox and Jim al Khalili both do good ones.

Yes - civilisation brought hierarchies and financial oppression and things like slavery and capitalism, and ultimately is responsible for all the damage to the planet.

However I think women were/are probably also oppressed in hunter-gatherer societies as well, though maybe it varies. I think there have been quite a lot of studies of the Yanomami for example that reveal pretty vicious treatment of women, e.g. rape and wife-beating are common. (not saying modern/westernised societies are any better of course)