* From: Jim Devine isn't blamng the bow an example of technological determinism?
^^^ CB: I'd say so. On the other hand, the alternative theory - the origin of agriculture, which is to say a whole set of cultivation technology, farming science, etc. - also relies on some technological determinism at this level. Very sketchily, after 200,000 years of hunting and gathering,with very little surplus production, "somebody" decides do some planting to save up for hardtimes. We could speculate that it is some kind of environmental disaster for a particular group in Mesopotamia that causes a serious scarcity. People decide to start producing surpluses to save against some future disaster. Necessity is the mother of invention. The surplus production allows more "leisure" time for some to develop the science of cultivation. Somehow at some point some of these newly differentiated predominantly mental laborers decide to become the first ruling class...the rest is history, a history of class struggles. So, there's a technological prime mover in there.
