The Early Days of Tech

Microstory

Here is one of those microstories I write now and then. There is a story behind the microstory. I’m a pattern-oriented guy; I remember shapes and bits of repetition and feel these little pops of recognition when they show up again in some other part of my life. In this case, I remember being especially struck, as many people are, especially 13-year-old boys, by those Stone Age Venus statues, the most famous being the so-called Venus of Willendorf (see above). But there are many variants, all displaying the large-breasted, wide-hipped form.

This form lay somewhat dormant in the back of my mind until one day I got interested in palaeolithic hand axes, perhaps the greatest technological leap humans ever made.

And I began to think how similar the two forms seemed, set side by side. From there it wasn’t much of a jump to the idea that the hand axe had been invented accidentally by someone trying to carve the shape of his girlfriend out of stone. After all, many of the greatest inventions have come about by accident.

This clever idea gave me the first paragraph of the following story, but I left out the detail of the Venus shapes and hand-axe shapes because it seemed to lumber the story with more intricate detail than it could bear. The thrust of the story is to pursue the idea of technological advances through the ages. Maybe one day I will give Grn a story all to himself.

Now you know everything you need to know about how stories develop in my brain. No doubt many of you will find ChatGPT infinitely preferable.

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The Early Days of Tech

Grn was an artist not a scientific innovator, which is why it seemed implausible that he should invent the stone hand axe and change the course of human evolution. He remained unrecognized in his lifetime, and for hundreds of thousands of years. As more and more of us churned out hand axes, he was totally forgotten. Even today, he is forgotten.

We were not human yet, but we thought of ourselves as graceful, intelligent creatures, top of the food chain. We walked leaning forward, occasionally balancing on our front knuckles. We could climb trees and were deadly lovers. We had developed resourceful defensive tactics when needed. Some 47,822 years before, a man named Knk had worked out that if you strike a sabre-tooth tiger with a large rock, it will go away. He made signs and grunts to the rest of his band that they should try this method instead of, as was their habit, running away and letting the tiger have one of the old people. This caught on.

At first, many of us were dismayed at the blind enthusiasm of the herd for the new gadget (we thought of rocks as gadgets). For thousands of years, traditionalists persisted in running away from tigers. And especially early on, many people failed to pick up a big enough rock, and the tigers would devour them.

Then one of Knk's descendants, an ancient woman of twenty-two summers, mother of ten, of which two had survived but were eaten by the people in the other cave, made an important discovery. Her name is no longer remembered, and in any case all the women had the same name, Plp. (Little girls would be addressed affectionately as Plp-Plp or Plpita--we were only just discovering the use of vowels.) We will call her Plp, and it is remembered that she had large breasts and an enormous behind and delightfully thick beetling eyebrows like juniper thickets with darting grey-green eyes that reminded me of a trout.

In any case, Plp was naturally depressed after the last child left home to be eaten. She sat on a rock in front of the cave for days and nights, rain or shine, sighing and not eating and making such a mess with her excrements. At length, she invented suicide and made the first attempt. She picked up the rock she was sitting on and hit herself on the head. Our skulls were still awfully thick, there was nothing fragile and modern about our skulls. But the blow on her forehead gave her a new idea, a brilliant idea.

She picked up the rock and walked over to the other cave, found the man who had taken her last child, and dropped the rock on him. The rest of the band went over and brought the body back, and we ate it. Thus we discovered hunting. Hitherto we had only used the rocks on animals that came to us. Suddenly, we were able to forage afar. We began to roam about, killing anything we could drop a rock on. Many more children lived. We did not have to eat each other as often. It was a golden age.

We began to experiment with fire. A woman named Plp was the original pioneer. She had extremely large breasts, a capacious caboose (as we said in those days), big-boned, bristly eyebrows of the most entrancing shade of black, and furtive green-grey eyes (ah, she was lovely, and still could hang from a tree by her big toe). She was wandering outside the cave one day with a rock looking for something to kill when she was struck by lightning. Waking, she discovered her hair was on fire. She scampered back into the cave to show everyone. She was not the first person, nor the last, to give her life for science.