In his latest book How To Invent Everything, Canadian computer scientist and comic writer RYAN NORTH takes a look at the 200,000 years of inventions and discoveries that have helped to shape our society and humanity itself. He talks to HELEN GLENNY
Your book appears to be a repair guide for a time machine?
Yes. But, as the time traveller finds out, time machines are really complicated, with no user-serviceable parts. If you’re stuck in the past and your time machine’s broken, you’re not going to fix it. Instead, we’ll help you bring the future back by explaining how to reinvent civilisation from scratch.
Let’s say we travelled back to between 200,000 BC and 50,000 BC. Why’s that such a key time period?
Around 200,000 BC is when we start to see anatomically modern humans, whose bodies look like ours. Then around 50,000 BC we get behaviourally modern humans, who start behaving like us: they’ve started doing things like burying their dead, creating art and wearing jewellery.
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