Look into a chimp’s eyes and it’s almost like looking in a mirror. You can see the awareness, the almost-humanness, gazing right back at you. You might even get the uncanny feeling that, with a couple of evolutionary sidesteps, we’d be sitting in a very different spot on the food chain.

That feeling shouldn’t surprise you. After all, it was only about seven million years ago that our earliest hominin ancestors split off from tree-dwellers like chimps and bonobos. That’s practically yesterday in geologic time, and we still share a majority of our DNA with chimps. 

So what really gave us the edge to become human? To leave the chimps and bonobos behind and begin the long evolution toward the genus Homo, eventually becoming the last of our genus standing? It’s our technology—and we aren’t really human without it.

That’s a bold statement, I know. Especially when we’re used to thinking of technology as machines. But it’s so much more than that.

To help nail it down, let’s grab a definition from Tom Chatfield’s book Wise Animals. As Chatfield writes, technology “describes the entirety of the human-made artefacts that extend and amplify our grasp of the world.”

So when we’re talking about tech, we need to include things like chairs and clothes, along with basic tool use—sticks to dig with and sharp rocks to cut with.

But is it really the ability to use tools that sets us apart as humans? No. After all, chimps, crows, and plenty of other creatures have figured out rudimentary tool use as well. (And to rule out a few other factors, lots of species feel emotion, live in family groups, and have language. None of those things are unique to humans.)

The key here is that technology is not the same thing as tools. Technology involves taking basic tools and recombining them into new forms. Turning those sticks into arrows and slingshots. Smelting those rocks into bronze and iron. Constantly adapting and reinventing until precious metals go from coins to circuit boards.

So far, we are the only species on this planet to create and use technology in the true sense of the word. Indeed, it’s part of our DNA. We have been creatures of technology from our ancient hominin ancestors to today.

It’s not that our technology makes us human. It’s that our creation, diffusion, and adaptation of technology is our defining feature. And we are not human without it.

Photo by Jason Wo on Unsplash