UNBOUND ─ How Eight Technologies Made Us Human, Transformed Society, and Brought Our World to the Brink

Human life has been repeatedly transformed by certain key technologies, each of which has triggered a profound metamorphosis. The fabrication of weapons, the mastery of fire, and the technologies of clothing and shelter transformed the human body, enabling us to walk upright, shed our body hair, and migrate out of tropical Africa into temperate climates. Symbolic communication changed human evolution from a slow biological process into a fast cultural process. Food production transformed the relationship between humanity and the environment, and with technologies of interaction led to the birth of civilization. Precision machinery, developed to build accurate clocks, spawned the industrial revolution and the rise of nation-states; and in the next metamorphosis, the rise of digital technologies may well lead to the birth of a global civilization.

Synthesizing the findings of primatology, paleontology, archeology, history, and anthropology, Richard Currier reinterprets and retells the modern narrative of human evolution that began with the discovery of Lucy and other Australopithecus fossils. But the same forces that allowed us to integrate technology into every aspect of our daily lives have also brought us to the brink of planetary catastrophe.Unbound explains both how we got here and how human society must be transformed again to achieve a sustainable future.

Richard L. Currier earned his BA and PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and was a professor of anthropology at Berkeley, the University of Minnesota, and the State University of New York. He coauthored a ten-volume series on archeology for young adults and published numerous articles in scholarly journals and mainstream magazines. A pioneer in the design and development of interactive learning technologies, Currier has won numerous awards for his work. He lives in Oceanside, California.