5. Printing Press
Before the printing press was invented way back in 1439, books were all actually hand-written believe it or not. A lot of people find this hard to conceive since most of us were born and immediately presented with typewriters and computers. The truth is that the printing press changed the way that people exchanged ideas and information forever. It has allowed for the rapid spread of intellectual information and because of this, we get to experience a higher degree of technology than ever before.
4. Plumbing
Experts like to give credit to the Romans for the development of plumbing, but most people can agree that it didn’t really become that popular until the 20th century. These days, plumbing has becoming such an ingrained part of most people’s lives that we no longer even think about it. Think about this: before modern plumbing, people would use outhouses without toilets and often bath in streams. It is a good thing that we have modern plumbing as well considering that there are nearly seven billion people on the planet.
3. Tools
In general, tools have been a very important for us as a society. They have allowed us to build things as well as repair them. They’ve allowed us to take our imaginations and transform them into physical objects. Think about it like this: without tools, all of the other technology that you see today would not be around. Tools have allowed human beings to build things from scratch and without them we would be just as clumsy and slow as animals.
2. Cooking
While it may be tempting to conclude that fire was the greatest invention by human, the truth is that fire wasn’t something “created” by humans. However, we can use fire to cook things and because of this, the invention of cooking has made its way onto the number two spot of this list. Probably the most important use of cooking is that it allowed us to sterilize our foods during times when modern technology was not available. People have been cooking for millions and millions of years and it has become a prominent snippet in our evolutionary process.
1. Language
That’s right: language is the greatest invention ever created by humans. Yes this is an invention because humans created it in order to communicate thoughts and emotions to one another. Our ability to communicate is a reason that we even have a list of technological advancements in the first place. While all animals communicate with one another in some form or another, none of them do so as intricately and as effectively as we do. Nobody knows exactly how old “true” language is, but one thing can be said for certain: it is the greatest invention ever created by humans.
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