Man Finds Stick - How Human Craft Began
Cover, full-page and spot illustrations for Nautilus Magazine
“This issue's cover story has a simple thesis: Human craft, the building of things by hand, began with the wooden stick. This simplest and earliest act of construction changed the course of human evolution, the first in a succession of tools that would go on to reshape our habitats, diets, and bodies. The story’s author, archaeologist Alexander Langlands, paints a picture of an engineering revolution that is laughably simple, profound in its implications—and, crucially, slow. It’s a remarkable fact that we took hundreds of thousands of years to move from a hand axe to a hafted arrow. (...) Given a constant rate of human evolution, and an exponential rate of technological evolution, we can continue to run experiments with an ever-greater risk profile; we can seek to constrain our new tools until we have understood and adopted to them properly; or—as Elon Musk has famously argued—we can join our technology instead of trying to beat it. Through even more technology, like neural computer interfaces, we can merge ourselves with our instruments and hitch our rates of evolution together.” - Michael Segal
