The history of civilization is the history of creativity. You cannot talk meaningfully about the past without bringing up the most important people and inventions of the time. We are here today because of the creativity of the past. Creativity and culture are inseparable. In no small way, creative people are responsible for the world around us. 

From time to time in this podcast, I’m going to highlight different people, inventions, or time periods important to creativity. While I don’t intend to go through each era of creativity in chronological order, since this is the first episode where I talk about a creative era, I’m going to start from the very beginning. We won’t go all the way back to stone tools and cave paintings. Cave paintings are interesting in their own right, but they’re less consequential than what I have in mind. 

I don’t want to turn these episodes into a history show. I’ll gloss over the dates things happen. I’m also going to do my best to make sure that this isn’t a list of bullet points about history that have no real takeaway for listeners. We’ll keep our focus on the main events of the time period, what creativity meant to the people living in it, and how we can apply the lessons to our own creativity.

Pre-civilized people had their own type of creativity. They discovered how to use items they found as tools, then how to make their own tools. And with all the time they saved, they taught themselves how to draw a mean stick figure Buffalo on cave walls. 

The rate of change was incredibly slow during this period. So much time was spent on survival that there was little time to devote to other activities. Creativity is built by combining various ideas together to form something new. The more ideas you have to play around with, the more combinations you can make. This is why expertise is so important to creativity. With few ideas to build off of, creativity was relatively stagnant. 

Creativity is built off of the past, so what do you do when you have no past to build off of? You’d think the creativity of pre-civilized humans would break this rule, but it actually doesn’t. Pre-civilized humans built creative ideas off the past just like we do today. They did it using two creative tools that are still incredibly important to us today: Observation and experimentation. 

Civilization was largely formed on the back of 4 major innovations: The ability to grow food in abundance meant that people no longer had to all be hunter gatherers. It satisfied the bottom layer of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Before this, there simply wasn’t time available for the creative process to take place. 

The second innovation was labor specialization. This meant that for the first time in human history, people could focus their attention on specific areas unrelated to finding their next meal. 

With labor specialization, there were new opportunities to work together. Suddenly, you had something that I couldn’t make myself and I had something you wanted. We needed to work together in a way that humanity had never done before. This required the third innovation: The organization of society. 

With increased social interactions and specializations, it become increasingly important for a way to track what’s going on, so we see writing systems forming.  Writing was the lubricant that made everything else work. It made everything easier for a group of people who were constantly confronted with new problems. 

These four innovations have their own smaller innovations inside of them that I’ve completely left out. We treat these innovations as if they were sparks of genius, but in reality, there were innumerable smaller ideas that came together slowly over time that allowed for the innovation to occur. 

So how did pre-civilized people create these things using the past when there wasn’t even a past to draw from? The answer is that there was a past, it just took a different form than we are use to seeing today. Let’s take labor specialization as an example. Keep in mind that this innovation occurred before homo sapiens even existed. It’s that old. Archeologists have found traces of labor specialization that are over 40,000 years old.

Like so much creativity during this period, it probably naturally arose. There was no goal for dividing labor. People observed what was already happening, and then magnified it. Division of labor likely arose out of differences between different sexes and age groups. Older citizens were no longer effective at farming and hunting. You can’t send grandma into the fields. She had to specialize in something else. This probably took the form of cooking and housekeeping, but it would have also involved things like sewing. If I had to take a guess, I’d say that labor specialization came from a grandma. It makes sense for the needs of the time period, but also, grandmas are incredibly powerful figures. There’s something about the DNA of a grandma that gets **** done. Grandpa probably retired, found a comfy chair, and then complained about having nothing to read since writing hadn’t been invented yet. So yes, if you want someone to thank for labor specialization and creating the foundation of society… it’s probably a grandma. 

This was building off the past to create something new. Pre-civilized humans, as well as many other species, already had labor specialization. It wasn’t something someone had to “think through” to create. The differences between men and women, old and young had already existed. Whether you found yourself with a prefrontal cortex didn’t matter. It’s evolutionary. The creativity here was in recognizing that this specialization was already happening, and then magnifying and doing it on purpose. That was the real innovation. To do it, all pre-civilized people needed were the abilities to observe what’s already happening and experiment. Some pre-civilized grandma wanted to find a way to contribute and then became so good at it that her skills were requested by her neighbors. Eventually, grandma was back at work. Trading grain for her sewing expertise. At this point, all pre-civilized people had to do to complete the innovation was recognize what was already happening and magnify it. They said, if grandma can trade her sewing skills for a lot of grain, why can’t we? What’s really cool about this is that none of it requires advanced level thinking. It was already there, they just hadn’t noticed it yet. 

I know it seems weird that I’m claiming a grandma setup the foundations for society, but if we’re talking purely about creativity (and not the males engaged in constant warfare) then I think it’s true. Creativity takes free time, something that would have been incredibly rare during this time period. There would have been tons of smaller innovations coming from the people engaged in the everyday work, but that’s not what we’re focused on here. You can’t simply work harder at farming to recognize that you need to build a society or a writing system. Someone needed to do it. That person needed to be influential, have an outside perspective that allowed them to see the entire problem all at once, and they had to have enough free time to think through the implications of the idea. It was grandma. 

As you’re creating today, get back to the basics. This process of observation and experimentation just as relevant as it was 40,000 years ago. Perhaps the solution to your problem is already in front of you. You just need to recognize that it’s there, and then experiment with it. These 2 simple actions are all it takes to create something amazingly simple or incredibly complex. They are so basic to the foundations of creativity that you cannot separate the 2. Whether you know it or not, you’re already doing this. The question is, will you do it on purpose? 

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