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A fascinating exploration of the history of memory and human civilization
Memory makes us human. No other animal carries in its brain so many memories of such complexity nor so regularly revisits those memories for happiness, safety, and the accomplishment of complex tasks. Human civilization continues because we are able to pass along memories from one person to another, from one generation to the next.
The Guardian of All Things is a sweeping scientific history that takes us on a 10,000-year-old journey replete with incredible ideas, inventions, and transformations. From cave drawings to oral histories to libraries to the internet, The Guardian of All Things is the history of how humans have relentlessly pursued new ways to preserve and manage memory, both within the human brain and as a series of inventions external to it. Michael S. Malone looks at the story of memory, both human and mechanical, and the historic turning points in that story that have not only changed our relationship to memory, but have also changed our human fabric. Full of anecdotes, history, and advances of civilization and technology, The Guardian of All Things is a lively, epic journey along a trajectory of history no other book has ever described, one that will appeal to the curious as well as the specialist.
- Sales Rank: #1395820 in Books
- Published on: 2012-08-21
- Released on: 2012-08-21
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.47" h x 1.14" w x 6.44" l, 1.08 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 304 pages
Review
“Health care costs continue to escalate, and every day the news brings us new or conflicting research about cancer treatments, if salt is actually good for you, how much fat is healthy, what role do your genes play in your health. Readers are looking for ways to take control of their health. They are turning increasingly to mindfulness and food as medicine. In the area of nutrition and diet as ways of managing health, for example, Tana Amen (The Omni Diet) writes extensively on how to reverse illness and influence gene expression with the food you eat.” ―Marc Andreessen, Web pioneer and venture capitalist
“Ingenious, richly complex account of how humans exchange, record, preserve and manipulate information . . . An original, fascinating scientific history of how human memory and a series of inventions have driven the advance of civilization.” ―Kirkus, starred review
“Premier technology writer Malone transforms our understanding of memory, human and artificial. After a vivid account of the evolution of the brain, he charts the developments that enabled our ancestors to acquire language, the first step in sharing memories and knowledge. With informed pleasure in the ingenuity involved, Malone deepens our appreciation for the development of increasingly sophisticated forms of memory preservation, organization, and communication while delving into the personalities and lives of both celebrated and forgotten technical visionaries.” ―Booklist, starred review
“In this sweeping and ambitious story . . . Malone celebrates the power of memory and the freedom it provides us while at the same time cautioning us to guard our memories and protect the record of our time in the world.” ―Publisher's Weekly
About the Author
MICHAEL S. MALONE is one of the nation's best-known technology writers. He is the current ABCNews.com "Silicon Insider" columnist and editor-in-chief of the Silicon Valley new site, Edgelings.com. A former New York Times columnist, Malone has also contributed numerous articles and editorials to The Wall Street Journal, The Economist and Fortune. He has also authored and co-authored more than a dozen books, notably the best-selling Virtual Corporation, Bill & Dave and The Future Arrived Yesterday. M alone holds an MBA from Santa Clara University, is an honorary fellow of the Said Business School at Oxford University, and is a Distinguished Friend of Oxford University.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
Finding a Voice
Memory as Word
When did hominids become human?
When we used our memories to do more than remember.
When did that occur? That’s not any easy question to answer—certainly not as easy as it might seem from those charts of the “Ascent of Man” we first encountered as children and have seen parodied ever since.
There, the answer was obvious: in the long parade from the knuckle-dragging Ardipithecus ramidus to the upright Australopithecus to Homo habilis carrying his stone scraper, to Homo erectus with his flint knife. Next, depending upon the complexity of the chart came Neanderthal Man, carrying a spear on his sturdy shoulders.
Finally, and you can tell this was the culmination of human evolution because the figure was standing upright, his hair combed, looking European, and in some posters even clothed to protect our same-species modesty, stood Homo sapiens in all of his mid-twentieth-century glory. He always looked about to shake your hand and introduce himself as the Southeastern regional sales manager.
Implicit in the chart was the notion that man became Man somewhere in midstride between heavy-browed Neanderthal and shiny new Brussels bureaucrat. Older charts made things a little more complicated, because, unexpectedly, there was a new guy (also covered in skins because he looked a little too much like one of your neighbors) slipped in between Mr. Forehead and ourselves. This was Cro-Magnon Man, who—until he was judged to be just modern man in mufti—presented the depressing paradox of apparently being a more impressive specimen than modern man.
Still, missing links (real or imagined) or not, the Ascent of Man seemed a neat and straight parade across the course of a couple million years. And the threshold between early man (simple tools, hunting parties, small family groups) and modern man (computers, cities, nation-states) lay somewhere in that blank space just in front of Mr. Neanderthal’s mighty forehead.
Part of the appeal of limited knowledge is that it often makes organizational schemes and taxonomies really easy. But eventually you dig up enough bones and fossils that you have to put a new head—and a new name (Apatosaurus)—on everyone’s beloved Brontosaurus. And so, in the four decades since the discovery of “Lucy,” the little female Australopithecus afarensis who lived more than three million years ago, the Ascent of Man has changed from a single-file march through history into something closer to the crowd at the end of a hockey game milling around in the plaza and slowly making its way to a single exit turnstile.
Every year, archaeologists, armed with ever more powerful investigative tools, find new bits of bone and other artifacts that alter—sometimes radically—our understanding of hominid history. And it is only going to get worse: Thanks to phenomena such as “genetic drift” (in which rare genes can come to dominate isolated populations) the closer we look, the more alternative evolutionary pathways, breakthroughs, and dead ends we are likely to find.
A case in point was the controversial discovery in 2004 on the Indonesian island of Flores of the tiny bones of “Hobbit people” (Homo floresiensis), most of them less than three feet tall.1 Remarkably, some of these skeletons are only about 13,000 years old, making them contemporaneous with modern man. Whether the Hobbit people were a distinct species or merely the bones of Homo sapiens with genetic diseases (such as lack of a thyroid gland) is still being debated.
But perhaps the most interesting recent discovery comes from the spot just behind Neanderthal Man’s huge head on our old chart. His name is Homo heidelbergensis (named after the university) and though first identified at the beginning of the twentieth century, his importance wasn’t really understood until the 1990s—which is why he is all but unknown to the general public. H. heidelbergensis both answers and complicates an important question in human evolution: What happened during that apparent transformation from Neanderthal to modern man 50,000 years ago in Asia (30,000 years ago in Europe)?
The answer, scientists now believe, begins with H. heidelbergensis, who appeared about 600,000 years ago. H. heidelbergensis was an impressive figure: heavily muscled, six feet tall (there may even have been some seven-footers), and with a brain about the size of modern man’s. He knew how to use simple tools. And, most remarkably, he also appears to be the ancestor of both Neanderthal and modern man.
That helps to explain why, at least toward the end of the former’s existence, Neanderthal and modern man appear to have existed side by side. Neanderthal Man got most of Heidelberg Man’s looks—the heavy bones, beadle brow, and the comparatively large brain. But modern man got the height and added a uniquely flat face and a lanky frame. And if modern man didn’t inherit quite the cranial size of his Neanderthal cousin, he instead got something even more important: language, and a brain to process and store it.
As anyone who watches science documentaries knows, chimpanzees and apes, for all of their brainpower (our appreciation of which also seems to grow by the day), have limited ability to speak because of a weak larynx due to a narrow cervical vertebra. What most people don’t know is that, as with deaf-mutes, this inability to verbalize is further constrained by an inability to hear—in the ape’s case, a lack of capacity to differentiate between certain vocal sounds.
Of all of the points of divergence between man and apes, this is a big one—a fact made clear when researchers first taught apes to use sign language and were stunned by their facility. Historically, this divergence appears to have taken place with Heidelberg Man’s immediate predecessor, Homo ergaster, a southern African hominid who should also stand on the chart between H. habilis and Neanderthal Man.
Like Heidelberg Man, Homo ergaster is a very interesting character. Huge—he may have averaged a couple inches taller than six feet, and the females were nearly as tall—Homo ergaster appears to have used his comparatively larger brain not only to gain mastery over fire but to take hominids out of Africa for the first time. As earthshaking as those achievements were, H. ergaster’s greatest achievement was to evolve both a wider cervical vertebra—which gave him the first “human voice”—but also a new middle- and outer-ear configuration that enabled him to hear the voices of others.
This was hardly a coincidence. The competitive advantage of a more facile voice was amplified by the improved hearing of that voice—and vice versa. H. ergaster probably never had a true speaking voice, much less developed a spoken language; his brain was still too small for that. But as with fire and tools, H. ergaster was, if not the ultimate owner of spoken language, certainly its pioneer.
The task of turning this capability into a defining human characteristic fell to H. heidelbergensis, with his larger and nimbler brain. Certainly he had the physical tools to do so. And there is a wealth of circumstantial evidence—for example, he was the first to honor and bury his dead, he developed relatively precise tools, and may have collected red ochre for painting and body adornment—that suggests a level of cultural sophistication that seems impossible without some kind of complex form of communication.
But was it a spoken language? We may never know the answer to that. There are no known Heidelberg Man drawings or carvings to suggest pictogram-based communication. And as anyone who has ever been in a hunting party or a reconnaissance team knows, it is possible to convey a considerable amount of information—even without a formal grammar—via a very small repertoire of hand signals. Indeed, being prodigious hunters operating in small family units, Heidelberg Man may well have created a kind of sign language like that found in later hunter-gatherer societies (such as American Indians) to create a kind of lingua franca for those rare intertribal encounters.
But that larynx and inner ear weren’t evolving without a competitive advantage. So, we can assume that Heidelberg men and women were communicating with one another with an increasingly sophisticated vocabulary of sounds, if not yet a true language. Further, we can also assume that these sounds were taught to thousands of generations of progeny, who slowly but surely added to the common repertoire. And, given the flexibility with which these sounds could be made by the evolving voice box—and the fact that verbal communication didn’t have to be line-of-sight—it seems pretty likely that, had you been walking in the Bavarian woods a half-million years ago, you would have heard proto-humans calling out to one another across the valleys and through the forests.
Spoken language might not have conferred much of an additional advantage during the hunt, but it certainly did before with strategy and after with the distribution of the spoils. And in a world of terrors and dangers, shouted warnings would be especially useful—especially to warn people looking the wrong way, or to assemble the tribe quickly in an emergency.
But this is as far as Heidelberg Man got, even in the most optimistic analysis. He could convey information (look out!) in the present—and perhaps reference physical objects in the past (the wooly mammoth with the crooked tusk we killed)—but not much more; and even the latter was probably better expressed with sign language.
More sophisticated spoken language would have to wait for Heidelberg’s descendant, Neanderthal Man. This may come as ...
Most helpful customer reviews
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
Time well spent--I'm glad I stuck with it.
By Paul Tognetti
When I spotted "The Guardian of All Things: The Epic Story of Human Memory" at my local library I was positively mesmerized by the topic. However, being a scientifically and technologically challenged individual I wondered if I was going to be able to keep up. Nevertheless I decided to take the plunge. I am very pleased to report that despite the complexity of the subject matter Michael S. Malone has come up with a very readable volume. This history of memory proves to be incredibly enlightening and endlessly fascinating. I simply could not put this book down.
So just what happened during the transformation form Neanderthal to modern man some 50000 years ago in Asia and perhaps around 30000 years ago in Europe? As Michael Malone explains it the Neanderthal brain was totally focused on the present. There was absolutely no language and therefore no memory. Neanderthal man could neither remember the past nor contemplate the future. But over time human beings developed the ability to hear and to make sounds. As homo sapiens continued to evolve over the millennia they could talk, form relationships, create art and tell stories. About 10000 years ago hunter-gathers would give way to an agricultural society. Not only would there be spoken languages but as the result of commerce and trade counting and arithmetic and finally written languages would evolve. And as Malone points out "The ability to write meant the ability to record information to remove something from one's own memory and place it into a cache of synthetic memory where it could remain largely untended until it was needed again. This recorded memory could also be shared with others with a precision never before available with human beings passing messages from one to another." Thus, we have the beginnings of recorded history.
In "The Guardian of All Things we discover that Egypt played a significant role in the advancement of memory. Malone touches on the role hieroglyphics played in the process and also discusses the emergence of papyrus as a lighter, much more portable and extremely durable medium to write on. Then there is the Library of Alexandria built in the 3rd century B.C. and sadly destroyed by fire in 50 B.C. This was the first attempt in the history of mankind to capture, catalog and store mankind's collective knowledge and memory. It was a huge step forward. Fast forward now to the 12th century where we see the emergence of universities in Europe. The university had four major tasks--to educate, preserve, translate and investigate. Meanwhile, the primary task of Europe's scholars was to capture and collate all of this collective memory. It was about this time that the idea of the encyclopedia began to gain favor.
Another significant chapter in the history of memory was a type of book known as the bestiary. This incredibly expensive format was extremely popular between 1180 and 1290 A.D. According to Michael Malone "The best of them combined dozens of exquisite paintings, many of them masterpieces. As for the animals themselves this isn't some modern field guide. Rather, the selection of creatures ranges from the prosaic (mouse, cat and dog) to the fabulous (unicorn, phoenix, manicore and of course the dragon." There can be little doubt that the creation of books such as these are the primary reason that such mythical beasts still exist in human folklore to this day. Very fascinating stuff!
In the second half of "The Guardian of All Things" Michael S. Malone focuses on the inventors, entrepreneurs and technologies that have combined to advance human memory over these last many centuries. Some of the names will be quite familiar to you while others you have probably never heard of. Among the significant inventions discussed as the printing press, the automatic loom, the tabulator, photography and Thomas Edison's phonograph. And as Malone points out "the phonograph's subsequent effect on human memory is almost incalculable. Amen! And of course as we move into the second half of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century the advances are even more breathtaking! Perhaps the most ground-breaking of all of them was the transistor. The transistor made it possible to produce smaller, more efficient and more durable products and opened up an exciting new world of possibilities for both inventors and entrepreneurs alike.
I suppose that the best way to sum up this history of memory is to borrow from the title of an old Grateful Dead album--"what a long strange trip it has been." Indeed! Memory is now free. With the emergence of the internet there is little need for any of us to memorize any more. What matters most is our ability to access information and to analyze it. One cannot help but wonder what fantastic advances lie ahead of us. I thoroughly enjoyed this book although at times I did struggle with terminology. But it was well worth it! In my opinion "The Guardian of All Things: The Epic Story of Human Memory" would be a great choice for history buffs, technology geeks and general readers alike. There is much to be gleaned from this well written and meticulously researched book. Very highly recommended!
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
A Wonderful Journey Through Time
By Book Fanatic
This book is wonderful. It's about memory but only a very small portion of the book is about memory in human brains. It's about how humans have collected and stored their collective memory first in language in human brains and then externally in drawings and written language. From there he goes through the collection of memory in clay tablets, animal skins, reeds, and paper and the collection of all of this into vast libraries. The book travels through photography, film, audio, magnetic tape, magnetic disks, chips and microprocessors, the internet, and the rest of the modern digital world.
It's a fascinating journey that is quite unusual. This book has Amazon's "Search Inside" feature so you should take advantage of that to preview its contents. I enjoyed it and I think you will too.
Definitely recommended.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Saving Western Civilization For All
By Upstate New York Reader
Michael Malone has written a wonderful journey through Western Civilization using the skills and tools needed to past that history from generation to generation as the framework to build his story.
I began reading, expecting to be bored to death. However, I found myself sneaking reading times - staying a bit longer at a restaurant, postponing the start of other tasks, staying up a bit later - all in order to get through the book. Malone begins with the development of speech and moves forward through history.
I found the chapter discussing the "Art of Memory" to be the most fascinating - having never encountered it before. In one chapter the author discusses the influence of well-known inventors, such as Thomas Edison, Thomas Watson, and the work of John Shaw Billings and Herman Hollerith and the development of the Hollerith Punched Card Tabulating Machine in preparation for the 1890 census. In a similar vein, it was also interesting to read the history of George Eastman (the founder of Kodak). Having spent years in the computer industry, it helped to see how the influence of many of these tools also drove the future development of the computer industry. The connections drawn in the book are not always linear - as people living in the same century often influenced each others work - occasionally forcing the author to move in circles as he discusses multiple tools and lives developing tools for recording history.
I do wish there were an accompanying web page - links to pictures or to additional details would add to the value of the book. I can always use Google to find links, but that gives me no way to evaluate the material. If time had been taken to build a website containing authoritative and trusted links, the books value would be increased several times over.
Readable and enjoyable, the book might interest anyone that wants to look at world history from a larger perspective. Though the book discusses technology, it does not get "geeky" and is accessible to the average reader. The book reads like a good novel - with a bit of humor, human interest, and even a bit of mystery. It was well worth the time I spent reading this past week.
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This review is based on a free electronic copy of the book provided by the publisher for the purpose of creating this review. The opinions expressed are mine alone.
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