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.

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