What explains the apparent ecological dominance of Homo sapiens? How did our species swell, in the span of just a few hundred thousand years, from scattered bands of hunter-gatherers eking out a living on the African savannah to nearly 8 billion individuals distributed across most ecosystems on the planet, and even in orbit around it?

Our many innovations—from turning silica stone into handaxes to turning it into computer chips—have undoubtedly been critical to the human story. Enabling such innovations is our distinct ability to think about the future and especially to recognize potential. This is no easy feat as many baffling examples in history show.

Recognizing potential

Consider the Greek mathematician Hero of Alexandria, who described a steam engine in the first century AD but seems to have used it only to entertain guests at parties. If Hero or one of his guests had recognized the myriad practical uses of such a device, then—for better or worse—the Industrial Revolution just might have kicked off many centuries before it actually did.

Recognizing future utility is key to innovation, and it does not really matter whether one creatively comes up with a solution or just stumbles on it serendipitously. Take the story of nitrous oxide, which for decades was enjoyed for its psychoactive effects at parties and exhibitions. In 1844, the dentist Horace Wells finally recognized its applied potential when he noticed that a man who had injured his leg during such an exhibition apparently felt no pain. Wells bravely had a molar extracted the very next morning to verify the sensation-dulling properties of the happy gas, and so opened the door to the introduction of anaesthetics into medicine. We can even recognize the potential of an idea without knowing how it could ever really work. When science fiction writers such as Jules Verne envision light-propelled spacecraft, submarines going 20,000 leagues under the sea, or flights to the moon, other people can adopt these visions as goals and start working on how to realize them. Many lofty ideas have eventually become reality, even if others, such as Verne’s notion of a journey to the center of the Earth, have not.

Foresight is also critical to teaching

Teaching, when those in the know convey information to those out of it, is a second powerful way in which foresight has driven cultural change. A teacher anticipates what a pupil needs to grasp and then shapes their mind towards the goal of expertise. Teaching and innovation fostered a second inheritance system (in addition to genetic inheritance) that enabled our ancestors to accumulate and refine solutions to life’s challenges. From making stone tools around the campfire to geology courses at university, our species has deliberately passed on skills and knowledge to each other and the next generation.

So foresight has clearly accelerated cultural evolution. In turn, cultural evolution leads to improved foresight, creating a potent feedback loop that has paved the way to increasing human dominance on the planet—and all the new problems that entailed. Let’s look at an example of this feedback loop in action.

Envelope and the tokens it held, from Susa, Iran, ca. 3300 BC. The tokens stand for commodities like animals and grain

Source: Courtesy of Musée du Louvre, Départment des Antiquités Orientales and Dr. Schmandt-Besserat

Accelerating cultural evolution

After the last ice age, people in the Levant began to abandon a hunter-gatherer life in favor of a sedentary agricultural existence that raised some novel challenges, including the collection and distribution of grains, meat, and other goods through trade and taxes. They needed a way to keep track of who owed what to whom and when it was due. An innovative solution was the use of clay tokens of different shapes, such as cones and cylinders, to stand for measures of grain or livestock. By around 5,000 years ago, Sumerians began to place such tokens into hollow clay balls to record taxes that had been paid or goods to be traded. Storing information in a sealed container prevented future disputes and eliminated the need to rely on inadequate human memory. But to check their content, these balls had to be broken. Perhaps because of the wastefulness of this destruction, someone came up with a further innovation: by pressing each token on the outside of the not-yet-fired clay ball, one could create impressions of what was inside. Four cone-shaped indentations on the outside meant there were four cones on the inside. As there was no longer any real point to putting tokens inside—given that the information was now also on the outside—the balls were soon replaced by flat surfaces that made it easier to make marks in the wet clay. Mere impressions were then complemented with pictures that were traced, such as an ear of barley. For centuries, accountants invented new symbols and went busily about teaching each other how to interpret and use them.

What we just described, of course, is how Sumerians invented writing. Writing allows us to store stories, laws, and manifestos. It turns the flow of ideas into concrete objects, freeing up mental load to reflect on and further develop new ideas. It lets us share insights and innovations; and it is, itself, a teaching tool par excellence. Writing, a product of cultural inheritance, radically enhances the very mechanisms of innovation and teaching that brought it about in the first place. And one of the first things people used writing for was to formalise their calendars, helping them to coordinate their futures.

With a farsighted species at the helm, cultural evolution could accelerate dramatically. Isaac Newton famously said: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” But it helps if those giants are also standing up, attempting to catch sight of something on the horizon.