While modern innovations seem to occur at light speed — the ever-present iPhone has been with us for a shockingly small amount of time, historically — others, like fermentation, jokes or fire, are so ingrained in our society they seem to have evolved over thousands of years.
But Cody Cassidy, author of the new book “Who Ate The First Oyster: The Extraordinary People Behind the Greatest Firsts in History,” (Penguin), out now, argues that genius innovators were just as essential in discovering many of life’s staples.
“Because of the appearance of a slow gradation, it’s tempting to assume that no single individual could possibly have played a significant role in the seemingly inevitable trajectory of human history,” Cassidy writes.
“But this gradation … neglects the way technology and even evolution have always occurred; in fits and starts, with individuals at the forefront.”
Thanks to advancements in DNA, scientists have learned much about many such innovators in recent decades. In his book, Cassidy tells the stories of individuals over the past thousands and even millions of years whose names will never be known, but whose innovations benefit us to this day.
The first person to paint a masterpiece
The first artistic masterpiece was painted around 33,000 years ago in a cave in southwest France.
The Chauvet Cave, as it’s known, “contains more than 400 paintings created over some 5,000 years of periodic occupation until a landslide sealed off the cave’s entrance nearly 25,000 years ago.”
The quality of one work there, called Panel of the Horses (above), is regarded as “so consistently high” by rock-art conservationists that “it’s likely only the best painters were allowed to paint its walls.”
That first masterpiece was painted by an early Homo sapien, and it’s believed he was formally trained as an artist.
Peter Robinson of the Bradshaw Foundation, which studies and conserves rock art, told Cassidy that the paintings were “so well considered and consistent in style there’s reason to suspect … there may have been an established system of apprenticeship.”
The first person to use a baby sling
A young mother in Africa three million years ago who belonged to an ancestor species of ours called Australopithecus was the world’s first known inventor.
“She stood almost 4-feet tall, weighed a lithe 65 pounds, and other than on her hairless face she was covered in thick dark fur,” writes Cassidy. “During the day she walked upright in search of food, but at night she clambered back into a tree nest to avoid nocturnal predators.”
Without the weapon of fire — which hadn’t been discovered yet — she was prey to panthers and eagles. And when she gave birth in her early teens, she became even more vulnerable.
“Walking upright would have made it more difficult for a baby to cling onto its mother,” Cassidy writes. “She would have had to carry her baby for at least its first six months of life while spending most of her waking hours searching for food.”
Using skeletal evidence showing a link between walking upright and a growth in brain size, archeologists conclude that she invented a baby sling — a “simple loop of vine wrapped and tied off in a knot” — to help her search for food and care for her baby at the same time.
That invention helps parents to this day. “Without baby carriers, helpless hominin babies would have been set down by tired mothers and picked off by panthers long ago,” Cassidy writes.
The first person to eat an oyster
A Homo sapien woman 164,000 years ago in South Africa was the first known person to sample the delicacy that is oysters.
Based on the large amount of oyster shells found in caves in that place and time, it is believed that a woman — who gathered food while men hunted for meat — found the bivalves on the beach at low tide by chance. She may have been searching for something else to eat, such as “a sleeping turtle or its eggs, or maybe a beached whale or resting sea lion,” when she saw a baboon or another animal crack open an oyster and devour it, and then followed its lead.
The woman in question also “knew when to travel to the ocean.”
“She learned how to predict the ocean’s tides,” likely based on “the appearance of either a full or a new moon,” Cassidy writes.
So, in addition to discovering oysters, this adventurous eater “may well have also become the world’s first practical astronomer.”
The first person to ride a horse
A people called the Botai, who lived almost 6,000 years ago in northern Kazakhstan, were “utterly and peculiarly obsessed with the horse.”
The Botai ate horse meat. They drank horse milk for breakfast, then fermented it into an alcoholic drink called kumis. They used “horse bones for tools, horse hair for rope, and horse skin for leather.” When they died, they were buried alongside a horse.
The 2006 discovery of 5,600-year-old horse manure, taken as the first proof of equine domestication, and the 2009 discovery of “a set of curiously worn horse teeth,” clearly made from chomping on a bridle, led scientists to conclude that the Botai were also the first people to ride a horse in a domestic fashion.
At some point, a young Botai man, likely a teenager, designed the first bridle, which would have been “nothing more than a leather rope looped around a horse’s lower jaw and locked into place with a piece of wood.” And because riding a horse was deemed so risky at the time, it could only have been tried by “a teenager without a fully developed prefrontal cortex.”
This eureka moment is “unsurpassed in the history of human transportation,” Cassidy writes.
“By inventing brakes, [the young man] invented speed. With his well-placed rope, humans went from slow to fast, and horse riding remained the fastest way for humans to travel over land for more than 5,000 years.”
The first person to brew a beer
The first brewer is believed to have lived around 15,000 years ago where northeast Jordan is now, after the oldest baked cereals ever found were discovered there in 2018.
Likely a woman, she harvested a “wild ancestor of wheat” and while gathering seeds, stumbled upon one plant with “a rare mutation” that kept its seeds on the plant instead of bursting them to the ground.
With these new, easier-to-gather seeds, she would have “made herself … gruel by pounding them from their shell and soaking them in water to convert the cereal’s starches to sugars.”
“Once she made her bowl of gruel, it would have been a short step to beer,” Cassidy writes. “All that was required was a moment of forgetfulness, a stray fleck of yeast, and the hot Middle Eastern sun.”
The first person to tell a joke
The first joke was written by a Sumerian instructor 4,000 years ago in the ancient city of Nippur, in what is now Iraq.
One of his gags, according to Yale University professor of Assyriology Benjamin Foster, who is quoted in the book, might have been this one, found on a clay tablet in the region:
“When the lion came to the sheepfold, the dog put on his leash.”
The joke refers to a dog who believes he is a forceful guardian — until a lion suddenly shows up.
“It’s profoundly unfunny,” Cassidy says. “Whether it’s funny today, however, isn’t the point.”
The point is that, up until 4,000 years ago, writing was simply a way for accountants to “record debts and enforce taxes.” Then there was a shift, as “master scribes wrote ancient quips for their students” to teach them morals and the Sumerian language.
“Thanks to this joke and others like it, humanity’s most creative invention turned from a boring accountant’s medium into something else entirely,” Cassidy writes.
The first person to use the bow and arrow
The inventor of the bow and arrow was most likely a boy who lived around 64,000 years ago, possibly near the modern South African city of Durban. He is believed to be part of a hunter-gatherer tribe that “made some of the oldest pieces of symbolic art ever discovered: beads, shell necklaces and small engravings,” Cassidy writes.
The recent discovery of stone arrowheads from that place and time along with the long history of toys evolving into real weapons — including robots and rockets — led scientists to conclude the bow was invented by accident, as a child’s toy.
Anthropologists believe the child invented the weapon while “experimenting with tying beads to a stick, then tying the two ends of a stick together and having arrived at a protobow.”