Let's hear it for the plough

Some people are nervous of technology and timidly avoid it whenever they can.  Others love it to bits and can't get enough.  Most just seem to accept it as a product of our maturing world.  Regardless of your level of love or hatred of high tech, you probably take many recent innovations for granted.

Given our relative ambivalence to the marvels of high tech I reckon we don't even think about the low tech stuff that's actually fundamental to our civilisation.

I got to pondering this in an study activity where we were asked to think about historical technology and consider the consequences/impact of introducing that innovation.  My first historical technology example was the humble plough.  It's an ancient invention that probably came into being in various guises around the world thousands of years ago but it's still as vital now as it always was.

The impact of this kind of technology is so fundamental to our civilisation yet most of us don't even spare it a passing thought.  Where would we be if we couldn't till the land without resorting to digging it with a spade?  How could we grow the crops that we all consume or provide the pasture for cattle to graze so that we could produce meat, dairy, wool?  How would our ability to produce sufficient food to feed the ever expanding world population suffer?  How could we have tamed the landscape that allows us to build our cities?  I'm thinking the answer is that we simply couldn't have done these things beyond subsistence levels without a simple invention that turns soil when you drag it along.

For me, it's a sobering thought that I couldn't have any of my modern high tech toys if these most fundamental innovations hadn't come first.