INTRODUCTION At first naturally fearful of fire our ancestors in time learned to conquer harness and utilize fire to their advantage marking one of the first scientific advances of humanity Sheila Terry Science Source
INTRODUCTION E rmchair philosophers for hundreds of years have pon dered a favorite question What was the first scientific inven tion Some say the knife Some say a the wheel others the boat Some say I learning to start use and control fire Whatever the correct answer and S whether it came about by accident or 2 experimentation it was the begin A ning of a long legacy of discovery resulting from human curiosity It I might be said that there have been scientists for as long as there have been people The story of science dates to long before the beginning of recorded history Isaac Asimov a famous science fiction and nonfiction author and biochemistry professor suggested in one of his books that the first human scientific advance 2 occurred four million years ago It was TTE when primitive humans became bipeds rising to walk on two legs Perhaps the FREE next big thing scientifically the use of stone tools occurred two million years I later A million and a half years after that archaeologists estimate humans learned how to take advantage of fire
SCIENCE Its HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT for warmth and cooking Fire was a natural phe nomenon they instinctively had feared for a very long time Ever so gradually science advanced Prehistoric men and women learned to cul tivate crops in addition to foraging for wild plants and hunting game They developed wheels most likely inspired by rolling logs and adapted them for transporting heavy loads They learned to count They cut and shaped copper tin and other metals for many practi cal purposes from coins to armor They began to understand better ways to take advantage of and survive in the changing seasons They learned that certain plant foods were nutri tious and curative others poisonous Dates and circumstances of the earliest scientific developments are unknown because the people who made them had no system of writing What they learned was passed down to younger generations by word of mouth Their findings were not entirely unrecorded however Prehistoric drawings in different parts of the world indicate how people lived They show that certain early cultures had fairly advanced understandings of agriculture celestial objects and other complexities of the natural world 10
INTRODUCTION With the advent of writing experiment ers and scribes began recording the history of scientific development We know much for example of the work of ancient Chinese astronomer Zhang Heng who studied the stars and invented a seismometer to detect earthquakes We know that the mathemati cian Archimedes demonstrated the powers of the lever in classical Greece We benefit from the extensive teachings of brilliant sci entists of the Renaissance and more recent eras Each step forward in modern times has been well chronicled Today we read regularly of breaking discoveries from microbiology to deep space Exciting research is constantly underway New fields of science have emerged as a result of new tools The invention of the com pound microscope in the late 16th century led to minute studies of organisms and substances In recent years advances in digital technology have provided far greater access to informa tion and faster modes of communication In this book we will trace the progression of science through its transition from his tory to current events 11
