The Powerful Primate: How Controlling Energy Enabled Us to Build Civilization

By Roland Ennos

A panoramic account of how control of physical power has given us unprecedented material wealth and shaped civilization – and the perils this entails

In popular histories of humankind, our ascent can appear to involve a bewildering series of unrelated innovations – walking upright, making tools, taming fire, creating art, inventing agriculture, waging war and industrializing…  to name just a few. But in this book, Roland Ennos shows they all stem from a single pressure: our need to produce, transmit and control ever greater bursts of physical power.

In contrast to carnivorous mammals, our hominin ancestors made up for their relative physical weakness by devising two novel ways of powering tools, he argues: using the arm as a sling (to swing hammers and axes and throw boomerangs and spears) and as a crank to slide a tool across the surface of a material (to slice, scour, mill, grind, shave or polish it).

By combining these two basic techniques, humans could become efficient gatherers and scavengers as well as top predators. And when they settled into farming they simply repurposed these tools: they learnt to smelt metals and shape them into a wide range of equipment and machinery, and exploited animals, water, wind and fossil fuels to power them – and go on to increasingly vie for political power and cause unparalleled damage to our planet.

If we’re not to perish, Ennos concludes, we have no choice but to invent wiser ways of using power or wean ourselves off our addiction to it.