The Greatest Human Inventions

Inspired by a friend, my top list of inventions that changed the world in noparticular order

1) Domestification of certain species of animals and plants, life becomes a whole hell of a lot easier when you don't have to every day spend hours running after some animal or looking for and collecting plants. Farming and animal husbandry revolutionized the way we humans feed ourselves, both are vastly more effient than hunting and gathering they replaced. This allowed a farmer to produce
more food beyond the needs off his immediate family to feed others. This in turn allowed people to engage in activities that were not directly related food production, like art, philosophy and governance.

2)Currency aka money, gave humanity the ability determine the comparative values of various goods, helping to smooth out the inherant inefficiencies in barter trade. Money helped to further labour specialization that agriculture started, now people had the ability to trade goods and service against a single universally accepted commodity, that they could later use to acquire goods and services that they themselves needed.

3)Writing, the ability to store information with symbols wasn't invented by poets or great story tellers, it was done by accountants and tax collectors. When you need to remember a vast amount of information using symbols to describe ideas and words is an invention you are going to need pretty quickly. This started the first information revolution in human history.

4)Magna Carta clause 29 "NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right"

This is one of the first human rights statements written down, which is so fundamental that people rarely remember it anymore; the idea that no one can be imprisoned if they haven't broken a law and convicted by a court. If you are not convinced, think of this why do oppressive regimes bother with making laws to oppress instead of just throwing people in jail?

5)The ability to send signals with electric signals, starting from the a simple telegraph and ending with the internet. Electric signaling started the third infomation revolution( the second one was the printing press), now information is no longer stored as symbols on a paper but digitally.