An archeologist named Timothy Taylor has published a book with an intriguing premise: humans and our technology can't be separated. Humans didn't evolve to use tools, so much as we evolved because we used tools.
As someone studying to be a librarian, I find this a startling notion. Taylor seems to be saying we're some kind of primitive Borg-esque species. If you take away our technology, there is no "us". Or, to put it more concretely, there is no human species without our information. This takes the form of everything from stone tools to books to, yes, even e-readers.
He argues that our early prehuman ancestors used tools to make other tools. This process of "entailment" allowed us to develop further than Darwinian evolution could take us. For example, females who walked upright would expend enormous energy carrying their young because they couldn't lug their kids around the way chimps do. So they used stone tools to fashion simple slings, not unlike the ones we have today.
This led to several things, in Taylor's view. Females could now carry their young upright using far less energy. But more fundamentally, babies' brains could keep growing after they were born. Because walking upright led to a smaller pelvis, this limited how large a head--and brain--our ancestors could have. But if it could keep growing after we're born, we'd have larger brains than simple evolution would suggest.
In this New Scientist interview, Taylor makes an interesting statement. He believe that our brains have actually been getting smaller over the last several thousand years because we can store more of our intelligence outside our heads. Since we have computers--and books--we don't have to keep so much in our brains. And he (hopefully) jokingly suggests we'd probably give up our toes to keep our libraries.
Don't let the many local governments considering library cutbacks see this, because it may give them ideas.
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