What was the greatest discover or invention man ever made in your opinion?

Question

In my opinion there are two things that are the greatest invention and discovery of man. 1. The invention of the wheel, and 2. The discover of fire

Answer 1

A lot of things might qualify: the wheel, the lever, writing, the control of fire (not fire itself!), the use of fire to cook food (anthropologist Richard Wrangham argues this is what made our brain size take off), cave-painting - i.e. the ability to abstractly depict events that lie in the past (or future), antibiotics, vaccination, selective seed-breeding, the domestication of wolves into dogs for hunting (which according to anthropologist Pat Shipman is a probably cause of our out-competing the Neanderthals), the calendar, the clock, Hindu / Arabic zero, eyeglasses ...

Note a couple of things though:

1. Many of these were almost certainly invented / discovered multiple times in different places, not just once.
2. A smarter answer than any of these might be: "Uh ... why do you ask the question? Surely (a) it's not clear in what sense one thing should be ranked higher than another - lives saved, power over nature and thus population increased, aesthetic value ... just what are you getting at with the word 'important'?" And surely (b) even if we clarified that, there is no reason to think we can give more than a totally speculative answer. Yes, the invention of writing was more significant for human cultural development than the invention of the insulated coffee mug. But all we can say about "painting" versus "cooked food" is that our world is unimaginable without either of them.

BTW one last really significant thing ... please let's rephrase the question as "human invention or discovery"! We have no reason to think we know the gender of the discoverer(s). And any *instructor* still using "man" in this sense in 2020 needs calling out on it - with good reason, it started to be recognized as a dated and unacceptable usage in academic circles around 40-50 years ago.

Hope that helps! - Richard

Answer 2

There's near infinite answers to this question, a number of inventions and discoveries have had a role in shaping the course of human history and marking divisions between major periods in world history. The first event that comes to mind for me is the development of agriculture which sparked the Agricultural Revolution (the 10,000 BCE one, not the British one).

The Agricultural Revolution marks the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to sedentary agricultural societies. As agriculture increased the amount of food produced per person, a food surplus developed which allowed for division of labor - fewer people were needed to produce enough food to feed the society, so more people could specialize in other types of labor (i.e. building, cooking, carpentry, etc). In addition, the food surplus allowed for massive booms in population that the hunter-gather lifestyle could never sustain. Without these changes, humanity arguably would have never been able to develop the grand empires that would come later in history, and subsequently the societies we know today.