Humans have harnessed energy from wood, animals, water, wind, sun, and fossil fuels to fuel our rise.

Blending anthropology, biomechanics, and history, he writes about ambition, ingenuity, and costs of progress.

We must change our mindset to live happier lives and achieve a healthier balance with nature.

I'm always looking for books that challenge the status quo, and when I learned about Roland Ennos' new book The Powerful Primate: How Controlling Energy Enabled Us to Build Civilization, I couldn't wait to get my eyes on it, and I'm thrilled I did. In this landmark book, Ennos offers "a compelling argument that flips the traditional view of humanity on its head. Rather than focusing solely on our intellectual abilities...[he] argues it’s our physical power and engineering brilliance that have set us apart in the animal kingdom." His arguments reminded me of an intriguing interview I did with author Justin Gregg titled "Is Human Intelligence a Gift or a Burden?" Here's what Ennos had to say about these intriguing and well-supported ideas blending anthropology, biomechanics, and history, and the costs of progress.

Marc Bekoff: Why did you write The Powerful Primate?

Roland Ennos: In my last book, The Science of Spin, I uncovered the ways in which we use rotational motion. I showed how we use compound sling actions to swing our arms when we hit or throw, and described how spinning machinery powers our modern world. In this book, I wanted to showcase these examples of our physical prowess and engineering skills and demonstrate how important they have been in enabling us to dominate our planet.

MB: How does your book relate to your background and general areas of interest?

RE: I have always loved creatures and machines, and spent my career in the field of biomechanics, investigating the engineering of animals and plants. I started to link up my findings about the ways we move, the material properties of wood, the nest building of orangutans, and the stability of cereals, with visits to archaeological, rural, and industrial museums to build up a picture of how humans evolved and created the modern world.

MB: Who do you hope to reach?

RE: Anyone who is interested in the story of humankind and wants to understand our species better, from artists to scientists, anthropologists to engineers. I hope that the book will help bridge the divide between the arts and sciences, so that we not only know ourselves better but also each other.

MB: What are some of the topics you consider, and what are some of your major messages?

RE: I first consider the evolution of early hominins. I show that as soon as they came down from the trees and stood upright, they were able to improve their already impressive tool-using abilities. They could marshal muscles from their legs and trunk to hit harder and throw farther. For the first three million years of human history, selection pressures acted mostly on their bodies, improving their grasp and coordination. This enabled them to survive on the plains by foraging for roots and nuts and scavenging animal carcasses.

By three million years ago, when Homo erectus became fully terrestrial, evolutionary pressures shifted to the mind. Humans became better foragers largely by making more sophisticated and powerful weapons and tools. They became better at learning from their neighbours by improving their observational and communication skills. Consequently, the last two million years have seen no change in our bodies, but a doubling in our brain size. This enabled our ancestors to spread all across the globe. I argue that we learnt how to speak and create art and music as a by-product of our need to deal with the physical world about us.

I next consider the rise and spread of agriculture and civilisation. In many warmer, wetter areas, New World hunter-gatherers settled down to a leisurely life of gardening, growing fruit and root crops. However, in arid regions such as the Middle East, people could only survive by cultivating cereals. I argue that the deficiencies of these winter annuals drove cereal farmers to develop a whole new series of tools, materials, and machines to lessen their labour, and they harnessed draft animals and water power to drive them. They built towns and cities, travelled between them in wheeled vehicles and ships, and fought each other with powerful metal weapons. This technological progress eventually enabled a small group of Spanish adventurers to sail to the New World, conquer its people, and impose their inferior form of agriculture.

Finally, I consider the birth and spread of industrialisation. I show that the Industrial Revolution was powered by new energy sources—peat in the Netherlands and coal in Britain—and trace how the patent system freed up engineers to build the modern world. I show how successive innovations speeded up production and built a worldwide transport infrastructure. And I show how engineers finally spread the benefits of industrialisation by transmitting power across cities and by developing portable machinery that could be used everywhere. The unprecedented economic growth of the last 70 years has been driven largely by the development of hydraulic machinery and electronics.

The last part of the book considers the downside of our dominance: how, by increasing our energy consumption, we have magnified our power to destroy ourselves and damage our planet. I argue that we can only survive if we escape from the destructive loop set off by our pursuit of cereal farming and return to a simpler, lower-powered way of life—gardening.

MB: How does your work differ from others that are concerned with some of the same general topics?

RE: Most histories of humanity concentrate on our intellectual and social abilities. They seem to neglect the vital questions of how we actually obtained our food and survived, and talk only in the vaguest terms about “tool use” and “agriculture.” My book redresses the balance, investigating how we moved, made and used tools, grew our crops, and designed and built our machinery. This approach actually answers the fundamental question that other authors have ignored; it explains why it was a terrestrial ape that came to dominate the world rather than any other sort of animal.

MB: Are you hopeful that, as people learn more about the way we have shaped our planet, they will pay more attention to how we could stop ourselves from destroying it?

RE: Yes, my history shows that it was only by chance that our species has become so acquisitive, destructive, and divorced from the natural world. It was the deficiencies of cereal farming that led us to harness the labours of other animals, build machines, create an industrial society, and overexploit the natural environment. I show that if we return to a simpler, more energy-efficient way of life—gardening—growing fruit and vegetables to support ourselves, we can live happier lives and achieve a healthier balance with nature.

In conversation with Roland Ennos, a visiting professor of biological sciences at the University of Hull. He is the author of successful textbooks on plants, biomechanics, and statistics, and his popular book Trees, published by the Natural History Museum, is now in its third edition. He is also the author of The Age of Wood and The Science of Spin.

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