10,000 years ago we were cavemen who lived off the land. We only had what was accesible in nature. Now we have cars, iPhones, and computers. I’m assuming everything we have now is composed of the same matter cavemen had access to. How did we get all this stuff?

Question

Apologies if this is a repost.

I just don’t get how the Earth went from being entirely nature to having the iPhone I’m typing this on. And like where did we get the internet? And how do we take pictures?

ETA: A lot of great answers but I’m not really asking about people. More about the stuff. When I picture the Earth 10,000 years ago I don’t see anything that could make my phone.

In: 0

Answer 1

The phone in your hand is made of a bunch of little pieces that fit together like a puzzle. Each of those pieces is made of one or more naturally occurring substances, dug up by humans and shaped/changed using methods refined over thousands of years.

Your phone likely has a plastic body. We learned to dig up oil, and one of the things we learned to do was process it into plastic that we could shape. The frame of your phone is probably aluminum. We dig up raw aluminum ore, and refine and shape it into the frame of your phone. So on and so forth for each component in the phone.

The internet is just a big network of computers all strung together on copper or fiber optic cables. We make both of those out of materials we dig up and process.