Cranfield Forensic Institute, Cranfield University, College Road, Cranfield, MK43 0AL, UK.
Sci Rep. 2021 Oct 13;11(1):20255. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-98514-7.
In research on early invention and innovation, technological "firsts" receive enormous attention, but technological "lasts"-instances of abandonment and rejection-are arguably more informative about human technological behavior. Yet, cases of technological discontinuance are largely ignored in studies of early innovation, as the lack of robust datasets makes identification and analysis difficult. A large-scale geospatial analysis of more than 4500 gold objects from the Caucasus, an early center of gold innovation, shows a precipitous decline at 1500 BC in precisely the places with the earliest global evidence of gold mining (c. 3000 BC). Testing various causal models reveals that social factors, rather than resource limitations or demographic disruption, were the primary causes of this rejection. These results indicate that prior models of technological rejection and loss have underestimated the range of conditions in which they can occur, and provide empirical support for theories of innovation that reject notions about the linearity of technological progress.
在早期发明和创新研究中，技术“首创”受到了极大的关注，但技术“淘汰”-废弃和拒绝的实例-对于了解人类技术行为更具启发性。然而，技术中断的情况在早期创新研究中基本上被忽视了，因为缺乏强大的数据集使得识别和分析变得困难。对来自高加索地区（早期黄金创新中心）的 4500 多个金器的大规模地理空间分析表明，公元前 1500 年，在全球最早发现金矿（约公元前 3000 年）的地方，黄金的使用急剧减少。对各种因果模型的测试表明，社会因素而不是资源限制或人口结构变化，是导致这种拒绝的主要原因。这些结果表明，先前关于技术拒绝和损失的模型低估了它们可能发生的条件范围，并为拒绝技术进步线性观点的创新理论提供了经验支持。
