Creativity in Scarcity

Sooty (Adj): Covered with or as if with soot. 

The human race has amazed me with its innovative ideas through out history and how the world as we know it nowadays is due to crazy people with crazy ideas. This comes to when I first came across pit cooking and my mind wandered of thinking "who came up with that idea?" I mean, when most people look at a pit oven they think of the the stone age, and how people were so primitive. However, when I look at it, I just wonder that if someone was so primitive how come they invented something so creative and innovative for their time? Think about it. Who on earth would have thought of cooking in the ground thirty thousand years ago? 

All of this thinking made me think that when people have the least, they are the most creative. This is true for various situations. When you have everything, or well almost everything, you are lazier and don't have to be so resourceful as when you have nothing. For instance, this old proverb says " give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." Here, when the man is given everything (the fish) why would he bother to learning how to fish, but when the man has nothing (no fish), he will learn how to fish and consequently come with a more ingenious idea. Those living centuries ago had almost no technology, and didn't live with abundance. Therefore, being resourceful was their only salvation and way to advance to the future. The author of Consider the Fork, Bee Wilson makes note of this. Here she says that "no method was as ingenious as the technology of hot-stone cookery practiced across the globe, starting at least 30,000 years ago" (Pg. 6). 

To our eyes creating the pit oven was a very small achievement, but the amount of thinking and creativity was much more than we give them credit. It is more important nowadays to find a cure for cancer than a new way of cooking a long time ago. However, we have a lot more resources and tools to use therefore making the process easier for us and faster, consequently requiring much less thinking. It is like using a calculator and not using it. The amount of thinking we need is less, therefore  a stone age man creating an over out of stones is a much greater achievement than many things nowadays. It is truly a relative matter and it has to be seen through objective eyes, but their accomplishments are truly amazing. If humans could still use their thinking like they did before, we would be a lot more advanced than we are right now.