What Happy Companies Know: How the New Science of Happiness Can Change Your Company for the Better

Chapter 15. Tools for Building Constructive Culture

Tool use is one of the defining characteristics of humanity. Whereas a few other species use simple tools in simple ways, and chimpanzees make and use simple tools, human beings and our predecessors have been making and improving tools from the earliest days of our existence. It is possible that proto-humans began to use tools—bone and stone applied in their natural state—as soon as they began to walk upright, about 3.6 million years ago. It is quite likely that Lucy, one of our oldest known hominid ancestors, used stone tools 3.2 million years ago. Archeological evidence shows that by 2.5 million years ago proto-humans were shaping stone and bone into points to make them more effective. Stone ...