Here is a portion of a list compiled by Ryan Allis for The Startup Guide, a cultural resource that combines the essence of the social enterprise movement with the hacker spirit of high-growth technology startups and gives advice for future entrepreneurs who want to build a big company while creating sustainable value for society at-large. To read the complete article, check out other resources, and learn more about The Startup Guide, please click here.

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The first steam engine [above], invented in 1712 by British iron maker Thomas Newcomen, powered the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, enabled factories to greatly increase their productivity, formed the basis for the steam locomotive, and led to a great rise in human productivity.

In order to develop world-changing innovations, it helps to be aware of that which has come before us. Here’s a brief tour through some of the most important innovations in human history. Let me know in the comments if you think I left out any important ones!

[Here are the first 15 of 40.]

1. Fire (400,000 BCE): The controlled use of fire was an invention in the early Stone Age, with some of the earliest evidence dating back to hundreds of thousands of years ago. It’s not exactly certain when fire was first being used by humans, but most research puts it somewhere between 200,000 and 600,000 years ago.

2. Language (100,000 BCE): True semantic, phonetic language was first being used around 100,000 BCE, making it a lot easier to pass on how-to knowledge from generation to generation and speeding the spread of innovation.

3. Trade and Specialization (17,000 BCE): In Chapter 2 of the book The Rational Optimist, author Matt Ridley highlights just how important specialization and trade has been to our advancement as humans. Matt gives the example of two early humans Oz and Adam. Oz focuses on getting really good at catching fish and Adam focuses on getting really good at making fish hooks, and then they trade as needed for both to benefit. The first known instance of humans trading with other humans comes from New Guinea around 17,000 BCE, where locals exchanged obsidian, a black volcanic glass used to make hunting arrowheads, for other needed goods. By 3,000 BCE, trade routes across Asia and the Middle East developed, followed the domestication of the camel and the creation of the trade caravan. Trading merchants, who purchased goods up front and held the inventory as they transported it were, of course, the original entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs rearrange land, labor, goods, and capital to enable the sum of the outputs to have high value than the sum of the inputs.

4. Farming (15,000 BCE): Around 15,000 BCE (about 17,000 years ago), the first animal domestication began taking place, and around 10,000 BCE, the first domestication of plants. This step was critical for the advancement of the human species. Instead of having to be a nomadic species that continually moved around seeking new places to hunt and to gather, we could stay in one place. This allowed us to start to form communities and cities (the basis for civilizations), which have been critical in the development of human knowledge. Around 12,000 BCE, food preservation began as civilizations in the Middle East extended the life of their foods through drying them in the sun. With the ability keep food edible beyond the time that it would naturally go bad, and store it for the future, time and energy were made available to work on other things besides simply farming, hunting, and gathering, enabling a great advance in our ability to specialize and trade. With greater specialization and trade came a substantial increase in the variety of tools and goods available.

5. The Ship (4000 BCE): Around 4,000 BCE, the ancient Egyptians were making wooden sailboats and around 1200 BCE the Phoenicians and the Greeks began to make even bigger sailing ships. The advent of the ship was a huge step forward from humanity because it was one of the first forms of transport that enabled commerce to begin happening between different parts of the world.

6. The Wheel (3400 BCE): The next significant step in the history of innovation came with the creation of the wheel, sometime between 3300 and 3500 BCE We know this thanks to the discovery in southern Poland of the earliest known depiction of a wheeled vehicle on a clay pot.

7. Money (3000 BCE): The next critically important innovation that contributed to the development of a strong human civilization was money. Around 3000 BCE, the Sumerians were one of the first societies (if not the first) to begin using money to help the ease of commerce and exchanging of goods, replacing the barter system.

8. Iron, (3000 BCE): The whole science of metallurgy began around 4400 BCE when human civilizations began to use copper and silver, and soon thereafter we figured out how to merge copper and tin to form bronze. Around 3000 BCE we found an even stronger substance called iron, which gave rise to a new age of human history.

9. Written Language (2900 BCE): Although language had been around for tens of thousands of years, the invention of written language was extremely important because it made written records and numerical calculations possible. The first recorded written language was Sumerian cuneiform, which started around 2900 BCE.

10. The Legal System (1780 BCE): In 1780 BCE, Hammurabi, the sixth king of Babylon, was one of the first to write down a formalized code of laws. He created a structure that enabled his people to understand what the societal norms were. Other examples include the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Ten Commandments, the Twelve Tables of Rome, and the Book of Leviticus—early legal systems that enabled society to tackle dispute resolution at a lower cost and create an understanding of what the norms are. These systems helped create amazing advancement in our ability to conduct commerce in a frictionless environment.

11. The Alphabet (1050 BCE): The first “true alphabet” (containing vowels as well as consonants) was created by the Phoenicians around 1050 BCE. Many modern alphabets evolved from the Phoenician alphabet.

12. Steel (650 BCE): Steel is a compound, an alloy between iron and carbon, and one of the strongest substances we know. The earliest known production of steel is a piece of ironware excavated in Western Asia that is about 4,000 years old. The Spartans used steel extensively around 650 BCE, as did the Chinese from 400 BCE, and the Romans.

13. Water Power (200 BCE): The next great innovation, around 200 BCE, was water power—first used in the Fertile Crescent area in the Middle East. This breakthrough enabled enormous transformations in our ability as a species to harness power, and water power continued to be used into the nineteenth century, when water-powered mills were still common in England and New England.

14. Paper (105): Moving into the common era (CE) calendar, we saw the creation of paper, which was first used by the Chinese in around the year 105. Around the sixteenth century, wood pulp paper became more widely used, replacing rag paper. With wood paper, knowledge could spread much more easily.

15. Movable Type (1040): Advancing about 900 years, we had the creation of movable type. While many people think that movable type began in 1436 with Gutenberg’s printing press, it actually goes back to imperial China in year 1040. Later, when Gutenberg invented his press, he was able to use special inks and tin, lead, and antimony to mass-produce books and get content to the educated folks of Europe in fifteenth century.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Ryan Allis was the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of iContact from 2003 through its sale to Vocus for $169 million in February 2012. Allis is now the Chairman of Connect in San Francisco, the Chairman of the Hive Global Leaders Program and a member of the United Nations Foundation Global Entrepreneurs Council.