In the Hunter-gatherer era humanity was frequently on the move as they were not the top of the food chain. Humanity did not reach the top of the food chain till the very end of the hunter-gatherer era during the period called the Pleistocene overkill. A period when the hunting process and technology improved to the point where archeologists theorize that humanity wiped out many large animal species. However that was only towards the later stages of the hunter-gatherer era. Therefore hunter-gatherers diffused information typically from one generation to the next or with communication enabled by travel on foot.

The process for communication diffusion took an incredibly long time as a result. This process increases in velocity during the Agricultural era because humans began to group together in ever larger towns and cities which made transmission and maturation of technology era to era comparatively much faster. Of course the advancements in communication technology even now in the industrial era accelerated the diffusion to even shorter time spans (greater speeds). The speed for the lifecycles of human economic eras is occurring increasing faster (i.e. hunter-gatherer era was much longer than the agricultural era etc). However in modeling the development cycles the acceleration rate shows up as relatively unchanged.

Ray Kurzweil, the inventor for many of the core technologies of the information age has proven this dynamic mathematically. He put the advances in technology into an logarithmic view which shows that though we are accelerating, the rate has never changed no matter how far one go goes back in human history. Kurzweil has a good explanation for his law of acceleration on his website.

The agricultural era is the last complete era which has also been the most thoroughly studied and documented. The following chart lays out the Transition Periods for the Agricultural era based on accepted scholarly opinion today for the history of that era. The Transition Periods shows the process each age undergoes and how the mini updates to worldview coalesced to culminate with the major update and then the subsequent transmission for worldview. Worldview produces a brand new survival guide which undergoes a process where it is customized for the specific economic era.

The last issues we will address concerning the economic eras are how the model rationalizes the exact number of economic eras humanity has experienced. There are proposals for as many as five economic eras in other models; however, this is a historical model and not one for philosophy or sociology, which were the basis for those classifications.

When examining any economic era – one must use stringent logic to thresh through the data. Today even the casual observer realizes technology powers the economy. Therefore when determining what specifically constitutes an economic era, basic factors such as how technology was enabled, how it was powered and finally what was technologies distinct impact on society. If one compares subset logic, such as the gender of a societies gods or other factors then an economic era can not be defined within the context of a historical construction. This model recognizes three distinctive economic eras by examining how the technology cores were enabled, utilized and the technologies subsequent transformation in human communications.