Technology has to be invented or adopted.

The line distills a central idea in Diamond’s work on long-run human history: technological change enters societies through two main pathways—local invention or diffusion from elsewhere. It implies that “having” technology is not simply a matter of intelligence or will, but of historical circumstance: contact networks, population size, available resources, and incentives all affect whether a society generates innovations internally or gains them by borrowing. The phrasing also underscores a constraint: if a group is isolated or lacks channels for exchange, it may lag not because it cannot innovate, but because it has fewer opportunities to adopt what others have already developed.