10,000 years ago we were cavemen who lived off the land. We only had what was accesible in nature. Now we have cars, iPhones, and computers. I’m assuming everything we have now is composed of the same matter cavemen had access to. How did we get all this stuff?

Question

Apologies if this is a repost.

I just don’t get how the Earth went from being entirely nature to having the iPhone I’m typing this on. And like where did we get the internet? And how do we take pictures?

ETA: A lot of great answers but I’m not really asking about people. More about the stuff. When I picture the Earth 10,000 years ago I don’t see anything that could make my phone.

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Answer 1

That’s a very very long story.

In short: first we civilized, wich basically means we specialized on specific jobs and worked together. One person grows food, the another defends from enemies, a third makes tools and yet another has time to write and think.

Then we industrialized. We thought about how we could make work more efficient by inventing machines that allows fewer people to get the same thing done. And then this grew pretty fast and the machines were able to build things we couldn’t make before. (As the less people you need for manual lahor the more can work on progressing things)

We discovered a bunch of new things that you could manipulate to achieve something. Electricity being a big one of them.

The internet is basically a far developement of the early telegraph. That was quite simple, you press a button and electricity will be transmitted to punch a point onto a piece of paper in a different town. That was enough to communicate, but over the decades we kept improving that concept to transmit more complicated information by basically encoding it into the electrical signal.