Whenever a modern uncontacted tribe is found, it seems curiously consistent that they are barely even agricultural at best-much less even up to pace with most of the world’s society. What makes it so we never seem to discover unheard of industrial societies? They had as much time as anyone else to have come to the same conclusions. What causes one group to be splitting atoms while the other is still using bows and arrows?
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The premise you’ve created here isn’t quite right. There’s no such thing as an uncontacted industrialized society…because one of the key elements of technological advancement is travel and trade. And you can’t do that if you’re isolated in jungles.
But to explain technology a little, one of the major factors is a consistent and versatile spoken language, as well as a standardized written language. Those allow for the transfer of knowledge. No one man figured out how to land on the moon. The Apollo space program I think had something like 400,000 engineers, who documented their designs by writing them down (granted this was largely wiring diagrams, machined part drawings, analyses, etc., but none of it is possible without written symbols). And that was after spending years in college learning complex mathematics, physics, chemistry, from reading about it in books.
Then you need to meet the bare minimum threshold of human survival across wide swaths of society. There is no time for innovation when every able-bodied human is either hunting, scavenging berries, or hauling water just to live. You have to meet some minimum standards and the best way to do that is through specialization. Have the best fishermen fish for the whole village. Have the best weaver make baskets for the whole village. Have the best builders craft the shelters for the whole village, and so on. This creates an economy of labored goods and services. Currency isn’t necessary but it facilitates the exchange and allows for larger sums of transfer as the currency is symbolic of value, containing little value intrinsically.
Then you need modest challenges, and lots of time. Innovation comes from uncomfortable pressure. Humans solve problems. We don’t often create technologies without first determining there’s a problem out there that we need to solve. There’s some neat reading about a language called [Pirahã](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language) in the Amazon where it’s postulated that because they lived in such abundant forests, their society could meet much of their needs by hunting and gathering. They never faced a need to manage large data sets by farming or ranching for sustenance because their needs were met in much shorter time scales. Lacking the need to count large quantities, their language never developed terms for numbers. Linguists and
scientists worked for months and couldn’t teach a single member of the tribe to count to 10. The concept of numbers and counting was completely foreign to them. You can’t develop any appreciable technology if you are incapable of counting or arithmetic.
That doesn’t mean you’re incapable of craftsmanship. I’m certain they produced high quality crafted items. But those items aren’t *designed* if it’s merely spoken training from craftsman to apprentice. Technology requires written language.
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