Eli5 why did humans take so long to create civilizations?

Question

I understand that it took quite a few million years for humans to accommodate to their environment, but why did apes for example stay the same approximately while we had all the advancement. For example why are we into philosophy, writing manifestos, infrastructure, complex design, technology etc while apes aren’t exactly.
Why did it take us 6 million years of hunting to think about farming?

In: 178

Answer 1

There is a concept called the law of accelerating returns. https://www.thekurzweillibrary.com/the-law-of-accelerating-returns

At it’s core, this concept is about the fact that each tool that is created allows new and better tools to be created. We are most familiar with this idea in Moore’s law, which says that the amount of transistors on a chip doubles every two years.

Moore’s law is a subset of the law of accelerating returns and Kurzweil argues that the same principle applies to any complex system, even evolution. When we moved from single cells organisms to multicellular ones this allowed far more efficient body plans that could better shape the world and help them survive. Warm blooded animals can expend cat amounts of energy that cold blooded animals can’t keep up with. Farming allowed is to build cities and gather groups of people who did nothing but think. Medical technology allows us to live longer and thus we can have doctors that have decades more experience and can do even more research.

This is an exponential curve which means that it starts very slow, as you don’t have many tools to work with, but accelerates over time up to infinity. That is where the concept of the technological singularity comes from, it is where our technology grows so fast that we can’t keep up with it. He believes that the specific tool which will complete that process is AI

While his concept suffers under the Whig interpretation of history (which states that the future is always more advanced than the past) the basic concept that each invention builds on the previous ones and makes future intentions easier to build is almost axiomatically true.