We went from no human flight to landing on the moon in under 100 years. I’m personally overwhelmed at how fast technology is moving, it’s hard to keep up. However for 240,000+ years we just rolled around in the dirt hunting and gathering without even figuring out the wheel?
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Lots of talk about technology in the comments but I think a major aspect was population and climate which limited the biggest game changing technology, agriculture. Simply put there wasn’t many of us for a lot of those 250k or so years and we had multiple periods of brutal climate conditions over a great deal of the planet. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the technological growth of the last 12k years occurred right after the last glacial maximum. Obviously there was growth periods before then but the climate conditions after the glaciers retreated allowed us to move from surviving to thriving. We went from nomadic hunter gatherers that spent all waking hours trying to survive to stationary agrarian populations that could specialise and had a lot more time to experiment as well as the labour resources to put towards civil projects. Agrarianism is the key. It’s also something that can’t just be “invented”. It takes so many little advancements and a lot of chance.
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