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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It’s not entirely accurate to say that humans stopped evolving. We only gained the ability to drink animal milk a few thousand years ago, for example.
Think of it like a landslide. One or two Pebbles falling won’t have any impact, but once you get enough of them going at the same time, they start a chain reaction that becomes way bigger than what kicked it off.
Combine the ability to drink animal milk with domestication and suddenly you can colonize huge swaths of land that were formerly uninhabitable. Now you have way more people, which allows for way faster progress.
That’s just one example.
We weren’t “just rolling around in the dirt hunting and gathering.” People were getting shit done all the time in the ice age. Most of the speedy technological developments just can’t happen without the modern scale and population of the world.
My great-grandmother told me stories of crossing the Mississippi on a raft in a covered wagon pulled by mules. They came from Tennessee to pick cotton in Arkansas. They had no electricity at home, only kerosene lanterns. She lived 103 years and saw autos replace wagons, home electricity, indoor plumbing, two world wars, the telephone, radio, and TV. She was alive when men landed on the moon. I should be so lucky to live a life like that.
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.
I often wondered the same thing. Then I had a child. I can 100% say that pre modern times with houses and steady food supplies etc, keeping a child alive must have been absolutely brutal back then. Add in the fact that a lot of women and children died during and after birth, and that’s one piece of the puzzle
My great-grandmother told me stories of crossing the Mississippi on a raft in a covered wagon pulled by mules. They came from Tennessee to pick cotton in Arkansas. They had no electricity at home, only kerosene lanterns. She lived 103 years and saw autos replace wagons, home electricity, indoor plumbing, two world wars, the telephone, radio, and TV. She was alive when men landed on the moon. I should be so lucky to live a life like that.
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.
There have been several times in human history where we either got kicked in the proverbial nuts or knowledge took a huge step back. There’s theories and stories from ancient texts that claim there have been major cataclysms that reset the human super volcanoes, massive floods, etc- and we’re finding more evidence of this recently. Then you have instances where through our own savagery, stupidity and greed, we’ve prevented our own progress- burning of the library at Alexandria, the sacking of Rome, the council of nicea, the black plague, how we’re currently resisting advancements in technology because big corporations make too much money on oil and gas, etc.
In summation, we’ve had a decently long, sustained period of time where nothing catastrophic has happened, either by our hands or by natural forces, thus allowing us to continuously build upon the knowledge of our past.
PS- there’s also theories that our recent exponential technological growth is due to reverse engineered tech from “somebody else’s” recovered technology, but that depends on whether you believe that sort of thing.
We weren’t “just rolling around in the dirt hunting and gathering.” People were getting shit done all the time in the ice age. Most of the speedy technological developments just can’t happen without the modern scale and population of the world.
There have been several times in human history where we either got kicked in the proverbial nuts or knowledge took a huge step back. There’s theories and stories from ancient texts that claim there have been major cataclysms that reset the human super volcanoes, massive floods, etc- and we’re finding more evidence of this recently. Then you have instances where through our own savagery, stupidity and greed, we’ve prevented our own progress- burning of the library at Alexandria, the sacking of Rome, the council of nicea, the black plague, how we’re currently resisting advancements in technology because big corporations make too much money on oil and gas, etc.
In summation, we’ve had a decently long, sustained period of time where nothing catastrophic has happened, either by our hands or by natural forces, thus allowing us to continuously build upon the knowledge of our past.
PS- there’s also theories that our recent exponential technological growth is due to reverse engineered tech from “somebody else’s” recovered technology, but that depends on whether you believe that sort of thing.
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