Modern humans appeared 200,000; civilization 10,000; and advanced technology 500 years ago. Why no advancement for something like 190,000 years?
In: Technology
The 190,000 year gap you’re mentioning is the gap of hunting and gathering until humans finally settled down. You have to understand that this came as a natural process, not one where people suddenly woke up and realized ‘hey, let’s just grow crops and tame pigs and stop running after wild boars and berries’. It came gradually over a long period of time (potentially generations), with humans potentially not even being aware of going through such a radical change in ‘society’ (or rather through the creation of). What I mean by gradually is that we first for example found some vegetables which were good and we stuck close, then the seeds we were dropping led to more of them growing there etc. until we ended up farming over years and years of environmental change that made humans stick around in certain places.
This process was slow probably because it was dependent on population growth. Few people means that everyone can hunt freely for anything. More people means food becomes more scarce and some species may go extinct. Even more people means that we may have to start looking at vegetable food and other stuff in the first place.
And population growth was dependent on other factors which determined change in social structure such as the development of communication (language) – another slow process.
Again, it was a natural change, not necessarily a conscious one of settling down, and these are some of the factors.
I truly recommend Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari to get a glimpse of how we came to be, including some answers to your question.
Or check out this idea & more: https://deepstash.com/idea/41628/settlement-of-early-hunter-gatherers
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