why didn’t humanity advance technologically for thousands of years when it comes to things like electricity and other electrical power devices like WIFI, but now humanity is advancing rather rapidly?

Question

why didn’t humanity advance technologically for thousands of years when it comes to things like electricity and other electrical power devices like WIFI, but now humanity is advancing rather rapidly?

In: 23

Answer 1

The answer is energy, meaning coil and oil.

Since humans are able to extract huge amounts of energy from coil and oil, we started building machines to do what we used to do using human body. And much more efficiently.
Since we have “free” energy, we can become sedentary, we can live in cities, most of us can go to university, etc.

I recommend you reading Jean Marc Jancovici “World without end”. Very interesting book, talking about climate change, energy and society.

EDIT : Added the coil instead of only oil, thanks to Douglas1994 comment.