Greentext

My own line of reasoning is that the speed of progress of technological advancement is dependent on the amount of people who can dedicate their lives to doing stuff other than trying to gather enough food and shelter to survive. So for the longest of times basically everyone had to just try to survive and maybe have an idea or two every now and then. Low human population and no-one able to dedicate themselves to innovation means extremely low innovation rate. But those rare times something really useful was developed and passed on to the next generation led to freeing more people to be able to dedicate themselves to innovation and thus increasing the amount of people one human can support with their work effort. This is a positive feedback loop so it has exponentially grown to today where one person's work can support multiple people making theoretically most of humanity free to advance technology.

"something doesn't add up"

yes it does. that's exactly what it is you're describing. all of it adding up. as always people struggle with exponential growth because it's not very intuitive.

my favorite way to demonstrate the unintuitive nature of exponential growth is this question:

there's a pond, and a lily pad on it. the number of lily pads double every day on the pond. so on day 1 there's one, day 2 there's two, and on day 3 there's four... etc.

if it takes 120 days for the pond to get completely covered in lily pads, what day was only half of it covered?

!the answer is 119.!<

That most people spend most of their time passively reading celebrity news on tiny black rectangle tells you everything you need to know about the rate of human progress.

Exponential growth, thats about all there is to it. Advancing from clacking rocks to hunting deer is actually already a huge advancement.

Those 190k years in caves however werent non-advancing. A lot of advancements happened over those years.

Fires, wheels, knot tying, ceramics, pottery, grains, hunting, animal husbandry, medicine, language, art, music, rope...

Also, 10k years is after we gained writing of various forms to store information.

Keep in mind thats at the stage of shit like egypt, the great pyramids, etc. We were waaaaay beyond "cavemen" at that point. We already had trade routes, cities, nations, countless languages, doctors, etc.

The big issue was before that point, all our forms of storing information were just not able to stand the test of time very well, is all. We stopped being "cavemen" way before that mark though.

you know how sometimes you're trying to solve a puzzle but you're stuck at the very beginning? You can spend hours looking at the puzzle and get nowhere. But then you spot it! the one step or the one logical conclusion you needed to advance, and you start blasting through the puzzle

it's that

anon assumes development of science and tech is linear

Oldest stone axes are like a million years.

We're not the first smart species.

start rolling down hill

going slow

go faster

hmm

about 70 years after human had its first flight, we stepped on the moon.

It was mostly agriculture and dense human settlements, I think. Once you have someone farming enough food for themself plus someone else, that "someone else" can do something else to progress technology. Sometimes with things that allow that farmer to produce enough food for three people, then five, so goes on.

The answer is probably language. Before advanced language was developed, there wasn't a good way to pass along any knowledge that was gained by an individual.

Shit can get pretty wild when you start writing stuff down

language => written down language => widespread literacy => affordable information (printing press) => internet => hypertext websites => search engines.

we went from struggeling to keep our knowledge arround to having access to almost the entire sum of human knowledge in a mostly convenient manner.

A lot of the comments are talking about writing being the game changer but it took generations of selective breeding crops and livestock to make them viable for domestication. We haven't found any evidence of domestication prior to about 12k years ago in archeology or genetics. There were many civilizations who built large cities and never needed a writing system.

The Pleistocene (2,580,000 - 11,700 years ago) was fucking crazy cold and had a hella unstable climate. Not a nice predictable environment.