I feel like there’s a bias towards overstating the impact of recent innovations. It’s easy to think of recent “revolutionary innovations” (internet! gene sequencing! cryptocurrency!), while going backwards we tend to view them as more infrequent and discrete (automobiles, steam locomotion, cotton gin). To some extent this may be a real acceleration of innovation driven by population growth, economic expansion, etc. However I think it’s also just becoming more course-grained in what we consider innovative (automobiles=combustion science + mechanical improvements + materials + road tech + …). If this is the case then extrapolating back to neolithic times we’d expect “innovations” to be very infrequent, just because we don’t know about or appreciate all the incremental improvements between them. If each refinement in stone tools is actually an accumulation of numerous developments in eg flaking techniques or geology or apprenticeship systems went into each refinement in stone tools, then that dramatically decreases the impact of any one inventor.
I feel like there’s a bias towards overstating the impact of recent innovations. It’s easy to think of recent “revolutionary innovations” (internet! gene sequencing! cryptocurrency!), while going backwards we tend to view them as more infrequent and discrete (automobiles, steam locomotion, cotton gin). To some extent this may be a real acceleration of innovation driven by population growth, economic expansion, etc. However I think it’s also just becoming more course-grained in what we consider innovative (automobiles=combustion science + mechanical improvements + materials + road tech + …). If this is the case then extrapolating back to neolithic times we’d expect “innovations” to be very infrequent, just because we don’t know about or appreciate all the incremental improvements between them. If each refinement in stone tools is actually an accumulation of numerous developments in eg flaking techniques or geology or apprenticeship systems went into each refinement in stone tools, then that dramatically decreases the impact of any one inventor.