this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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Do we know that knowledge of those accomplishments has been repeatedly erased from history? That seems like a bit of a leap.
We don't. But I find it hard to believe that not one person in 90,000 years of human history, never came up with a single advancement similar to the ones that happen all the time now. Our brains were just as developed as they are now, for that entire time.
It is inconceivable that we only started using them in any significant capacity, just recently.
We didn't just start using our brains like that in recent time only. There may have been a few Albert Einsteins in the stone age but if they couldn't spread their ideas, then that civilization did not have that knowledge. Leather tanning and meat conservation can be discovered easily, but it has to be rediscovered every time there's a new group of 20 people, it doesn't get transfered to be improved upon over the centuries.
The problem your reasoning is missing is scale. We know you can't build the Great Pyramid if your busiest cultural center is a village of 200 people in the closest 100 km and they couldn't communicate.
And all our tech is based on improving upon something that exists. No one can conjure a microchip and a cell phone out of thin air.
Well, we did use them, but mostly for not starving to death and not getting eaten. Both of which we did very regularly anyway. Also, there were only a few thousand humans overall.
We didn't have free time until agriculture and automation.
Hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers have pretty similar workloads - by many estimates, subsistence farming requires more labor, even. The advantage in subsistence farming is consistency and food preservation, allowing for larger populations, surplus, and specialization.
If you make a stone spearhead twice a month, you might not spend much time thinking of how to do it better - but if you do it for the whole village, 60 times per month, you might be spending some of that knapping time thinking about how to make it easier.