The modern humans are believed to have evolved about 200,000 years ago.For the first 100,000 years, we remained there until some unexplained sequence of events started forcing them outward. Then humans started walking, and it took multiple generations for them to survive the deserts Africa to reach Europe and Asia, and later the Americas.
Only when we started settling did we have the time and resources to build something that could be passed on to the future generations.Without that settlement, great ideas would have died with the person or the tribe. Our first major settling down happened around 12,000 B.C.
Until about 10,000 BC, the world population never exceeded 15 million and mostly was around 1 million.
The present population of the world is 7 billion.Even if we assume that early human being could be as productive as us, their civilization could produce less than 1/1000 of what our society could do.
Life Expectancy: From that point until 20th century, we had a very low life expectancy (about 30 years). Imagine if we all died by the time we reached 30, how much could we learn from our parents and how much could we teach our kids?
Early humans didn't find a way to use the fire in a controlled way. This means we often lived in a dark cold, and scary place .It was about 125,000 years ago that we started using fire in a controlled way.
Early humans used primarily stone tools, and until about 50,000 years ago, these were quite crude. They helped a little bit in hunting, but didn't take us far. We had to wait until 6000 B.C. to get our first metal: gold .
We didn't have any animals to help us out. We first started domesticating dogs and later sheep, pigs, horses, etc. Each of the domestication waves took thousands of years of trial and error .
By 12,000 B.C., many groups of humans found habitable regions to grow their tribe. They had found ways ways to domesticate a few plants and animals and had made superior tools.
It was about 3000 B.C. when we actually started putting our ideas into a pictorial form. Until that point, most of the ideas that humans generated would have evaporated. Imagine if we had no science books. Each generation would have to discover Newton's laws and all other scientific theories by themselves. With writing, we could stand on the sholders of others.
Then, we discovered the wheel about 4,000 years ago. This allowed us to travel fast and transfer products and humans between regions. The rest is history. In short, we spent a lot of time in a trial-and-error mode to find the right places to live and the right things to eat. Given the short life spans and absence of settlements, ideas could not get transmitted. As we discovered ways to keep us warm and bright at night, got spare time due to agriculture we started putting our brains to a good use.
Innovation/Invention requires a lot of trial and error and the ability to build on previous results. Until a few thousand years ago, these experiments were local, and there was little we could learn from others' experiments. Thus, a guy in Ethiopia might have been trying to master fire control even 5,000 years after a guy in Sweden has already mastered it. There was no easy way to transfer ideas given the lack of wheel (to enable quick movement), writing systems, broadcast communication, etc. The population was also too low to improve the odds of experimentation. Lastly, we were too focused on survival to afford us the time to innovate. Agriculture liberated us from the focus on the daily search for food.
Source: Quora
Only when we started settling did we have the time and resources to build something that could be passed on to the future generations.Without that settlement, great ideas would have died with the person or the tribe. Our first major settling down happened around 12,000 B.C.
Until about 10,000 BC, the world population never exceeded 15 million and mostly was around 1 million.
The present population of the world is 7 billion.Even if we assume that early human being could be as productive as us, their civilization could produce less than 1/1000 of what our society could do.
Life Expectancy: From that point until 20th century, we had a very low life expectancy (about 30 years). Imagine if we all died by the time we reached 30, how much could we learn from our parents and how much could we teach our kids?
Early humans didn't find a way to use the fire in a controlled way. This means we often lived in a dark cold, and scary place .It was about 125,000 years ago that we started using fire in a controlled way.
Early humans used primarily stone tools, and until about 50,000 years ago, these were quite crude. They helped a little bit in hunting, but didn't take us far. We had to wait until 6000 B.C. to get our first metal: gold .
We didn't have any animals to help us out. We first started domesticating dogs and later sheep, pigs, horses, etc. Each of the domestication waves took thousands of years of trial and error .
By 12,000 B.C., many groups of humans found habitable regions to grow their tribe. They had found ways ways to domesticate a few plants and animals and had made superior tools.
It was about 3000 B.C. when we actually started putting our ideas into a pictorial form. Until that point, most of the ideas that humans generated would have evaporated. Imagine if we had no science books. Each generation would have to discover Newton's laws and all other scientific theories by themselves. With writing, we could stand on the sholders of others.
Then, we discovered the wheel about 4,000 years ago. This allowed us to travel fast and transfer products and humans between regions. The rest is history. In short, we spent a lot of time in a trial-and-error mode to find the right places to live and the right things to eat. Given the short life spans and absence of settlements, ideas could not get transmitted. As we discovered ways to keep us warm and bright at night, got spare time due to agriculture we started putting our brains to a good use.
Innovation/Invention requires a lot of trial and error and the ability to build on previous results. Until a few thousand years ago, these experiments were local, and there was little we could learn from others' experiments. Thus, a guy in Ethiopia might have been trying to master fire control even 5,000 years after a guy in Sweden has already mastered it. There was no easy way to transfer ideas given the lack of wheel (to enable quick movement), writing systems, broadcast communication, etc. The population was also too low to improve the odds of experimentation. Lastly, we were too focused on survival to afford us the time to innovate. Agriculture liberated us from the focus on the daily search for food.
Source: Quora
