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Now if only our technology can speed up the biggest scientific problems of our day without politics getting in the way of progress.

They genocided each other too.

The skeletal remains that we find of males at dig sites have vast amounts of damage to them, and we find significantly less women and girl skeletal remains. Aeons later and the heterogeneity of the Y chromosome is suspiciously low in contrast to that shown in mtDNA. That's a lot of killing and raping

There was no mutation, or at least there's no evidence for it. The big change 50.000 years ago likely happened because population density finally became large enough to meaningfully transmit and preserve culture.

I wouldn't say genocided per se. We have pretty significant percentages of non-homo sapien DNA. Which implies a decently high degree of inter-breeding.

My money is on a combination of inter-breeding leading to genetic extinction through dilution, resource competition (strained by changing environmental conditions), and of course inter-group conflict.

Also cooking before you eat matters a lot

Technology grows exponentially.

There's a compounding effect to advances in different fields. But I would posit it's not exponential, but sigmoid.

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Early in the study of a scientific field, discoveries are slow and difficult. But as the benefits of research are industrialized, you see a critical mass of research and human labor invested in applied sciences. You see a surge in development up until you hit a point of diminishing returns. Then the benefits of research diminish and the cost of maintaining the libraries of information and education grow beyond the perceived benefit of further academic work. Investments slow and labor product diminishes over time. Existing infrastructure cements itself as the norm and improvements become more expensive to impose. Finally, the advances in technology plateau for a period of time.

Eventually, you hit on another breakthrough and there's a new surge in investment and novel infrastructure, until that well of new useful information is exhausted.

Periods of rapid and transformative growth may look meager and unimpressive in hindsight simply because you are standing on the shoulders of giants. But can anyone seriously argue that the steam engine (17th century) was less significant than the nuclear power plant (20th century), when a nuclear power plant has - at its core - a very high efficiency steam engine? We don't seem to recognize 300 years of internal combustion as a period of relative technological stagnation.

Anon (plural) isn't exactly famous for their intelligence

Solid point, yeah, but 20 years ago was 2005.

GTA: San Andreas released 21 years ago.

Half-life 2 released 21 years ago.

Morrowind released 23 years ago.

Ocarina of Time released 27 years ago.

Crash Bandicoot released 29 years ago.

Star Fox released 32 years ago and had 500-600 tris on any given frame.

DOOM also released the same year, but is not true 3D

Obviously your point still stands, but full true 3D games were common by the late 90's, and pseudo 3D games were prevelant as early as '92 with Wolfenstein 3D.

Unfortunately, time flies.

If there's one hard lesson of history I keep relearning, it's that almost nothing ever happens until it materially is required to happen. Language and agriculture waited until population density was high enough. The industrial revolution didn't happen until the logistics and population sizes again necessitated massive changes, even though the steam engine was hundreds of years old. Revolutions don't happen until the population is starving.

If anything in history is impressive it's the rare individuals and societies that change before they're forced to by material necessity (and those cases are often debatable). Really dampens the notion of idealism being viable.

There's no need to farm if few humans there are can sustain themselves via farming

That is wisdom right there

Why didn't they use a calculator then?

The CIA is hiding something

Actually the biggest factor was most likely the development of language, which probably required certain evolutionary traits in order to be possible. With language, collaboration and cooperation become much easier, which leads to fire and cooking and other ideas like that. You get to writing things down a lot later.

Is this the anthropological equivalent of cultural relativism? "Yeah maybe we got to mars but Grog figured out how this berry makes him shit a lot and that's an equivalent accomplishment!"

maaaan...

Although, to be fair, without semi-modern medicine, I'd have died 2-3 times as a kid, and without semi-modern surgery, I'd at least be crippled as a result of being a stupid teenager.

Ehh...not really. I enjoy too many of the things that make life more comfortable. Plus I would have died already. If not by some hunting mishap then when my appendix tried to kill me about 10 years ago.

No.