The idea of exponential growth is basically that key inventions led to the ability to rapidly advance technology. That may hold some truth but it isn’t really likely “the answer.” To understand why humans took so long we have to look at some things. Oddly enough the answer is in part in the fallacy of the argument. “We were basically cave men before that..” not at all. At one point we could generalize humans as “cave men,” but fairly quickly one would discover that isn’t the most tenable solution. As your family grows you may need a bigger cave, as you forage and hunt around your cave and as your tribe or family grows the resources around the cave get scarcer and scarcer.
Eventually you need to move caves. Being a cave man, your life is in the cave and your time is mostly spent foraging and hunting and defending and all that other stuff- in the area around your cave- you wouldn’t likely know of any great caves that weren’t near your cave and the depleted or dangerous areas around it.
Long story short we end up with nomads. You either find a really great cave and area which inevitably leads to the thought by others in your group that there may be even BETTER places, or a bad place that makes you want to move again- or maybe you find a good area in your travels but there aren’t any super close good caves- so you start to “commute” from a good cave in a bad area to a good area and back.
This itself is a huge development. In this time we focus on developing general knowledge, navigation, communications, tools and skills and such if the nomad. People start dealing more with new climates and varied ecology. The more people are nomadic the greater odds of people running into strangers- diplomacy, war, language, sharing knowledge and mixing genes and such.
It’s generally accepted that the greatest leap towards modern technology was agriculture and livestock. Until the end of the ice age these things weren’t practical most places. The ice age wasn’t just a big cold period. It changed the face of the earth and it also brought fresh water and fertile soil as it subsided. Our historical evidence points to humans as largely nomads through the ice age, crossing land bridges across continents and spreading the globe often over paths that have been submerged under water since the thawing post ice age. This fits the picture I paint you. Up until the ice age most humans were commonly nomadic and would travel to find better climates or to follow prey or forage fertile areas and such.
As weather and conditions generally improved post ice age and the conditions- fertile top soil and fresh water made it more practical- we started to develop agriculture and livestock keeping. These are huge technological undertakings. You forget that it isn’t exponential in the sense that even today with all our technology we struggle with basic improvements to many natural processes and materials. While we have for example certain exotic metals and composite materials- iron and steel are still fundamental materials that aren’t just used because they are cheap- in some applications you really can’t beat them. To get from flint to alloy steel was a long process. One that has only been marginally improved and specialized today. Many ancients metals hold up well against modern metals.
We has to develop processes to make hotter fire and extract various elements etc. to treat and mix and burn out impurities in modern steels. It was an i crime tal process. Someone had to figure out what made steel strong or weak and then the technology to manipulate it on an atomic and molecular level. Hay, hay was a major development. All sorts of things we take for granted were developed- and then subtly improved over thousands and tens of thousands of years. We had to “unlock” the building blocks to open new frontiers and slowly but surely improve knowledge and quality of life.
Look at the space program. Astronauts today enjoy much better meals and have toilets instead of cans and diapers (they still have diapers for some things..) but compared to 60 years ago with the early space missions how much have we improved? We went to the moon, going to the moon is still a major undertaking full of danger. The technology has advanced but it isn’t like night and day. Most of the problems that were problems in 1969 are still problems in space exploration in 2023. There haven’t been any major advances to the craft used- the US was using the same basic space shuttle design with incremental improvements and the Soviets used… basically the same capsule design as is… since early space flight. There are more options for meals and things are slightly more comfy and slightly less dangerous. That’s about it. It’s been incremental.
Realize that just getting to the Bronze Age is a huge thing. Some minerals can be found, at least in small quantities, almost laying on the ground. These are the metals our early ancestors mastered first. Other minerals were very rare, while common in the earth, without the ability to dig deep or the knowledge they were there, you wouldn’t know. Asides chance and occasional meteors or seismic activity or such- you wouldn't know they existed and they’d be very rare, perplexing. So we had to develop a lot of technologies to get to where we could even really start playing with these things. For someone to be able to spend the time and effort to just start digging to maybe find something useful- to be able to dedicate time and resources to science and curiosity, we had to be at a place where we had stability. Permanent settlements and access to agriculture and animals steadily and reliably. As we start freeing up time and individuals so that not everyone has to always be hunting and gather
ing and working on survival based needs, we have more time for art and thought, including science- asking and trying to answer questions and doing things just to satisfy curiosity. The scope and scale we can explore increases. Often the fruits of these labors pay off in better living or increased prosperity or in further advancing technology.
The tools we use for farming and grooming and building etc. needed to be made and then improved. Clothing and irrigation and crop rotation, fertilizers and methods to deal with pests. Medicines and medical knowledge, reading and writing, domestication of animals.
We figured out how to use gravity or pressure or other means including natural kinetic energy or heat to do work- turn mills, irrigate, heat and cool. We figured out how to use animals to assist in labor and other tasks. We developed ways to couple animals to equipment and tools and conveyances and we had to come up with those tools and conveyances and the coupling means and the tools and the vehicles and such all would see improvements. We figured out paths and roads and started learning to engineer them to last longer or work better or resist erosion or rutting and sinking and other issues.
That’s one possible way to think of it. Who would be trying to invent a rock that does math when no one has chairs or windows or shoes? While humanity did develop all sorts of critical and impressive concepts and technologies over the tens of thousands of years of history we have some insight to- we were busy inventing everyday stuff.
There was ALOT to invent when you are talking about “cave men” because they didn’t even invent the cave. Anything you can’t find on the ground basically doesn’t exist. You’d probably start inventing all the life or death stuff. Better ways to get and keep stead supplies of food and water, better ways to fight or avoid predators and pests, medicines so that when you get the sniffles it doesn’t mean death. People like comfort and a lot of comfort ties in to life or death. Warm clothes and blankets. Ways to keep your home warm. Ways to keep cool. Ways to keep warm without choking to death or burning your home to ash.
Tools that let you do more in a single day or exert less effort or face less danger doing the things you regularly do. Humans now and presumably our ancestors tend to put effort into improving things we encounter everyday, into finding “hacks” in everyday life to make tasks faster or easier or less perilous etc.
So once starvation wasn’t the default and with a little work and better than horrible luck we had a pretty steady food source, people tend to turn to making life better. So we invented lots of technologies to make life better. Around the globe there are records of things like slowly improving sanitation. At first ways to keep pests and stench etc. away from where we sleep and eat. Over time slowly a growing realization that waste is connected to sickness and efforts towards mitigating the health impacts. We experimented with food- what’s safe and what isn’t, but also how to prepare more pleasing or filling dishes and finding new foods and flavorings because once you have some stability in not starving your focus can shift a little from how to get food onto how to enjoy food.
Basically we weren’t and largely still aren’t on some set path to some technological goal. We get side tracked. The entire globe is currently focussed on developing and building a way to colonize mars or create “infinite clean energy,” we have bright minds at work making pills to improve orgasms or designing video game systems or engineering new colors of paint that last longer. It’s always been that way to some degree. Regardless of our ability to think of and plan for the future or not- we live in the now. In a lab somewhere are some
Geniuses of math and science using rare and expensive tools of enormous power to figure out how to make the black on the next generation of TV look “blacker.” That is not a development likely to be immortalized in history books discussing man’s technological progress. The jump to 1080p is probably not going to be a milestone note in human development.
We want better picture to watch and play new entertainment that has no direct link to improving our abilities as a species or bettering our survival. Those are just things to make life more enjoyable, because a lot of what we invent is aimed at making life more enjoyable, because all in all things like food are on average fairly available in most of the world. Of course these things are worthless either. Improvements to video technology allows for clearer imaging in the sciences and can help in other areas that visual technologies serve important practical purposes.
To the earlier points we often find technologies or discoveries that at first seem random until someone finds a use for them or that are perhaps a bit frivolous can often come back to have useful and critical applications. It’s a two way street where sometimes big important things made for saving lives and such can become common and plentiful enough to allow them to be used for more frivolous or mundane usage and sometimes technologies that were developed for or applied to more frivolous things can turn out to be a critical part of big discoveries.
Tl:dr- there’s more to it but exponential growth is maybe a factor- really just consider that it wasn’t so much early man was inventing huge advanced things but that we had a lot to invent. Basically nothing existed except what grows or is produced by nature. You don’t need a computer or an airplane if you are starving and those things have no direct way to get you food. Before most people decide to try to figure out some huge problem and imagine an unseen technology from thin air then chase after it they might want a desk and a chair to think and work at or pencil let alone a system of writing to work with. So we had alot to invent and improve over tens of thousands of years and then reached a point where we were mostly all pretty well fed and could keep away bugs and weren’t dying at 4 years old and there were enough of us that we could improve those things while also trying to make a rock do math for us.
Eventually you need to move caves. Being a cave man, your life is in the cave and your time is mostly spent foraging and hunting and defending and all that other stuff- in the area around your cave- you wouldn’t likely know of any great caves that weren’t near your cave and the depleted or dangerous areas around it.
This itself is a huge development. In this time we focus on developing general knowledge, navigation, communications, tools and skills and such if the nomad. People start dealing more with new climates and varied ecology. The more people are nomadic the greater odds of people running into strangers- diplomacy, war, language, sharing knowledge and mixing genes and such.
The tools we use for farming and grooming and building etc. needed to be made and then improved. Clothing and irrigation and crop rotation, fertilizers and methods to deal with pests. Medicines and medical knowledge, reading and writing, domestication of animals.
Tools that let you do more in a single day or exert less effort or face less danger doing the things you regularly do. Humans now and presumably our ancestors tend to put effort into improving things we encounter everyday, into finding “hacks” in everyday life to make tasks faster or easier or less perilous etc.
Geniuses of math and science using rare and expensive tools of enormous power to figure out how to make the black on the next generation of TV look “blacker.” That is not a development likely to be immortalized in history books discussing man’s technological progress. The jump to 1080p is probably not going to be a milestone note in human development.