I'm always profoundly disturbed by how stupid humans are when I'm doing this sort of thinking. Man, are we dull, dull, dull.

Retrospective on basic tech is good for this. Read the improvements in basic steam engines. Seem obvious in hindsight, but they took generations.

— Ian Welsh (@iwelsh) March 30, 2021

I think about this a lot when I consider that, even if you are talking about just Homo sapiens, we used the same stone tools with some variations and improvements for 200,000+ years.

We’re still those apes barely up from the savannah.