Greentext

"something doesn't add up"

yes it does. that's exactly what it is you're describing. all of it adding up. as always people struggle with exponential growth because it's not very intuitive.

my favorite way to demonstrate the unintuitive nature of exponential growth is this question:

there's a pond, and a lily pad on it. the number of lily pads double every day on the pond. so on day 1 there's one, day 2 there's two, and on day 3 there's four... etc.

if it takes 120 days for the pond to get completely covered in lily pads, what day was only half of it covered?

!the answer is 119.!<

Oldest stone axes are like a million years.

We're not the first smart species.

Pretty sure we had a triage stage during the whole prehistory to get to our point to randomly get an individual violent and cunning enough to survive the wilds and other competitors but helpful and sociable enough to survive within it's tribe.

Yep. For most of human history technological progress amounted to getting a little bit better at smashing slightly sharper rocks over the course of hundreds of years.

A lot of the comments are talking about writing being the game changer but it took generations of selective breeding crops and livestock to make them viable for domestication. We haven't found any evidence of domestication prior to about 12k years ago in archeology or genetics. There were many civilizations who built large cities and never needed a writing system.

Its all about building ontop of the law of adjacent possibilities, which end up becoming an S tier for progress. Of course it started out slow.

The Pleistocene (2,580,000 - 11,700 years ago) was fucking crazy cold and had a hella unstable climate. Not a nice predictable environment.

We haven't even hit the steep bit of the curve yet, wait until you see where we are by the end of this century!

We didn’t have writing for 190k years

Shit can get pretty wild when you start writing stuff down