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It’s entirely possible that humans just like you or I weren’t able to produce that last level for ≈280,000 years. It’s also possible that whatever evidence there was of their achievements has been lost. It’s not unthinkable, just see the highly effective genocide of the Amerindians - they likely had very large villages or even cities built from wood, which would require coordination of labour, sophisticated building techniques and materials knowledge. It’s possible but unlikely that all of this knowledge was passed down orally, but we don’t have much records of whatever their written archives were. The Aztecs for example had universities for their philosophers and priests, but it was all destroyed.

Cheeky edit on this bit. I'd assume there has been plenty of written down stuff that started some of the modern advances over the last few thousand years, much like what you've mentioned. The biggest jump from that was widespread distribution from printing and fast global communication after that. Now we have all of that at our fingertips so all that knowledge happens by osmosis to some degree to a lot of people and it's all there to improve upon for those who wish to, unfortunately we're still mostly the same as we were thousands of years ago so also just use it to wank and spread misinformation at about the same rate. I think most people throughout history probably thought they were at the pinnacle of existence, I'm getting a hint of us possibly peaking, but the optimist in me hopes not.