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Message: <blockquote data-quote="R_Chance" data-source="post: 7785077" data-attributes="member: 55149">Oddly enough my degrees are in history (MA, BA, AA) and cultural anthropology (BA) and I teach history <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> There are a variety of reasons for the rate of progress in the periods of time he mentions. And sure extremely important things happened (agriculture is the single most important thing, everything else derives from the benefits of a steady expanding food supply, the resultant specialization it allows and the increasing complexity of society), but the rate of development was slower than in later eras. The foundations took a long time to establish and spread only slowly. Development ramps up slowly and speeds up as it builds on what came before. That's the nature of any complex system. The perception that nothing happened in the stone age, bronze age, and iron age is due to the limited amounts of information we have and the long time it took for innovations we do know about to occur. Stone age tools, for example, remained largely the same for thousands of years. Low population density and little or no specialization is are the reasons. As population density increases due to agriculture and specialization is established the rate and amount of innovation increases and the stone tools people used changed. All of this assumes that natural laws, and, later, science (the instrument through which we which explore the world) work as they do on Earth. Last time I checked magic doesn't work here though. If it does there, the assumption that everything else works the same there as here is... well, you know what they say about assumptions <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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