[qrybam]

I understand that this comment probably wasn’t meant in this way but it comes off as condescending of people from only a few thousand years ago and it feels like my friends were being spoken about (personally!)

We have to remember that it’s humans we're talking about here, and that this wasn’t exactly that long ago. They would have had the same cognitive potential as us, if not more simply because we’re lazy ungrateful creatures living in a level of comfort that royalty of old could not even imagine. The cost of a mistake in their “real world” was often death, and they _had_ to get it right so that their family didn’t die.

People can spontaneously self organise and achieve all sorts of things “on the spot”, kids in the playground do this daily- making up fun games without any parental input. I don’t believe you need a whole level of social development beyond “I won’t kill you, let’s be friends” to achieve great things. This becomes complicated as groups grow of course, but I would imagine most of us have experienced this on some level.

Necessity is the mother of innovation. Doing something the hard/impossible way a few times will force you to be creative, especially when you need to feed your family/group.