Just because we haven't found evidence of progress in early civilizations doesn't mean it wasn't there. Any small marginal gains were probably immediately lost

Just because we haven't found evidence of progress in early civilizations doesn't mean it wasn't there. Any small marginal gains were probably immediately lost to time, though. We needed civilization to spread out enough for commerce to protect new inventions from luddite regime changes to avoid losing progress (think Mao's book burning and communist regimes like Pol Pot's slaughtering academics/people who look smart - probably based on what Qin Shi Huang did 2000 years ago.)