This is an important point that is easy to overlook in our age of historically cheap information storage and transfer. In the paleolithic every bit of informat

This is an important point that is easy to overlook in our age of historically cheap information storage and transfer. In the paleolithic every bit of information was costly to preserve because humans were the only storage medium. Every technology had an information overhead that had to be maintained in cultural memory. There's only so much RAM in band of 300 hunter-gatherers, so unbounded growth in information (and therefore technology) wasn't even possible. Progress took so long because these people were up aginst a semi-hard information-theoretic wall on what their culture could process and remember. Not even counting occasional catastrophic loss.