Even aside from the big advances, look at things like clothing in the past few decades. Outdoor clothing has changed enormously but so have so many other day-to

Even aside from the big advances, look at things like clothing in the past few decades. Outdoor clothing has changed enormously but so have so many other day-to-day things--a lot of which are about electronics but that's materials-related as well. It's an interesting question. Why couldn't the Romans have invented $X? And the answer is mostly the tech tree. There are probably exceptions around things like germ theory of disease and so forth but it's mostly true.