>>519404020
It's because we probably discovered fire a hundred thousand times before it finally stuck.
A tribesman could have figured out fire and then got killed by a lion on his way to show everyone. Or killed by a man from another village for performing sorcery. Or simply figured it out when he was too old to tell anyone.
Look at how quickly we advanced the moment we figured out how to harness steam.
Look at how long it took for guns to become widely used, we had firearms while we still had knights in plate armor, but they were unfeasible for hundreds of years.
Look at the fact that we lost how to make concrete for almost 1400 years.
We've completely lost the recipe for authentic Greek Fire.
Hell, half the shit Tesla was working on is completely lost because he didn't write things down. He just memorized it because he was a sperg. So it all died with him.
Technological advancement is incredibly fragile, and if we lose an advancement we can lose it for centuries to come.
Fourteen hundred years to rediscover concrete, one of the most absolutely fundamental building-blocks of our entire society. We've used more concrete in the last fifty years than we ever would have in those 1400 hundred years.