Inventions

This might sound crazy, but for the longest period of human history there were no inventions at all.

The generations of people used the same tools, weapons, and techniques for over 100,000 years, and then when people became more intelligent and creative, we began the rat race of development.
Looking at the fossil and paleontological records, this holds out to be true.

There are fossil pieces that show anatomically modern humans existed for many millennia, and the exact same types of artifacts appear in the same geological layers as the fossils do, up to a certain point between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago.

At that point in the fossil record, the bones remain the same, but the artifacts change. They grow suddenly more complex, and begin to be quite different from region to region, and more complex and varied as time passes.

In the fossil record, things were the same, but in the paleontological record, everything changed. We had discovered the key to true humanity: invention.