Of course some of us did a better job than others, but enough lived that Humanity (collectively singular) is still here, and to me it seems the only way for anyone to learn anything is via the negative image formed by all the ideas that didn’t work.

Sorry I know this sounds a little woo-woo fruity, but that’s Humanity’s godlike power to transcend the limitations of our bodies’ material dimension where energy can’t be created or destroyed.

Collectively we’re like a blockchain holding a mirror-image dimension of all the best ideas just by virtue of the other nodes not making it, growing over time as our new embodiments get to start at what from their point of view is “zero” despite being unknowably old and full of patches and bug fixes. Storage and retrieval are the same operation!

Sarcasm nonwithstanding, it took over 12000 years of technological advances for agricultural societies to catch up to their palaeolithic bretheran in terms of average life expectancy and even metrics like height.

I'm not a primitivist by any means (I'm using a pc right now as it so happens) but we continue to have a lot to learn from modern hunter gatherer societies both in terms of social organisation and food consumption.