Innovation is an antisocial act to some extent. By innovating you are saying someone is either wrong or less competent than you in some area. You are also challenging traditional roles and systems of social organization.
Breaking tradition in a tribe requires convincing one or two people that helped raise you from childhood. You seem to expect a Modern Age style religious persecution.
The interference between invention and tradition is because people don't know how to use or replicate things, and there is no formal education, or books, or whatever to spread it.
Exactly. Tradition was this mechanism by which society factory-ized itself. Changes were disruptive because it affected something as simple as another person's ability to repair the "innovated" item. I think people are instinctually sceptical of change because it's deeply ingrained in the evolution of human culture to understand that change can break the socially distributed factory.
Resistance to change is more complicated than this of course. I don't want to get too evolutionary-psychological about it. I think Darwin has a tendency to bring that out in us moderns. Never discount the incredible power that culture has to become self activated and shape human behavior even against our benefit sometimes.
I think this might be a stretch. I think most group dynamics allow for innovation to some extent.
Yea, if you're weird dick and declare you have "innovated the mighty tent and everyone else is inferior" than you should be rightly thrown out of the tribe.
But, if you can just say "hey I had this idea to put a this animal hide on a couple of branches to keep the rain away, and it's lighter than carrying the cave...I think most people would understand.
It is not that we don't know how to work on those things. We can build things, we can try different approaches. We could perfectly document what has been tried. In stead the proposed work will be shut down by angry emotional responses.
This while in many scientific efforts the useful application of the discovery is unknown. Some efforts look truly nonsensical! Say, what could appear more useless than to document the culture of some primitive unwashed jungle dwellers? That steam engine from Heron of Alexandria! It was completely useless at the time. A seemingly nonsensical effort.
Nothing but emotions is preventing us from spinning up a data center to do astrology. We would all line up to scream how IT MIGHT NOT WORK! which is hilarious if you think about it.
It's easy and low risk to modify an arrow head a bit, so you see a lot of incremental progress in knapping. But moving the band from cave dwelling to tent dwelling would be a paradigm shift.