Whenever it's Homo Sapiens remember that's just ordinary modern man, no different than us now. Pre-Historic or not.
So naturally every generation or at least every hundred years or so there's always been an Einstein, Tesla, or DaVinci come along.
So naturally every generation or at least every hundred years or so there's always been an Einstein, Tesla, or DaVinci come along.
The geniuses of the Stone Age did little things, like finding better ways to make fire, flint knap, leather processing, weaving and looms, tent making, taming animals, inventing the wheel, food preservation, which plants were good for what ailments. You know, all the stuff you need without question.
These ‘blueprints’ are preserved because they were carved in rock. All the thousands of years of prior art of scratching lines in the dirt are lost to time.
Also, human population was very small in the old days: https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth#world-pop...
Which would mean that also about 7% of all geniuses ever are currently alive, and thanks to modern agriculture most of them are not stuck farming.
4000 years is a long time, and our civilization will likely be gone, nothing but ruins.
Quick who was the first kind of England, and who started or ran the east India trading company?
The extreme is the Lurie Family which can “trace” part of it’s lineage back 3,000 years and that was with paper records. (700 years of that is well documented, prior to that is less certain.)
Things may fade even faster even if we have written record of it.
You definitely would expect to see a proportional number of outliers on a time scale.
In terms of impact both are huge, Fabrice's works are a marvel and Hyke's repackaging of ELF with YAML is considered business genius - he could sell anything I'm sure.
Some dude named "Bob" who lives in a trailer in the woods and never talks to anyone.