> most important technology in human history.
Do you really believe this?
Do you really believe this?
It isn't absurd to think this is one of the most consequential technologies ever. It probably doesn't make sense to rank technologies (which build on top of each other after all) by importance, but it's fairly clear this is a historic breakthrough.
There's also fire.
Writing was very important, I'm not so sure about industrialization, maybe as modern men we might think that way. But human life was perfectly liveable and conceivable without it. Even writing. Big civilizations like the Inca empire didn't really have writing (although they had the quipu system for record keeping).
If there's a civilization collapse, we will still be doing fire and agriculture. We probably won't be doing industrialization and computers.
In fact you could reasonably argue that life for most people didn't change that much from establishing agricultural settlements all the way up to industrialization. Most people spent most of their time procuring food and clothing/shelter using roughly similar methods.