Our early predecessors, such as Homo Erectus, are estimated to have been using rudimentary tools and cooking with fire between 1 and 2 million years ago.  The knowledge to utilize these things did not come from our genes, but from memes.  The use of memes is a relatively rare adaptation, but some other species also have some of these abilities, such as apes, bees, and even ants.   The difference though, is that other species have no way of improving their memes other than through random trial and error.

Humans, on the other hand, somewhere along the way from our Stone Age beginnings, evolved the unique ability for creativity which allowed us to come up with new ideas and improve on the memes we used to survive in the world.  Somewhere in the last few hundred thousand years, as this ability for creativity evolved alongside our ability to utilize memes, hominids began to quickly outcompete other species and spread out across Africa, Asia, and Europe.

Our capacity for creativity was likely to have been fully evolved over a hundred thousand years before the invention of agriculture which occurred roughly 12,000 years ago.  But this begs the question: why was there so little noticeable improvement in the lives or technology of our predecessors?   What was creativity being used for?

Most species replicate simple memes by imitation or simple copying, such as an ape learning from another ape how to manipulate a stone to break open a nut.  But humans can enact complicated memes, which involve complex actions defined by sets of rules.  This is not done through imitation of actions, but by using creativity to replicate the actual rules that define the memes.  In essence, we use creativity to conjecture the meaning behind what we observe and use that meaning to implement a complicated behavior.  This also explains how we learn and pass along knowledge from one human to another.

If this is the case, why did we not use our creativity for improving memes to generate new knowledge and innovation over the many thousands of years before civilization actually began to emerge?   Because, unfortunately, humans put their creativity to work faithfully replicating the anti-rational memes of static societies for many millennia!  Imagine cultures that had come to dominate their local ecosystems and spread across the planet, demanding a rigid subservience of their members to the static ideals of their culture.  Ideals that were in themselves complicated rules (requiring the creation of deep explicit and implicit knowledge) that governed behavior that each member would need to follow or risk being rejected. 

Deutsch describes it as a "hideous practical joke" played on humanity by the universe.  For the very adaptation that allows for an endless stream of ever-increasing knowledge to be possible was instead captured by anti rational memes that trapped humanity into tens of thousands of years of suffering in static societies where almost nothing ever improved.

Even as progress started to become more noticeable after the advent of agriculture, it was still very slow in terms of human lifespans.  For most of recorded human history very little changed from one generation to another.  There were numerous short-lived mini awakenings, such as the Greek and Renaissance periods, where knowledge and progress began to flourish but were then quickly extinguished as anti-rational memes asserted themselves and caused reversion to static societies.   It wasn't until the Enlightenment period, characterized by its rebellion against authoritarian structures, unleashed the unbounded creation of new explanatory knowledge that enabled the beginning of a potentially infinite progress.

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