Progressive Evolution

If humans have been around for a couple hundred thousand years, why did it take so long to progress to where we have now? What were the steps in our evolution from ape-man to technologically advanced society? Why do you think there's been such great leaps and bounds in progress over the last few thousand years?

Empire wrote

If humans have been around for a couple hundred thousand years, why did it take so long to progress to where we have now?

Religion. :D
You could also ask: why did it take so long for us to get to where we were a couple hundred thousand years ago? Baby steps.

Empire wrote

What were the steps in our evolution from ape-man to technologically advanced society?

Whew. That would take a long time to answer. You'd be better off taking a anthropology course, reading up on the history of technology (maybe at Wikipedia), or studying archeology.

Empire wrote

Why do you think there's been such great leaps and bounds in progress over the last few thousand years?

Larger societies=more minds working together.
Also the gradual formation of effective education, written language and visual records, math, etc...

[Victus]

Our technological development has been quite gradual. We used nothing more complex than rocks just ~20,000 years ago. About 10,000 years ago we started settling down into societies. This allowed us to develop more advanced technologies. These technologies allowed us to develop other technolgies faster, and so on. It's an exponential process. Not much to look at at first, but look at us go now. Even in psychology, you can pick a disorder and try to keep up to date with it but papers get published at a rate faster than you are able to read them.

[Professor Chaos]

It hasn't been long, Empire. Humans will be around for a long, long time. We're still a quite young species.

Professor Chaos wrote

It hasn't been long, Empire. Humans will be around for a long, long time. We're still a quite young species.

I have hope that we'll one day make it to a Star Trek type world. But right now, with 2 world wars in the last century, and enough nuclear weapons to destroy ourselves numerous times, it doesn't look promising. I think that's why it's so important we become more active as reasonable people because the world is quite clearly going to shit.