There is an opinion that the development of any civilization, as, indeed, of all mankind, occurs cyclically. That is, during the existence of civilization, there are several significant scientific, technological and cultural shifts. The development of civilization between them, as a rule, proceeds at a very slow pace.
Often, the development of mankind took place due to the emergence of new tools or the discovery of new knowledge about nature. An example of this would be the invention of the plow or the production of fire by friction.
However, in the history of mankind there have been such huge "steps forward" that it is difficult to explain the natural course of things. Why did the Stone Age, or the Paleolithic with more or less established orders and cultural level, last several hundred thousand years, while the eras that followed it swept like lightning? Or how to explain the fact of the sudden appearance in the Middle East of two centers of culture at once - Egypt and Mesopotamia - practically out of nowhere? Perhaps, against the background of such serious processes, the unexpected discovery, for example, of the laws of gravity by Isaac Newton, looks a little frivolous, however, and this fact leaves enough reason for the historians of science to question.
So how can such abrupt changes in the qualitative level of development of our civilization be explained? Actually, there are only two explanations for such phenomena: they could be due to internal or external reasons.
Internal can be attributed to the independent emergence of ideas about some new ways to benefit from the outside world. It often happens that a new idea, which is called "is in the air" and sooner or later someone comes up with the idea of how it can be implemented. However, this path, called extensive, requires certain conditions to be met. For example, you need to have several individuals dealing with similar problems and looking for ways to solve them. Besides, communication of similar generators of ideas with each other is obligatory. Roughly speaking, it is necessary that the "creative intelligentsia" of this or that tribe or group of people exchange information quite often with their colleagues from other tribes or peoples.
It is quite simple to implement such communication at the present time, since humanity currently has an excellent communication system and the exchange of ideas is very easy and fast. But how could something like this happen in the ancient world, when, not only was the number of people small, but contacts between different groups were a very rare occurrence due to the great distance from each other. That is why the progress of mankind in that historical period moved at a snail's pace.
External reasons imply the receipt of information from some source that is not associated with humanity as such. It can be either representatives of other, more developed civilizations (both terrestrial and extraterrestrial) or some other force, in the common people called God. Well, the hypothesis of the Lord God is considered by all more or less serious researchers as very extreme.
The idea of help from external forces runs like a red thread through most epics (both oral and written) of almost all peoples inhabiting our planet. Different sources cite a wide variety of areas in which external forces helped humanity: from Prometheus, who gave people fire, to the Hindu dragon gods, who gave people writing.
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An interesting detail should be noted here. Only the last few centuries mankind can boast of the so-called "multiple discoveries" - when the same research or inventions take place simultaneously in different parts of the planet. Examples of this are the foundations of differential calculus, simultaneously discovered by three scientists, or the invention of radio, the idea of which came to five people almost simultaneously, and so on. There was nothing like this in the ancient world. As a rule, every "cultural island" on our planet was the source of one, maximum of two inventions, and the rest simply copied or stole the achievements of others. Copper casting was discovered on the banks of the Jordan, grammatical writing - in Mesopotamia, and the wheel - in Europe.
It would be logical to assume that each people at one time (especially at the beginning of the formation of civilization) was supervised by its own group of higher beings, which provided them only with knowledge in some relatively narrow area. Most likely, representatives of some higher alien civilization at one time conducted a kind of experiment on humanity and observed how people would exchange knowledge with each other. Perhaps the experiment was not limited to just these questions. The tasks of the aliens also included monitoring how the knowledge given to people would be used, stored and multiplied.
With the development of mankind, the requirements for him increased, but the help from the aliens was also more significant and relevant. For example, practically all social institutions that exist today (from despotic monarchies to liberal democracies) appeared on our planet almost simultaneously. In the ancient world, the theocratic monarchy in Ancient Egypt, the oligarchy of the Sumerian kingdom and the unification of the Amorite nomads, which, albeit with a stretch, can be attributed to the early manifestations of democracy, perfectly coexisted.
Perhaps the experiment continues to this day and its ultimate goal is to find out whether humanity will reach the level at which it can come into contact with its still invisible benefactors. And who knows, perhaps this moment is already close, since it was in recent decades that the number of recorded contacts with representatives of other worlds has noticeably increased. There is a wealth of documented evidence that we are constantly being watched by someone. Maybe we are already ready to meet them?