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Tens of thousands of years ago people foraged and hunted for their food and ate whatever they could. Among their forage were wild cereals, which included the ancestors of modern cultivated wheat, barley and others.

People like sweet things. Grains are starchy, but if sprouted they start converting those starches to sugars, so people would've left grains in water to sprout. These sprouts are also easier to digest, thus more nutritious, which bestowed an invisible advantage on those sprouting their grains.

If grains are left in water too long, however, they begin to ferment. Alcohol is produced. People like alcohol.

In ancient Mesopotamia the fermented grains were experimented with, resulting in an early form of beer. The process of making that beer was quite complicated and involved a combination of sprouted and mashed grains.

People wanted beer all year round, but early beers did not have long shelf lives and the grain could only be harvested at certain times. So the ancient Mesopotamians invented a way of storing the ingredients for beer.

It was made of the grain mash, honey, dates and spices that were fermented to make beer. For storage, prior to fermentation, the mixture was baked dry, cut into smaller pieces and baked again to remove all water. This produced bapir, a product very much like biscotti, which could be stored for later rehydration and fermentation. Sometimes it was eaten instead.

I've made bapir, and I've eaten it. It is brittle but delicious. It's also a form of unleavened bread.

Bread was invented as a way to store the ingredients for beer, which was most likely a development from a chance discovery. Leavened bread (that is, with bubbles) may well have been discovered when a mixture like that for bapir was accidentally allowed to ferment before baking. Yeast is responsible for both alcohol production and leavening.

In reality, technologies are frequently discovered, lost and rediscovered, often multiple times, and frequently in parallel. A Dark Age in one region may be a time of rapid technological development in another region, and it’s not uncommon to encounter evidence of ancient civlisations using technologies a thousand years out of whack with the “proper” order of discovery… where “proper” is defined in terms of the order in which those technologies were discovered in Western Europe - there’s that Eurocentrism again.

I mean, just to give you an idea of how flexible the order in which technologies are developed can be and how ultimately wrong-headed the notion of linear technological progress is, there are Central American civilisations that had indoor plumbing, central heating and hot and cold running water before inventing the wheel. Some of the First Nations in what is now Eastern Canada had sophisticated climate models and reliable weather prediction - including functioning barometers and other simple meteorological instruments - before they figured out metallurgy.

The Inca are often accused of “not knowing about wheels.”

Except, they did have wheels. They just didn’t use wheels for long distance transportation. They had a huge road system. On which everything was moved by pack animals and people. The Inca road is an incredible feat of engineering.

So, why didn’t they use wheels?

Because their land was so freaking mountainous that the road would repeatedly turn into this:

Tell me what earthly use a wheel is when your road keeps having to have steps and narrow bridges because you live on top of a mountain.

But that image shows us what they did have.

That’s a suspension bridge. Europeans didn’t invent those until centuries after the Inca did.

Because when the most efficient route through your home hits chasms, guess what?

You get real good at making bridges!

And when the best way to move goods through your desert homeland is a big river?

You get real good at making boats.

Minoan Greece was also a sea power. They had huge fleets of ships, which meant they did a lot of exploration. They also built one of the biggest trade networks in the world, reaching as far as Egypt, Cyprus, Canaan, Syria,  the Iberian Peninsula (modern-day Spain and Portugal), the Levantine coast, Anatolia and Mesopotamia (modern-day Turkey, Israel and Iraq).

A volcano eruption on a nearby island, which caused a tsunami, possibly destroyed their sea power and left them vulnerable, which is why most of their technology was lost.

The Late Bronze Age Collapse a few centuries later led to the simultaneous destruction of advanced civilisations in Greece, Egypt, the Near East, Asia Minor, North Africa, Caucasus, Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean. This caused a dark age across two continents which created isolated village cultures, and is the reason most of their advancements were lost.

But on the flip side…they came up with a way to use water to basically hydroplane those giant stone blocks in their buildings across the desert. Which is a hell of a lot more useful in an unpaved sandy region.

Likewise let’s not forget the Aztecs, who came up with a farming system so efficient (chinampas) that parts of it are still used today and really ought to be revived on a wider scale as part of sustainable farming. And also Native Americans, and I’m using that term BECAUSE it’s so broad: look at tribes across the country and you’ll see something interesting. Iroquois, living in a cold, well-forested, and often icy land, built immovable longhouses—which would survive the bitter northeastern winters. Plains tribes developed the tipi/teepee—while they also faced long, even dangerous winters, they also lived in a place where travel was far easier and the worst of winter could be weathered by heading south. Or down where I live, the Sinagua (later assimilated into the Hopi) built their homes IN CLIFFS. And by that I mean “off the ground, built into the cliff face with adobe.” Aka, some of the best pre-refrigeration insulation against the heat that you could possibly hope for. We still don’t know how they did it, incidentally. “With ladders, dumbass” is an obvious answer in some of their dwellings, but in others it’s not clear how they just….hung over a sinkhole, a quarter of a mile or so above the water, and chipped out the front doors so they had a place to sit while they made the rest. Scaffolds? Very well-balanced rope ladders? Smaller cliffs they chipped off afterward to prevent enemy incursion? We don’t know, but we do know they found a way to make the extreme heat survivable and even sort of a nonissue. They never bothered with stuff like modern central AC because they found a way to let the stone and clay do the job for them.

Technology isn’t always a race. Sometimes it’s just an evolution.