[nnq]

Their kings were. Imho there's a certain minority of people, maybe 0.001%, who are definitely not what I call "makers", with waaaay above average "communication/leadership/manipulation + sword swindling" skills who end up kings/emperors/etc. (at least the first time; then it's just because they were born in the right bloodline - hence another reason for "bloodline obsession"). And their scribes (the guys with good communication but bad sword swindling skills and of the wrong bloodline).

The rest of the people were more obsessed with "what steps to follow to plant my seeds in the ground so as to increase the probability of crop yield" or "what steps to take when preserving food so as not to get really sick" or "what steps to do in what order when building my house do it does not fall down on me at the next storm" etc.

Oh, and lineage is pretty much retrospective "how-to knowledge" anyway: it describes what the sequences of actions where that resulted in someone existing today: 'X1 and X2 had a baby", then "the son of X1 and X2 married Y0" and "moved to village Q" after "fighting in war Z" etc. History is pretty much recorded procedure.

Not until we got to philosophy, geometry and other types of math did we really have clear what-is knowledge... (Except maybe for religion, and no wonder that smart priests and monks were pretty damn good at math.)

As an example, go to any remote village with and ask them "where is X" and what they'll inevitable tell you is "what actions to perform to get from here to place X". (The infuriating part is that some of the modern humans kept this thought pattern and good luck getting indications to how to get anywhere from them... thank god for the "what is" knowledge provided easily by google maps :) )