But now there's so much more that you can do alone.
Write an app, and you've made a new tool instantly usable by any person on earth.
Come up with a simple device and 3d print it.
Lack skills to do any of that - instantly hire unlimited number of experts. Lack knowledge? Access it instantly.
If we're talking about simple low hanging fruit inventions that can be made by a single person, the search space is much larger than the stuff you can do with your bare hands alone in the forest.
What you describe is the difficulty to be creative. You need to try a lot of things and it takes time.
It's the same now than it was then.
What's changed is that, with the same creative power, as an individual, you could do more then.
You can carve a wheel alone in the wood. It's hard, but as a single individual with only natural resources, you can.
A kid in china, or a grandpa in west africa can do it.
To code a revolutionary AI today, you need a lot of per-requisites: electricity, computer, internet, access to knowledge, education and a looooooot of time to practice.
Even if you are the most creative person in the world, from all centuries included. You can't do it in the wood. You will not see somebody in Mali do it. A kid is unlikely to be able to do it.
Because being capable of creative the concept in your head is not enough. The stuff you could do with what anybody had at hand is gone.
Making your own rope is easy with some trial and error. You just take a bunch of stringy things and twist them together to make a stronger stringy thing.
The twisting bit takes some finesse, and obviously you won't be making nylon rope with your bare hands, but making a grass rope is child's play.
Making a wheel, once you have the concept of a wheel, is pretty damn easy too. If you want a stone wheel, take a large stone and chip away until it resembles a wheel. If you want a wooden wheel, take a large piece of wood and whittle away until you have a wheel.
I think that this sort of perspective is (at best) a-historical. I have absolutely no clue how difficult it would be to actually conceptualize "rope" or "wheel" without any of my modern knowledge.
The saying that 'hindsight is 20/20' would seem to be particularly true at the scale of early human invention and civilization.
Good luck with making your own wheel or rope from scratch (i.e. alone and naked in the woods)!
This comment (by my interpretation) implies that the process is difficult. I agree with other comments stating the concept is difficult, but the process for those two inventions is quite manageable - even if you are "alone and naked in the woods".
Exactly. The invention isn’t the physical object, it’s the idea - the realisation that a certain class of objects/processes can be useful in unexpected and open-ended ways.
Wheels are almost useless in dense forests that have no roads, for obvious reasons. So why would anyone waste a day or two making one?
You can't make a useful wheel out of a single large block of wood. It will dry out and crack. Wooden wheels are made of several pieces to minimize this problem.
Write an app, and you've made a new tool instantly usable by any person on earth.
Come up with a simple device and 3d print it.
Lack skills to do any of that - instantly hire unlimited number of experts. Lack knowledge? Access it instantly.
If we're talking about simple low hanging fruit inventions that can be made by a single person, the search space is much larger than the stuff you can do with your bare hands alone in the forest.