[riffraff]

how do you quantify the inventions to say "nothing much" was invented?

I have the feeling we underestimate how much stuff has been invented and forgotten.

For example, if you consider architecture the romans used half a dozen kind of opus to build walls, different varieties of arches, cement mixtures, hollow bricks and sunken panels to allow for lighter domes, both rib and barrel vaults, and likely a bunch of other things I never heard about.

A lot of that stuff has been superseded, so we don't really care a about a dozen old cement mixtures, or pure wood techniques, but it doesn't mean they were not invented.

[danieltillett]

By total inventions since the dawn of time. The vast bulk of innovation (in quantity not necessarily quality) has occurred in the last 200 years.

[lurker456]

Taking population into account, that's not that unusual - the vast bulk of people ever alive also fall in the last 200 years.