You are missing the point. ALL inventions or ideas ultimately came from single individuals, or, at the most, a very, very few highly intelligent people. It is only very recently that science prizes are far more likely to be shared between different individuals, for example. So, yes, a civilisation might feed and clothe a particular genius but they do not contribute or participate in his genius. So what if geniuses also relied on the past discoveries of various genius individuals in the past?
You are the one missing the point. Of course they participate! Put a modern genius in a Paleo HG tribe and he will be entirely useless. The geniuses in those circumstances are the handy artisans who can invent and make effective stone and wood tools, utensils and weapons, that's it!
Not correct. In fact, according to Huebner the rate of progress is actually slowing down and has been for some time:-
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7616-entering-a-dark-age-of-innovation/
Some of that is true and some of it isn't. Incidentally the cut off point he chooses is about the same time that the world entered the modern era of global democracy. But even though the democractic forces increasingly do a lot to hamper human achievement and progress, there has still been massive progress in many areas, because technology builds on itself, and because the world population has increased significantly, which both increases the efficiency of the global market, and provides more new minds to come up with new ideas. On the other hand, the democratic forces have made it so that much of the population growth has happened in anti-natural ways, where leeches are bred and producers are decimated, so that has the opposite effect. I would readily admit that anywhere from 1 to 3 billion people worldwide not only do not contribute to world progress, but actively hamper it, and the world would be much better off without them. But in fact the world would be even a lot better still if instead those people (or their roles in society) were replaced by roles like the ones that the rest of the world population has, the roles of the worker, of the farmer, of the businessman, the caring mother, of the inventor, the capitalist, the entrepreneur, the babysitter, the entertainer, etc, etc; instead of the roles of the welfare queen, of the politician, of the syndicalist, the thief, etc.
As far as patents go, that is a two edged measure, because patents are very damaging to productivity and progress, as they are essentially a government-granted monopoly, which is not what you want if you want further technological achievements. That is not to say that all information on how to produce all technology should be forcefully shared, producers have a right to hide these from competitors, but they don't have a right to threaten competitors with deadly force if they do figure out what they're doing and copy it. So while it could be that the number of patents in the US has declined because there are fewer inventions, it could also be that the State isn't upholding patents as strongly as it used to, and so fewer people are bothering to register new ones, and that would be a very good thing.
Numbers mean nothing, really. The Ancient Greeks lived in tiny city-states and produced, per capita, most of the scientific base we moderns now rely on.
Actually, the ancient greeks did not come up with any significant technological advances. That is partly because of the democratic elements in their society, but mainly because they were a heavy slave society. Societies with significant degrees of slave labor are noticeable for their lack of innovation even after hundreds of years.
Anyway, the more I look at this over-concreted world, the more I realise that everything good happened in palaeolithic times such as the low population, the diet, the exercise, etc. It is all downhill now with decreasing average hominid brain-size, people living in urban appartments in a way that reminds one of domesticated animals in kennels(I include myself, sadly). Whatever the case, though, one does not need billions, or even millions, of people in order to speed up technology, past historical examples basically prove that.
You are of course free to go live in the wild, there are plenty of places in the world where you can go and not be bothered by States, and where there is very little pollution from human activity. Being bothered by other tribes or dangerous animals is another matter. But the point is it makes no difference for you whether the world holds 7 billion people or 10 million, you can still go and live in pretty much the same way as you would've in paleo times. You can even take a lot of modern technology with you that will be useful in the wild, such as a knife, a bow and arrow, a rifle, material and tools to make and repair a roof and your clothes; containers to carry water and to store food, etc.
