Music, spoken language, stone tools, controlled fire, bone tools, mining, boats, fiber cloth, twisted rope, agriculture, metalworking/metal tools, animal husbandry, wheel/axle, written language, cement, soap, plumbing/sanitary sewer, the arch, aqueducts, currency, glass processing, cartography, wind/water mills, compass, screws, the plow, steam power, printing press, optics, artificial fertilizer, antibiotics, electric generators/motors, the Bessemer Process, radio, powered flight, general/special relativity, DNA, transistor computing (and computing in general), GPS, the Internet, genomics.
Without any of these (and others I missed no doubt) our world would be radically different. So.. I’m not sure “Top 10” is practical.
I agree that “top ten” is not practical.
For instance, somewhere in the list you have to have basic chemistry. At some point, (even though it was a series of steps), we went from believing in fire, earth, air, and water to a more detailed understanding of oxygen and stuff like that.
I suppose you could refer to it as some kind of “materials science”
And this is part of the big picture that brought us nifty stuff like Super Glue, that kind of thing.