“With absolutely no idea what that origin was, how to recognize it if you found it, or whether it even still exists? “
In a word, yes.
We are doing things now with the information and we do not know where it came from, what is was, or even if it still exists. We have the blueprints. :)
Don’t you think we are making progress without this knowledge of origins?
That's like saying having a piece of program code gives you the blueprint of the programmer.
What we're doing right now is just learning to read to program code and finding out what the program does.
At this point taking what little we know now and saying we know enough from that to identify the programmer seems a tad out there.