Actually you made my assertion stronger...those beings were alledgly around over 25000 years ago...so it went from 25000 yrs ago using bones and rocks to 20000 years later using rocks and then in less than 5000 years we went from using stick and stones to flying to the moon...
It's called learning agriculture.
Once we learned to grow food on farms etc, citystates were able to develop, and instead of spending all of our time trying to feed ourselves, we were able to put our time into creating civilizations, and making war.
War is the greatest reason for developmental leaps.
Trying to keep up with the jones's so the jones's don't kick your butt up around your ears is quite the motivation, or for that matter, wanting what the jones's have, and creating more and more sophisticated weapons to do it.
Farming, and then civilizations, and then war.
war has always been there, but on a very small scale, I am talking big wars, with thousands of soldiers, which was not viable when you are a hunting and gathering society.
Farming allowed civilization, and civilization created more sophisticated war making, and then war allowed leapfrog developements in technology.
Competition and free market economies will do that also.
Oh, and it is also about climate, when the climate changed to a point where large scale agriculture became viable, we took off running.
I saw the claim in 1966 that we'd doubled our scientific knowledge in the previous 20 years. (That is, since 1946.) That sounds believable to me. Feedback effects, that kind of thing. Success breeds success and you get an exponential runaway going, eventually.
In 1900, we had just noticed various forms of radiation and knew nothing of the atom. We were 11 years away from knowing how densely packed an atomic nucleus is and how much empty space surrounds it.
We had anesthetic, sterile surgery but no blood banks or antibiotics. We had deduced by indirect observation the existence of genes and could guess they were hiding in cellular chromosomes somewhere, but not everyone took the idea seriously.
We didn't know for sure what galaxies are and regularly confused them with the glowing dust clouds called nebulae. We didn't know the universe is expanding.
We had telegraph and even telephone links but no voice radio or even radio telegraph. We didn't know satellites were possible. We knew something was wrong with our ideas of light, space, and time but had no idea what. We knew something was wrong with our classical ideas of light, energy, and heat but had no idea what. IOW, no relativity, no QM.
We had no powered flight. The automobile was an interesting gimmick but it was unclear if it would ever replace the horse. The best way to get around on land was by train. On water, steamships were still common.
It starts really slow, yes. For a long time, people didn't realize that change ever happened. You see medieval European artists rendering scenes in ancient times and it's abundantly clear they don't realize that their peculiar armor, women's fashions, and gothic architecture hadn't been around forever.
But it builds on itself. The industrial revolution brought unmistakable change to people's lives. They didn't always like it. That era gave us the term "Luddite."
Someone born in the powdered wig world of the US founding fathers, say 1798, could have lived to see the Civil War in his middling-old age, and maybe the telephone and electric light before his own light winked out.
I'm already living in a very different world than the one I was born into in late 1949. Computers (better known as "electronic brains") were strange things that filled warehouse-sized space with vacuum tubes and wire patch panels. No one knew much about what they were or what you would ever do with one, not to mention that only a tiny few existed, all custom-built.
Moon landings? We're already in a different world from the one (1969) the moon landing happened in. Perhaps I wouldn't have laughed if you'd told me then that I'd have a surpassingly powerful computer on a table at home, or that an array of devices including my car and some of the stuff in my kitchen would have computers in them, but I wouldn't have guessed it on my own. I didn't have a calculator then. It was still the Age of the Slide Rule, although in a year or two my Dad would spend about $100 for a four-function TI.
So, big whoop. How does all that help you? BTW, recognizeably shaped stone tools go back to Homo habilis, which is why he was "handy."