Nowadays we have reached... «A Short History of Progress»

Nowadays we have reached such a pass that the skills and mores we learn in childhood are outdated by the time we’re thirty, and few people past fifty can keep up with their culture — whether in idiom, attitudes, taste, or technology — even if they try. But I am getting ahead in the story. Most people living in the Old Stone Age would not have noticed any cultural change at all. The human world that individuals entered at birth was the same as the one they left at death. There was variation in events, of course — feasts, famines, local triumphs and disasters — but the patterns within each society must have seemed immutable. There was just one way to do things, one mythology, one vocabulary, one set of stories; things were just the way they were.