The modern anomalous rise in wealth is directly correlated to an increase in the use of fossil fuels since the beginning of the 20th century. So if you want to talk about giants, you should mean to say you're standing on the shoulders of trillions of carbon lifeforms condensed into coal, oil and natural gas over hundreds of hundreds of millions of years.

What people have accumulated in wealth between when life arose and 1850 is entirely insignificant than what was built in the last 167 years (roughly).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_g...