I forget where I saw the story, but I once heard of a native tribe whose members made some money by making baskets to sell to tourists. The tourists would buy the baskets with the belief that this basket represented how the people of the tribe had lived thousands of years ago, the same pattern of living continuing over the whole time.

But the person who told the story talked to the basket makers, who were all trying to create new and distinct patterns of basket weaving, different and better than their teachers and their contemporaries.

The "same pattern of life" can be distinctly different, depending on the scale at which you look.