> Nothing explains the lack of development the previous few millemnia.

What explains the lack of development in ancient Sumer or ancient Rome? Wait a hot minute, because we have no idea and could have no idea if there was a small industrial revolution 10K years before ancient Sumer was a suburb. There would be no way to know if something like actual stainless steel was forged 60K years ago and the technology was lost. This is the problem with the blogger's armchair reasoning.

Actually, we know for at least one industrial revolution in sumerian times a.k.a the beginning of the iron age. And we have a way to find for civilizations with larger impact by checking the isotopes locked in ice. This is the method for dating volcano eruptions and for tracking the produce of lead in antiquity.

Yet look at today, with climate change.

How many areas are seeing reliable ice layer formation? Stuff at the top (most recent) is melting away, too!

So... if the same thing happened before, Industrialization, co2, eventual collapse after warming, ice records may be unreliable...

Yes, but per the graph in the article, any earlier "industrial revolutions" and even the Roman Empire weren't even visible blips relative to the Western European industrial revolution.

> Nothing explains the lack of development the previous few millemnia.

But it also took many, many thousands of years for us to get to the industrial revolution. And we did not have magic, we did not outsource stuff to elves and dwarves, we did not have wars with orcs and dragons and other monsters and no extremely powerful transcedental/imortal beings actively involved/shaping the development of history.

And we only overcome feudalism because of the plague and the discovery of the New World -- non of which happened in the LOTR universe.

The church lost a lot of their influence as well.

Capitalism and the European Enlightenment overcame feudalism. Precursors of both can be found already before the discovery of the Americas.