And I don't see how you can ever factor out conquests and taking peasants as slaves.
Also: do we need to put things in space, and to have computers? Are our lives fuller from that?
If we are not doing that we are not sentient species but a kind of animal that happens to speak and use some rudimentary tools.
Also those "non-sentinent animals with rudimentary tools" did have quite some culture, and technology. Not in today's sense of course: no personalized advertisements with goebbelsian tricks to trick people into wasting even more resources and destroying our environment even more. They only made rudimentary tools like composite bows, tools for horse riding and taking care of animals, etc.
I'm also sad to hear that people before 1960 were just a kind of animals in your opinion, and if that is the measure, many people around the world still are.
Many people today are trying to return to animal state, like you are contemplating it.
An illegal immigrant crossing the sea for better living is more human than a developed country suburban dweller trying to learn carbon neutral living.
How do you know we were always going forward in the right direction? How do you know sometimes we don't need to go back? DDT? CFC gases? There lots of examples even from the recent times.
Why do you think people in the pastoral civilizations didn't exercise their curiosity? Just because they didn't built things you fancy? Didn't they create things, like art, just for the sake of beauty? Isn't that a kind of exercising curiosity, Didn't they develop and learn methods to live in harsh environments, to use the plants as medicine, etc. Isn't that kind of learning valuable, because it does not lead (as quickly) to creation machines doing fancy flashing stuff? they were living, and progressing in a different pace in possibly different directions.
Your attitude is not simply colonialist, but also lack respect for many forms of knowledge, only for these are not on the modern technocratic urbanite's tool-belt makes it especially narrow-minded.
Art is great. Let's always be trying to discover newer forms of art.
It turns out their way of progressing did not bear friut and peasant societies were much faster. That's life.
Why are you only obsessed with new things? Why cannot the legacy be cultivated?
It turns out that pastoral life did bear its fruits, you simply dismiss those. For one, the most important fruit: those people are still around. No that is life, not "progress for the sake of progress".
Legacy absolutely should be cultivated and remembered. But never at the cost of rejecting further motion.
Pastoral life was great why it was going on (even remembering all the raids and slavery stuff), but then it could not go on anymore since peasants learned how to build walls and posts and forts. And had a good reason to do so.
It remains to be seen if this results in a better lifestyle for humanity
I question whether the agricultural lifestyle is a better lifestyle for humanity than pastoralism in some kind of utilitarian or consequentialist sense, provided the conquest of and parasitism upon agricultural peoples could be factored out. Pastoralists had generally taller stature and better dentition than agriculturalists until the industrial revolution. Pastoralists maintained smaller populations, and avoided the negative externalities of settled agriculture, e.g. soil exhaustion under intensive irrigation, pests and disease from close-quarters living.