Hi Ask Historians! I'm not sure that this is the right sub but thought I would ask anyway.
Is it that there were civilisations that we just don't know about? Or was there something stopping us from building civilisations for this time period?
Hi OP,
I am in anthropology and we hear this question a fair bit. Essentially there is no answer to the question "what has stopped us progressing?" However, hopefully I can explain in a way that will be helpful when thinking about progress.
The issue with this question is that it presupposes that progress is inevitable, when it is not. What you might be thinking is "what did humans do for those 194,000 years?" Well, humans survived, and reproduced, and carried on with their lives. Many features that are often cited when we talk about 'civilization' (eg. writing system, government, technologies) don't exist in groups where there is no need. Societies that do not have writing will not necessarily develop writing at some point, especially if they have no need for it. There's simply no point. Thinking about civilization as the 'end goal' of society is something of a trick: where it seems as though we can look back and say what got us to where we are today. The reality is that view (apart from being incredibly Eurocentric) is mostly hindsight bias and overly teleological (that the nature of humans is to progress).
In those 194,000 years, as far as we know, humans for the most part travelled around in small groups and didn't really settle down. The first towns we have evidence of were not established until roughly 7,000 BCE in the Near East (very rough estimate - not my area of specialty). There are many factors that need to be considered when we talk about why humans formed more permanent establishments (climate, agriculture, population size), but there's no hard and fast rule that states that given enough time any society will eventually form a 'civilization'. This harks back to a form of (social) unilinear evolution theory dating back to the 19th century.
This kind of thinking also presupposes that societies that are not 'civilized like we are' are somehow backwards or lesser. This is, again, incredibly Eurocentric and problematic.
Ultimately, the answer to your questions is that nothing stopped us from progressing. There was simply no invisible force of 'progression' to be stopped.
If you are interested, I would first recommend reading E.B. Tylor, and Henry Morgan (for the 19th century views I'm discussing), and then Julian Steward for an early refutation of unilinear evolution.
Edit: Whoops, wrote 7000 years ago when I meant BCE
I rather like David Christian's take on this. The rise of agriculture around 12,000 years ago marked a transition from "extensive" (using large amounts of land) to "intensive" (using the same land more efficiently) technology, which changed the rate of human progress fundamentally.
First, it's simply not true that we didn't progress for nearly 200,000 years. Even prior to agriculture, we invented or vastly refined many forms of technology: clothing, tools, shelters. We migrated out of Africa and settled all the corners of the world (except Antarctica) during this period. This required adapting to new environments, learning to take advantage of previously unfamiliar plants and animals. Learning how to hunt mammoths, for example, helped us survive on the cold and barren tundra; mammoths were not only an important source of food but also of raw material (mammoth bones were used to build houses). We may have domesticated dogs as early as 30,000 years ago. We may have built canoes or rafts that allowed us to cross large stretches of open water, enabling the migration to Australia 50,000 years ago.
By the time agriculture first appeared, the total human population was somewhere around 5 million, which is already an order of magnitude more than that of any other primate. This was due to the "extensive" effect of being able to spread very widely. However, at that time, individual human communities were probably not larger than they were when the first anatomically modern humans appeared. Although we had perfected the ability to hunt and gather in any environment on earth, there is a limit to the population density that such a lifestyle can support.
Agriculture allowed us to extract far more resources from the same area, enabling drastically higher population densities (perhaps a factor 100 higher). With larger and denser societies, we get a much faster rate of change, for several reasons. First, there are simply more people around to learn from and cooperate with to generate new knowledge. Second, larger societies develop new social structures and conflicts of power that have to be dealt with. Third, growing populations prompt technological innovations (such as irrigation systems) to produce even more food. Eventually, these changes lead to the development of "civilizations" in the narrow sense of the word. Note that by the date 6000 years ago that you refer to, agriculture is already at least 6000 years old, and a lot happened on the path from early agricultural societies to the first cities.
So one possible answer to the question of why we couldn't build civilizations earlier is that we needed agriculture first. The jury is still out on why agriculture first developed around 12,000 years ago and not earlier. The fact that it developed independently in several different places almost simultaneously suggests that climate change (the end of the last ice age) may have been an enabling factor. I also think one shouldn't completely discount the significance of earlier progress, even if it appears slow in comparison. It sometimes takes a lot of gradual change until you reach a tipping point where a burst of development can occur. It may have been the case that a certain level of sophistication in our tool use was required before we could transition to agriculture, so it couldn't have occurred 150,000 years ago. Agriculture itself was a gradual development, not a single invention as it is sometimes comically depicted. Hunter-gatherers knew about techniques used in agriculture long before they started using them systematically.
It's important to note that there is no inevitable linear progression here, as /u/anthroqueen pointed out. Hunter-gatherer societies don't necessarily develop into agricultural societies, and agricultural societies don't necessarily develop into civilizations. However, agriculture does appear to have been a prerequisite for civilization. Without the increased population density, there is not enough "pressure" (Christian's term) for some of the features that we associate with civilization to develop.
As an aside, many historians will complain about the term "progress" in this context, but I think it's fine to use it in a value-neutral way (there are various objective ways to measure progress, for instance by measuring the increase in energy consumption or the capacity to support large populations, without making a judgement whether progress in this sense is good or bad). I also don't think it's inaccurate to say that "the nature of humans is to progress". We are biologically adapted to be extremely skilled at learning new ways to exploit our environment, to cooperate and pass our knowledge on to future generations; we do this much better than any other animal thanks to our facilities for symbolic language. Given that a large number of more or less isolated human communities have existed in parallel throughout our (pre)history, internal and external factors would have led some of them to change in different directions than others, or indeed in some cases to change very little; from a very high-level point of view, "progress" followed, in some cases, due to random variation and selective advantage, to borrow the language of biological evolution. We just have to remember that when we look at the societies that changed the most, by whatever criterion we choose to use, we don't get a view that is representative of all societies.
Not saying that this can't be answered here, but you might wanna post this to /r/AskAnthropology as well.
The long and short answer is that there was a tonne of progress between 200,000 and 6,000 BP. Your question is based on the assumption that if people weren't building "civilizations" then they weren't innovating or doing anything interesting, which is simply not true.