If change proceeds faster in our time than in the Bronze Age, or faster in the Bronze Age than in hunter-gatherer civilizations, we explain it by references to the variances between humans and the differences between human cultures. These variances are relatively small, but they form the whole of our experienced reality. We explain the variance between humans by looking at characteristics such as education, experience, and the unknown quirks that make the occasional Einstein or Newton. But no amount of education will make a chimpanzee a scientific researcher. The underlying hardware remains constant.
Humans are smarter than chimpanzees, presently the smartest creatures on Earth.
Certainly, the human brain's hardware is far slower than the theoretical limit. Human neurons fire approximately 200 times per second, using signals that travel at a maximum of 100 meters per second. A civilization based on smarter or wiser or more creative intelligence is impossible to imagine, even as fiction. If the human ability to consider abstract general processes is as far as any conceivable intelligence can go, then a smarter intelligence would simply be able to solve problems faster, more directly, more elegantly, perhaps with solutions that are at once beautifully multifaceted, yet obvious in retrospect - but they would be solutions to the same class of problems we consider now. Or the ultimate limits of smarter intelligence may lie as far beyond humans as humans are beyond chimpanzees.