It's funny, I've never thought about it that way. If we look at our own world, we've gone from hunting wooly mammoths to space exploration in the same time span. It disturbs me. That's why i think things in ME aren't like in our world. How the Elves who learned things from the Valar didn't discover and make applications of Electricity and make applications with it for example.
Electricity is an extremely simple phenomenon.
Whatever Tolkien said, I think ME cannot be our World.