While binge-watching a drama set a few hundred years ago in one of the world's empires, I realized that there was something intriguing about the mix of technology in use, which I think was a reasonably accurate rendition of what was in use at that time and place. This wasn't a meticulously-researched historical drama, so I'd expect some anachronisms, but the showrunners were constrained by using actual locations and a well-known and well-documented society, so I wouldn't expect to see the equivalent of a Roman senator on an e-bike.
On the one hand, there were ships at sail, intricately woven fabrics, expansive, multistory buildings with carefully crafted architectural details and a highly-developed administrative state which, among other things, required people across a wide geographical range to carry personal ID. There was an extensive system of roads and detailed maps to show you how to get around them. There were cannon, rifles telescopes, steel farm implements and deadly-sharp swords.
On the other hand, buildings, including heavy-duty structures like jails and military fortifications, were built mainly of wood -- very well built, to be sure, but of wood just the same. Most people lived in small wood-and-stone huts. Some lived in very small dwellings made of sticks. Ladders were made from small logs bound together with rope. The roads were generally traveled on foot or horseback, or in wooden horse-drawn carts. Fighting was mostly hand-to-hand and the main projectile weapon was the bow and arrow.
In other words, while there was quite a bit of technology that would have been state-of-the-art at the time, many if not most of the objects most people dealt with day-to-day could have been made a thousand years before the time of the story, or even five thousand. Consider, for example, a clay cooking pot. While an archeologist could probably tell from the details roughly when and where a particular pot was made, from a purely technical point of view "clay cooking pot" narrows the time and place down to ... "probably not Antarctica" and "probably the last 20,000 years".
Impressive as the more modern-looking items were, few of them seemed essential. An elaborately-embroidered ceremonial robe is not purely decorative. It serves as a signal that the wearer has the resources, including human labor, at their disposal to make such things. Nonetheless, it's far from the only way to keep the wearer warm, and it's actively in the way of the wearer moving around easily, again a feature, not a bug.
Relatively few technological developments are groundbreaking. An aluminum extension ladder is a better general-purpose ladder than a log-and-rope ladder. It's easier to carry. It's probably more weather-resistant and durable though, not knowing any better, I wouldn't want to underestimate how well a well-made wooden ladder would hold up. Likewise, it can probably bear more weight. Because it's easy to change the length of an extension ladder, it can be used in a wider variety of places.
Nonetheless, an aluminum extension ladder is still a ladder, and ladders have probably been around about as long as cooking pots. It's hard to tell for sure since a non-metal ladder is less likely to survive the millennia than a ceramic pot, but there is at least one surviving depiction of a ladder from 10,000 years ago. On a clay pot, of course.
An aluminum extension ladder is also a lot harder to make. While aluminum compounds, particularly alums, have been known for millennia, actually extracting aluminum requires electricity, and quite a bit of it. Aluminum has only been available in commercial quantities for a little more than a century. While we may think of aluminum foil and beverage cans, not so long ago aluminum was rare and expensive. It's probably not true that Napoleon III had a special set of aluminum silverware, but the aluminium statue of Anteros in Piccadilly circus, made in 1893 was the first of its kind, and so kind of a big deal.
Now that we can make aluminum ladders cheaply, they're everywhere. I have a couple in my garage. If someone gave me a carefully crafted wooden ladder, I'd keep it, because cool, and maybe even use it if it happened to come in handy. Like most of us, though, I have absolutely no reason to go out of my way to get one, particularly since it would almost certainly be much more expensive.
As far as technological developments go, I think aluminum ladders are more the rule than the exception. A modern freeway is in most respects a better road than the Via Appia, though not necessarily in durability. A modern car can go much farther and faster than a horse-drawn cart. A coat with a zipper is easier to get in and out of than one with buttons. It's somewhat easier to pay with a card or phone than it is to count coins and notes.
In general, a new development has to offer at least some advantage in order to catch on. That advantage doesn't have to be groundbreaking or even particularly great, however, and it doesn't even have to make sense on a larger scale. Plastic bags have their uses, but whether a new and cheaper way to make plastic bags catches on has little to do with whether we need more plastic bags, as long as we want some plastic bags.
Coming back to the title, in some sense we do still use stone-age tools every day. Ladders are still a thing. You can still buy rope at a hardware store and put it to the same kinds of uses it's been put to for as long as there's been rope. But in most cases, you'll be buying a stone-age tool made with modern technology. The rope you buy at a hardware store was almost certainly made by machine and very likely from a material that didn't exist a hundred years ago, much less several thousand.
I do keep thinking of getting a clay tagine pot, though.
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