Can technology improve even though people don’t understand what they are doing?

Beginning about 60,000 years ago, our species spread across the world occupying a wider range of habitats than any other species. Humans can do this because we can rapidly evolve specialized tools that make life possible in different environments—kayaks in the arctic and fishing weirs in the Amazon. How are we able to do this? Most scholars focus on our intelligence: people are better at causal reasoning than other animals, and this allows us to invent useful tools.