Some geek writing down a bunch of specific data that wouldn't make good campfire story but was probably just a ledger at the time can become a manual for the geek that is asked to repeat what was created for his generation. They can study the manual and add to it their own discoveries. We can build on that by having lots of books written on the specific thing by many generations. We can learn from generations long gone. The press spreads all that information far and wide. The internet is the new press. We have the whole of what we know at our fingertips. I can't remember all the things that I needed to know and learned in a book or on the internet. I can't even comprehend how much I have grown learning the things I didn't need to know but learned by chance exploration in a deep database or library.

I started out disagreeing with you. Then I realized language and numbers made all that possible. I think a lot of our advanced knowledge sharing is based on having the word or number for it to write down in the first place. Language isn't the rain. It doesn't exist unless it is invented.