What are big inventions? Usually the wheel is mentioned, or fire. "Don't reinvent the wheel" is a standard expression.
What other inventions are there that we take for granted, but that someone very clever had to come up with.
Most of these will have been invented an extremely long time ago, and the name of the inventor will not have been recorded. Many will have been invented in several places independently.
Apart from the bow and arrow, we still use all these devices daily, in shapes that have not changed much, and we take them for granted. But there was a time they did not exist.
Here is my list, in alphabetical order, not in historic order:
This must be several tens of thousands of years old and probably precedes the bow by a long time. Its characteristics are that it penetrates the skin of the hunted animal and its shape prevents it from coming out easily.
Chairs and tables are from at least 5'000 years ago. They are light, movable, provide flat surfaces to sit on (chair, and it also isolates from the cold) or to work on (table). One could put the bed in the same category, and maybe the bed came first: it probably was a way to sleep off the floor to get away from all kinds of animals, and once you have a bed you will use it as a table or chair in the daytime.
This comes after the pot, as an elongated form of it. Its characteristic is that you have to tilt it quite far before the liquid comes out. How far depends on the shape of the bottle and to how high up it has been filled.
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And that's true even for bottles with short necks, and that are filled quite high up as the pictures show.
See arrow.
Thousands of years. It does not matter that originally it was more an elongated peg stuck through a slit in an animal skin. The concept is very old. It relies also on the use of string.
Recently (2009) there has been a fashion to make very thick & small buttons, reputed to be of various natural & quality materials, but a button must thin enough to pass through a buttonhole easily as well as large enough not to slip out by itself. Fashion over function again.
Strips of leather to hold things in place, adjusted by a buckle that fits onto one of several holes spaced out along the belt. Probably also tens of thousands of years old. A recent improvement is the fast-fixing buckle: it is fixed onto the end of the belt by a clamp and it hooks into the holes by a knob. I think that is an enormous improvement, especially for belts worn on trousers. However, again in recent times (2007, or even earlier?) there has been a regression back to "classic" buckles. I could not find a single fast buckle in the shops for the last two years. So I am jealously preserving my fast-fixing buckles.
They were used to lift pots, to fasten them together, and evolved into the handles on cups.
Must have been invented several times: the Native Americans had them in their pueblos well before the Europeans came.
Essential for buttons and buttonholes and especially for sewing skins together. Originally crude, but apart from some miniaturisation and better materials, needles still have the same shape. To quote Raymond Loewy:
I once said that the most difficult things to design are the simplest. For instance, to improve the form of a scalpel or a needle is extremely difficult, if not impossible. To improve the appearance of a threshing machine is easy. There are so many components on which one can work.
One can see how it evolved from anything shallow that could hold liquid for drinking into a deeper form that protected the liquid better. Came well before the potter's wheel.
Once you have one step, multiple steps follow easily. Yet it is the most used transportation "machine".
See also button. String is at least as old.
See chair
It does occur in nature, but that was only discovered recently. The advantage of a wheel over rollers is that it remains attached to the load. The difficulty is in finding a hard enough material for the axle so that it does not wear out because the efficiency of the wheel depends on the friction between axle and hub. A smaller axle has less friction but proportionally more force wearing it out.
