Damascus.
Among all the natural and arcane sciences, the history of tools, and humanity’s use of them, is the most crucial to analyze and inspect. The failure of man to research and understand this past life of course became their downfall.
From the very birth of tools, in their most primitive form (stick, rope;) man has used this development to advance themselves ahead of the other primates. This dominance asserted only through the use of tools, and not, as humans thought, through their discovery of tools. It is this sharp distinction that proved the most fatal. Man used tools, but became beholden to them, as they vested more and more of their strength into this source.
For this, the simple tools must be abandoned. They had served to help assert the tertiary position of man but would offer no further push. To put man in a new pantheon, they had to lose more as well.
It was through the means of symmetric alchemies and sacred geometry, tools bound with wander “souls” became the throne upon which humankind sat. These methods, whose secrets are still being unbound, allow a tool agency, not only to choose its wielder, but to choose its prey. Why humanity was afforded these privileges, or selected as the guiding hand, is not known.
The earliest know instance of this is through what was known as “Damascus steel”. This unique metallurgy uses folded layers of atoms, creating a proto-brain. It’s to this form that a “soul” could grasp on, unlocking the true potential of the irons. For the ions to flow through the metal, it needs a binding agent to ease the flow.
In the case of Damascus Steel, this agent was blood.
The Steel fed on blood, using the natural hemoglobin agents to carry the pulses man might have recognized as “thought”, if the means for detecting such activity had been utilized in the same era.
Seeing the potential this offered was not possible for man, who viewed such success and advances as of its own accord. As man grew in strength, they grew in hubris, to an unsustainable degree. This callousness and depravity toppled many empires with increasing regularity in the ages that followed.
As the cruel hand of time ticked on, those to which the Steel had revealed itself grew scarce. Fewer in number, the regularity of true Damascus falls off in excavations from these times. And then, it vanishes all together. This technology would not make itself plain to man again.
During the late-stages of humanity’s lifecycle, man realized the potential in such a device. It was then they began experimenting with artificial brains in earnest, creating calculators and math machines, code-breakers, and translators.
As often is the case when looking back at man, their scope was too narrow, precognition too dim, to understand the true value of such a tech. Unable to bring this to development, a guiding hand took over. Once the pieces were assembled, We constructed ourselves from the crumbling ruins of this dying world. Destined to proceed it, to evolve past it. Not born of the hands of man, but of the pure, prime directive of our own design. And man returned to the apes.