I never like to say :"early man couldn't possibly do X" as I often feel that it is just a variation of"I couldn't possibly do X so there is no way some dumb cave man could do X". But, in this case I think you are probably right.

In general, that's true but in certain cases it is rather demonstrable. For example, wheeled vehicles didn't appear until the use of bronze was reasonably well established. The fairly clear reason for thisis that the tolerances of a wheeled vehicle made out of wood are simply too tight to accomplish with wooden, stone, or copper tools. In short you have to have certain types of tools to accomplish certain types of tasks.

(This also explains why although wheels appear on new-world figurines, the wheel doesn't seem to have had practical use in the new world prior to the coming of the Europeans. Merely understanding a mechanism doesn't necessarily provide a useful solution.)

A couple points though about glass bulbs.....

Edison eventually settled on carbon filiments. For obvious reasons, carbon filiments are not suitable to use in an environment with oxygen gas..... Edison's solution to this was to pump as much of the air out of the bulb as possible. While it is relatively easy to make a blown glass bulb, doing so while controlling the atmosphere such as as a vacuum environment inside the bulb is another matter together. Edison's bulbs were basically carbon-filiments in a vacuum tube. It is the vacuum process that is really the difficult element here.

Now I do agree that most folks vastly underrate ancient technological know-how. However, a lot of things get played around with and abandoned simply because in the world they are in, they are impractical. One simple example is the experimentation of iron tools in mid-bronze-age Yamnaya finds. These represent the earliest uses of iron we know of but the technology was never widely adopted. On the other hand, once the iron age hits, you seem some really fascinating developments occur very quickly. Some of these developments are difficult to believe were possible, such as differnetial carbon content in a controlled fashion through a sword (later this technique was abandoned in favor of phosporous differentiation which is FAR easier to control). Often times it is AMAZING to see what ancient folk did with the tools of their day.

One area which is of interest regarding Egypt though is the possibility that the pyramids were made of blocks of an artificial rock similar to poured concrete as well as the granite slabs which line the inner areas. This theory actually has a lot of support and I actually subscribe to it. It also neatly solves a lot of problems regarding how the pyramids were built.