That's a very big claim, perhaps true only if human endeavor only ever builds linearly. But I dont think that is true. Certainly not in the arts or music, e.g. the Beatles did not need to ingest the entire corpus of Mozart or even Scott Joplin to be highly productive. Although, it certainly helped that they were extremely open minded to all types of music.
A second example is that of recent advances in virtualization, where the last decade of advances in things like cgroups, namespaces and containers were all done by people who I assert had no training in IBM MVS/zOS and therefore weren't building on what went before (imho, to their detriment).
