Sure, but what about people changed in general? Our relatively short life spans and the increasing amount of information renders it difficult to keep a perfect thread of lessons learnt from history (and people are inclined to learn different lessons from the same events). Future generations also have their own morals, ethics philosophies (as they should), and so anything we think was accomplished by some big event in the past may just as well as had not happened. So no, I am not convinced that apocalyptic events are needed for human cultural evolution. The catalyst of cultural evolution is almost always a desire for a better way to live. Even if everyone was the same religion, caste, race, class, education level, IQ etc. , fundamentally people will always behave the same.
