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The appearance of sameness across the years from 100 A.D. to 1600 are largely just a lack of detailed historical knowledge rather than anything meaningful.
As one random example: the invention of the (practical, iron) stirrup and (more advanced) saddle doesn't seem too significant to us because we don't care about horses, but it ushered in an era of political dominance by feudal lords and their knights. The invention of barrels, of particular metals, and fasteners, and construction methods. The Viking longship, that enables continuous travel from Iceland all the way to Byzantium in the 800's. The invention of double-entry accounting in the 1200's, etc etc. That's not even getting into social developments.
My historical knowledge isn't perfect, but there were massive advancements in things you don't even think about if you don't know the details. The deeper you look in the past, the more you start to realize the pace of change wasn't that different. This is especially true when you compare the change for the average person then to the change for the average person now. Sure computing was a big-deal of an invention but it took like what, 60 years before there was any meaningful impact to the average worker? Even longer, if you take into account the coworkers I've had who seem to have had no trouble retaining their positions despite being computer-illiterate.
Note that I'm not saying that the contemporary era isn't predictable, just that it's not really all that different from the speed of development in the past, with maybe a few exceptions. (Though frankly, I think even something as large as the Industrial Revolution is easily paralleled by the Agricultural Revolution.)
Quibbling here, but the saddle was invented before the stirrup in Central Asia at the latest sometime in the first millenium BC (with Assyrians known to use saddle-like things), while stirrups were invented later (2nd c. BC toe stirrup in India vs 2-4th c. AD foot stirrup in China). Both were invented in the classical period.
I guess that proves your point?
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The stirrup and saddle were important, yes, but the idea that the rich rode horses while the poor fought on foot is at least as old as Alexander's companion cavalry (who had neither stirrups nor advanced saddles). Similarly, political organization revolving around personal relationships between kings and subordinate networks of landholders who also owed military service doesn't arise with medieval "feudalism" (which itself isn't a unitary concept, because e.g. the French, English, and Polish models are so radically different) but was much, much older - the huscarl/fyrd system is similar, not reliant on mounted troops, and has antecedents back to classical Germanic tribes. Heck, even classical greco-roman hoplite/legionary systems are similar (though the Roman system diverged with the consolidation of agricultural land and then the marian reforms).
Developments in every day life did occur, and are interesting. But let's not lose the forest for the trees - it wasn't until first the Columbian exchange, and then the modern era, that there were true civilization-rocking material sea-changes.
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