Almost all science is tightly bound with advances in material science, often the driving each other in alternating steps like interlocking gears. One engine driving those gears is war, another is population growth and education.

There are obvious exceptions, such as Math, Philosophy (insert all links lead to philosophy here). But even Math is seeing progress in materials science as a component now (computer derived proofs for instance).

Making a really good tech tree is a stupendously hard problem. I once started working on one for a game but gave up once I realized that doing this properly is probably going to take a lifetime or two and there are other things I can do that are more immediately useful.

Even aside from the big advances, look at things like clothing in the past few decades. Outdoor clothing has changed enormously but so have so many other day-to-day things--a lot of which are about electronics but that's materials-related as well.

It's an interesting question. Why couldn't the Romans have invented $X? And the answer is mostly the tech tree. There are probably exceptions around things like germ theory of disease and so forth but it's mostly true.