Yes, and famously the ancient Egyptians used steam power for religious trickery and to open a pair of doors to one of their temples.

The trick is that without much better metallurgy and pipework, it wasn't possible to create the kind of high pressure needed for a steam engine.

Same thing goes for evolution. The rough concept had been around for a while; it took until "deep time"(earth being billions of years old) was proven that we knew that life actually had the kind of time needed to evolve.