Significance

The significance attached to certain characters in our texts might seem puzzling to us, because our understanding of significance is defined by our culture. More often than not, protohistory was more concerned with the first “significant” generation rather than the actual first generation. This seems to be a reflection of the ancient concern for function as opposed to material significance. — Toward a Poetics of Genesis 1-11, page 233

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Which we also hold, but don't realize it. For example, who built the first home computer? I suspect you answered either Apple or IBM. Wrong on both counts. Both of those were early populizers—the first significant ones, if you will. We could go on...think Xerox, Kleenex, Band-aids, to name but a few.
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