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Lalartu comments on The Octopus, the Dolphin and Us: a Great Filter tale - Less Wrong
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But how you imagine that would work? How will a longer timespan help?
Let's picture that we literally took 10 000 top human engineers and scientists, with all our human knowledge, into dolphin bodies, on another planet with no human artefacts. So, our dolphin people now need to somehow develop a way of writing down their knowledge underwater, which they can only do very laboriously because they haven't got hands. They can write very large letters with immense energy expenditure per letter. They can barely store any knowledge. They also got short lifespan and sharks to worry about.
And on the tools side, you need tools that are good enough so you can use them to make better tools. That generally requires ability to harden things - make something while it's soft, let it harden, use something softer to crack apart something harder. And to get that started, you need hands, because without hands you can only make the kind of tools that doesn't help you make better tools.
If you can't make an improvement in any single generation, you can't make any improvement in a thousand generations either.
Meanwhile, a planet populated with those same scientists and engineers in human bodies - hell, dog bodies, cat bodies, elephant bodies - would've had it all sorted out in no time. They'd have steel, electricity, running water, radio, and so on, in less than a generation - hell even 10 people can do that.
(assuming they all cooperate).
The gap due to the body shape and environment appears utterly immense. The only hope would be that dophins would evolve much greater than human intelligence and come up with something that we can't come up with (e.g. mind controlling some animal with hands).
edit: That is not to say a small number of top scientists and engineers would single handedly create industrial manufacturing, but that is to say they would re-create pre-industrial village level technology and then hand-make many important bits of 20th century technology. You can take a 16th century blacksmith's forge and make an electric generator in there, a spark gap transmitter, a coherer receiver, a carbon arc lamp, and the like, using most basic materials and hand manufacturing techniques. Indeed that's how the early instances of all those things were made - by a small number of top engineers, often in their spare time, without advance knowledge.
Taken literally, no. There will not be any civilization above hunter-gatherers without domesticated plants and animals, and that cannot be done in one generation. Remember that ox and wheat also are human artefacts. Well, realistically (in human variant) most of them will be dead very soon, survivors become nomadic hunters.
Hunter gatherers had a lot of free time, though.
And as for the most of them getting dead very soon... I dunno, wildlife survival is not really that hard in general. We only have wildlife left in the regions where it's very hard for humans to live, so if you drop people into the remaining regions of wilderness, they don't fare very well. And we didn't start on the wheat cultivation with the grand plan of going to the moon, we did that because the wheat as it was naturally gave huge and immediate benefits.
I don't think you'd end up with a culture resembling any culture that existed in history. You have those smartest engineers and scientists, who already know how to make bows, steel, glass, firearms, electrical generators, and so on, and once settled in, they have a lot of free time (because there's a ton of wildlife - buffalo herds, passenger pigeons, all that other easy to kill stuff that's extinct - which will take many generations to deplete. They're not in the modern day wilderness in the region where people can barely survive and almost all the food is extinct. They're the new predator).
First, hunting with stone age weapons is far fom easy. Second, most engineers and scientists are not hunters, noone of them know how to hunt with spear and almost noone with bow. Third, they have no food supplies and so no time to learn. They will survive olny in very favourable conditions, like on tropical island with plenty of shellfish and tortoises (I think most people can hunt those).
I were thinking of my experience in Russia where engineers, mathematicians, and physicists absolutely loved going out on various nature trips (Didn't really think of Sheldon and US tv shows). Of course, not everyone did, but we're dropping a huge number of people, and those who know can teach those who don't. Healthy person can go for 2 months without food.
Let's say that they spawn on 1kmx1km zone in a grid with 10m spacing, in the temperate climate in the late spring, clothed in earliest stone age clothing (for same reason why we don't spawn dolphins into a desert, we don't spawn people into the Arctic).