Ideas are like technology - you can only take one step at a time and advance to the next "adjacent possible", which is exploiting previously seen ideas. However, over many iterations of this you may end up with something that would be silly not to recognize as novel.

For example, say you appeared out of the future into the stone age and tried to explain to them general relativity or modern semiconductor fabrication .. there are just too many levels of abstraction and discovery from the ideas they would have had for it to be meaningful to say that these are just building upon their ideas, and certainly not just combinations of their ideas.