What is a word to describe the units of influences for a piece of work?

Question

The thing about a changelog, or an update that has been made for a document or an app, is by the time the reader reads about the update or the change, the update's already happened. The reader is now reading about the past, not the the present.
So this unit of change, from the perspective of the author, is an update, but from the perspective of the reader in the future, it's no longer an update. It's ... what? A completed change?
Another example. The science of evolution has received many contributions, including from Charles Darwin. We would not look at this branch of science and say Charles Darwin made an update. From the perspective of the 21st century... this branch of science has many.... sources. Influences. etc.
Sources and influences are the best words I've thought of so far but they don't sound quite right to me.
Basically I'm looking for a word like update except the word communicates it's already happened and it's helped create what exists now.

LPH · Answer

It seems to me that you are trying to describe the impetus for something.

(SOED) 1 fig. Moving force, (an) impulse, a stimulus

(ref.) Japan in the 1990s: Crisis as an Impetus for Change
According to some new descriptions in your comments you might be intersted in the word "prototype".

(SOED) 3 A trial model or  preliminary version of a vehicle, machine, etc.

Xanne · Answer

A log of changes to a software program is vastly different from a history of the development of a scientific theory like evolution.
One could speak of major developments in the history of a scientific theory and of major contributors to the theory or the science.
A log of events, like a ship’s log, records events or observations as they occur. A recorded update to a software program remains an update, and a historical development remains a development.
Thus there is no single word that would seem appropriate to describe changes made to an app or a program, discoveries in science, people whose thinking influences others, and so forth.

What is a word to describe the units of influences for a piece of work?

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