Something about Europe changed around 1500 or 1600. Islam was busily doing its thing a good 800 years into their non-dark ages. Southeast asia was thriving, warring and trading. South America was busily being wiped out and Africa had a couple-few empires that were 500-plus years old.
No, it's not about so-called "dark" ages, maybe I misled by lumping the scientific revolution label in. Nor amount of trade, etc. All that is basically myth created by modern historians (although -- well I don't have time to go find the relevant askhistorians links but it's a really interesting topic and more complex than I am letting on...). To me it's more about modes of thought. And the ones I'm talking about began in Europe, sure, but we've been busy trying to impress them on everyone else since. So this is a non-response sorry, I'm fucking busy today. It's awful. Suffice to say I disagree but there's nuance.
The 'dark' ages are a myth (at least in the way we think about em) but I'd actually say modern historians are pretty good about dispelling that. If anything I'd argue that the Romantics were the ones that started throwing the term around really and that recently modern historians are actually much better at seeing past that. As for modes of thought, I dunno actually. Yeah you had a particular set emerge in Europe during this time but it would be rather silly to think that European thought alone emerged as a victor in the modern day (there are definitive parallels in most civilizations, I'd say, and they tend to appear in very particular time-periods). What I mean by that I suppose is that globally there are different strains of a sort of 'progressivism' (if you want to call it that - ideological breaks from the past) which are not really linked to Europe, and certainly didn't appear in the same context.
It's complicated, though -- you can trace the European dark ages (such as they were) through archaeology. Read an amazing book about that once but it had a generic title that I can't recall. So yes and no. I disagree with your second paragraph.