Is Anyone Original?

"There is no such thing as a new idea" - Mark Twain

I often view people as puzzles. You have 10 piece puzzles, jigsaws, tetris, but at the end of the day they are still puzzles. No matter the complexity you can still understand the conclusion. There are archetypes and patterns. The best indicator someone will do something, is if they did it the first time. We look to our ancestry to understand likelihood of illness and events in our current lives. Everything we are rests on the shoulders of the people before us. With this being the state of humanity, are any ideas novel?

Contrary to Mark Twain, I believe original ideas do exist. Of course we function within the limits of our universe. We all use the material the earth provides us to create, but it is what we do with the material that makes it original. The act of researching is not considered "original", but the act of research using a computer database is. At the end of the day it's the same human function we've learned to facilitate through innovation, imagination. It's not simply the act that is original, but how we do it.