No, I was referring to the whole post. Nobody means that when they say “advanced technology”
An advancement in tech =/= advanced tech.
No, selective breeding is not genetic manipulation.
FFS, I’m not a prescriptivist by any means, but words can’t just mean whatever it takes to suit your argument. Both of these are just Humpty Dumpty arguments.
So by your argument the steam engine would not be considered high tech today. But at the time it was high tech compared to wind power. High tech depends upon your existing technology at the time, not some definition of it that was coined recently to describe a recent split between old and new industries.
Of course, this example does depend on fire to achieve its advancement in technology. 
Perhaps a better example would be the wind sail compared to a paddle, neither of which required fire.
The example I always use in discussions along these lines is this:
Go back in time and challenge Archimedes: “I want you to build a device,” you say, “That a man can use in Athens such that when he shouts into the device, an audience in Thebes can hear every word.”
With enough time and resources, Archimedes would likely be able to prove to you, via an explanation of the speed of sound, the curvature of the earth, the way sound degrades over distance, the maximum volume of human lungs, the maximum volume (different definition) of the human voice, and so on, that the device you described was physically impossible.
It’s pretty unlikely he’d think of the telephone.
When we discuss what’s possible with technology, we’re necessarily limited by our current technology. It’s really tempting to think that if we can’t solve a problem with our current technology, it can’t be solved. Better, instead, to admit humility, and to qualify our answers by saying, “With our current technology, this problem is unsolvable.”
So, yes. With what we know about technology, almost entirely human technology, fire’s a necessary prerequisite for advanced technology. But it may be that there are billions of different pathways to advanced technology that we haven’t followed; it may be that our human approach of smelting ore is rare compared to other paths.
But I would not call steam power “high tech”. “High tech” is an expression of the modern post-atomic age. It was more advanced than a waterwheel, but it was not “advanced tech”.
Your cite shows indicates that genetic manipulation via methods other than genetic engineering existed earlier:
Genetic engineering as the direct manipulation of DNA by humans outside breeding and mutations has only existed since the 1970s.
Humans having been purposively changing the inherited characteristics of plants and animals for a long time, and doing so doesn’t require energy-intensive means.
And that’s where we differ. A man in the early 1800’s would definitely see a steam engine as a high tech advanced machine over a windmill, despite our definition of advanced technology today. As would a someone with only a knowledge paddling a boat would be amazed to be passed by sail boat. He would consider that advanced technology compared to what was previously known to be possible.
We are more or less quibbling about what the OP meant, and the OP admits that it wasn’t well framed. I see now that he later clarified his definition, my bad for keying on the OP’s original post.
No, it doesn’t. Selective breeding isn’t genetic manipulation.
I’m not disagreeing with that. I’m disagreeing that the term “genetic manipulation” covers those techniques. If you’re not directly changing genes, you’re not doing genetic manipulation.
This kind of thing is where my went. But reading about it, I now see a huge hurdle regarding that device, and my curiosity about having our same (or similar) technology though arrived at by alternate methods. If you know high heat can smelt ore, you can cast around for an alternate method to replace fire. But I’m guessing man’s use of fire and high heat allowed them to stumble upon the concept in the first place.
Even if you could use hammered gold to make that devise and achieve the desired temps would it have even dawned on someone to heat ore in the first place?
Maybe that’s why we’re hairless, evolution selected against those of us that were more flammable! 
The critical, technological part is the sun-tracking mirrors. You won’t achieve the temps without that.
I mean, it’s a fun science-fiction problem. Sunflowers already track the sun. It’s easy to imagine a planet with a more mobile and exact heliotropic species (“sungazers”), and an intelligent species that domesticates sungazers & improves their heliotropic properties. Makes them adjustable by putting mirrors at slight angles near their “eyes” so each sungazer is at a slightly different angle. Puts little golden graduation caps on each head for the mirror.
You’d still have to come up with a reason why they’d want to, though.
My sunflowers don’t. They always face east. I know, weird.
Defense against slavers.
I mean why they’d come up with the idea of building a solar smelter…without already having the concept of smelting metal.
All by itself, probably not, but with some other reason to develop sunflowers with parabolic mirrors like self defense then a solar smelter may follow.
What if they’re instead ordinary silver without glazing?
And it’s also possible to make an ice lens large enough to reach decent temperatures, and sunbaked ceramics are a thing, even if they’re not as strong as kiln-fired.
Third-most at absolute best. It’s a long, long way behind language and writing.
And tracking the Sun is an easy problem. All you need is a bunch of flat sheets of metal (gold or silver will work just fine), with a hole in the middle of each, and one person controlling each sheet.
I think you missed my point - absent fire, how do you even know metal smelting is a thing, to be attempted?
I wouldn’t class language as a discovery/technology the way I would fire or writing.
And there have been human cultures without writing, but none without fire. I would say fire was more of a game-changer. Hell, it was possibly even the crucial brain-changer.
It’s not mere solar tracking, it’s the automated solar tracking that was the problem.
I am missing your point unless you consider the use of mirrors for defense to be the equivalent of smelting metal. The existence of fire, the use of fire for heat and protection doesn’t lead directly to smelting metal. If you have the mirrors and point them at rocks you may one day find lead melting out of those rocks, likely the same way we discovered that metals could be smelted from rocks heated by fire millennia ago.
I don’t think a species that can manipulate genetics with some biological ability is all that likely but it wouldn’t surprise me if that ability does lead to advanced technology.
No, but the widespread use of fire (and subsequent technologies like pottery and calcining lime) leads to that kind of serendipity.
Why are you pointing your weapon at random galena for the sustained periods that would smelt out metals?
Possible pathways to smelting are contentious, but they all involve some sustained exposure of ore minerals to fire as side effects of other activities. You wouldn’t do that with your weapon, since that seems to exist to point at people. I wouldn’t call that “the same way”
It would surprise me greatly. It seems that would be a dead end as far as tech goes.
Because it makes the rocks toasty warm to bask upon when weather turns chilly. And then it’s used to make food taste better. And then it sets some stuff on fire and then it’s not really necessary to take it further. But let’s say there’s no combustible material available, they’re heating rocks all over the place now so eventually they’ll heat some ore hot enough to smelt out metal. It may be a more difficult path without fire, for instance copper may be less likely to reduce without high CO levels that wouldn’t exist without a wood fire. There could be benefits though of solar heat though, melting and casting metals may be achieved more quickly.
If you could use genetic manipulation to modify species to your purpose then you undoubtedly have technology. To reach the advanced stage from there all that is needed is science, mathematics, and curiosity.