[naikrovek]

I am ashamed that we think so little of ancient cultures.

they weren't stupid. they were as smart as we are, perhaps smarter.

they were far fewer in number than we are today, and the library of technology they could draw from to solve a problem was much smaller for them, is all.

nothing about the Antikythera mechanism is complex; the math is simple and the construction is that of a machine made many times and made slightly smaller each iteration, as sections are moved to fit into a more compact arrangement.

even coming up with the ratios to describe the motion of the planets would be easily done by one or more people who were dedicated observers who wrote their observations down.

nothing here is complex, yet we still consider new discoveries about the device which reveal unpredicted complexity to be "too advanced" to be made at the time it appears to be made...

I don't know why scientists do this. why can't we just admit that we don't know what ancient civilizations were capable of, rather than assuming they were incapable of simple tasks?

[stjohnswarts]

Scientists build on what they know, not what they speculate. "We" don't look down on ancient peoples, it's just that history didn't show any devices this complicated so this "unique" device has captured everyone's attention. No one is looking down on the Greeks. Ancients humans were as smart as we are, they just didn't have as much data to draw from to create new things or come up with new theories.

[sidlls]

I'm not sure in general "scientists" do what you suggest. Not all scientists are required to take them, but there are courses in the history of science. I took two semesters and it was quite enlightening. The texts we used were replete with admonishments against the sort of chauvinism you suggest.

At the same time, if we discover some feat of engineering or scrap of insight that was heretofore thought unknown in the period it was created in, it's worth noting: it permits us to revise what we know about the investigators of the time and what they actually knew to begin with.

[mannerheim]

The ancient Greeks did the same thing. They believed that the walls of Mycenae were built by cyclops because they couldn't imagine how their forefathers built them - and so they dubbed it cyclopean masonry. Ancient aliens for ancient Greeks.

[BatteryMountain]

If you enjoy this kind of rabbit hole, check out Randall Carlson. People tend to dismiss him but what I like about him, is that he tries to put everything into the correct context, as time goes back. He is not just looking at a tiny slice of what/how things could have been in one domain (say, climate change or ancient structures or math) but tries to put all of it into context of everything else around it & regarding timelines. He also seem to not go out of his way to attribute historical findings to fantastical causes (aliens, gods, giants, reptiles etc) - he tends to boil them down to the simplest explanations (as boring as that is vs aliens etc) and also tries to imagine the mindset and the way the ancient peoples thought about things, how they gathered and transferred knowledge etc. Even if he is incorrect, most of what he claims seems very plausible and it is very humbling to reflect on what our home (the earth) has endured, how much our ancestors and other animals & plants have endured and just how perfect our planet is for us. We must cherish and protect it by all means if we can, but we must also protect knowledge and pass it forward. And then ultimately we need a way to store/send knowledge and life off-planet to somehow ensure we can repopulate the earth if things go sideways (again)(and it will, just a matter of time).

As I said, very nice rabbit hole to fall into. Randall Carlson and Paul Stamets are my two favourite bearded story tellers of our time, about our relationship to our home, our place in the universe & consciousness. They are our Gandalfs. They are perhaps not super accepted by mainstream science or all scientists, but they play a very valuable role.

Anyone else reading this, do you have any other Gandalfs that you can recommend?

[dr_dshiv]

* Ben Cerveny

* Don Norman

* Karl Pribram

* Wim Hof

[Syonyk]

> why can't we just admit that we don't know what ancient civilizations were capable of, rather than assuming they were incapable of simple tasks?

A quirk of humans CS Lewis calls "Chronological Snobbery" - that what we know and generate now is obviously superior to what they knew and generated then - because if they were so smart like we were, they'd have invented the stuff we did.

It falls apart with the slightest interaction with actual history (even the known bits - Roman cement and aquaducts are obvious examples that stick out), but since we don't really teach history, and that which we do teach is a bit "religion of progress" biased ("From the caves, to the stars, through us, always onward and upward!" - again, doesn't match reality, but nobody seems to care).

The gizmos we have now are mostly a function of the energy resources we've cracked open in the past few hundred years, which were related to some quirks of a small island to the west of the European continent a few hundred years back, and so on back through time.

Human nature hasn't changed for much of recorded history, and neither has human intelligence. It's been used in different ways in different times, for different goals, but if anything, we've spent the past 30+ years finding ways to destroy the human ability to focus in pursuit of profits - look at any modern smartphone app. Great profit, for someone else, because it destroys your attention. Oral epics and such are just a different focus from what we currently value, which is mostly "How can I capture and process behavioral surplus to generate prediction products to sell advertisements?" (to paraphrase Zuboff).

Never underestimate what a bored machinist can accomplish in their spare time.

[Cthulhu_]

> Never underestimate what a bored machinist can accomplish in their spare time.

Put a bit broader, never underestimate what people can achieve and figure out in their spare time. I mean as a child I would build dams and channels out of stones and dirt at the beach or near rivers while on vacation, without any formal education or knowledge about waterworks. I can see how this play would end up in things like irrigation systems, aqueducts and sewage systems over time, if I were to live in a place or a time where those things were not present.

It's probably been the same with tools and art for tens of thousands of years. When people are not struggling for survival, they will experiment.