[stared]

Well, just because someone published does not mean that it was not (even implicitly) based. For example, there was a paper rediscovering trapezoid method of integration https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9602/rediscover... A scientist may had been not aware of the method - yet, mathematics used for that is thought in high school.

Note that phase transitions are 100 years old or so. If someone genuinely does not know statistical mechanics, they still may know a lot of tools derived from it (a famous one - Shannon entropy).

I am not saying it is impossible to independently discover something (it happens all the time), but if discoveries are not (more or less) as the same time, likely there was some knowledge diffusion before.