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Ancient Babylonians Figured Out Forerunner of Calculus (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes: Tracking and recording the motion of the sun, the moon, and the planets as they paraded across the desert sky, ancient Babylonian astronomers used simple arithmetic to predict the positions of celestial bodies. Now, new evidence reveals that these astronomers, working several centuries B.C.E., also employed sophisticated geometric methods that foreshadow the development of calculus. Historians had thought such techniques did not emerge until more than 1400 years later, in 14th century Europe.
Wait, the Vikings discovered it and settled it.
They didn't go around telling people they'd invented it, but they sure as hell 'discovered' it and navigated back and forth.
The entire point is Europeans, after many hundreds of years rooting around in the muck like ignorant morons, rediscovered many things which had been known in antiquity ... and then proceeded to pretend like the barbarians who came before them were far too unsophisticated to have known this stuff.
And increasingly that view of history written to soothe the egos of those Europeans and their descendants is proven to be largely rubbish, which has nothing to do with reality.
And I say this as a white guy of European ancestry -- what we call history is really mostly "the history as told by white people who had no clue about what was really happening before they got their heads out of their asses".
While Europe rooted around in the muck and the filth, they forgot that things like math, navigation, and indoor plumbing had been around for a very long time. And then they pretended like they invented them.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
No, my narrative hasn't got a fucking thing to do with racism.
After the Dark Ages, where the Church basically did their best to wipe out human knowledge and sanitize everything ... then the descendants of those damned people went about "discovering" everything they had long since forgotten.
The point isn't white, brown, pink or yellow skin ... it's about morons obliterating knowledge and history for their own purposes and then being too clueless to realize they'd just "discovered" things which had been known before.
Self inflicted ignorance isn't some noble thing to hold up for all to see.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Blah, blah, blah. I don't pay any attention to them. As far as I am concerned, all religions Babylon.
Civilizations tend to "discover" philosophy, mathematics, literature, drama and great works of music in the centuries after they invent ways of writing those things down.
What's probably going on is that these things have been cropping up intermittently for thousands of years (or tens of thousands of years), but the ideas would usually not survive for very long because it would take unreasonable amounts of human effort to remember and transmit them.
By the way, video finally made it possible to commit dancing to permanent media in the early 1900's, so future historians will probably think of the 1900's and 2000's as the centuries when great dancing was first invented.