Well, human psychology is a good example in my opinion. Technology has allowed us to make progress here, but even philosophies from this era still hold incredible insight that many, many modern humans may never acquire in their own lives.
Look at Buddhism or stoicism as examples. The deeply nuanced and detailed understanding of human behaviour in some writing is almost dumbfounding at times. You can learn so much from it. Sure, there are weird parts too. But kids these days like skibidi toilet, and I know people who like tv shows about guessing if something is made out of cake or not. We’re as weird as ever.
The ancients noticed patterns, but had almost no causative understanding of what was happening.
> The influence of the moon and the sun on weather and tides.
Even Newton didn't correctly understand how tides actually work (there is no oceanic "tidal bulge"). It took until Laplace for dynamic theory to be developed. The ancients were unable to predict tides except by repeated observation of a specific location.
> Where baby animals come from.
There was zero understanding of biological reproduction before the modern era. Claiming that people 2000 years ago understood this phenomenon "almost as well as we do" is absurd. They didn't even know about sperm cells, nevermind chromosomes or DNA.
> How to make beer and bread.
Alchemy, with no insight into what was really going on.
The ancients understood none of the things you mention even remotely as well as we do today. In fact, I'd argue that they essentially didn't understand them at all.
For the purposes of planning, I think they understood them about as well as most modern people do. Specialists now understand them a damn sight better but in practical terms I suspect a brewer in Egypt knew when the beer was ready about as well as some hipster with his alcohol meter, and the Egyptian shepard knew when sheep fell pregnant, and how to tell which ones had been tupped by the Ram.
Very few people trying for a baby think about DNA. They think about the fertility of the woman in terms of her menstrual cycle. Thats practical science which has been unchanged for a very long time.
You're not wrong. I am literally wrong of course. Figuratively I think I'm less wrong than you say.
Literally none of these are even remotely close to “examples of things people 2000 years ago understood almost as well as us”.
Knowing when the beer is ready is a damn sight less than the chemistry done by even a good number of amateur home brewers these days. Knowing the sheep are pregnant is a far cry from the directed breeding done even at small farms today, to say nothing of the genetic programs at larger ones.
Nothing. It was all magic and gods. They lived as long as their rotting teeth allowed. And discovering that you can observe things and have power over your own mind isn't exactly huge these days.
It’s one thing to discover it or have a cursory understanding of it, but it’s another thing to essentially invent CBT millennia before it was formalized by modern humans.
If you think their work was trivial, you might not understand how competent and insightful they were, or how little so many aspects of this knowledge and these theories have changed in thousands of years.
I was a fan of Marcus Aurelius as a teen, and I grew out of it. But that doesn't give me the right to call people ignorant in some online forum. Your opinions are your own and so are mine.
