It is the tendency to think that people in the past were dumb, and we aren't. Like, there always has to be some explanation involved when we learn that people did something unintuitive in the past -- people learned how to make beer by accidentally leaving leftover bread in liquid and then drank it when they were starving. Maybe? Or maybe they figured out that things ferment and played with it until it worked, like we would have done it? Why does it always have to be an accident?
People may have had less access to information and technology, but that didn't make them any dumber than we are now.
There's probably an aspect to people confusing "knowledge" with "brainpower". People in the past were just as good at figuring stuff out as we are today.
We have the advantage of Millenia of stuff figured out and documented. So we know on average more about how the universe works than people in the distant past.
I seriously doubt that. My experience in college was not to learn facts and formulae, but to learn how to learn. I.e. training the mind.
It's similar to athletes. The worst Olympic athlete today would blow away the best from a century ago. That's not because people are inherently stronger today, but because we know how to train much better.
If you took the athletes today without their support team and sent them back in time two years before an Olympics event to compete on their own, I don't think it would be as big of a blowout as you suggest.
I also don’t think that brainpower/learning ability correspond as directly to training regimen as physical ability. We also don’t have as clear of an idea for what the “best” ways to increase learning ability are as for fitness. And of course our methods to quantify intelligence are much less objective than for fitness - partly because we separate fitness ability into different domains in a way that we tend not to for intelligence.
I suspect it is because the thought of what might be possible just never entered their minds.
For example, Edison invented the idea of the invention development laboratory. Very, very recently. The Wright Bros were the first to come up with the idea of a research and development laboratory - just over a century ago.
The scientists that existed before the industrial age in the West were upper class, bored and educated men who did it for their own amusement.
It wasn't until the abandonment of the economic system which worked on the assumption that international economics was zero sum and capitalism (and imperialism) took hold that the incentive structure for creating novel technologies could exist.
This is all recollection based on various histories I have consumed and may not be entirely correct, but I'm pretty sure the idea is solid.
That is partially true. There is no incentive, for example, for slaves to make any improvements. I cannot think of any technology developed by slaves. That meant the few people in power were not enough to think of much new stuff.
You could say free markets were the greatest invention, because it incentivized everyone to be a creator.
The evolution of guns is an interesting topic. So is the evolution of sailing ships. The latter occurred over thousands of years. Very very slow!
You might want to investigate James Burke's "Connections" book and series. It's an entertaining overview of the history of invention.
Going back further, the Islamic world had a lot of science going on which is often ignored or omitted by the western world when it comes to discussing the origins of science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_in_the_medieval_Islami...
Because that's a surprisingly common way for things to be discovered.
Saccharine? Somebody working in a lab didn't clean their hands well, licked their fingers, and discovered it was sweet.
Aspartame? Somebody working in a lab didn't clean their hands well, licked their fingers, and discovered it was sweet.
I think this is true of basically every major artificial sweetener except invert sugar.
...but now I'm starting to wonder how many people working in a lab didn't clean their hands well, licked their fingers, and died, because they had accidentally discovered a toxin?
They figured it out through reasoning and trial and error and raw experience, while for us it's apparently impossible to learn anything we don't already know the answer for.
