Why so many headlines of really common-sense "duh" science?
Who would have possibly imagined that creatures on this earth would evolve to endure their surroundings?
Who would have possibly imagined that creatures on this earth would evolve to endure their surroundings?
Flat Earth was ‘duh’ science at one point. Good thing we tested it.
This is probably a myth; anywhere you can see water, you can see things going over the horizon. We knew the Earth was round (and its size) well before circumnavigation.
Also, a flat stretch of land will do nicely, too. It doesn't take long to notice the discrepancy of hills… and we have the actual calculations of the ancients to prove that they knew; they're fairly accurate, too.
> Many ancient cultures subscribed to a flat Earth cosmography, including Greece until the classical period (323 BC), the Bronze Age and Iron Age civilizations of the Near East until the Hellenistic period (31 BC), and China until the 17th century.
Indian philosophy uses a spherical earth in 6th century BC as well as many thinkers in Ancient Greece like Pythagoras.
For a direct quote from that link: “early Muslims tended to also view the Earth as flat” In other words it was a common belief, but not universally accepted fact. So saying that culture believed in a flat earth isn’t true anymore than saying they believed the earth was round.
My mother had to actually explain to me that the world is an spheroid so I would stop having those terrifying nightmares where I fell off the edge of the world.
There are in fact many benefits to living next to a river or lake instead of the coast. A large one is that the water is mostly potable, instead of largely not. I would hazard a guess that most ancient coastal communities were actually ancient coastal river communities, and that rivers are actually the thing humans lived next to (there's some indication in the abstract here[1] that this is the case). If that's the case, proximity to water is a poor indication of how many people would have seen ships sailing over the horizon. As to how obvious bases of trees would be over large lakes, or how likely large lakes would be compared to the norm, I don't know.
Realizing it was evidence of a round earth is of course a different story. My guess is most people simply never considered it.
Also, I would guess that the speed and type of change being experienced as a result of human activity (that animals are responding to) is relatively rare and thus valuable to understand.
Take for example the mathematical journey of laying our fundamental axioms starting at Peano all the way through ZFC.