Peoples interior model of the world is very tenuously related to reality. We don't have a direct experience of waves, quantum mechanics, the vast majority of the electromagnetic spectrum, etc. The whole thing is a bunch of shortcuts and hacks that allow people to survive, the brain isn't really setup to probe reality and produce true beliefs, and the extent to which our internal models of reality naturally match actual reality is related to how much that mattered to our personal survival before the advent of civilization and writing, etc.

It's really only been a very brief amount of time in human history where we had a deliberate method for trying to probe reality and create true beliefs, and I am fairly sure that if consciousness existed in humanity, it existed before the advent of the scientific method.