There are many assumptions that come to us in our education because a close reading is not given to the facts even as we know them. And let’s face it when the protagonists have been dead two thousand years it is hard to know what we know. For example would it interest you to know that eight hundred years ago the people who thought the Earth was flat would have been looked upon by educated people in the same way scientists and modern thinkers think of people desperately trying to deny evolution today.
The fact is that the proof (albeit luckily discovered) that the Earth was 24,000 miles round was found in 300 BCE.
Around about the same time or slightly earlier middle eastern thinkers had discovered the Moon controlled the cycle of time and come up with close to a 365 day year, though their leap year to keep up was every nineteen years. Whenever the Olympic circus begins I always sort of wish we have kept the nineteen year leap year.
Clocks were invented by the Chinese almost two thousand years ago. In fact to think that somehow people were standing still and not thinking much over the last ten thousand years is to misunderstand human beings. People were experimenting long before experimental method was created. They were simply not being systematic. So the Romans knew what crude oil was they did not have a use for it.
In the past many people have hit upon accurate ideas they have just not been the ones listened to, their knowledge was lost or other countries rose and conquered theirs and disregarded their findings.