Antikythera mechanism probably predated the Greeks

There was that rare moment in Britain during the two bank holidays of this week, a fairly sensible and interesting programme on television.

Those who had their curiosity raised by the report on the Antikythera mechanism can find more information from Wikipedia here and Archimedes here.

It is amusing how self-styled scientists in a wide variety of disciplines, rigidly stick to the assertion that the birthplace of civilization was the fertile crescent and that the Greeks, who happened to be the first to record much of mankind's earliest knowledge, in a language that we can still understand today, were somehow the original discoverers of these basics of fact, rather than the mere scribes, new discoveries almost daily indicate that they were.

DNA research has now, in my view, irrefutably proven that civilization spread from the West to the East in the Mediterranean, in my view a possible world exception, due to the landlocked nature of that body of water. Elsewhere trade winds generally ensured that mankind and learning traveled the world's great oceans from East to West.

No matter the programme was a pleasure to watch and tantalizingly hinted at one of the main possibilities of the book on which I am still working, namely that we presently move further from knowledge and truth with each generation that arrives!