Science historian and journalist Dick Teresi, from the first chapter of his book Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science—from the Babylonians to the Maya, which was published this month by Simon & Schuster.
My embarrassment at having undertaken an assignment with the assumption that non-Europeans contributed little to science has been overtaken by the pleasure of discovering mountains of unappreciated human industry, four thousand years of scientific discoveries by people I had been taught to disregard.”