For all the derision the current scientific community has towards those who lived in the path, they forget that these same *Bronze age desert dweller* contemporaries, were the ones who laid the very foundations of the science that we learn in elementary school.
They had to discover this stuff and reason it out on their own with very rudimentary equipment and math knowledge.
Considering the handicaps they worked under, those were men of genius the likes of which we rarely see today.
Today we have all the information we need at our fingertips and the knowledge of math and science that we take for granted they had to discover with NO help from anyone.
THAT takes far more brains than spending a couple decades in school being taught all they did not know but had to discover on their own.
We have it so easy it's ridiculous and it is inexcusable to compare them to us and condemn them for the things they did not know that we now learn in 2nd grade.
The smug attitude of intellectual superiority so many scientists have today is a slap in the face to their forerunners.
We owe a profound debt to these "Bronze Age desert dwellers," but refuse to acknowledge it. Nor do we acknowledge the debts we owe to the great thinkers of the ancient world, e.g., of the great civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, of ancient Egypt, of Athens, Rome, and -- yes -- Jerusalem. Our own civilization is built on the foundations they established, in law, in science, in mathematics, in social organization, in ethics, in human psychology.
But, having destroyed history, we ignorantly suppose that the present generation, maybe including recent generations now past, are the sole creators of our "advanced" human civilization -- via the "scientific method."
Then there is the unstated assumption, fall-out of the logic of Darwinian evolution theory, that people of the past are less worthy than people of the present, because evolution always moves in the direction of "improving" the human stock. Ergo, the more recent human is "better" than humans living in the past. So we can disparage those "Bronze Age desert dwellers" with impunity and not be thought mentally deranged.
One thought in closing. Darwinism fails to explain why human nature itself remains constant over the millennia. The very same things that worried and challenged those "Bronze Age desert dwellers" continue to be the very same things that worry and challenge us today. E.g., problems of aging, sickness, death; of providing sustenance and safe habitation for one's self and one's family; fear of the power of other men over ourselves; etc., etc. I would argue that nothing has changed about fundamental human nature over the past seven millennia, as captured in the historical records.
The only thing about man that has changed is not his human nature, but the tools he uses. And I worry that the tools are co-opting the man who uses them.