Whilst it seems none of our modern scientific knowledge predates the Greek philosophers, surely there is earlier documented evidence of science-like experiments?
Note that I’m interested in actual experiments - not simply early thoughts on life, etc.
Would galvanic piles from ~200 BC suggest that someone had been experimenting in electrochemistry ?
Riddle of ‘Baghdad’s batteries’
Trig:
My history is a little rusty. I don’t remember ever learning about Greek science “experiments”. Can you jog my memory?
“Osti” (the Tyrolean iceman from a few years back) carried herbs and toolings of surprising complexity for an Iron Ager.
Also, the development of distilled spirits and curarae predate Archimides, and those had to involve a lot of trial and error.
Your question seems tricky because the experimental method as we know it didn’t actually appear until the early modern era. Ancient “science,” if you want to call it that, was more of a matter of natural philosophy. Most natural philosophy (in Europe at least) before the early modern era tended to be Aristotelian and was based upon observations of nature rather than actual experimentation.
I doubt that. All ancient civilisations had astronomy. All that I know of, anyway.
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It’s Ötzi.
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I nominate The Babylonians for thier observations of the stars, sun & moon. They took detailed measurements for centuries from at least 2330 B.C.E., but probably for a few centuries before that as well.
The were doing it for their “science” of Astrology (more like Sidney Omar than Issac Newton). Still, thier actual observations used what we would recognize as scientific principles as did the tools they developed to measure. You could strectch the point to say They even made “hypothesis” as to when stars would re-appear & tested them.
Thales of Miletus is generally recognized as the first “scientist”, but that’s largely due to the fact that he’s the first one we have a bodo of writings from. Even Thales didn’t spring entirely original from the ground.
I suspect that there were a lot of unsung geniuses, people who discovered One Big Thing (which was probably lost and re-discovered many times over), or maybe a few who discovered more than one. Knowledge that a 3-4-5 triangle has a right angle goes back to some unknown person in Egypt (although it would not surprise me to find it indepenendently discovered elsewhere). Knowledge of variable stars is shown (as I argue in my book) in Greek mythology, and arguably in Chinese mythology as well. There’s quite a bit of mathematical knowledge recorded in Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Indian, and Chinese records.