It's hard to fathom the difficulties our ancestors had to contend with given how our world has advanced with technological sophistication over the past century. We shouldn't, however, underestimate the power of the human-mind, and how everything that was discovered in the past paved the way for the practices used today, especially those used in science.

Of the very first astronomers, the ancient Babylonian were the first to use simple arithmetic to predict the positions of celestial bodies. Evidence reveals that these astronomers, working several centuries B.C.E., also employed sophisticated geometric methods that foreshadow the development of calculus. Historians had thought such techniques did not emerge until more than 1400 years later, ...