It should become fairly obvious even to an awfully passive observer of the good old world, that it is currently traversing through a surge of hyper-nationalism from almost all quarters. In the backdrop of this trend, political leaders of our country have been proclaiming tall tales of the existence of everything in Ancient India, ranging from the internet to plastic surgery and IVF.

This essentially serves three purposes: 1) It acts as a classic distraction tactic; say something startlingly ludicrous to trigger a discussion and deflect public attention from criticisms or comments about the present day government and its policies. 2) It attempts to portray one group of people (usually the one the speaker belongs to or claims to belong to) as superior to others with the help of the legitimacy of science. 3) By glorifying the bygone age, it conjures up a scenario in which we are already great—courtesy of the achievements of our ancestors— thereby unburdening ourselves from striving to make the country more progressed. Those who wallow in past glory, without the hunger and drive to make the present count, are easy to be manipulated and controlled.

Apart from generously embarrassing everyone with even a smidgen of common sense, such fallacious statements go on to produce adverse reverberations on our psyche. It denies historical accuracy to the story of science in which we were equal contributors occupying the glorious stage with millions of people from all around the world. In addition, it helps in creating a lethargic demographic with a false sense of achievement (without any effort on the part of the individual), who is dangerously gratified in only delivering panegyrics about past glories (many claims being demonstrably spurious) without endeavoring to make a greater, more advanced and equitable society for tomorrow. The Indian subcontinent had definitely contributed a great deal to the progress of science and technology even in ancient times, but let’s be clear about one thing, that at the onset, science is and always has been a global enterprise. Hence, as responsible citizens, it behoves us to seek out accurate historical accounts of such scientific advancements during ancient times and the contributions the antecedents of this land had made in the initial periods of this long journey.

Of stones and more…

Archaeological and anthropological pieces of evidence exist for the use of various tools by prehistoric people of palaeolithic age. Whether the use of such tools by hunting communities were only for survival, or as part of a larger exploration of the natural world, is lost in the mists of time (use of gnomes and lunar sticks do point to keen observation of celestial bodies).

But that does not mean science had not yet been born during the palaeolithic age. Science did not begin with a watershed moment in the web of history, but as a continuous quest of nature, unravelling the hitherto unknown secrets through observation, experimentation, abstraction, and the subsequent manipulation of these discoveries. Prehistoric people of the palaeolithic age participated in scientific advancement a great deal more than what they are usually credited with. European explorers and conquerors of the Pacific islands, Africa and pre-Columbian Americas, had recorded substantial evidence which reveals extensive knowledge on the part of native tribes in the fields of geography, navigation, astronomy and botany.

Most of their technologies are unique and indigenous, indicating their independent origins in the absence of contact with other civilizations. Their methodologies reveal veritable thoroughness suggestive of thousands of years of observation and practice. For example, for the development and efficient use of the sidereal compass for navigational purposes, Polynesian islanders required extensive knowledge of positions of stars and ocean currents, as well as the development of elaborate techniques such as the Etak. Considerable knowledge about the use of a variety of plants for medicinal purposes has been known to exist among many secluded African and Native American tribes. Original sources of many medicines, such as quinine, colchicines, ephedrine, salicylic acid, ipecac etc., constituted this early knowledge base. Accumulation of natural knowledge, hence, existed before the beginning of the most famed civilizations of the world.

Global nature of science is hard to miss

Origins of civilizations are conventionally thought to coincide with the advent of predominantly agricultural societies after the last ice age, in a period known as the Neolithic age. Archaeological evidence place the inception of agricultural settlements around 10,000 years ago in the middle east and (according to more recent studies) independently in New Guinea. Domestication of indigenous plants also developed in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas as well. Once geographically settled societies started to flourish, trades started to develop. Archaeological evidence of tokens (with discrete shapes or carvings of the goods produced) used in commercial activities had been excavated in the Middle East and is dated to ~ 8500 BCE. Over the years, these have transformed in shapes and abstractness into the very elaborate cuneiform tablets (c 3250 – 3100 BCE) of the time of the Sumerian empire of Mesopotamia (although a dispute still exists on whether the provenance of these was during the Sumerians or the earlier Sumerian empire).

The abstract representation of ideas had developed in other civilizations of the world around the same time (which also had strong traditions of trades), as exemplified by the Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Indus valley script or the Chinese characters. These have gradually given way to more sophisticated and numerals to represent mathematical concepts. As the trades in these societies evolved, difficulties in associated mathematical calculations had commensurately escalated. Two monumental inventions that eased the cumbersome mathematical calculations, and had a substantial influence on history, had been those of the positional numeration and concept of zero. The origins of positional numeration based on decimal systems date back to between the third and fifth century CE in India. The use of this exceedingly efficient system was disseminated through trade routes, reaching Europe around the 13th century CE through Arab traders. The mention of the place-value system and zero makes its first appearance in a work (dated to 458 CE) titled Lokavibhaga from Sarvanandin. The contributors to this development may have been numerous, but their identities have been lost in the annals of science.

While arithmetics was being developed and popularized through trades, monuments aligning with celestial bodies had been constructed in various parts of the world; Newgrange (3200 BCE), followed by Stonehenge, the pyramid of Giza and many more, reveal intricate knowledge in astronomy, a subject that was acquainted by people as early as in the palaeolithic times. The abstract representation of mathematics has aided these structures with more predictive powers about impending celestial phenomena (an eclipse, for example). These monuments also stand witness to the astonishing architectural prowess possessed by early civilizations. Engineering expertise of the ancient world reflected in the unearthed remnants of urban settlements as well. Archaeological evidence from sites of Indus valley civilization unveil the existence of meticulous town planning including an elaborate system of drains. The sites of Indus valley civilization also presented many a relic which revealed an advanced knowledge of what would later develop into the branch of academia called material sciences. But it would have all started in the more distant past when someone (in fact a multitude of them) discovered the wonders that the combination of dexterity and a mighty fire can do to a lump of clay.

Creating pottery out of clay by implementing the controlled use of fire had existed in various parts of the world (Asia, Europe, Africa) much before the commencement of agriculture-based civilizations. The science of smelting copper from malachite ores, too, may have its origin in sophisticated pottery kilns (although it is hard to know how exactly that had transpired). As the smelting processes continued to develop, bronze (an alloy of copper and tin) made its grand appearance in ~ 3300 BCE in the Middle East. Earliest dated bronze items were excavated from the tombs of Sumerian kings. Archaeological evidence indicates that bronze might have been independently discovered in various other parts of the world such as China, India, Balkans, Nigeria, Peru and South-East Asia. The famed iron age was ushered in ~ 1000 BCE in the Mediterranean. The Greek civilization (approx. 500 BCE to 500 CE) existed in the iron age and had contributed significantly to engineering, human anatomy, navigation, astronomy, geometry, metallurgy, etc. Greek science was greatly influenced by knowledge possessed by earlier civilizations of Egypt and Phoenicia.

Records show that extraction of brine, methane and petroleum from earth’s interior had been in use in China latest by 4th century BCE. Several momentous inventions came from China, many of which had played significant roles in the course of history, whether it be the magnetic compass, invented by sometime around the fourth century BC, or gun powder (ninth century CE). Papyri documents dating back to the third century CE reveals that Hellenistic artisans used furnaces, beakers, stills and heating baths in their workshops. Writings of Jabir ibn Haiyan (eighth century CE) and Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (ninth-tenth century CE) documents the expansive knowledge that existed in the Persian-Arabic science at the time; for instance, detailed reactions involved in the production of various substances such as lead carbonate.

 There are many minutiae to discourse on for thousands of pages in the story of every field of science (and many books by diligent science historians which do exactly that), but it should be fairly apparent that science has an undeniably global face. An accurate exposition of the history of science deserves the same evidence-based inquiry that the scientific methodology upholds, and denying the story of science of such a quest, is a mockery of the scientific method itself. The purveyors of spurious history lessons and obscure pseudo-scientific claims never bother themselves with the most important concerns associated with knowledge: “What is the evidence and what qualifies as evidence?”. Hence, apart from the ulterior political motive, such claims also betray the speaker’s ignorance of arguably the single most important question in science: “How do we know things?”.

(The author is a PhD in Theoretical Biophysics from IIT Bombay.)