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Are we cleverer than people who lived in the past?

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Well, when asked this question many people would (probably without even thinking) answer yes.
Ok then, how about… Are we cleverer than people who lived around two thousand years ago?
This time a vast majority of people would unhesitatingly answer in the affirmative.
Let us look a little closer though… maybe we should not be so sure that as time progresses, so does our intelligence!
When thinking back a couple of thousand years, most people have a hazy picture of scenes reminiscent of stories from the Bible, with maybe some Greeks and Romans thrown in for good measure. Overwhelmingly, their impression of the people of these times is that of a fairly primitive, superstitious and backward people, with less intelligence than we of the modern era are in possession of.
It will be of interest to many then, to note that thousands of years ago, the Greeks had already established the belief that the world was round. It was not until the Middle Ages that later, more ‘advanced’ man, popularised the flat Earth model, but perhaps, the pre-eminent example of the point that I am trying to illustrate, is that over two thousand years ago man accurately calculated the circumference of the Earth!
The man responsible for this extraordinary feat was Eratosthenes, a Greek astronomer. Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth to be 24,000 miles – today, with all the benefits of satellite technology, accurate measuring apparatus and aircraft; we know the circumference to be around 24,900 miles.
How did Eratosthenes pull off this incredible feat?...With no more than a pole and the power of deductive reasoning.
This is how it was done: Eratosthenes firstly made the very clever assumption that since the Sun was so far away, all sunbeams reaching the Earth were effectively parallel.
The next step was to simultaneously compare the direction of the vertical at two different locations, with the direction of the sun’s parallel beams. This in itself, was a huge problem. Nowadays, I would just get an assistant to take a simultaneous measurement at a pre set time – but this was 2,000 years in the past and there were no timing devices that would allow such a feat.
How then, was this hurdle surmounted? The problem was solved by carrying out the measurements at noon (when the sun is highest in the sky) at two locations on the same line of longitude.
Why choose locations on the same line of longitude? Because all points on the same line of longitude experience noon at exactly the same time!
The sites that Eratosthenes chose for the measurements were Alexandria and Syene. Part of the information he required was the distance between the locations. Eratosthenes determined that the distance was 500 miles – even today no one is sure exactly how such an accurate calculation was made so long ago.
So what observations were made and how did they finally determine the Earth’s circumference?
The observation at Seyene was ingeniously simple. From ancient records, Eratosthenes knew that at noon on Midsummer’s day, the Sun’s rays touched the waters of an extremely deep well in the town and were reflected back upwards.
From this, he realised that at that particular moment, the Sun’s rays and the local vertical were identical and, therefore, the Sun’s ‘parallel’ rays deviated from the local vertical by zero degrees.
Because of this brilliant deduction, Eratosthenes had no need to physically take the measurement at Seyene. He was, however, in Alexandria on Midsummer’s Day and made the following observation:
A pole of pre-determined length placed in the ground at exactly noon, cast a shadow at an angle of 7.5 degrees from the top of the pole.
What this meant, was that he was effectively measuring the angle between the Earth’s radius at Alexandria and the Earth’s radius at Seyene.
So what have we got so far? The angle of the Earth’s radii between Alexandria and Seyene is 7.5 degrees and the distance between the two locations is 500 miles.
Worked it out yet? Ok, imagine this… picture a cake, and cut from the outer edge to the centre. Now, make another cut at an angle of 7.5 degrees from the centre to the outer edge. What you have got is a slice of cake. Imagine that the distance along the curved outside edge of the slice is 500 miles (500 miles of arc) and you will have a picture in your mind of how Eratosthenes visualised the information that he had gathered. Now here is the final maths:
If 7.5 degrees = 500 miles of arc then 360 degrees divided by 7.5 degrees will give you ‘how many lots’ of 7.5 there are in a complete circle.
The answer is 48… therefore, 48 multiplied by 500 miles will give the distance around the Earth’s circumference… 24,000 miles!
If you think about the kind of intelligence that was required to even envisage a solution to the problem, you may now see that the ancients were far cleverer that we give them credit for…in fact:
If you took say, 10,000 modern university students and set them the same problem, how many would come up with the answer? Be honest!
So are we in fact, really any cleverer that the ancients?