"Another folly of moderns is to think that the ancients were primitive, superstitious and all together not too clever. In stead, these people were precisely as intelligent as we are today, but their heads weren't filled with the vast library of distractions we treat ourselves to on a daily basis. Our knowledge and their knowledge do not relate like, say, a child's drawing versus the schematic of the space shuttle, but are of similar height and depth but with different focal points. They didn't have iron not because they didn't know how to work it, but simply because that's not what their society was going for. In other words: their men of wisdom had better things to do than figure out how to make steel, and where we today are great at making implements of destruction, they were great at things we know nearly nothing about. What's left of their legacy has for long been dubbed fables and mythology, but most recent times has seen an increasing urge of researchers to brave the truth: we are the stupid ones, not they..." ibid