@ImperiumRequiem over on Twitter cited Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment. Murray thought that eastern Eurasia hadn't figured out the scientific method until the Europeans showed up in their ports.
The West didn't have a scientific method either, as we know it, as has been pointed out in the History For Atheists blog. But up to, oh, AD 1400 parts of the West did have something like it. This proto-scientody had reached its limits by then; but it was still being practiced around the Mediterranean. Ibn Khaldun rated the nations of which he knew : he thought the Greeks, Egyptians, and Iranians to be best at it; and the northern Europeans and subSaharan Africans to be savages. In between, Ibn Khaldun placed India and China.
But then something changed - and it changed among us European savages, first. Gregory Cochran points out that the discovery of Jupiter's main four moons enabled a proper definition of latitude here on Earth. It strikes me that Central Asian Iranians should have figured this out first.
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