The history of our understanding of geology is more complex than you would think. Even in the 1300s, writers were comfortably discussing how fossils had been deposited by gradual changes in sea level and the shapes of the coast, how sedimentary structures were laid down over eons, and generally had a very solid understanding of the deep history of the planet. New historical research shows that these writers were far from unusual; in fact, this appears to have been the general consensus throughout the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, and very likely well before that as well. Its worth remembering that, contrary to modern ideas of the Middle Ages as being entirely lacking in understanding of the world -- imagining the moon to be made of cheese, the Earth to be flat, and geology to have started a few thousand years earlier ex nihilo -- people were actually reasonably sophisticated about these things. The famous flat Earth maps (most importantly, that of Cosmas Indicopleustes) were considered to be the work of cranks or fairy tales even then; writers and thinkers, who in Europe were mostly monks and priests, were quite familiar with estimates of the size of the Earth and were thinking about its structure in a quite reasonable fashion. Thats not to say that the Middle Ages were all that fantastic in other ways: this periods reputation for filth, pestilence, and general barbarism was well-earned. But Medieval thinkers were no fools.
Posted on: Tue, 15 Jul 2014 05:08:01 +0000
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