The Korean people have had heated floors, called ondol, since the 15th century. African physicians in what is now Egypt had perfected cataract removal surgery hundreds of years before the rise of ANY western civilization with surgical knowledge. The Aztecs had sophisticated enough technology to perform cranial surgery to do everything from reducing swelling of the brain to removing foreign objects.
We still aren’t 100% sure how the Romans made their (damn-near-everlasting) cement, or the exact composition of original Damascus steel, iirc. And often Roman houses belonging to the wealthy would have heated floors, as well. Plus, there was that…whole little thing with the Roman Aqueducts, when they just…decided to move several hundred thousand tons of water, several hundred miles, over valleys and mountains. You know. Like you do.
The Romans had heated public baths! Everyone loved soap and perfume! The soap was apparently fantastic! You could go anywhere there was a market and buy body oil and even food from vending machines–in ancient Greece!
Your average European house in the 1900s, supposedly at the “peak” of their ‘exploratory’ (imperialism) boom, were cold and drafty, with no plumbing, and no heating. Sanitation amounted to literally shitting in a fancy pot and then throwing it out into the yard, or the street.
There were no sewers, so when this happened, the shit would just…chill there, until it rained, and then things got ugly.
The Minoans, hundreds and hundreds of years before, had complex city-wide plumbing systems, and flushing toilets.
The River Thames was so polluted with literal, actual human fecal matter that in the 1800s, the English government had to pass a law banning people from dumping shit directly into the river.
Eurocentrism is such a weird idea, especially when you lay out a timeline of what other people were doing in the rest of the world, before and during the rise of the various European countries.
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