This innovative history proves once and for all that the roots of modern science were established centuries, and in some instances millennia, before the births of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. In this enlightening, entertaining, and important book, Teresi describes many discoveries from all over the non-Western world -- Sumeria, Babylon, Egypt, India, China, Africa, Arab nations, the Americas, and the Pacific islands -- that equaled and often surpassed Greek and European learning in the fields of mathematics, astronomy, cosmology, physics, geology, chemistry, and technology.

The first extensive and authoritative multicultural history of science written for a popular audience, Lost Discoveries fills a critical void in our scientific, cultural, and intellectual history and is destined to become a classic in its field.

Dava Sobel Author of Galileo's Daughter and Longitude If you think, as I did, that science flowered in ancient Greece -- the way Athena sprang fully formed from the brow of Zeus -- then read Dick Teresi's Lost Discoveries and revel in the global expression of early genius, from Sumerian mathematics and ancient Indian particle physics to the sky maps of the Skidi Pawnee and the rubber 'factories' of the Aztecs.