Wha? Oh, are you still there? I must have dozed off. Apparently I put myself to sleep with the monotony of saying for the one millionth time that people in the ancient world … were much more clever than we …

ZZzzzzZZZzz.

So, it appears that Persians in the 900s or 1000s were making a steel that had some chromium in it, similar to our stainless steel. Technically this period is medieval, not ancient, but it still surprised archaeologists because we modern people think that all the clever inventions and technological innovations were made in about the last 100 years and, really, in the last fifty.

We invented the world we are living in, you see.

We are also the first generation to possess moral virtue, but that’s a rant for another day.

OK, maybe I am being a little hard on the archaeologists. After all, you can recognize in principle that people in the past were just as clever as you and I, without being able to guess in advance specifically what they invented. But the article itself slips into snark, when it says that the ancient Persians “stumbled upon” an early version of this alloy. Who’s to say they stumbled upon it, and weren’t experimenting with different materials? I realize this snark is completely unintentional, but its very innocence does kind of reveal our modern bias.