> My thought is that a lot of humans might have understood more about those forces in the past but were unable to effectively pass that information for the next

> My thought is that a lot of humans might have understood more about those forces in the past but were unable to effectively pass that information for the next generation to build upon. This sounds incredibly unlikely. When do you imagine that these people lived? What data were they using to derive their scientific theories? What technology were they using to generate that data? You can't hope to explain the universe without observing it first, and humans are quite bad at observation without the aide of technology.