Much of what we think we know from history is known to us only because somebody claimed it in writing, and it seems plausible enough so we have no particular re

Much of what we think we know from history is known to us only because somebody claimed it in writing, and it seems plausible enough so we have no particular reason to believe they made it up. As far as I'm aware we haven't dug up any ancient Greek polybolos ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polybolos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polybolos) But they were described in ancient writings and the premise seems plausible, so we believe such polybolos existed and put it into our modern history books. The Antikythera mechanism evidently failed the implicit plausibility test, so we didn't believe it until we found one. Or maybe the written mentions of it simply failed to attract much notice so the plausibility was never given much thought in the first place.