It is basically a teleological and short-sighted narrative: everybody was living in darkness until a handful of people plucked Enlightenment out of thin air. M

It is basically a teleological and short-sighted narrative: everybody was living in darkness until a handful of people plucked Enlightenment out of thin air. My point is not to disparage the contributions of those great scientists, but rather that they were working on a specific cultural and technological context, leveraging advances that others before them had taken centuries to develop. It is only because we usually take all that previous knowledge for granted that the contributions of early modern scientists seem to have come out of nowhere.