A relative claim of "most" assumes a survey of "damage to human knowledge" not evident in the link. Maybe some points of human history were stuck in local minim

A relative claim of "most" assumes a survey of "damage to human knowledge" not evident in the link. Maybe some points of human history were stuck in local minima, scholastic periods where all things were considered known and new observations fit to existing theory in ever more Byzantine epicycles. Maybe not, but its hard to tell from this vantage.