We just got dunked on by a civilization that wrote on rocks and didn't have Wi-Fi.

Researchers finally cracked a Sumerian star map from around 3100 BCE, and turns out it wasn't mythology or primitive sky-watching—it was a precise astronomical record of an asteroid impact. The kind of impact that would've lit up the sky and probably ruined everyone's month. While we've been busy arguing about whether ChatGPT can pass the bar exam, these folks were tracking celestial mechanics with clay tablets and doing math that held up for five millennia. Embarrassing for us, honestly.

This is the fourth or fifth time this year we've discovered ancient civilizations were wildly more sophisticated than we assumed. Lidar keeps revealing massive cities under jungle canopies. Ground-penetrating radar finds advanced water systems. Now the Sumerians were apparently running astronomical surveys that we needed modern computers to decode. There's a pattern here, and it's not about them being lucky—it's about us being consistently, arrogantly wrong about the capabilities of people who didn't have our tools.

Here's what nobody wants to admit: we've been confusing tools with intelligence for decades, maybe centuries. Silicon Valley is particularly guilty of this. We assume that because we have satellites and machine learning, we're fundamentally smarter than people who used abacuses and star charts. But intelligence isn't your tech stack—it's what you do with constraints. The Sumerians looked at dots in the sky and reverse-engineered celestial mechanics. We look at TikTok and can't figure out if it's making us dumber. Different problems, sure, but let's not get too cocky about who's winning.

The truly wild part? Their storage solution outlasted ours by orders of magnitude. Those clay tablets sat in the dirt for 5,000 years and we can still read them. Meanwhile, we're already losing data from the 1990s because we can't find working floppy disk drives. NASA just spent millions recovering data from old missions because the file formats went extinct. We've built this entire civilization on the assumption that digital is permanent and superior, but it's actually the most fragile information storage system humans have ever created. The Sumerians literally baked their homework and it survived multiple apocalypses. We can't keep a hard drive alive through a software update.

This connects to something deeper happening in tech right now. We keep building tools that make us feel smart while actually offloading the intelligence to the tool. Every founder pitching an AI copilot is essentially saying "we're too dumb to do this ourselves anymore, so we built a thing." Which is fine—that's what tools are for—but we've started believing our tools make us superior rather than just different. The Sumerians didn't have the tools, so they built the intelligence. We have the tools, so we're forgetting how to build the intelligence. Check back in 5,000 years and see whose knowledge survived.

The market already sees this, even if it won't admit it. Why is everyone suddenly obsessed with asteroid detection and planetary defense? Because we know we've lost the skill our ancestors had—the ability to watch the sky and understand what's coming. So now we throw billions at satellite networks and early warning systems to replicate what some ancient astronomer did by paying attention. We've reinvented their homework with worse handwriting and called it innovation.

So what happens when AI finally decodes all our ancient texts and we realize Bronze Age mathematicians were doing things we still can't fully explain? Do we update our assumptions about linear progress, or do we just build an LLM to make us feel better about it?