Many discoveries in science could have been made at almost the same time by someone else, scientific advancements are often like a wave that carries several people forward at nearly the same time. Galileo was not the first to play with lenses, he wasn't neven the first to turn them to the skies, but he WAS the first to publish his discoveries. I was just reading today (in a Discover magazine article about Jupiter's moon Europa) that both Galileo and the German astronomer Simon Marius both claimed to have been the first to discover the 4 moons of Jupiter, but Marius must have dragged his feet when it came to writing about it. Similarly Darwin was not the only scientist to have figured out that species evolve over time, but he hurried his findings into print when he learned that someone else was writing along the same lines, so he is the one we credit with the idea.
That "tide in human events" holds true in other areas too. The buried ruins of Pompeii may have been discovered by accident when a farmer was digging a well, but the Romans left a lot of fairly well preserved remains scattered all over southern Europe, and farmers were plowing up artifacts all the time. I guess that genius artists like Giotto and Masacchio would have been experimenting with new ways of painting no matter what was percolating in society at the time.
Now political history might be a different thing, although I wonder if the time schedules of major changes would have been only off by a little. If the South had won the War Between the States, do you think we would still have slavery? Not a chance!
It IS fun to think about these things, though.
