Antikythera mechanism possibly older than previously thought?

[Anomalocaris]

I imagine that you know more things today then you did 10 years ago. Nevertheless I am sure you have learned stuff and then forgotten what you learned. If this is true of every individual....why shouldn't it be true of the collective?

Because the collective only forgets when it's overrun or taken over by morons.

I don't believe that is true.

1. Not every flash of inspiration makes it into the corpus of knowledge appreciated by the collective.

2. Throughout history the Collective mis-remembers and forgets all the time even those things which it appreciates or appreciated at one time. It is only in fairly recent times when the collective even attempted to systematically catalogue and preserves what is known. Prior to about the 18th century, it largely fell on the shoulders of individuals to preserve what they happen to have been interested in.

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... Nevertheless I am sure you have learned stuff and then forgotten what you learned. If this is true of every individual....why shouldn't it be true of the collective?

Books!

That implies books are adaquately catalogued and sufficiently circulated. Even today there are vast amount of recent knowledge that were written down in books and which is lost to the public because the books containing them are rare, little known, or inaccessible in private collections. Often the owners of the private collections also have no idea of what is contained in their private collections.

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Found an interesting article on research regarding the Antikythera Mechanism.

The Antikythera mechanism (/ˌæntɨkɨˈθɪərə/ ANT-i-ki-THEER-ə or /ˌæntɨˈkɪθərə/ ANT-i-KITH-ə-rə) is an ancient analog computer[1][2][3][4] designed to predict astronomical positions and eclipses. It was recovered in 1900–01 from the Antikythera wreck, a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera.[5]

New research suggests that the device may be as old as 205 BCE.

Sadly, the knowledge that went into creating the device was lost for a very long time. How much farther might we have progressed scientifically and technologically had much of the ancient knowledge of the Greeks and others not been lost?

I heard one suggestion that the origin of the antikythera technology goes back to between 300-260BC, shortly after Alexandrian conquest of near east, and the technology embodied in the gear train was perfected in Sicily prior to roman conquest during first punic war. The antikythera device itself might have been a late product of that technology built sometime after second or third Punic war. The technology then died out by late roman republic era, or early imperial era, and Romans merely collected the surviving fruits of that technology mainly as curios, with little or no appreciation of the potential of their technology other than as a parlor trick.

Only knowledge which are appreciated are likely to survive. There is no evidence knowledge and technology a bodied in the antikythera mechansim was properly appreciated. Antikythera knowledge and technology probably didn't survive long enough for Christianity and the dark ages to be able to claim responsibility for killing it.