Historians are keen to assign the invention of an idea to the first person (or culture) we have on record as mentioning it. Even if that mention suggests that they received the idea from somewhere else.
Ayahuasca, the hallucinogenic brew, is a combination of two plants native to the Amazon rainforest: the Banisteriopsis caapi vine and the leaves of Psychotria viridis. The caapi vine contains MAOIs which allow the DMT in the leaves of the Psychotria plant species to become orally active in the human body. If DMT-containing plants are taken by themselves, then the body’s store of the enzyme MAO (monoamine oxidase) will quickly break down the DMT. However, by combining DMT-containing plants with MAO inhibiting plants, the DMT becomes orally active and intense psychedelic effects take place.
The Mysterious Origins of Ayahuasca (samwoolfe.com)
Not only is it highly unlikely that this combination was discovered by chance – there are 80,000 plant species in the Amazon – both ingredients need to be pounded and boiled separately, before being combined for ingestion. The boiling occurs in multiple stages.
How did the Amazonian people, thousands of years ago, think of combining the correct two plants and know that they need many, many hours of boiling? If you ask them, they were instructed by the plant gods.
The Pythagorean theorem, of course was “invented” by Pythagoras (570 – 495 BC), and while he may have come up with the idea on his own, earlier cultures were provably aware of it.
The Berlin Papyrus 6619 from Ancient Egypt (1800 BC) lists Pythagorean triples (essentially mathematical exercises that indicate they knew the theorem), and the Mesopotamian tablet Plimpton 322 from the same period also lists triples.
The Precession of the Equinoxes (aka Axial Precession)
Attributed to Hipparchus of Rhodes in 127BC, who noticed that the star Spica had moved relative to observations made by compatriots a few hundred years earlier. His conclusion was the precessional cycle took 36,000 years, based on rough estimates.
Other civilisations were advanced enough in astronomy that it would not be surprising at all if they had known about precession, especially the Egyptians and Mayans who watched the stars continuously for thousands of years, and aligned monuments accordingly.
Proclus Diadochus of Nicea (410-485 AD) said that the Egyptians were well aware of it:
“Let those who, believing in observations, cause the stars to move around the poles of the zodiac by one degree in one hundred years toward the east, as Ptolemy and Hipparchos did before him, know … that the Egyptians had already taught Plato about the movement of the fixed stars. Because they utilized previous observations which the Chaldeans had already made long before them with the same result, having again been instructed by the gods prior to the observations. And they did not speak just a single time, but many times … of the advance of the fixed stars.
(Proclos Diadochos, Commentaries on the
Timaeus, IV)
According to Robert Bauval (The Egypt Code, pages 112-113), it was well acknowledged by the ancient Greeks that they learned astronomy from the Egyptians. “Democritus lived with the priests of Egypt for five years” and Pythagoras lived with the priests and learned geometry and astronomy.
Potentially some types of knowledge, which can be achieved through observation and thought (and not requiring advances in technology), have been around since the First Time, 12,000 years ago, or even earlier still. There is no way of knowing if they did or didn’t.