I've wondered how many scientists prior to Pythagoras had actually seriously asked the question, 'what shape is the earth?' Were there earlier scientists who actually conducted experiments and arrived at the conclusion that the earth is flat?
If not, then you can't actually say that scientists prior to Pythagoras were wrong about the shape of the earth, simply that they hadn't asked that question in a scientific way.
I've always been fascinated by the history of maps and how ver wrong information makes it into maps, gets taken out, and gets put back in decades or even centuries later. California as an island, and a mythical arctic sea with a mountain at the north pole being two famous examples of this. Cartographers aren't exactly scientists in the strictest sense, but the similarity is that they make their own discrete discoveries and then attempt to show how that discovery fits into the larger base of knowledge, and in doing so they perpetuate ideas that have not been properly verified.
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