According to the conventional view of history, humans have only walked the Earth in our present form for some 200,000 years. Advanced civilizations appeared several thousand years ago, but much of the mechanical ingenuity we know in modern times began to develop only around the Industrial Revolution
In his poems of the Iliad, the Greek Philosopher Homer introduces us to the mythical city of Troy, which remained a curiosity to many until the late 1870s when Heinrich Schliemann, on a hunch, began excavating the remains of an ancient city in Turkey.