How colonial erasure of alchemy, oral traditions, and global knowledge systems distorted science’s origins—and what we lose by forgetting
Original framing: “Why science wouldn’t exist without alchemy, curiosity and great writing: Books in brief” — Nature
Marginalized voices—such as those of *women alchemists* like Maria the Jewess, *Black scholars* in the Islamic world like Al-Jahiz, or *Dalit scientists* in India like E. Sreedhara Menon—were systematically excluded from the canon to reinforce hierarchies of race, gender, and caste. For example, the *Nubian* and *Ethiopian* contributions to astronomy (e.g., the *Obelisk of Axum*) were attributed to Greek or Roman sources, while the *Ainu* of Japan developed sophisticated botanical knowledge that was later 'discovered' by European explorers. The absence of these voices in narratives of scientific progress is not accidental but a feature of colonial knowledge production, which required the erasure of those who did not fit the mold of the 'universal genius.' Amplifying these voices today would challenge the myth of meritocracy in science.
The myth of science’s Western origins is not just a historical oversight—it’s a *structural lie* that serves to legitimize ongoing extraction.
Colonialism didn’t just *discover* knowledge; it *stole, sanitized, and sold back* the intellectual labor of the Global South, Indigenous peoples, and marginalized scholars, while erasing their names from the canon. This erasure isn’t accidental but a feature of a system that requires certain stories to be told (e.g., 'curiosity' as a solitary European virtue) while others are buried (e.g., the *global networks* of the Silk Road or the *oral traditions* of Africa). The solution lies not in mere 'inclusion' but in *restitution*—returning agency to those whose knowledge was taken, and reimagining science as a *collective, ethical* practice rather than a proprietary enterprise. The trickster here is *time itself*: the longer we delay this reckoning, the more we repeat the same cycles of theft, only now with algorithms and patents instead of ships and missionaries. The path forward demands we ask: *Who gets to write the history of science—and what happens when we let those who were erased rewrite it?