Almost a Century Ahead of The New York Times

Many of the influential thinkers, prestigious publications, and important articles of that bygone era are almost totally unknown today, even to many specialists, and the vacuum produced by that loss of historical knowledge has often been filled with the implied histories of modern Hollywood movies and television shows, some of which are occasionally not totally accurate or realistic. Indeed, a casual perusal of the major writings of the past often seems somewhat akin to entering a science fictional alternate-reality, in which America took a different turn in the 1920s than we know it actually did. Except that in this case, the alternate-reality we are exploring is the true one, and it is our assumed understanding of the past which turns out to be mostly fictitious.

I don't recall any direct modern evidence that Denisovans where small brained, thought it isn't a out there assumption to make, but otherwise Unz makes a good point. As Robin Hanson pointed out in Why Read Old Thinkers

Cynicism often seems this way to me. Finding deep insight in 350 year old sayings by de La Rochefoucauld discourages me, as it suggests either that I will not be able to make much progress on those topics, or that too few will listen for progress to result. Am I just relearning what hundreds have already relearned century after century, but were just not able to pass on?

Having different assumptions and related motivated cognition, means different kinds of evidence will be emphasised and others ignored. Sometimes the science of the past is more like the science of a foreign country rather than something obsolete that we moved on from. We notice he past getting it wrong and we kind of gloat about this in narratives of history. But the fact is sometimes we get stuff wrong that the past got right. And I'm not talking about them getting it right for the wrong reasons, sometimes they did good work that we dismiss.