Andrew Tomas makes many intriguing claims about the knowledge of man's early civilizations. Ancient Chinese and Greeks meddled with automatons, cybernetics, and robotics, and ancient Hindus, Greeks, and Egyptians had electrical devices including electric lights in his chapter "Electricity in the Remote Past." Far-fetched and controversial but still fascinating reading today.
Why did the Aztecs constantly await the visitations of supreme rulers from an island in the east? Why did the ancient Egyptians believe that their culture-bearer, Thoth, had come from a land in the Western Sea? Andrew Tomas suggests that this land to the east of Mexico and to the west of Egypt was Plato's Atlantis, called Aztlan by the Central Americans.
Why are the sites of London and Paris not buried under ice as they were twelve thousand years ago? Why did the climate of the Atlantic basin suddenly warm up? Because the sinking of Atlantis removed the barrier which had blocked the northward course of the warm Gulf Stream and thus provided the present-day 'central heating' of Europe and America.
In antiquity one can find evidence of progressive scientific concepts. Their presence can be explained by a legacy left from a highly technological civilization which disappeared without a trace to live on only in the folk memories of all peoples.