[Fester Chugabrew]

"I don't think there's much divine mystery behind early observations that the body is mostly water."

Which came first? The ancient writing that man is made mostly of water, or the scientific observation of the same? A mummy, of all things, gives little evidence of water.

[tpaine]

I don't think there's much divine mystery behind early observations that the body is mostly water.
Observing what happens to a dead body in the desert provides some easy (and obvious) clues about the ratio of tissue to water, and mummification is itself a pretty ancient art. 2282 -atlaw-

Which came first? The ancient writing that man is made mostly of water, or the scientific observation of the same? A mummy, of all things, gives little evidence of water.
2369 -fester-

Fes, do you even attempt to understand the posts you reply to? -- Atlaw makes a pretty clear, logical comment on how mummification is an easy fact to observe, -- thus, - this would lead to the recording of that fact, once writing was invented. -- Scheesh.

[atlaw]

You wrote: "Which came first? The ancient writing that man is made mostly of water, or the scientific observation of the same? A mummy, of all things, gives little evidence of water."


Your observation that "[a] mummy, of all things, gives little evidence of water" misses the point. To deliberately create a mummy, one must deliberately dehydrate a corpse, a process that presupposes a certain knowledge about the water content of the body.

As for which came first, "[t]he ancient writing that man is made mostly of water, or the scientific observation of the same," it seems fairly obvious. If you are talking about some form of script in a tomb in which mummification is evident, then one can safely conclude that the writing is descriptive of the contemporaneous mummification process. Furthermore, writing itself is a fairly recent development, and there is considerable evidence of ritual mummification that pre-dates any known contemporaneous writings. One need not invoke divine intervention to conclude that knowledge about the ratio of water to tissue and bone in a human body (by simple observation as well as the practice of mummification) came long before any written accounts of it.