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What is surprising about learning that earlier civilizations developed advanced understandings and respect and reverence for nature and integrating it into their daily lives? We've lost so much connection to nature as modern society chugs along.
The reason for this is that they had very little control over nature and saw it as something of a deity that they had to appease.

A breech baby was pretty much a sentence to an agonizing death for both mother and baby (for a portrayal, see House of the Dragon). A compound fracture was also either a death sentence or at a minimum and amputation. If you lived in an area with cyclones, you didn’t know when you could get catastrophic winds. Anytime you sailed out of sight of land, could be your last. Floods and drought were far more devastating then. A pandemic might easily kill a 30% or more of the people and you had no idea how to deal with it (or even 90% as some of the New World civilizations experienced after the arrival of the Europeans).

In that environment, nature was seen as a capricious deity that you wanted to mollify.

After the scientific revolution, we now see nature as a system that is governed by laws that we can understand and take advantage of to improve humanity. We can monitor hurricanes. We can ship food to areas suffering famine. We are able to use medicine and surgery to make childbirth much less dangerous and much less painful. We don’t viscerally feel as if we are at the mercy of nature. Even with the recent earthquake, look how quickly the discussion has turned to how the ignoring safety codes in building led to a large portion of the deaths.

We don’t look at a natural disaster now and throw up our hands and sacrifice virgins to appease the gods, now. Instead, we look at what we can do to prevent and mitigate a future occurrence.

I for one, much prefer how we are now then how we were before.

It's surprising because society today is conditioned to treat everything as a disposable resource that should cost as little as possible so they can buy more stuff with the money left over.
with earlier civilizations if you didn't have understanding and reverence for nature it would kill you dead in a heartbeat. today we have heating furnaces and 7/11.
Yeah but they didn’t have chocolate yet. That seems much more surprising to me.
Nile Red made chocolate recently. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaCZcdWk1DU

I have no idea how an ancient culture might randomly stumble into this process.

We've given up eating chocolate now since the recent report about heavy metal contamination in it. They said in most articles "but you'd have to be eating a tremendous amount - like a bar of dark chocolate per day - to be consuming a dangerous amount of heavy metals." We could put that away in a morning! Anyway I guess the moral is don't go overboard.
If you ever get a chance to do a cacao ceremony I'd recommend it! It's subtle but enjoyable.
> The Surprisingly Sacred Roots of Chocolate

I have ~2895876932.3 and ~1.998^126

(Sorry. Once per year... Actually, I think I really misread as 'Square' Roots)

Edit: although, it's really lossful... Reversing the process, only half of the original data is retained - for the 64bit. Not to mention the double precision. Oh well.)

...Not to "dig deeper", but just for the sake of conclusion, as at former writing I only had a 64bit calculator at hand and I could use GMP (GNU Multiple Precision Bignum) later:

the truncated square root of 'Chocolate' is 43260920640 (in the parent I had to truncate the string to 64 bits). Lossful though: you will have to get enough decimals (or resort to padding the input etc) to return to the original.

Yes, off topic and shamefully unrequired, "Curiosity show" material and a dad joke - yet, in a way still interesting. May be useful somewhere.