:lol: "We were born first". The world was flat once too...
Actually, the "belief that the World was flat" was a myth created by Washington Irving, an American author in the 18th century who was asked to write a biography of Christopher Columbus.
Columbus knew the World was round, and the church did too. It had done since the Greeks had proven it to be round about 3,000 years ago.
In truth people in the Middle Ages weren't as stupid as we have been led to believe but it suited America and their "aren't we clever for living here instead of horrible oppressive Europe" to think that way.
The author, (who also wrote the extremely popularLegend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle) was asked to write about Columbus and his journey of discovery, but he couldn't be bothered researching the historical archives he was given access to.
So he got the basics of the story right (enough for the story to be believable) and then embelished or completely made up the rest.
Columbus was searching for a trade route to India that was shorter than the established route. He knew the Earth was round, so he just guessed that if he sailed WEST he would approach India from the other side and save time and money and make himself and Spain fabulously wealthy.
The author of the story added in the part about the Church trying to stop him from doing it by claiming the World was flat etc and they were doomed to fall off the edge of the Earth. It was a complete fabrication.
The sad part is that the book was very popular and his word was taken to be fact and repeated so often that people today believe it to be true.
The Greeks actually established that the Earth was round simply by looking at an eclipse and noticing that the shadow of the Earth was completely round. Anyone who was able to look up at the sky knew this to be the truth. The Greeks also measured the circumference of the Earth using nothing more than a stick and a shadow. For evidence of how they did this please refer to Dr Karl Kruszlenicki's book "Never Mind the Bullocks, here's the science".
