If by "aware" you mean "ignorant of the most basic facts that we take for granted", then yeah.
It's very hard to get our heads around the pre-scientific mindset. These people were not stupid (if intelligence is even a little bit heritable and provides any selective advantage they were in smarter than us, as there has been zero selection for anything in the past 200 years, so we are the dumbest generation of humans ever to live). But they, like Jon Snow, knew nothing.
They filled that vast void of ignorance with beliefs that make modern anti-science people like opponents of vaccinations, GMOs and nuclear power look like caricatures of the most rigidly limited kind of reductive materialism.
The thought that anyone might publicly test an idea that "just made sense" using systematic observation, controlled experiment or Bayesian inference (which people used long before Bayes, of course) as a matter of routine was simply unknown. Arguments were settled via disputations over imagination, putting one form of plausible bullshit against another and seeing which advocate could sway the crowd of ignorant scholars.
So the world was full of causes no one could see, whose existence "just made sense" so no one bothered to test. "Humours" and their "balance" caused health and sickness. Saints and demons influenced all chance events. Thinking made it so. God's plan was manifest by signs and portents. No major decision was taken without prayer.
People (some people) laughed at George W Bush when he talked about doing God's will, but a few hundred years ago everyone talked, and thought that way. They took it for granted and they meant it with a depth and unquestioning sincerity that today can be found only amongst Islamists and a few others.
They were capable technologists (there is an argument that technological capability led the sciences in important ways) but they way technologists thought about their materials and structures was completely alien to us. Much of it was raw empiricism ("do this, that happens") wrapped in a tattered clock of sympathetic magic and tortured religious/hermetic metaphor.
Imagine a world organized in all walks of life around the ideas and mode of thinking practiced by Jenny McCarthy, Food Babe, and Deepak Chopra and you'll get a sense of it, absurd as it sounds.
You just confused 8000 years of post-agricultural society and culture, with medieval western Europe.
Yes, people are much more educated now, because technology lets them get better access to information, but I think it's inaccurate to say there were no educated societies in the past. Think about Roman engineering. Arabic and Indian mathematics. Baghdad with its libraries. On and on. Modern people didn't invent most of the knowledge we now take for granted... we inherited it from the past, where people found it out through trial and error. Just like we discover new things now.
> there has been zero selection for anything in the past 200 years
This is false to the point of being absurd. For there to be zero selection, mating would have to be completely random, as would death at reproductively viable ages.
It's very hard to get our heads around the pre-scientific mindset. These people were not stupid (if intelligence is even a little bit heritable and provides any selective advantage they were in smarter than us, as there has been zero selection for anything in the past 200 years, so we are the dumbest generation of humans ever to live). But they, like Jon Snow, knew nothing.
They filled that vast void of ignorance with beliefs that make modern anti-science people like opponents of vaccinations, GMOs and nuclear power look like caricatures of the most rigidly limited kind of reductive materialism.
The thought that anyone might publicly test an idea that "just made sense" using systematic observation, controlled experiment or Bayesian inference (which people used long before Bayes, of course) as a matter of routine was simply unknown. Arguments were settled via disputations over imagination, putting one form of plausible bullshit against another and seeing which advocate could sway the crowd of ignorant scholars.
So the world was full of causes no one could see, whose existence "just made sense" so no one bothered to test. "Humours" and their "balance" caused health and sickness. Saints and demons influenced all chance events. Thinking made it so. God's plan was manifest by signs and portents. No major decision was taken without prayer.
People (some people) laughed at George W Bush when he talked about doing God's will, but a few hundred years ago everyone talked, and thought that way. They took it for granted and they meant it with a depth and unquestioning sincerity that today can be found only amongst Islamists and a few others.
They were capable technologists (there is an argument that technological capability led the sciences in important ways) but they way technologists thought about their materials and structures was completely alien to us. Much of it was raw empiricism ("do this, that happens") wrapped in a tattered clock of sympathetic magic and tortured religious/hermetic metaphor.
Imagine a world organized in all walks of life around the ideas and mode of thinking practiced by Jenny McCarthy, Food Babe, and Deepak Chopra and you'll get a sense of it, absurd as it sounds.