Riadh Al Rabeh Subliminal perception may provide one with information that seems to occur to one as a hunch. Good guesstimates (aka educated guesses) may be the product of past experience and unconscious processing. The ancients likely engaged in a lot of trial-and-error that contributed to their practical know-how too. Hence they did very well at engineering and technological invention. But they didn't seem to be particularly scientifically theory-minded. What "true scientific explanations" are you thinking of?

Karl Pfeifer . The Sumerian suggestion that earth was water and land appeared later, the Sumerian/Babylonian suggestion that the univers is critically ballanced on the horn of a bull, which can be shown to be equivalent to conservation of momentum- from which the rest of physics can be derived, the suggestion that there are forces that affect things that can't be seen, the suggestion by the Greek Alexandria that gravity acceleration is independent of mass, and matter is discrete. And the most ingruguing one is that life originated in muddy swamps and the origin of everything is light. Light is radiation/energy and energy forms all matter as we know. There are many more..Even the idea that when one creature dies, it changes to another live one is true since we are all made of the same elements continuously exchanged between living things.

Riadh Al Rabeh Ancient myth reinterpreted as vague metaphors for present-day science hardly qualifies as "true scientific explanation". This is not to deny that there were some insightful proposals (atomism, Lucretius's evolution) that unfortunately didn't spark scientific pursuits in their day beyond imaginative speculation. But hey, the Sumerian/Babylonian bull is just bull.

See how you can derive all the laws of physics from the the bull myth: If the univirse is critically balanced then you can't move one mass to one side without moving another the opposite direction- like sitting in a boat. Mathemetically this is; sum(m.dx)=0 along any line in space. Differentiate once and twice wirt to time and you get; sum(m.v)=sum(p)=0 along any line, and sum(m.a)=sum(f)=0, where p,f are momentum and force. This gives you the conservation of momentum, the second law os Newton and his third law of action and reaction. If momentum is conserved the inverse square of Newton and Coulom follow. If you add to this the fact that all forces move at the speed of light, you get via the retarded integral the Maxwell equations from Coulomb and the linear GR equations from Newton's inverse square!!!

I doubt that the ancients had anything like that in mind. For starters, they didn't have calculus for such a derivation. And what became of the bull? This reminds me of those folks who claim that all scientfic knowledge can already be found in [insert your favorite sacred text here].