Sure they did. That is good and is getting ‘better’ day by day.
Even the most intelligent and most modern people of highest knowledge from highest of current day schools, universities and institutions from modern world made blunders after blunder. Didn’t they?
Or Should we believe that these people never made wrong assumptions and were always correct in their assertion and conclusions?
Anyone who has half the knowledge of science will agree that scientific or modern day scholars have made too many serious errors and have caused people to suffer…not necessarily unknowingly.
So why we must criticize people who had no good means to get the knowledge?