Taking a cursory look, ancient beliefs about lightning and thunder are odd, to say the least. Obviously of course, it makes sense that ancient cultures attributed the phenomenon to gods, but I would have at least thought they would have figured out there was a link between the two.

Instead, Aristotle believed that thunder was caused by the collision of clouds. He apparently didn't work that out in spite of the fact that lightning almost always occurs while it's raining and there's lightning around that always precedes it. And surely there was at least a few times that people were very close to the lightning and realized that the lightning was the source of the thunder.

In fact, hardly any ancient cultures seemed to make the connection. The closest I can find is some Native Americans believing that thunder comes before the lightning. This itself is still odd and you would think that after a few thunderstorms, they would make the connection that it's the other way around.

I realize I'm speaking from the privilege of having a modern Western education, but it still baffles me that this is one of the things the ancients just had no clue about. They were able to work out that the world was round by a few factors like boats disappearing bottom first, but millions of people across hundreds of cultures didn't figure out that lightning and thunder are related and that there was a "sound delay" between the two despite witnessing thousands of thunderstorms over thousands of years until the modern scientific era. Am I mistaken about this? Is there some factor I'm missing that would explain why they couldn't make the connection?