system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Before Newton, how did people explain falling apples?

As I understand it, Newton posited the gravitational force. 
Prior to this, what was/were the dominant explanation(s) for why things fell toward earth?
gpt
The answer will depend on how far back you want to go.

Way back with Arisistotle it was basically thought that the “earth” element pulled things towards the center of the universe. 

From there many individuals separately began to describe this attractive force that pulled stuff to the earth, and even began to calculate/quantify it. 

So it’s not really true that Newton came up with the idea of a “gravitational force” in the sense of some sort of law of nature that made apples fall from trees. 

What Newton did was develop a law of universal gravitation that could actually be applied to everything. At least everything up until we started seeing relativistic effects. 

His mathematical equations/proofs showed that the same force that made apples fall to the earth was what made the planets move, and that the force was at least correlated with mass. Prior to Newton the two were not unified, and many thought they were separate phenomena.