Disappearing Civilizations?

Rockingham

Banned
It helps for a civilization to be surrounded by others. Then, if something goes wrong, the civilisation ca nbe picked up by another. In contrast to when theirs one huge almighty empire, like Rome, and Greater Zimbabwe, which upon its fall has no real contender to replace it.
 
The Tartessians and the Minoans are good examples of civilizations that vanished... To a lesser extent, the Etruscans and the Illyrians. For that matter, we know very little about the people who built Stonehenge.
 
The more interesting and controversial question from the cultural evolutionary perspective is why the Old World civilizations kept evolving and piggy backing on each other to evolve into ever more powerful, technologically sohisticated, politically evolved, literate, and intellectually changing civilizations, where Meso America (and Peru for that matter) reached a level about 2000 years ago roughly equivalent to early Mesopotamia and stopped.

I would guess that a factor was that the Mesoamerican cultures had only one seed culture. While cultures in eurasia interacted and synergized, Mesoamerica kindof slowed down with only variations of a single one to work with.
 
From what I inferred about the Etruscans, it was they who founded Rome. After the Senate finally deposed Rome's last king, the Romans competed with the rest of the city-states founded by the Etruscans as the Latin League, which Rome eventually dominated. In short, the Etruscans became the Romans.
 
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