But the stories were transmitted orally for a long time before being written down. The 'original' story probably had something more akin to 'once upon a time' or 'a long time ago, in a
How do we know there wasn't an advanced civilization on earth 12,000 years ago?
- Thread starter Malone
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The problem is what people mean with advanced culture. I personally wouldn't be surprised if the Persian Gulf, before it was flooded, was home to a agricultural culture. But there's a long way from a early agricultural culture dwelling in a single river valley to a metal working culture to say nothing about something more advanced than that.
Then again there is the theory that he misinterpreted his Egyptian sources, who might have written about it having been 9000 Moons (i.e. months) before Socrates which then would fit nicely with the Santorini eruption.
This is strictly my opinion. If, a very large if, there was any significantly "advanced" culture in the pre Holocene especially during say the last glacial maximum. I would think it would of been a coastal based culture. And for one very good reason. Being near the coast would moderate the climate a lot. Any sites are now most likely either eroded away, under 100 meters or so of water or buried in silt. Look at just how much some areas have either eroded or silted up in the last 3 to 4 thousand years. You can have a very sophisticated culture that is basically in the Stone Age. The Polynesians were most likely the greatest navigators ever seen in terms of dead reckoning. Yet they relied on tools of stone, bone and shell. I suspect the average individual 10,000 years ago was smarter than the average today. Iits just that they used their intelligence differently are were much more dependent on their own abilities. How many people today are riding on the coattails of a small minority people who quite literally invented our world. Just think how few people really are Jack's of all trades and masters of most of them.
An Alantean super civilization. No. A small capable culture of skilled navigators or sailors. People with strong oral traditions that were very efficient at transmitting knowledge. That might be possible.
An Alantean super civilization. No. A small capable culture of skilled navigators or sailors. People with strong oral traditions that were very efficient at transmitting knowledge. That might be possible.
*shrug* that was just what i'd read. i'd volunteer to go and find the exact passage that i read it in (it was from an encyclopedia on mythology and folklore, not an online source) and recopy it here verbatim, but that particular set of books isn't at the library anymore (depending, i might be able to get back to you on it, though--i might be getting my own copies of that encyclopedia set
)The deal breaker of civilization developing anywhere on Earth during the glaciation is climatic instability. Not it being absolutely uninhabitable, as the ice sheets were and the tundra region adjacent to the ice sheets, or in most of the northern half of Eurasia too far inland to have ice (the great European sheet seems not to have been much farther east than the current borders of Finland...because precipitation would have been low after most of the moisture was scavenged by the ice sheet itself, recall that ice a mile thick is ice whose surface is elevated that high above sea level, minus some isostatic depression of the bedrock below--a high plateau stretching hundreds or thousands of miles will wring most of the potential precipitation) but northerly enough to be pretty bleak...no, lots of Earth's land area, increased by the lowered sea level, would be decently habitable and fairly fertile. Especially as @Kevin Renner notes, the coastlines. That's fine.
But for agriculture to get rolling, selective breeding of wild strains into something agriculturally useful has to happen first. If the temperature and precipitation averages and patterns were shifting fairly rapidly, say on average once a century, then the ecosystems would be in a constant state of crisis, and strains of plants improved in the qualities human agriculturalists would have to depend on would be maladapted for the new climate. Genetic diversity, especially given a short timeframe for natural selection to hone it down, would mean something or other would sprout and prosper after a substantial local shift, and if these shifts were not continuous but sporadic rapid changes to conditions that stay pretty stable for decades but not centuries, the second or third year after such a shift should be pretty stable; last year's successful plants and hence animals would be set up for success this year.
Gatherer hunter human beings in the low population densities normal to that mode of life would do OK for the most part; they are thin enough on the land that a little scrambling and ingenuity in shifting which plants and game they go after would tide them over ecological crisis years and subsequently the new pattern will be something they would be on top of from previous years' experience.
But any particular "wildcrafted" strains that deliberately or unconsciously (as say by gathering women inadvertently concentrating the seeds of the most favored plants as a byproduct of harvesting and consuming them) were being bred up to precursor agricultural staple species would be SOL; they would have been adapted for the previous temporary climate which is gone now; the gatherers would shift over to other plant types they had not been concentrating on before the shift and neglect to conserve the accumulated labor that goes into cultivation of suitable crop species. Perhaps some strains would do OK, with rising levels of human attention, in various climates; perhaps the altered genome distributions would not be totally wiped out by the intervening poor climate for them and when the climate shifts back to something similar to what it was before, the gatherers in the region will as it were pick up where they left off.
So...it is not that the shores are nasty, quite the opposite I would think. But if temperature and precipitation patterns shift drastically there as well as further inland, then they are no better than some inland plain, plateau or valley in that respect.
Human beings, living as GH people, did well during the glacial period--but as proto-agriculturalists they were quite stymied. Empirically it seems plain this was the case.
Anyway, while shore areas might have had more stable climates as well as better ones, and been fertile and well watered too, if in fact some precocious peoples did defy the odds and develop a suite of crops, and their population density expanded so as to become dependent on these crops, then the experience of the Interglacial, where the foundations of half a dozen or more major civilizational centers each with their own distinct crop suite were well established many thousands of years ago, suggests that it doesn't take more than 5000 years or so of reasonable climate stability over a moderately sized region for a crop suite and extensive markers of civilization to develop.
Once developed, I find it hard to believe they would just curl up and die out completely, resetting the board to leave the field open to others to develop wholly new suites of plant and animal cultivation from scratch. OK, the seas are rising and the climate is changing--I have already stated that the latter was par for the course in the Glacial period. Granted there was some specially favored zone of limited extent but large enough for the critical mass of opportunities to develop basic arts of civilization, and that not by coincidence all of these favored zones were below the current interglacial sea level, the evidence of the known OTL civilizations suggests that these populations would fill their favored niche up right fast--and note that population densities that seem sparse with plenty of margin to later levels of development might seem terribly crowded and Malthusian to people at a more modest level of development.
Therefore I have to figure that if we had a pattern of one or several fortunate zones all on shorelines now submerged actually developing to say the level of Egypt or Mesopotamia when the first cities and major temple sites were built, there would be people on the outer margins who were more or less induced into at least partial dependence on agriculture, who lived out where fluctuating climate conditions would open up territories previously not favored for cultivation, as other areas previously under some marginal development are abandoned.
By the time the whole world started undergoing systematic warming, and sea levels started to rise, we'd have a prosperous core but surrounded by marginal zones--and these would tend to be at least somewhat higher up, somewhat inland. Some of them would be comfortably above the current sea level, and some of these would remain within the expanded envelope of the crop/domestic animal suite, bearing in mind the people on the margins will have stretched it to survive many different climates. Meanwhile while land of a given type in terms of temperature and precipitation cycle would be vanishing beneath the briny waves, the changing, warming climate would shift other regions into the sort of favored climate. Overall, the rate and magnitude of climate shifting would slow down, buying more time for desperate cultivators to hit upon workable mixes.
So if there were such pre-interglacial civilizations, I think they would manage to generate offshoots that survive the transition, and the clock of world civilization centers would be advanced by many thousands of years. The OTL known centers would be preempted by previously established ones. Perhaps not all of them; if just one pre-melting center survives, then only in its own region would we see this precocious development, and they will be expanding with their early start into a newly climate stabilized world around their submerged former core, while distant sites that OTL sprouted civilization independently of the particular ones this one people preempts would develop as OTL. But being several thousand years or more behind this one "Atlantean" survival, that one will presumably evolve from there much more slowly due to lack of input from other centers, but withal expand without rivalry either, so we would have a world where one center of clearly unified lineage holds a particularly large share and is more advanced than all others, until perhaps distant centers benefiting from more diverse inputs around them catch up. After that it might not look superficially a lot different than OTL. But when we look back on it anthropologically and archeologically and with historical reconstruction from a modern-equivalent perspective, it will be plain that indeed a lost core submerged in the glacial melting did spawn one set of successors who survived and set the template for a really large portion of the world.
And sheer size of the precocious zone will increasingly substitute for the absent diversity of all peoples starting from GH Go! at the same time OTL; the expanding "post-Atlantean" zone will diversify, and I think retain a clear lead perhaps up to modern times; the transition to capitalism might start there some thousands of years before Europe is matured enough to host it instead.
Say the favored "Atlantean" zone was in the New World, and was say in the Gulf of Mexico so the successors moved onto higher ground in both Mexico and the lower Mississippi. Thus the Old World develops pretty exactly as OTL, and the lack of many rival centers--Andean, Amazonian--in the early thousands of years means this complex around the Gulf proceeds rather slowly, so that by say 0 CE what was a 5000 year lead on the Old World complexes has shrunk to a mere 1500 years lead, overall. Still this means that a bunch of civilizations stretching from say the Great Lakes and with a branch up the Pacific coastal valleys (Puget Sound, Columbia-Williamette, California Central Valley plus numerous smaller coastal enclaves) all the way down to the northern tier of South America, encompassing the Caribbean islands, and pretty much annexing the Andean and Amazonian peoples (and I daresay with a major disease pool developing to rival Eurasia's, so these Amazonians will not succumb as catastrophically as OTL's did upon making contact with the Old World) are, at the time the Roman Empire is being consolidated and China is entering the Han dynasty, including some centers as developed as Europe circa 1500. They cross the Atlantic west to east, or perhaps first go coastwise up to Alaska and thence into maritime Siberia and "discover" Manchuria, Korea and Japan, with something like 1000 years lead on the Old World civilizations. By something like 500 CE, we'd broadly expect more or less modern conditions overall, with a global system pretty much as North America/Caribbean centered as the OTL one of 2000 CE was Eurocentric--which is to say by the time these people start splitting the atom and making moon rockets, the Old World peoples, having recently been much eclipsed and subordinated, are bouncing back. Probably nothing like the Columbian exchange dieback happens, and if it does it seems more likely to blow back on the advanced Americans rather than decimate the Old World, but the magnitude would be less and the Americans would have some cultural resilience against plague--and as the precocious vectors of inter-hemispheric contact, their being burned would tend to cause the contacts to cease--the hand removes itself from the flame as it were, rather than double down as the world new to it seems to miraculously depopulate itself by divine providence as the Europeans did in America OTL. So the clock might again be slowed and say another 800 years is lost--this still has a world as advanced as our own by 1300 CE.
If the precocious center survives in the Old World instead--if indeed for instance it was the now-submerged Persian Gulf that was the one center to survive--by the simple expedient of moving upriver to the Euphrates and Tigris headlands, and spreading laterally into the Levant and Iranian plateau and thence on to Indus Valley and the Nile--the development would be even more lopsided--surely the overall pace is slower if the Nile, Levant, Anatolian, Mesopotamian, and Indus centers are all cultural clones of each other instead of diverse separate developments in at least some cases--but if we lose say 3000 years but out of a 5000 year lead, again by 0 CE we have essentially modern conditions, with essentially OTL Columbian Exchange levels of devastation unleashed on the Americas and Australia about 500 BCE. I assume in these circumstances the development of Europe and China would be much accelerated and the Indian subcontinent would be annexed to the Indus branch of the surviving Mesopotamian "Atlantis." If the single "Atlantean" culture to survive were centered in Indonesia, which once was a vast peninsula, China as we know it never emerges at all, Australia is a marginal legacy colony along with New Zealand, the North American Pacific coast might be incorporated perhaps 1000 BCE, and Europe is a colonized backwater on a par with the Americas.
Note all this discussion does not even begin to address that aside from the core and shifting-climate periphery, such civilizations are unlikely to simply sit in their favored zones; with the rise of agricultural and civilizational division of labor, the increased population base and increased demands for specialized goods will send traders and other ambassadors of the new order of things afield from their core zone, and they are liable to discover other spots that temporarily or over the longer term are suitable for their settlement, and beyond that anyway establish centers of notably post-GH activity in still more distant spots. We ought to find the traces of that at any rate, far beyond their coastal cores.
I really have to wonder what you base the implied notion that we have degenerated since the Ice Age on. As for every man and woman being both Jack or Jill of all manly or womanly trades--yes, that was true, but there were very few "Trades" to be master or mistress of in gatherer-hunter societies. This is the economic aspect of the egalitarianism of GH bands as observed by anthropologists of course. The mobile bands had no ability to haul around lots of accumulated material culture, and in their low populations, their culture was mainly a matter of lore. Every man knew how to make the basic tools he needed, every woman how to make the utensils she depended on. So there was no basis for "truckling and bartering" as Adam Smith in his armchair assumed was the fundamental human nature. The way a particularly excellent arrowhead maker or fabric weaver could leverage their skill to their advantage was by giving the products of their labor freely, and thus assuring the goodwill of band members to share out what they gathered and hunted freely. The bands were family.
So it is not true that our glacial era ancestors mastered a tremendous range of skills. The men knew how to hunt and make the tools of that "trade," the women how to gather mostly vegetable matter and how to make baskets, hollow out gourds and so forth; they knew how to make simple tents and quite simple clothing. Their productivity, defined as mass of material output for a given amount of labor time, was appallingly low...but so was their learning curve, and they existed in such small numbers as to render great efficiency superfluous. Per anthropological investigations, average labor time was low, not more than 40 hours a week or so. There was no material surplus to speak of; they lived hand to mouth, but with reasonable assurance that a fair amount of effort would feed them if not every day, then long before the collapse of major degrees of starvation brought them down or debilitated them. With no surplus to concentrate or plunder, save in the form of surplus non-labor waking hours, there was no basis of social stratification. And no specialized skills to be supported by redistribution.
I don't think then they were under pressure to be smarter than we are; if anything, the mechanisms of social exploitation that go hand in hand with the rise of agriculture press most working people much closer to the grindstone of absolute privation and force more ingenuity into play--offset by general debilitation of course.
I think that psychologically, our evolution essentially stopped some 50,000 years ago with the rise of what anthropologists call "modern mentality." Once we crossed that horizon, the inclination of most social systems is to enable everyone to survive, and breed. Conceivably you are venturing a form of the "Marching Morons" dystopia, more familiar to younger moviegoing SF fans as "Idiotcracy," suggesting that the arts of civilization preserve people who would have been killed off as too stupid to live in Manly Man Hunter-Gatherer times. I daresay a number of disabilities, such as poor vision, are being less selected against. But by and large I think the effect has neither been ongoing hard honing nor a notable softening of the brain, but essentially stasis. Evolution has proceeded in such matters as resistance to infectious diseases, but otherwise I think we are essentially the same as people 12,000 years ago in basic potentials and biological basis of ability--and of course light years beyond them in terms of cultural amplification of those potentials.
Unless you've come from an alternate timeline, there was no Czechoslovakia 20 years ago, because it has ceased to exist over 26 years ago. Also, we knew there was Roman settlement in Czechoslovakia already a few decades ago. It's just that the Roman settlement and Roman influences known then, mostly from archaeological research and secondarily some written records, pertained to the latter half of Czechoslovakia. Finds of Roman artefacts in Czechia might have come later, I concur, but even those don't seem all that shocking. The Romans were trading with much of Europe, you'll find loads of traded Roman artefacts even very far to the north and east of the Limes Romanus. I say that as a person from a country that has former parts of the LR within its territory.
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Very minor artefact of their presence that far north, almost a miracle they left that inscription on the site of their temporary encampment. There are much more proper artefacts down south, near the Danube, on the northern banks.
The dude who led and commanded the unit there had also served in North Africa. Part of how historians identified who he was.
And your last sentence is at least debatable
Gerulata, Celemantia, even the site on Devín. Plenty of big limes forts. Stupava had a trading post north of the lines.
The southwest was also where the vassal kingdom of the Germanic Quadi existed in the early centuries AD, Vannius being their most well-known ruler (and first known monarch of any kind in the history of our territory).
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Minor or not, and not even too far up north - since the limes was at the danube, few days of march for romans, however, they came fromAquincum so the long way around....
Anyway. For sure, the limes was not the end of the world. Not for the romans. We know dozens of buildings on the other side of the Danube - for example Pest - or huge buildings onthe limes itself -Hadrian palace - and suddenly, the limes sarmatie makes sense.
Long story short: there were for sure various range of roman presence over the limes, with limited remains and records.
And my second remark was my daily irredenta, you are out of practice
Philip Reeve's Hungry City Chronicles had this. The series guidebook written from an in-setting perspective had a conversation between two historians, one theorizing that the Ancients* were functionally illiterate and kept all their records digitally** and the other that their books decayed.
* Us.
** Fragments of silicon chips lasting longer than paper.
I'm reminded of a line from that "China, Illinois" show with a character talking to an ancient alien/conspiracy theorist type.
"Don't judge others based on your limitations."
Yep. I've grown to hate the misconception that people of past time periods being less advanced than us automatically means they were less intelligent than us.
I think people want to find lasers and obsidian pyramids when undiscovered prehistoric cultures are more likely a bunch of corrals, huts and wicked rock art. I think if there is anything left to find, the most I would expect is along the lines of Göbekli Tepe.
Reminds me of the Richat structure. It did have prehistoric human occupation, but because chipped flints are not as exciting as Atlantis the real human presence at the site is disregarded in popular discussions in favor of speculation.
Reminds me of the Richat structure. It did have prehistoric human occupation, but because chipped flints are not as exciting as Atlantis the real human presence at the site is disregarded in popular discussions in favor of speculation.
Completely agree. Intelligence is to do with problem solving, when you get down to it (yes, I'm massively simplifying, I know) and the solutions which primitive* humans came up with to deal with their world can be truly awe-inspiring. Making a pot to boil water in, without an oven to be able to fire clay (or even without clay)...making a bow and arrows from nothing but bits of wood, bits of stone and animal remains...catching fish using fish traps made from layered stone or wood because the fibres available in the area aren't suitable for making nets to go in the water...keeping fire going throughout the year when constantly on the move from place to place...the list just goes on and on**.
*primitive meaning only less technologically sophisticated
** and I didn't even mention stone-tool-making - I had a chance to try flint-knapping a few years ago and only succeeded in making smaller bits of flint...
I don't think there is good reason to think individual humans have become less intelligent since the Neolithic, but neither is there any reason to think we've gotten smarter.
Culture is a great capability multiplier to be sure, but I think it is mainly material culture that accounts for most of this. There are aspects of mental culture that clearly leverage some important capabilities, but relatively few people master this at a high level, and meanwhile the interface of culture with society imposes some outright handicaps, by biasing thinking on important subjects to render society mainly serviceable to those who dominate it; these elite individuals IMHO are at least as confused and confounded by false ideology as the masses are, and perhaps more so.
It is hard to know what would happen if we had some sort of time machine to capture a young child from 20,000 years ago and raise them in modern conditions of course. My guess is that if we took a fair sized sample, some hundreds or more, they'd average out to capabilities about equal to other adopted children raised by the same demographic foster families--possibly have better vision and hearing and so forth on the average. (But also remarkably poor vulnerability to endemic diseases perhaps).
I think that except for certain physical things, mainly disease resistance (that is, genomes filtered for resisting the kinds of diseases that predominate in modern times) and eyesight, we have largely suspended natural selection via our intelligence just shoving nature aside for the most part. I don't think social stratification has been stable on given lineages on a long enough time scale for any systematic effect due to social factors to show; the "wheel of fortune" tends to bring down the descendants of those who dominated in past centuries and elevate new ruling elites from the masses, and human generations are long so that the total elapsed time from the beginnings of agriculture to today is relatively brief in terms of generations for Darwinian selection to work on anyway. We are essentially the same species that first started to become dependent on crops once the interglacial climates stabilized, just vastly increased in numbers, and with a lot of accumulated culture--most effectively, infrastructure and machinery.
Culture is a great capability multiplier to be sure, but I think it is mainly material culture that accounts for most of this. There are aspects of mental culture that clearly leverage some important capabilities, but relatively few people master this at a high level, and meanwhile the interface of culture with society imposes some outright handicaps, by biasing thinking on important subjects to render society mainly serviceable to those who dominate it; these elite individuals IMHO are at least as confused and confounded by false ideology as the masses are, and perhaps more so.
It is hard to know what would happen if we had some sort of time machine to capture a young child from 20,000 years ago and raise them in modern conditions of course. My guess is that if we took a fair sized sample, some hundreds or more, they'd average out to capabilities about equal to other adopted children raised by the same demographic foster families--possibly have better vision and hearing and so forth on the average. (But also remarkably poor vulnerability to endemic diseases perhaps).
I think that except for certain physical things, mainly disease resistance (that is, genomes filtered for resisting the kinds of diseases that predominate in modern times) and eyesight, we have largely suspended natural selection via our intelligence just shoving nature aside for the most part. I don't think social stratification has been stable on given lineages on a long enough time scale for any systematic effect due to social factors to show; the "wheel of fortune" tends to bring down the descendants of those who dominated in past centuries and elevate new ruling elites from the masses, and human generations are long so that the total elapsed time from the beginnings of agriculture to today is relatively brief in terms of generations for Darwinian selection to work on anyway. We are essentially the same species that first started to become dependent on crops once the interglacial climates stabilized, just vastly increased in numbers, and with a lot of accumulated culture--most effectively, infrastructure and machinery.
If intelligence is a survival benefit, and I think we can agree it is, then had humans been significantly more intelligent before whatever catastrophe destroyed "the ancient ones" then those survivors who carried this genetic makeup would be advantaged in the post apocalyptic world, as would their descendants. There is no evidence for this, and even with dilution this would cluster like other genetic factors like skin color, eye color, height etc. No evidence.
There are plenty of places that were dismissed as mere legends until archeological evidence was found. There is no archeological evidence for Atlantis. People have claimed the story of Atlantis was inspired by everything from Sweden to Antarctica to the Peruvian highlands. All of these theories involve ignoring most of Plato's description, then massaging the few cherry-picked points left to fit the theory.
[QUOTE="FriendlyGhost, post: 19129368, member:] and the solutions which primitive* humans came up with to deal with their world can be truly awe-inspiring.[/QUOTE]
Very much suddenly reminded of an online Steampunk\Fantasy RPG I played in, the admin, when describing "Primitive Artisan" as a potential focus basically said, that the title referred only to the TOOLS you employed and the actual work could be wonderfully sophisticated and complex.
Very much suddenly reminded of an online Steampunk\Fantasy RPG I played in, the admin, when describing "Primitive Artisan" as a potential focus basically said, that the title referred only to the TOOLS you employed and the actual work could be wonderfully sophisticated and complex.