Lost Civilisations?

It wasn't at all proven.
For the fossiles, the shape of silex are not the same, among other exemples.
No similar parietal art in Americas.
The european apport to "amerindian" genetics could totally have made something really distinct : the afro-american people is really distinct from african one because of same feature.
The African-Americans differ from their African ancestors because of two things:
- they are a mixture of several African people
- it was quite common that an American slaver impregnated one or several of his slaves, so many African-Americans do also have European ancestors
But the European influence in the heritage of some North American tribes are much older than the first arrival of Europeans in America.

The only things in support of Solutrean settlements is the shape of some artifacts that are indeed similar to europeans. But there's no 100 ways to cut a stone, and you don't need a settlement to people living at different places finding same solutions.
If this is so, then we should have found all possible shapes all other the world. But that is not so. Certain cultures used certain shapes. If you find artifacts of the same shape in different areas than it has to be the same culture. This is simple logic. And it is unrealistic to assume that a culture suddenly uses a different shape without outside influence (= another culture using that shape).
Sadly many still think that all Native Americans had immigrated from Sibiria. And they ignore findings which cannot be explained that way.
 
The African-Americans differ from their African ancestors because of two things:
- they are a mixture of several African people
- it was quite common that an American slaver impregnated one or several of his slaves, so many African-Americans do also have European ancestors
But the European influence in the heritage of some North American tribes are much older than the first arrival of Europeans in America.
You're using a circular argument here.
Afro-American genetics european heritance is more recent than amerindian one, because european came sooner. And we know that european came sooner because the DNA show that afro-american one is more recent?

For the mixture of several african people, as the european ones, the DNA difference is minimal.
The two continents knew an really erly genetic brassage, and you can't tell only by DNA which guy are from which people.

The DNA of Afro-Americans is distinct from african ones because of european legacy, as the Amerindian ones. And for the amerindian ones, we have two possibilities : 1)A legacy from historical colonization that is attested and that is enough to justify such change. 2)A possible solutrean settlement that is not proven yet.
So for now, without discovery that could infirm or confirm the second hypothesis, by applying simple logic, by retiring from this all the non necessary things (I'm sure that even if it's not an universal tool, the Occam's Razor can appply here), 1) is enough for now.


If this is so, then we should have found all possible shapes all other the world. But that is not so. Certain cultures used certain shapes. If you find artifacts of the same shape in different areas than it has to be the same culture. This is simple logic. And it is unrealistic to assume that a culture suddenly uses a different shape without outside influence (= another culture using that shape).
Pyramids are a common shape, are you suggesting that is coming from the same culture?
Again, there is no an infinite way to shape objects and it's quite common to see two cultures, without contact, using it.
Compass, Print, Rudder in Europe and China, are the most known exemple of how two distinct cultures can join themselves. Suggesting that ONE object can only came from ONE culture except influence is not just unreealistic, it's historically wrong.
Even agriculture was discovered independently on the two continents, damnit!

So yes, Amerindian could have perfectly shaped differently their artifacts by discovering ways of perfoming these. And again, there is no 100 way to do it.
Actually, you can find the same features in subsharian africa and Australia.

Unless you're suggesting that solutreen settled these places, you have to admit that yes, same features can be discovered independently by different cultures.

If not, i'm sorry to say so, but you'll have many issues understanding what historical artifacts can learn about pre-history and history.



Sadly many still think that all Native Americans had immigrated from Sibiria. And they ignore findings which cannot be explained that way.

To make it simple, nobody knows for sure if there was only a Siberia->Alaska migration or not. If the Clovis hypothesis is clearly to be replaced, it's not meaning that the traditionnal explanation is false.
The solutrean hypothesis pose many issues again : parietal art and relative limitation of how making performing prehistoric tools.

It's not infirming this hypothesis, but it's not at all confirming it. Only a possible new discovery could do it.
 
There is literally no credible evidence for Pre-Clovis cultures at the moments. No evidence that cannot be explained as charcoal, or Radiocarbon dating margin of error. I mean seriously, why did the Megafauna of America choose to die off when he Clovis hunters appeared, but the predecessor managed to leave with them for however long you think they were there before the Clovis hunters? Why haven't we found more compelling evidence than one or two sites?
 
That beg another, related question - could have had a civilisation TOTALLY disapeared in historical era, AT ALL, from our eyes? Erased wholly, even from archeology - beyond things like the recently discovered cities of the Amazonian region?

If that were the case, I'd doubt you'd find such civilizations in barren environments. The more likely scenario is to find lost civilizations in places where modern civilization thrives - Older ruins that have been destroyed and replaced by new ones. For example, we really don't know just how old the East African coastal trading cultures are, but we know that the Arab ports there predate Islam because of Roman records (the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea). Now, how about preliterate societies that didn't have a literate neighbor to record their existence?
 
Now, how about preliterate societies that didn't have a literate neighbor to record their existence?

Depends highly of their sucessors. I doubt that any historical or proto-historical civilization don't let sucessors even after a fall.

The lost civilization, vanished without any trace of it, safe the treasures and building is a colonialist fantasme : "the actual indigenous are not the sucessors of these great guys, so we can take all without remorse". I caricature a bit, but you see what i mean.

So, even the most isolated civilisation have heirs that can elaborate their own history. The problem is more acculturation than anything else, as it happened for rongo-rongo and Easter Island.
 
The lost civilization, vanished without any trace of it, safe the treasures and building is a colonialist fantasme : "the actual indigenous are not the sucessors of these great guys, so we can take all without remorse". I caricature a bit, but you see what i mean.

Eh, not so much. Sure, usually there are genetic descendants who might remember scraps of their own history, but a lot of the time they won't remember much. Think of medieval Europe vis-a-vis the Romans: even given their written sources, they had a really distorted view of what the Romans had been like. Suppose the Romans and the Europeans had been preliterate, it would be almost impossible for the Europeans to have in anyway an accurate view of what happened.

This is also leaving aside the possibility that the people who built the elaborate buildings and such were displaced by someone else culturally, so you get even less. Again, there are plenty of examples in Europe, although admittedly few where elaborate buildings ended up getting built.

So, even the most isolated civilisation have heirs that can elaborate their own history. The problem is more acculturation than anything else, as it happened for rongo-rongo and Easter Island.

I'm not quite getting what you're trying to say here? In any case, as I pointed out above, there have been plenty of cases where a people directly descended from another have a messed-up view of what their ancestors were like, hardly reliable history at all.
 
Personally I think there could have been at least two large, fairly advanced civilizations before 6000 BC. One was out of India and probably served as an inspiration for some of the stories (or simply created the original) Vedic stories. The other was a European oceangoing civilization that probably had some serious knowledge of astronomy, navigation, and may have been behind some of the ancient megaliths we see in chunks of northern Europe. I also wonder if the city that inspired the Atlantis legend might not be in the Sea of Azov or near the modern city of Kerch in the Ukraine, the availabilty of fertile land nearby and the prospect of "an area impassible to navigation now" could be plausible, along with the idea of a time frame in which the Black Sea expands. It would be ironic if the source of tales for Noah, Gilgamesh, and ATlantis al have a common origin.

A fun timeline might also be written using a civilization of pale red-headed people out of Ireland or people from southern India with a Tamil appearance using oceanic trade with a religion encompassing dragons, geometric temples, exceptional skill in masonry, and maybe advanced agriculture. For real irony maybe they start out from Papua New Guinea. Maybe they are decimated when the sea levels rise, resulting in a famine or plague that wipes most of them out. Perhaps a handful of refugees settle in various areas, including Mesopotamia, Peru, and China, forming survivor communities that gradually influence nascent civilizations there.
 
proven that the Native Americans on th east cost are genetically related to the Europeans, but the differences are so big that it could not be explained with European settlers. (But this theory has been rejected by most Native Americans.)

First of all, there has been a LOT of European immigration to the east coast, so why is the difference 'too big' to be explained by intermarriage with European settlers?

Even if this is true, what makes you think the Solutrean culture was genetically related to modern Europeans? Modern Europeans could very well be migrants themselves that replaced an earlier culture. In addition, if the Solutreans had the navigational technology to go gallivanting across the Atlantic, why didn't they settle Iceland and Greenland? Both those islands provide enough in seal and bird flesh to support people, but European and Inuit settlers reached those islands around 1000 AD and found virgin land with no natives.
 
First of all, there has been a LOT of European immigration to the east coast, so why is the difference 'too big' to be explained by intermarriage with European settlers?

The approximate number of generations since a lineage split can be determined by the number of distinct single-site mutations that have accumulated since the split (the reality is more complicated of course, but that is the basic idea). A certain percentage of native Americans from eastern North America have DNA that is not from modern Europeans, since the split between their DNA and the closest modern European lineage dates from (at least) thousands of years before Columbus, but is still much closer to DNA found in some modern Europeans (linked to the pre-Neolithic inhabitants) than it is to the more usual lineages of DNA which are related to those found in eastern Siberia.
 
That beg another, related question - could have had a civilisation TOTALLY disapeared in historical era, AT ALL, from our eyes? Erased wholly, even from archeology - beyond things like the recently discovered cities of the Amazonian region?

No, not really. The historical era's too recent for that. After all, look at the discoveries of Cahokia and the Anasazi civilizations, both of which were short-lived atypical "hi-bye" civilizations.
 
Personally I think there could have been at least two large, fairly advanced civilizations before 6000 BC. One was out of India and probably served as an inspiration for some of the stories (or simply created the original) Vedic stories. The other was a European oceangoing civilization that probably had some serious knowledge of astronomy, navigation, and may have been behind some of the ancient megaliths we see in chunks of northern Europe.
Not really. There was an European culture with a very good knowledge of astronomy and navigation, but that was never a civilization.

BTW there the theory that the constellations form a map of trading routes.
I also wonder if the city that inspired the Atlantis legend might not be in the Sea of Azov or near the modern city of Kerch in the Ukraine, the availabilty of fertile land nearby and the prospect of "an area impassible to navigation now" could be plausible, along with the idea of a time frame in which the Black Sea expands. It would be ironic if the source of tales for Noah, Gilgamesh, and ATlantis al have a common origin.

The newest theory is that Atlantis was located on the island of Santorin. And the eruption of that volcano destroyed Atlantis.
The tales of the Great Flood have their origin in the region around the Black Sea. It is speculated that the breaking of a natural dam closing th Bosporus lead to a great flood which was remembered by the people living around the original fresh war sea.

The approximate number of generations since a lineage split can be determined by the number of distinct single-site mutations that have accumulated since the split (the reality is more complicated of course, but that is the basic idea). A certain percentage of native Americans from eastern North America have DNA that is not from modern Europeans, since the split between their DNA and the closest modern European lineage dates from (at least) thousands of years before Columbus, but is still much closer to DNA found in some modern Europeans (linked to the pre-Neolithic inhabitants) than it is to the more usual lineages of DNA which are related to those found in eastern Siberia.
That's exactly what I meant.
 
I still feel there are room for early proto-civilization experiments in locations with high fishing potential at the end of the Ice Age. Obliterated by the sea level rise and movements of tribes in the turbulence of the Ice Age ending.
 
Depends highly of their sucessors. I doubt that any historical or proto-historical civilization don't let sucessors even after a fall.

The lost civilization, vanished without any trace of it, safe the treasures and building is a colonialist fantasme : "the actual indigenous are not the sucessors of these great guys, so we can take all without remorse". I caricature a bit, but you see what i mean.

So, even the most isolated civilisation have heirs that can elaborate their own history. The problem is more acculturation than anything else, as it happened for rongo-rongo and Easter Island.

Yeah, but after a couple of hundred years of "whisper down the lane," the actual history of those civilizations becomes pretty muddled, to the extent that eventually the oral traditions of their descendants are no more reliable than any piece of supernatural mythology from that culture. If you trace the family tree of the Japanese royal family all the way back to Jimmu, it eventually becomes pretty fantastic and not all that credible - Even more so if you go all the way back to Jimmu's supposed first ancestor, the Shinto sun deity.

Also, looking at real world examples, what do Eastern Native American myths tell us about Cahokia and the other Mississippian mound cities they descend from? Why doesn't there seem to be much within Amazonian myths that hint toward the more complex societies that once thrived where only small villages and hunter-gatherers remain? There are plenty of civilizations whose names we know only from neighbors - Funan in Southeast Asia is only recorded by the Chinese, Punt by the Egyptians, Dilmun and Magan by the Mesopotamians, and Agisymba by Ptolemy.

For the most part, when a civilization collapses, its former ruling class gets wiped out with it. They're the ones who hold important all the glamorous feats and accomplishments we associate with "civilization", while the peasants living in small villages simply continue living in small villages as if nothing happened. Maybe they'll weave together some morality tale out of ordeal, but they won't necessary leave historians with much to work with.
 
I'm not quite getting what you're trying to say here? In any case, as I pointed out above, there have been plenty of cases where a people directly descended from another have a messed-up view of what their ancestors were like, hardly reliable history at all.

This thread is not about "reliable" history, but about the capacity of a civilization to be completly lost.
As much i'm agreeing with you, even a mythified history can be full of information : by understanding the codes of the culture and by an adapted sociologic study you can determine grossly what is a total mythe from what can be true.

You have many exemples of cultures and civilization supposedly mythical that appears today as real and historical, once the mythe understood and removed : maybe Troy is the most known exemple. If think such discoveries musy prevent ourselves to be too "dogmatic" regarding the mythical histories.
 
I see your point, but Siberia doesn't jump out at me as much, due to Beringia being a large land bridge in ancient times that was merely crossed by moving tribes into the Americas. No colonial power would be needed for such a simple action of migration. But something like Malaysia to Madagascar sounds slightly more involved, even if ocean currents have a tendency to send boats that way. It's a long distance after all, and for a significant population of Malay to inhabit Madagascar one can assume it happened on many occasions to get the population large and diverse enough to flourish. I was just wondering if it could have been a lingering vestige of an ancient colonisation event that went unrecorded and may have involved places like India and Africa, where traces of such has since been erased by the abundance of native peoples and the mixing of Malays with the indigenous populations there.

Alas it couldn't- the settlement of Madagascar happened relatively recently (around AD 200-500). The settlers were Austronesians from Borneo and the Sunda islands. It's around 4000 miles from Sumatra to Madagascar and presumably they didn't do it in one shot since they could have made landfall in between. It's pretty doable seeing as the settlers of Easter island (also Polynesians, very closely related to the Malays) had to sail almost 3000 miles with no landfall.

We know that at the time there were no major organised polities of the sort which could send out coherent expeditions in SE Asia and colonisation wasn't really something that happened over these kind of distances at this time period- the only reason the Europeans did it from the 15th C onward was that they were stuck on a relatively impoverished continent and had to go thousands of miles for spice and other goods. Without that sort of incentive you don't send colonists those kinds of distances- which is why, for example, the South Indian maritime kingdoms never bothered going West and focused their power on controlling the rich islands of SE Asia.
 
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