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> they inhabited the same places over and over It must be jarring for a new cohort of humans to come across artifacts invented and developed by predecessor tha

• marcosdumay 9y ago
  You mean, like the pyramids? I could imagine everything around being like them.
  • InitialLastName 9y ago
    It blows my mind every time I remember that the Great Pyramid was the tallest building on earth from ~2560 BC to 1311 CE. Also, at the point that some apocryphal Israelites left Egypt, the Giza Pyramids would have already been 1000 years old.
    • jerrylives 9y ago
      The Romans looked upon the New Kingdom the way we look at the Romans. And the New Kingdom looked upon the Old Kingdom the way we view the New Kingdom.
      • ashark 9y ago
        I've got Lichtheim's 3-volume Literature of Ancient Egypt. The time between the earliest and latest entries in that collection? Something like 2400-2500 years (IIRC). And (again IIRC) it stops a few hundred years shy of crossing the BC/AD boundary. It spans 4-5 related, but distinct, major civilizations living on roughly the same land, only the last couple of which are recent enough to squeeze onto the leading edge of where we usually start the narrative of recorded history. The "ancient world" had its own ancient world.
        • jerrylives 9y ago
          Absolutely. Even before the Pyramids, imagine being an ancient nomadic human circa 5000-4000 BCE and coming across the ruins of Göbekli Tepe. Also another perspective fun fact: Stonehenge is older than the Pyramids
          • nerfhammer 9y ago
            They wouldn't understand how old it is. They would just say "huh, some people must have been here long ago."
            • jerrylives 9y ago
              I think you underestimate our ancestors
            • bbctol 9y ago
              They'd be more likely to say "Some gods lived here long ago."
          • avenoir 9y ago
            A little off topic. Gobekli Tepe is a really fascinating find. The size of the pillars, the inscriptions, the intricate designs of the pottery and jewelry (with cleanly drilled holes in them) give a glimpse of a sophisticated civilization with architecture and farming at a time when humans are supposed to be hunter-gatherers. Graham Hancock has a few very interesting books on this. He seems to believe that humans basically go through periods of amnesia or better put get periodically wiped out, lose their bearings and start over again. We become just like that ancient human circa 5000 BC looking at the ruins of Gobekli Tepe. Or the modern human looking at the Pyramids all over the ancient world and trying to piece history together.
            • Turing_Machine 9y ago
              A more recent example: the Mississippian Culture in North America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippian_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippian_culture By the time Europeans penetrated to most of these areas, the cultures were nothing but legends. Only the mounds remained.
• gumby 9y ago
  > It must be jarring for a new cohort of humans to come across artifacts invented and developed by predecessor that they can't understand. As others have pointed out your position is a modern one; the "wonders of the ancients" is a several thousand year old perspective. And in fact for a good chunk of recent European history (last couple of millennia) the prevailing view was one of declinism when compared to the Romans of the late Republic and early empire. But we don't know if the users of this cave had that jarring experience. 4500 years is a long time but it's quite possible -- likely even -- that there was continuous use, so it was "just part of the landscape" with knowledge accreting and being passed on. The reason I say "likely" is that presumably the color technology evolved over some period of time, and if the users died off and the cave was later rediscovered after a gap, the new discoverers would have to re-invent a bunch of the tech somewhat from scratch (although results and possibly raw materials would be right there to provide hints). It's interesting to speculate what kind of speech and culture they might have had.
  • simonh 9y ago
    Technology development was unbelievably slow back then, so re-inventing tech, which seems like a routine thing to do to us, was next to unimaginable back then. We see exactly the same artifices made exactly the same way over stretches of eover a million years (the Acheulian had axe). In that era lost technology was simply gone for all intents and purposes at a community level. This site lies in the Middle Palaeolithic era which lasted about 300 thousand years.
    • gumby 9y ago
      Even with good communication that remained true until very recently: read the debates on the constitutional roots of the US patent system and it was an explicit "bribe" that you received a government-guaranteed monopoly in exchange for explaining how to make your invention. Otherwise the information could easily be lost. Obviously that's not how the system works today