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Full article not accessible because of soft paywall, but: I feel we're surprised by these revelations because our current timeline of civilization is constructe
by hliyan 7y ago
Full article not accessible because of soft paywall, but: I feel we're surprised by these revelations because our current timeline of civilization is constructed using surviving artifacts and fossils, both of which are exception, not norm. The vast majority of evidence of ancient civilizations probably got completely buried. It's not outside the realm of possibility that there were early civilizations over 100,000 years old, whose artifacts have now been wiped away by plate tectonics and the ocean.
- chrisco255 7y agoSeems unlikely in the absence of metal mastery and we are reasonably sure we've found no evidence of iron usage in tool making before the iron age. Humans traded even in prehistoric times, so such tools would have been discovered in sites even remote from this mythical advanced civilization. It seems unlikely that such is the case.
- kortilla 7y agoDidn’t say anything about it being an iron civilization.
- chrisco255 7y agoWell metal is critical because it's really really hard to chop wood without metal. So you've got stones, bones, and loose timber to work with. About the closest evidence I can find is Mezhirich, a small paleolithic village built out of mammoth bones: https://www.thoughtco.com/mezhirich-mammoth-bone-settlement-171805 https://www.thoughtco.com/mezhirich-mammoth-bone-settlement-... about 18000 years ago.
- jdmoreira 7y agoThe mesoamerican civilizations used no iron
- chrisco255 7y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_in_pre-Columbian_Mesoamerica https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_in_pre-Columbian_...
- flexie 7y agoThey did chop trees with stone tools. Here you can see how: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BN-34JfUrHY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BN-34JfUrHY
- chrisco255 7y agoYes well I'm talking about chopping trees down and building homes out of them (and enough homes for a civilization). No doubt smaller sticks and loose timber could be used, that's how man mastered fire in the first place. But chopping whole trees probably didn't happen much until after metal.
- mkl 7y agoYou can build enough homes for a civilisation without felling any big trees at all. Stone, clay bricks, earth, small trees and branches, straw, etc. would be sufficient. Even felling big trees doesn't need iron tools - controlled fire will do most of the work: http://www.cherokeeheritage.org/attractions/dugout-canoe/ http://www.cherokeeheritage.org/attractions/dugout-canoe/
- chrisco255 7y agoThat looks extremely laborious but it's a fascinating technique. It still limits the amount of lumber one group can use. I agree on clay (in some regions) and stone being available and useable. It still says nothing about supporting a civilization, which requires agriculture.
- mkl 7y agoYou're moving goalposts, but early civilisations supported themselves with agriculture before developing metal-working: https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/development-of-agriculture/ https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/development-of-ag... https://www.ancient.eu/Stone_Age/ https://www.ancient.eu/Stone_Age/
- reallydude 7y ago
- dredmorbius 7y agoLarge-scale wood-based construction in paleolithic cultures did exist, notably in the Alps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_pile_dwellings_around_the_Alps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_pile_dwellings_aro... Not fine woodworking, perhaps, but possible. Most early construction was based on found shelter (caves), hides, sod or turf, brick, or stone. Locally-available and hand-workable with very simple tools.
- chrisco255 7y ago5000-500 B.C. is not the paleolithic era. That's well into the Neolithic and Bronze age.
- dredmorbius 7y agoPoint. "Neolithic/early bronze" is stated in the article. Point being that working wood with stone tools happened. Ale native American lodgehouses and pueblos (adobe walls, timber roofs), also stone tools.
- Boebo 7y agoActually there are iron weapons made from meteoric iron from before the iron age. Small scale for sure for obvious reasons. Not that relevant to the topic but it might interest you.
- adt2bt 7y agoNot OP but it interests me! Do you have a link by any chance?
- lixtra 7y agoI.e. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteoric_iron#cite_note-Waldbaum_1980-8 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteoric_iron#cite_note-Wald... There are several examples in the Wikipedia entry
- greglindahl 7y agoMeteoric steel isn't just iron, that's why it's interesting. And why it survives, compared to very early iron made before people learned how to turn it into steel.
- dredmorbius 7y agoNB: Meteoric ferrous metals are almost universally iron or iron-nickel, not steel (iron-carbon). I find few or no hits outside the gaming world for "meteoric steel". Are you referring to steel found indigenously within meteor fragments, steel forged from meteoric iron, or was this just a misspeaking?
- greglindahl 7y agoSorry, I was misremembering stories about things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutankhamun%27s_meteoric_iron_dagger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutankhamun%27s_meteoric_iron_... -- the point being that as an iron alloy (iron-nickel not steel) it doesn't rust away quickly in graves like early human-smelted iron does.
- hutzlibu 7y agoI'll go along your argument, that it seems very unlikely that there was a advanced civilization but just hypothetical: if there was a really really old civilization, wouldn't their iron tools be degraded beyound recognition? (especially if it was a coastal civilization later drowned in the salty sea) Oh and a (spaced out) esoteric explanation, some people tried to convince me of: this old civilization was so advanced it had quantum technology aka magic to get things done and eventually wiped itself out in a civil war ..
- perl4ever 7y agoYeah, but the article seems to be about 3,000 years ago. I am not shocked that there were relatively advanced civilizations in 1,000 BC - when did we think otherwise?
- greglindahl 7y agoThere's a difference between "relatively advanced civilizations" and "civilizations that significantly altered the Earth".
- perl4ever 7y agoYou could argue that, but I would be inclined to question how advanced a civilization was that didn't prosper enough to alter the environment. A civilization that is "advanced" should be fairly good at logistics, and that leads to a large population, which leads to a large environmental impact. How in tune with nature or whatever people in a society are on an individual basis wouldn't affect the total impact if whatever they are doing works well enough that everything keeps growing. I'm kind of thinking of Jevon's paradox.
- tkdc926 7y agoThe Great Pyramid of Giza was constructed about 4,500 years ago.
- perl4ever 7y agoI was thinking more of China.
- lkrubner 7y agoNot “buried” but “drowned”. The oceans have risen almost 50 meters since the peak of the last Ice Age. Assuming the biggest human settlements, then as now, were near large bodies of water, then they are drowned.
- chrisco255 7y agoWhy wouldn't they have just moved their cities inland? This doesn't seem too plausible. Maybe I could see some village suffering from rapid advance and the village gets abandoned but sea level rise isn't instantaneous, so it's doubtful to have caused deaths. Edit: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Post-Glacial_Sea_Level.png https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Post-Glacial_Sea_L... This image shows the fastest sea level rose was around 15K years ago, which is pretty close to the Neolithic era. At it's fastest rate sea level was rising at 30 meters per 1000 years, or about 3 centimeters a year. Ok, that's a very slow moving train. It's pretty easy to get off the tracks before it hits you. Doubtful to have cause civilization decline especially when it lines up closer to the onset of agriculture.
- inetknght 7y ago> Why wouldn't they have just moved their cities inland? That's a great question to ask of Venice, for example.
- chrisco255 7y agoVenice of course, is 1500 years old and people still very much live there. It's also made of materials that are impossible to craft without metal. I said a village might be abandoned due to sea level rise, but it's unlikely to cause civilizational collapse. Highly, highly unlikely, since it moves sooo slooow.
- hinkley 7y agoI don't think we're talking about Atlantis here. We're talking about ruins being inundated. There is some tipping point where every society collapses, and those inland and upland we occasionally locate. Except that we're having a damned difficult time doing that in aggressively biologically active regions like swamps or rainforests. Say you built your town on a 3% grade next to the water. That's 3 meters of descent for every 100 meters of distance. If sea level rises 50 meters, your town's ruins aren't just ~45 meters underwater, there's also almost a kilometer and a half out to sea. Nobody is looking there.
- HuShifang 7y agoSome recent, informed speculation about such possibilities: https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748 https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748
- anonytrary 7y ago> Full article not accessible because of soft paywall Off topic: I sometimes browse in in-cognito mode. This was one of those times. I clicked through to the article, and the website detected that I was in in-cognito mode and said I wasn't allowed to read the article in in-cognito mode. I feel as if this walled-garden approach is getting out of hand.
- Steko 7y agoNYT does this even when you're not in private/incognito mode.
- ekianjo 7y agonot sure if this is true but I heard once that Macchu Pichu was actually built by an earlier civilization that we know nothing about.
- raindeer3 7y agoYes the Incas overtook previous societies. But the Inca civilization is quite recent (15th century AD) so what was before was probably not that old either.
- squirrelicus 7y agoIf you're talking wood and clay and stone, I think your supposition is potentially reasonable for some very narrow definition of civilization. Perhaps two digits worth of humans. Surviving artifacts of the metal ages are very much the norm though, so I wouldn't expect early human villages to have gone beyond the stone age. And with coastal weathering it would be hard to identify any stone tooling from that long ago.
- ak39 7y agoRegarding the nytimes paywall: simply disable JavaScript and reload.
- Pimpus 7y agoIt's not just possible, but highly likely. Graham Hancock has compiled an impressive amount of evidence for pre-Younger Dryas civilizations in books like Magicians of the Gods.
- mkl 7y agoGraham Hancock is not an archaeologist, and actual archaeologists disagree with him. That "impressive" evidence sounds like cherry-picked non-sequiturs. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/no-there-wasnt-an-advanced-civilization-12-000-years-ago/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/no-there-wasnt-an... https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/defant-analysis-of-hancock-claims-in-magicians-of-the-gods/ https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/defant-analysis-of-hanc...