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Not “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

Not “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 ago
Why 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 ago
    Venice 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 ago
  I 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.
  - roywiggins 7y ago
    People have pulled artefacts off the seabed where Doggerland used to be (and still is, it's just under quite a lot of water). Mostly by accident: fishing sometimes fetches stuff up from down there.
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    See my post below where I link to actual data on sea level rise rate. The ice caps don't melt instantaneously there's not enough energy in one summer to do that. The fastest it ever rose was 3 cm a year during a 1000 year period. Even at 3 cm a year you can build new buildings on higher ground as the water advances and never lose a beat. Especially when we're talking an era when most homes were built out of bones and deerskin and maybe clay. Without metal they couldn't even chop wood but even wood buildings go up rather quickly. I just fail to see how we could believe our ancestors made it through several ice ages, mastered fire, avoided being eaten by saber tooth tigers and hunted wooly mammoths and populated the whole globe but failed to avert a 3cm a year sea level rise.
    - sooheon 7y ago
      I think the claim is not that sea level rise caused civilizational collapse, but that sea level rise could have obscured many coastal cities (which presumably suffered run of the mill, non-watery deaths).
    - reificator 7y ago
      You're still arguing against something that no one else is. You're viewing their arguments as "Water overtook their cities and they died because of it". Their argument is that "They died out and then water overtook their cities".
      - chrisco255 7y ago
        Well if we're still talking about "advanced civilization" like Mesopotamia, I can definitely see climate change causing a gradual collapse. I still doubt it was possible to have a large city prior to metallurgy and agriculture. Maybe megafauna was abundant enough that it could support that but it seems like a stretch.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  With changing climate, entire regions which may have been formerly hospitable, were not. Settlements may have been small and largely ephemeral. And they're now flooded under 300' of water and miles out at sea. As an example: the initial human settlement of the Americas likely followed sea routes along the North, Central, and South American coasts. The region near Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, with the Channel Islands, extended much further out to sea, with some of the islands being connected to land, others being only a short distance (rather than 20-30 miles) offshore. Settlements along both the coast and shore -- the most viable parts of these regions -- would now be utterly flooded. There are few or no traces of the initial migrations, save for a few inland settlements and venturing / foraging parties, though later settlements may exist. Much construction and many artefacts would be of earth, wood, hides, and plant fibres, most rotting or melting away under water. There are simply few surviving remains, and those which might exist are hard to find and access. The climate change itself would have occurred over centuries, with multiple moves and resettlements, or disappearance of entire cities. It's rare for even preindustrial civilisations to endure at their peak for more than a few centuries.
simonh 7y ago
So they built cities on the coast, but not along river valleys? How did they feed the cities without agriculture? If they had agriculture, we’d see the selection process in the genetic history of the plants, and the geographic spread of plants, and again they’d definitely have colonised river valleys that are better suited to agriculture than the coast. Then of course their tools and other artefacts would have been traded all over the place. Stone tools from 100k years ago and more got traded or carried thousands of miles and all we see are implements for the hunter gatherer lifestyle. It doesn’t make any sense.
- kortilla 7y ago
  The best places would have been deltas on the coast where you have an immense fish supply in the ocean and fresh water from the river.
  - trhway 7y ago
    Which is exactly https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
- cstross 7y ago
  You might want to read up on Doggerland: https://www.nationalgeographic.org/maps/doggerland/ https://www.nationalgeographic.org/maps/doggerland/ The TLDR is that a huge low-lying basin of fertile land around what is now the British Isles was inundated at the end of the last interglacial. (What is now the North Sea/English Channel was one of those river valleys you alude to.) The British Isles today would have been the relatively cold, arid, mountainous uplands survivors migrated into when their fertile, low-lying territory got flooded out. Assuming population density in the chilly uplands (glaciers, remember!) was low, then you'd expect the frequency of surviving stone tools to be lower, reflecting that. People don't leave stuff lying around in places where people don't live!
  - simonh 7y ago
    I'm fully aware of doggerland, but so what? Given all of Africa and Eurasia, doggerland was a tiny benighted patch of lowland in a cold remote corner. I'm sure some people called it home, but I don't see any compelling reason to put a lost civilization on it 100k years ago. There are plenty of very fertile, habitable areas in the same region that would have been just as attractive. So settlements? Sure. But surely a civilization is more than just a settlement?
squirrelicus 7y ago
Kinda puts the old religous flood stories in a different context eh? There were almost certainly costal communities who were consumed by rising sea levels the world over. Recent global flooding.
- ak39 7y ago
  The most likely origin of the middle eastern religious “meme” of the flood (Noah etc) is Sumerian plain floods (Mesopotamia). In fact, the stories in Genesis are most likely the retelling of Sumerian technological achievements (farming, building and the concept of time and seasons).
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  The inundation of the Black Sea may have occurred during early human times and have been passed down through myths and sagas. There are, of course, numerous other possible events, a synthesis, or even pure fabrication, as the basis.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

chrisco255 7y ago

Why 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 ago
  Venice 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 ago
I 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.
- roywiggins 7y ago
  People have pulled artefacts off the seabed where Doggerland used to be (and still is, it's just under quite a lot of water). Mostly by accident: fishing sometimes fetches stuff up from down there.
- chrisco255 7y ago
  See my post below where I link to actual data on sea level rise rate. The ice caps don't melt instantaneously there's not enough energy in one summer to do that. The fastest it ever rose was 3 cm a year during a 1000 year period. Even at 3 cm a year you can build new buildings on higher ground as the water advances and never lose a beat. Especially when we're talking an era when most homes were built out of bones and deerskin and maybe clay. Without metal they couldn't even chop wood but even wood buildings go up rather quickly. I just fail to see how we could believe our ancestors made it through several ice ages, mastered fire, avoided being eaten by saber tooth tigers and hunted wooly mammoths and populated the whole globe but failed to avert a 3cm a year sea level rise.
  - sooheon 7y ago
    I think the claim is not that sea level rise caused civilizational collapse, but that sea level rise could have obscured many coastal cities (which presumably suffered run of the mill, non-watery deaths).
  - reificator 7y ago
    You're still arguing against something that no one else is. You're viewing their arguments as "Water overtook their cities and they died because of it". Their argument is that "They died out and then water overtook their cities".
    - chrisco255 7y ago
      Well if we're still talking about "advanced civilization" like Mesopotamia, I can definitely see climate change causing a gradual collapse. I still doubt it was possible to have a large city prior to metallurgy and agriculture. Maybe megafauna was abundant enough that it could support that but it seems like a stretch.
dredmorbius 7y ago
With changing climate, entire regions which may have been formerly hospitable, were not. Settlements may have been small and largely ephemeral. And they're now flooded under 300' of water and miles out at sea. As an example: the initial human settlement of the Americas likely followed sea routes along the North, Central, and South American coasts. The region near Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, with the Channel Islands, extended much further out to sea, with some of the islands being connected to land, others being only a short distance (rather than 20-30 miles) offshore. Settlements along both the coast and shore -- the most viable parts of these regions -- would now be utterly flooded. There are few or no traces of the initial migrations, save for a few inland settlements and venturing / foraging parties, though later settlements may exist. Much construction and many artefacts would be of earth, wood, hides, and plant fibres, most rotting or melting away under water. There are simply few surviving remains, and those which might exist are hard to find and access. The climate change itself would have occurred over centuries, with multiple moves and resettlements, or disappearance of entire cities. It's rare for even preindustrial civilisations to endure at their peak for more than a few centuries.

simonh 7y ago

So they built cities on the coast, but not along river valleys? How did they feed the cities without agriculture? If they had agriculture, we’d see the selection process in the genetic history of the plants, and the geographic spread of plants, and again they’d definitely have colonised river valleys that are better suited to agriculture than the coast. Then of course their tools and other artefacts would have been traded all over the place. Stone tools from 100k years ago and more got traded or carried thousands of miles and all we see are implements for the hunter gatherer lifestyle. It doesn’t make any sense.

kortilla 7y ago
The best places would have been deltas on the coast where you have an immense fish supply in the ocean and fresh water from the river.
- trhway 7y ago
  Which is exactly https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
cstross 7y ago
You might want to read up on Doggerland: https://www.nationalgeographic.org/maps/doggerland/ https://www.nationalgeographic.org/maps/doggerland/ The TLDR is that a huge low-lying basin of fertile land around what is now the British Isles was inundated at the end of the last interglacial. (What is now the North Sea/English Channel was one of those river valleys you alude to.) The British Isles today would have been the relatively cold, arid, mountainous uplands survivors migrated into when their fertile, low-lying territory got flooded out. Assuming population density in the chilly uplands (glaciers, remember!) was low, then you'd expect the frequency of surviving stone tools to be lower, reflecting that. People don't leave stuff lying around in places where people don't live!
- simonh 7y ago
  I'm fully aware of doggerland, but so what? Given all of Africa and Eurasia, doggerland was a tiny benighted patch of lowland in a cold remote corner. I'm sure some people called it home, but I don't see any compelling reason to put a lost civilization on it 100k years ago. There are plenty of very fertile, habitable areas in the same region that would have been just as attractive. So settlements? Sure. But surely a civilization is more than just a settlement?

squirrelicus 7y ago

Kinda puts the old religous flood stories in a different context eh? There were almost certainly costal communities who were consumed by rising sea levels the world over. Recent global flooding.

ak39 7y ago
The most likely origin of the middle eastern religious “meme” of the flood (Noah etc) is Sumerian plain floods (Mesopotamia). In fact, the stories in Genesis are most likely the retelling of Sumerian technological achievements (farming, building and the concept of time and seasons).
dredmorbius 7y ago
The inundation of the Black Sea may have occurred during early human times and have been passed down through myths and sagas. There are, of course, numerous other possible events, a synthesis, or even pure fabrication, as the basis.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]