6 ms·

> but the state of public knowledge is so remedial that it's genuinely frustrating sometimes. This, I believe! Although it's probably a true statement for virt

by nkoren 6y ago

> but the state of public knowledge is so remedial that it's genuinely frustrating sometimes. This, I believe! Although it's probably a true statement for virtually any scientific profession. That said: I don't know the first thing about Graham Hancock, and I'm quite comfortable dismissing Velikovsky and his ilk as cranks. Just because one can construct an absurd theory to explain things one doesn't understand, doesn't mean one should. And yet... I was reading about the Norte Chico civilisation the other day, and thinking that it was really quite weird that they started building ziggurats at pretty close to the same time as the Sumerians, Egyptians, and Chinese also started building ziggurats. Really, the global flourishing of that exact form at that exact time -- in sites separated by thousands of miles, with no possibility of communication between them -- is honestly quite weird, right? When I've mentioned these kind of thoughts to archaeologically-trained friends, I've often encountered a curious lack of curiosity -- "yes, obviously just a crazy coincidence, can't be anything besides that, let's talk about something else now" -- or asserting theories, as facts, about how ziggurats are just an inevitable step in the development of urban architecture (this is definitely untrue). Both of these reactions are troubling to me. Dismissing these sort of things as "not a mystery" is doing them a disservice. Imagine how many great discoveries would have passed us by if every piece of initially-baffling evidence were dismissed as "just a coincidence". And while it's clearly irresponsible to to go on yammering about aliens or Atlantis or whatever -- at least in the absence of much more extraordinary evidence -- I don't think that it's much more responsible to concoct theories which are prosaic but obviously false. Anyhow, minor rant there, sorry. I have absolutely no working theory as to why ziggurats started popping up all over the place 5,000 years ago. I just want to hear a non-crackpot archaeologist admit that yes, that's a legitimate mystery, and that if it's just a coincidence, it's a very weird one.

wizzwizz4 6y ago
> in sites separated by thousands of miles, with no possibility of communication between them Human walking speed is about 3.1mph. Walking 8 hours a day, it takes 40 days to cross a thousand miles. Communication's slow, but not that slow – especially if you've got horses. My working theory is that people walked.
- eloff 6y ago
  Across the ocean? The walking theory breaks down when you look at the development of the Americas. That actually almost certainly kills any theory that communication is required. At least in the Americas, the timing was surely a coincidence?
  - ColanR 6y ago
    From what I've heard, transatlantic boats can be fairly small and rudimentary.
    - eloff 6y ago
      Not really. The Vikings pulled it off, but it was hardly a walk in the park and required a network of bases in Iceland, Greenland and elsewhere to support venturing further.
      - ColanR 6y ago
        I was thinking of the leather coracles used in another voyage. I read this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1088116.The_Brendan_Voyage https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1088116.The_Brendan_Voya...
      - datameta 6y ago
        There is evidence that some Pacific Islanders made it to the coast of South America in very small craft.
AlotOfReading 6y ago
There are absolutely some huge unknowns out there. Here's one that fascinates me: The earliest evidence for crop domestication around the world all happen within roughly 1-2k years of each other. Hundreds of thousands of years of foraging, and all of a sudden agriculture evolves independently half a dozen times in that tiny span. We've spilled libraries worth of ink on the subject, but pretty much the only firm conclusion we have is that there wasn't a singular cause. There is a [paraphrased] saying that might explain your friend's reactions though: the most exciting thing in archaeology is your data, the most boring is someone else's data. We have to compartmentalize a lot because there's an overwhelming amount of stuff out there.
- amayne 6y ago
  Climate. We know from ice cores that the climate prior to the current interglacial period wasn’t very conducive to crops. It was dryer and had less CO2. 180ppm be 260ppm pre-industrial area. Lower CO2 levels meant that plants lost more moisture opening their pores and growth would be stunted.
  - AlotOfReading 6y ago
    Climate change is a big part of the puzzle, but for cases like the cucurbitaceae family in the Americas, it likely also reflects quaternary extinction events and social/behavioral changes in human populations, among other things. It's complicated and multifactorial.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- nkoren 6y ago
  Heh, that's a good reaction. :-) Maybe I don't know the problem well enough, but the relatively simultaneous nature of domestication seems like less of a mystery to me. More recent domestications (eg. in the Americas) seem to indicate that a hunter-gatherer population needs to be getting comfortable with a particular bioregion for at least a thousand years or so before an accumulation of of local knowledge can lead to the development of decent local cultivars. If this is a general and defensible rule, then I think our climate history can provide the rest of the evidence. The ice age wasn't just cold, it was also chaotic, with temperatures pinging all over the place from year to year: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-climate-change-during-the-last-ice-24288097/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-cli... In that context, any population would have had difficulty staying in one place for a thousand years -- I don't mean living a settled life, I just mean hanging out in generally the same bioregion. Bioregional adaptation would be detrimental in such an unstable environment: your tribe needs to stay mobile and highly adaptable, or it'll die. No chance to develop agriculture under those circumstances. Eventually we enter a nice calm interglacial period, and settle down to do some fishing -- then spend the next thousand years being chased around by rapidly rising sea levels and mega-floods from bursting glacial dams. Finally, about 11k-10k BPE, all that settles down -- although not without us acquiring some nice flood myths along the way -- and we have time settle down and start getting to know some bioregions on a long-term basis. A thousand years or so later, we've got agriculture popping up all over the place. Seems like a reasonable story? Or am I missing something?
gota 6y ago
> ziggurats are just an inevitable step in the development of urban architecture (this is definitely untrue). Are you sure? I'm not strongly in one camp or another, but it seems relatively intuitive that if you are stone age people and want to build something tall, a square-based step-pyramid is the most stable form that can rise relatively fast wrt to the amount of material used and work needed Of course this only pushes back the question of _why_ did all these people want to build tall things roughly at the same time, but still
- deniscepko2 6y ago
  i dont know i think your thinking implies years of growing with the same theories, like getting to a point of building with square like objects i dont think its a given
- madaxe_again 6y ago
  Defensibility. Hill forts have been around as long as settlements. Don’t have a hill? Build one.
Epokhe 6y ago
doesn't look like anything to me

by nkoren 6y ago

wizzwizz4 6y ago

> in sites separated by thousands of miles, with no possibility of communication between them Human walking speed is about 3.1mph. Walking 8 hours a day, it takes 40 days to cross a thousand miles. Communication's slow, but not that slow – especially if you've got horses. My working theory is that people walked.

eloff 6y ago
Across the ocean? The walking theory breaks down when you look at the development of the Americas. That actually almost certainly kills any theory that communication is required. At least in the Americas, the timing was surely a coincidence?
- ColanR 6y ago
  From what I've heard, transatlantic boats can be fairly small and rudimentary.
  - eloff 6y ago
    Not really. The Vikings pulled it off, but it was hardly a walk in the park and required a network of bases in Iceland, Greenland and elsewhere to support venturing further.
    - ColanR 6y ago
      I was thinking of the leather coracles used in another voyage. I read this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1088116.The_Brendan_Voyage https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1088116.The_Brendan_Voya...
    - datameta 6y ago
      There is evidence that some Pacific Islanders made it to the coast of South America in very small craft.

AlotOfReading 6y ago

There are absolutely some huge unknowns out there. Here's one that fascinates me: The earliest evidence for crop domestication around the world all happen within roughly 1-2k years of each other. Hundreds of thousands of years of foraging, and all of a sudden agriculture evolves independently half a dozen times in that tiny span. We've spilled libraries worth of ink on the subject, but pretty much the only firm conclusion we have is that there wasn't a singular cause. There is a [paraphrased] saying that might explain your friend's reactions though: the most exciting thing in archaeology is your data, the most boring is someone else's data. We have to compartmentalize a lot because there's an overwhelming amount of stuff out there.

amayne 6y ago
Climate. We know from ice cores that the climate prior to the current interglacial period wasn’t very conducive to crops. It was dryer and had less CO2. 180ppm be 260ppm pre-industrial area. Lower CO2 levels meant that plants lost more moisture opening their pores and growth would be stunted.
- AlotOfReading 6y ago
  Climate change is a big part of the puzzle, but for cases like the cucurbitaceae family in the Americas, it likely also reflects quaternary extinction events and social/behavioral changes in human populations, among other things. It's complicated and multifactorial.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nkoren 6y ago
Heh, that's a good reaction. :-) Maybe I don't know the problem well enough, but the relatively simultaneous nature of domestication seems like less of a mystery to me. More recent domestications (eg. in the Americas) seem to indicate that a hunter-gatherer population needs to be getting comfortable with a particular bioregion for at least a thousand years or so before an accumulation of of local knowledge can lead to the development of decent local cultivars. If this is a general and defensible rule, then I think our climate history can provide the rest of the evidence. The ice age wasn't just cold, it was also chaotic, with temperatures pinging all over the place from year to year: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-climate-change-during-the-last-ice-24288097/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-cli... In that context, any population would have had difficulty staying in one place for a thousand years -- I don't mean living a settled life, I just mean hanging out in generally the same bioregion. Bioregional adaptation would be detrimental in such an unstable environment: your tribe needs to stay mobile and highly adaptable, or it'll die. No chance to develop agriculture under those circumstances. Eventually we enter a nice calm interglacial period, and settle down to do some fishing -- then spend the next thousand years being chased around by rapidly rising sea levels and mega-floods from bursting glacial dams. Finally, about 11k-10k BPE, all that settles down -- although not without us acquiring some nice flood myths along the way -- and we have time settle down and start getting to know some bioregions on a long-term basis. A thousand years or so later, we've got agriculture popping up all over the place. Seems like a reasonable story? Or am I missing something?

gota 6y ago

> ziggurats are just an inevitable step in the development of urban architecture (this is definitely untrue). Are you sure? I'm not strongly in one camp or another, but it seems relatively intuitive that if you are stone age people and want to build something tall, a square-based step-pyramid is the most stable form that can rise relatively fast wrt to the amount of material used and work needed Of course this only pushes back the question of _why_ did all these people want to build tall things roughly at the same time, but still

deniscepko2 6y ago
i dont know i think your thinking implies years of growing with the same theories, like getting to a point of building with square like objects i dont think its a given
madaxe_again 6y ago
Defensibility. Hill forts have been around as long as settlements. Don’t have a hill? Build one.

Epokhe 6y ago

doesn't look like anything to me