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I've been saying this for years - especially as humans are essentially a littoral species (culturally, at least - I'm not referring to the Aquatic Ape Hypothesi

I've been saying this for years - especially as humans are essentially a littoral species (culturally, at least - I'm not referring to the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis!). Most of our ancient history lies just off shore under a very few tens of metres of water. It's right there, entirely unseen. With recent post on HN referring to 'spontaneous' cultural developments within a tight timeframe around the world, I wonder how many answers could be wrought if we were ony able to see a lot more from a little off-shore.

travisjungroth 6y ago
> It's right there, entirely unseen. I doubt that. I've never heard of an ancient discovery offshore. A thousand years of salt, life and waves will turn most things to mush. These caves do a special job of preserving things. They have little movement, little life and freshwater sections. Edit: I didn’t do a great job of expressing myself. I’m sure that offshore ancient discoveries have happened (as some replies have pointed out). The comment I replied to seemed to be suggesting that all of our ancient history is just waiting to be discovered off the shore. It’s not. In all the diving I’ve done around the world, in all the treasure hunting stories I’ve read, no one has found anything ancient offshore. (And then I learned about some today)
- Morizero 6y ago
  The Doggerland portion of the North Sea has yielded prehistoric artifacts.
- dghughes 6y ago
  The Black Sea was flooded when the narrow section of land the Mediterranean from the sea collapsed (possible origin of Great Flood myths) 12,000 years ago. There are many archaeological sites on the now flooded coast many tells and preserved ships due to the cold, oxygen-free, and salt-free freshwater.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  Heracleion was the primary Egyptian port before the development of Alexandria, and was discovered offshore of Alexandria in 1999: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracleion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracleion
- SenHeng 6y ago
  Roman fish farms! https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2016/08/what-roman-ruins-reveal https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2016/08/what-roman-ruins-rev...
- detritus 6y ago
  I see someone's mentioned Heraklion/Alexandria, as well as Dogger bank in the North Sea - add to the list Dhaskalio in Greece, Yonaguni in Taiwan, Mahabalipuram and Dwarka in India, as well as ruins in Crete and even the Caribbean (can't find link). I think the point I was trying to make is that there clearly are examples and I don't think that we've barely even begun looking. You're right that healthy sea waters aren't ideal for preservation of human-derived metals and organics, but then silting and run-off from tributaries leads to preserving types of environment, sat in geographic areas of interest to humans anyway. That aside, stone - a material much used in ancient times - is fairly durable. When you were diving, were you actively looking for signs of ancient human activity, or might it have entirely slipped you by even if you stared straight at it? I'd suggest the littoral region is the next frontier of archaeology, because clearly a lot of our history was on-shore, and that on-shore is now off-shore... . - ed spelling
  - detritus 6y ago
    Moreso: I think when we start digitally encoding these environments - much as we have over ground in South America, using LIDAR to discover previously unseen, but right in-sight structures such as those of the Maya - we'll realise there's a lot of our old culture not far off. Drone submersibles with high resolution sonar doing fully-realised coastal scans would, I'm sure, yield hugely interesting results. - ed: drone wouldn't need to be submersible. that would just be cooler.
    - vidarh 6y ago
      22 years ago I worked on a communications relay app to make up one tiny part of a control system for an autonomous submersible used for mapping. My part was a relatively unimportant add-on - the system relied on a 2400bps acoustic link from the submersible to a small ship that needed to stay right above to get a reliable link. To allow relaying data real-time to shore or a bigger ship nearby I was contracted to write code to pass the data stream reliably over a 9600bps GSM data connection (it was intended for testing and demos in coastal regions, not for production use). Ended up using a slightly modified z-modem protocol that kept the session alive across redial. But the best part of that contract was to get to go out and see the real system in operation. Given what results they had back then I wonder what the state of the art in that field looks like now - the biggest problem with automating this seemed to be the tight tolerances for communication with the submersible. You won't be able to make it small and cheap if it needs to be tethered (dragging a heavy cable), but if untethered like the one I got to see, maintaining a reliable enough and fast enough connection becomes a challenge instead.
api 6y ago
I get the impression archeologists are incredibly resistant to pushing history back or otherwise enlarging it. This resistance seems to go beyond appropriate scientific caution and into the realm of unscientific dogmatism. There was a thread here a few days ago about Graham Hancock. I do think he's a bit of a crank, but I get the sense he gets a lot of traction because he's one of the few who will even talk about certain things. (Reminds me of how the alt-right and even worse ideologues get traction because they are the only ones who will talk about the economic collapse of the American center. Their ideas are bullshit, but everyone else pretends it's not happening.) Other fields of science seem to have no problem with discovering that things are much bigger than they thought. Astronomers discover that they were undercounting the number of galaxies by two logarithmic factors? Neat! Archeologists don't seem to greet enlargement of their domain this way. Maybe it comes from religious and cultural chauvinism or residual religious literalism. Deepening the historical narrative might mean the Mesopotamians were not "first" or that history vastly predates the historical accounts of many religious texts. The fact that entire cultures rose and fell so long ago might also make us uncomfortable. It reminds us of our collective mortality. I see this with many Americans wanting to pretend that native Americans were just the most primitive hunter-gatherers, not that they had sophisticated cultures with history and ideas... that could vanish in a very short span of time and barely be remembered.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  I think that’s an unfair assessment. It’s difficult for anyone to fundamentally challenge their thought processes with the near absence of facts. When you consider that the flood myth is almost a universal story across cultures, and that human population was dramatically smaller, and left behind little, it’s difficult to Have a position on pre-history. I recall taking classes on this era in college, and the professor spending time talking about what we don’t know — which highlighted the importance of small details of ancient cultures that allow us to infer knowledge. In the last 30-40 years more discoveries have been made that challenge even our understanding of Ancient Greece, we’re learning and eventually people will reach consensus about new discoveries.
- AlotOfReading 6y ago
  It's probably my thread from yesterday you're referring to. There's a pretty big divide here between what archaeologists/anthropologists say to the public and how they interact within their communities. There's a lot of reasons for this that I'm more than happy to go into (e.g. preventing looting, caution about the use of our works to justify bigotry, or simply because there's a lot we don't know). This essentially manifests as "the safest thing to communicate is the basic consensus." It's also the easiest thing to provide layperson accessible resources for. Internally though, the fields are quite aggressive about challenging popular narratives. That's pretty much the best way to make a name as a young researcher and grad classes tend to settle into a debate format, where you take turns trying to rip (sometimes each other's) arguments apart. Secondly, if we're going to point out issues in an entire field, it helps to be specific. No one can actually respond to the assertion that "archaeologists don't talk about things I haven't named." Like, do I list a bunch of things that have been rewritten over time? Finally, archaeology is hard and the record just doesn't answer a lot of the questions we want it to. The field as a whole is moving back from resolving big questions and producing grand narratives to answering little questions and small narratives the record allows us to support. These aren't the things the public asks about, so there's quite a large gap mostly filled by the kind of people too ignorant to realize why there's a gap. The challenge that we need to do a better job filling it was Jared Diamond's most interesting idea, in my opinion.

travisjungroth 6y ago

> It's right there, entirely unseen. I doubt that. I've never heard of an ancient discovery offshore. A thousand years of salt, life and waves will turn most things to mush. These caves do a special job of preserving things. They have little movement, little life and freshwater sections. Edit: I didn’t do a great job of expressing myself. I’m sure that offshore ancient discoveries have happened (as some replies have pointed out). The comment I replied to seemed to be suggesting that all of our ancient history is just waiting to be discovered off the shore. It’s not. In all the diving I’ve done around the world, in all the treasure hunting stories I’ve read, no one has found anything ancient offshore. (And then I learned about some today)

Morizero 6y ago
The Doggerland portion of the North Sea has yielded prehistoric artifacts.
dghughes 6y ago
The Black Sea was flooded when the narrow section of land the Mediterranean from the sea collapsed (possible origin of Great Flood myths) 12,000 years ago. There are many archaeological sites on the now flooded coast many tells and preserved ships due to the cold, oxygen-free, and salt-free freshwater.
bobthepanda 6y ago
Heracleion was the primary Egyptian port before the development of Alexandria, and was discovered offshore of Alexandria in 1999: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracleion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracleion
SenHeng 6y ago
Roman fish farms! https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2016/08/what-roman-ruins-reveal https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2016/08/what-roman-ruins-rev...
detritus 6y ago
I see someone's mentioned Heraklion/Alexandria, as well as Dogger bank in the North Sea - add to the list Dhaskalio in Greece, Yonaguni in Taiwan, Mahabalipuram and Dwarka in India, as well as ruins in Crete and even the Caribbean (can't find link). I think the point I was trying to make is that there clearly are examples and I don't think that we've barely even begun looking. You're right that healthy sea waters aren't ideal for preservation of human-derived metals and organics, but then silting and run-off from tributaries leads to preserving types of environment, sat in geographic areas of interest to humans anyway. That aside, stone - a material much used in ancient times - is fairly durable. When you were diving, were you actively looking for signs of ancient human activity, or might it have entirely slipped you by even if you stared straight at it? I'd suggest the littoral region is the next frontier of archaeology, because clearly a lot of our history was on-shore, and that on-shore is now off-shore... . - ed spelling
- detritus 6y ago
  Moreso: I think when we start digitally encoding these environments - much as we have over ground in South America, using LIDAR to discover previously unseen, but right in-sight structures such as those of the Maya - we'll realise there's a lot of our old culture not far off. Drone submersibles with high resolution sonar doing fully-realised coastal scans would, I'm sure, yield hugely interesting results. - ed: drone wouldn't need to be submersible. that would just be cooler.
  - vidarh 6y ago
    22 years ago I worked on a communications relay app to make up one tiny part of a control system for an autonomous submersible used for mapping. My part was a relatively unimportant add-on - the system relied on a 2400bps acoustic link from the submersible to a small ship that needed to stay right above to get a reliable link. To allow relaying data real-time to shore or a bigger ship nearby I was contracted to write code to pass the data stream reliably over a 9600bps GSM data connection (it was intended for testing and demos in coastal regions, not for production use). Ended up using a slightly modified z-modem protocol that kept the session alive across redial. But the best part of that contract was to get to go out and see the real system in operation. Given what results they had back then I wonder what the state of the art in that field looks like now - the biggest problem with automating this seemed to be the tight tolerances for communication with the submersible. You won't be able to make it small and cheap if it needs to be tethered (dragging a heavy cable), but if untethered like the one I got to see, maintaining a reliable enough and fast enough connection becomes a challenge instead.

api 6y ago

I get the impression archeologists are incredibly resistant to pushing history back or otherwise enlarging it. This resistance seems to go beyond appropriate scientific caution and into the realm of unscientific dogmatism. There was a thread here a few days ago about Graham Hancock. I do think he's a bit of a crank, but I get the sense he gets a lot of traction because he's one of the few who will even talk about certain things. (Reminds me of how the alt-right and even worse ideologues get traction because they are the only ones who will talk about the economic collapse of the American center. Their ideas are bullshit, but everyone else pretends it's not happening.) Other fields of science seem to have no problem with discovering that things are much bigger than they thought. Astronomers discover that they were undercounting the number of galaxies by two logarithmic factors? Neat! Archeologists don't seem to greet enlargement of their domain this way. Maybe it comes from religious and cultural chauvinism or residual religious literalism. Deepening the historical narrative might mean the Mesopotamians were not "first" or that history vastly predates the historical accounts of many religious texts. The fact that entire cultures rose and fell so long ago might also make us uncomfortable. It reminds us of our collective mortality. I see this with many Americans wanting to pretend that native Americans were just the most primitive hunter-gatherers, not that they had sophisticated cultures with history and ideas... that could vanish in a very short span of time and barely be remembered.

Spooky23 6y ago
I think that’s an unfair assessment. It’s difficult for anyone to fundamentally challenge their thought processes with the near absence of facts. When you consider that the flood myth is almost a universal story across cultures, and that human population was dramatically smaller, and left behind little, it’s difficult to Have a position on pre-history. I recall taking classes on this era in college, and the professor spending time talking about what we don’t know — which highlighted the importance of small details of ancient cultures that allow us to infer knowledge. In the last 30-40 years more discoveries have been made that challenge even our understanding of Ancient Greece, we’re learning and eventually people will reach consensus about new discoveries.
AlotOfReading 6y ago
It's probably my thread from yesterday you're referring to. There's a pretty big divide here between what archaeologists/anthropologists say to the public and how they interact within their communities. There's a lot of reasons for this that I'm more than happy to go into (e.g. preventing looting, caution about the use of our works to justify bigotry, or simply because there's a lot we don't know). This essentially manifests as "the safest thing to communicate is the basic consensus." It's also the easiest thing to provide layperson accessible resources for. Internally though, the fields are quite aggressive about challenging popular narratives. That's pretty much the best way to make a name as a young researcher and grad classes tend to settle into a debate format, where you take turns trying to rip (sometimes each other's) arguments apart. Secondly, if we're going to point out issues in an entire field, it helps to be specific. No one can actually respond to the assertion that "archaeologists don't talk about things I haven't named." Like, do I list a bunch of things that have been rewritten over time? Finally, archaeology is hard and the record just doesn't answer a lot of the questions we want it to. The field as a whole is moving back from resolving big questions and producing grand narratives to answering little questions and small narratives the record allows us to support. These aren't the things the public asks about, so there's quite a large gap mostly filled by the kind of people too ignorant to realize why there's a gap. The challenge that we need to do a better job filling it was Jared Diamond's most interesting idea, in my opinion.