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After listening to Dr. Robert M. Schoch on various podcasts, I'm starting to wonder if there could be, or have been, long-dead civilizations for which we have l

After listening to Dr. Robert M. Schoch on various podcasts, I'm starting to wonder if there could be, or have been, long-dead civilizations for which we have little-to-no evidence. This guy isn't a crackpot from some backwater university, this is a Yale-trained Ph.D.. His hypothesis that the Sphinx is actually 12,000 years old would imply that there have been much older civilizations which have died out. Can you build something like the Sphinx without any form of written system at all? I don't honestly know, but my educated guess would be a resounding "no". If that's the case, it throws everything we know about "the Alphabet" up in the air. What if our writing system is actually far, far older than we believe? I don't think its really "important", but its definitely fun to ponder.

varenc 6y ago
He may be a PhD, but his theories are fringe and widely disputed. His dating of the Sphinx seems solely based on certain erosion patterns and are not supported by other evidence. If an unknown long-dead civilization existed, I would think that their writing system and it’s influence would be one of the easiest ways to recognize them. Writing tends to be our best source of information on ancient civilizations. So it’s more plausible to me that if there’s unknown civilizations, then they lacked meaningful use of writing.
- seebetter 6y ago
  Wish I had time to refute your comment.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  > If an unknown long-dead civilization existed, I would think that their writing system and it’s influence would be one of the easiest ways to recognize them. Writing tends to be our best source of information on ancient civilizations. This only works if you actually find the things they wrote. If those works are still trapped in ice or ground somewhere, potentially thousands of feet or more underground, we may never find them. That's even assuming they used writing materials that would be preserved.
  - rmah 6y ago
    Well sure. And there may have been a dino civilization. But without evidence, what's the point of speculating?
    - cbozeman 6y ago
      Okay Dr. Grant, I'm pretty sure the velociraptors didn't have an advanced civilization...
  - wl 6y ago
    And their writings have to survive. Look at Mesopotamia, where writing began with cuneiform impressions in clay. We've got lots of clay tablets because those survive well when buried. When Imperial Aramaic written on parchment began to supplant Akkadian cuneiform, we lose a lot of the written record. It's created an odd situation where the written documentation of the second millennium BCE is often better than the first millennium BCE.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  > He may be a PhD, but his theories are fringe and widely disputed. I forgot that I wanted to mention this... I can't find the video on YouTube - its probably been lost to time, but there was a video where Michael Crichton was speaking to a crowd about scientific truth. I'm going to do my best to recall exactly what Dr. Crichton said, but it was something along the lines of, "The story of plate tectonics really is the story of a single person having it right and everyone else having it wrong." He's referring to Alfred Wegener, of course, who theorized continental drift back in 1912 or so. He was widely mocked and his theory totally rejected by - and it really isn't hyperbole to say this - every single geologist. Sadly, Wegener died long before he would have his theory confirmed.
  - dwohnitmok 6y ago
    > He was widely mocked and his theory totally rejected by - and it really isn't hyperbole to say this - every single geologist. It is hyperbole. It is accurate to say the geological establishment was solidly against Wegener, but it was far from the case that all geologists were against Wegener; he had quite a few supporters (and even more in adjacent scientific communities such as meteorology and climatology). In fact it was a contemporary geologist supporter of the day (the oft-underappreciated Arthur Holmes) that eventually would supply the missing piece of the puzzle, namely the mechanism by which continents would drift. In general I've never really liked the simplified story of continental drift that gets passed around because it ignores the really big stumbling block that Wegener was never able to get around which is that while he was very diligent about noticing similarities between continents he kept proposing wildly impractical mechanisms (e.g. tidal forces) that had implausible empirical predictions (Wegener's estimate of continental drift speed was eventually found to be off by several orders of magnitude). It implicitly peddles the story that Wegener's theory was essentially in complete agreement with empirical observations, but was just blindly rejected by the scientific establishment, which is not true in this case. (There are other more plausible cases where this has happened, but they are usually a tad more subtle.) That is while Wegener's observations were first rate, his theory was deeply flawed, and not just in the way that "all theories are wrong" flawed; it had deep flaws that directly impacted its ability to make useful empirical predictions in the realm it claimed to be applicable. He proposed continental drift but never discovered plate tectonics. Regardless, even though Wegener had an incomplete theory, his preponderance of other evidence is what kept his theory alive and eventually led to the acceptance of continental drift with the rise of plate tectonics in the 50s and 60s.
irrational 6y ago
There is some Harvard professor that believes that Oumuamua is an alien probe. Just being educated at or teaching at an ivy league schools doesn't make you immune from being a crackpot.
- opportune 6y ago
  Well uncynically, a small number of crackpot theories end up being true. Science needs crackpots on some level to drive the truth forward. Cynically, after having already achieved some level of legitimacy, having one or two big crackpot theories is a good way to drum up publicity/notability. If it turns out to be true, you would also be enormously respected and influential. So it’s incentivized by more than just discovering the truth
- anonunivgrad 6y ago
  The pyramids are landing pads for alien spaceships.
User23 6y ago
I know that traditionalist Hindus believe human civilization is much much much older than is generally thought in the West. This doesn’t strike me as impossible. The glaciers would have obliterated all trace of any northern civilizations older than 12000 years for example. Not to mention superstitious successor cultures could plausibly have destroyed artifacts as well.
- AlotOfReading 6y ago
  1) The only places that were completely glaciated during the LGM were Canada and a few bits of Northern Europe, which aren't the kinds of places you'd really expect to see a precursor "civilization". 2) You can still find stuff in previously glaciated areas, under reasonable conditions. I've found artifacts in probable pre-LGM deposits myself. 3) It's very difficult / borderline impossible for human hands to erase entire cultures. North Americans spent centuries eliminating as much native culture as they could, and it's still visible almost everywhere. We'd expect lots of indications to survive, from faunal population estimates, to sophisticated material culture, to simply drawings and other creative works, not to mention houses and infrastructure. These are all things we find for upper pleistocene groups, but not for hypothetical industrial precursors.
  - samatman 6y ago
    A plausible location for a pre-Sumerian agricultural civilization, perhaps the only one, is in what is now the Black Sea. It would of course be easy to have no evidence of this, just like we have very few artifacts of the Doggerlanders. It would also provide a tidy explanation for the widespread myths of catastrophic floods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis
    - AlotOfReading 6y ago
      I've never found that one particularly compelling. Flood myths are common across Africa, Asia, the Americas, and even Australia. There's isn't a reasonable argument to be made that all of these areas were in contact to share stories of this one event.
aardvark179 6y ago
Depends how long dead we’re talking about. You might like this paper[1] which asks what evidence would be left if there had been a pre-human industrial civilisation. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748 https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748
- cbozeman 6y ago
  I would totally love this paper. Thank you so much!
michaelpb 6y ago
Huh, not sure what podcasts you listen to, as I only know him in the context of podcasts by historians that debunk pseudo-history. He's definitely in the "crackpot" camp. Being generous, I'd say he carefully walks a tightrope between "ancient aliens" and real history. My impression is he does the former for $$$ (e.g. he's a co-author of "Lost Secrets of the Gods: [..] Ancient Astronauts" that makes extremely absurd claims to put it mildly), and as soon as he is critiqued by actual experts, he starts wildly walking back his claims or insist that he was misinterpreted or whatever to save face.

varenc 6y ago

He may be a PhD, but his theories are fringe and widely disputed. His dating of the Sphinx seems solely based on certain erosion patterns and are not supported by other evidence. If an unknown long-dead civilization existed, I would think that their writing system and it’s influence would be one of the easiest ways to recognize them. Writing tends to be our best source of information on ancient civilizations. So it’s more plausible to me that if there’s unknown civilizations, then they lacked meaningful use of writing.

seebetter 6y ago
Wish I had time to refute your comment.
cbozeman 6y ago
> If an unknown long-dead civilization existed, I would think that their writing system and it’s influence would be one of the easiest ways to recognize them. Writing tends to be our best source of information on ancient civilizations. This only works if you actually find the things they wrote. If those works are still trapped in ice or ground somewhere, potentially thousands of feet or more underground, we may never find them. That's even assuming they used writing materials that would be preserved.
- rmah 6y ago
  Well sure. And there may have been a dino civilization. But without evidence, what's the point of speculating?
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    Okay Dr. Grant, I'm pretty sure the velociraptors didn't have an advanced civilization...
- wl 6y ago
  And their writings have to survive. Look at Mesopotamia, where writing began with cuneiform impressions in clay. We've got lots of clay tablets because those survive well when buried. When Imperial Aramaic written on parchment began to supplant Akkadian cuneiform, we lose a lot of the written record. It's created an odd situation where the written documentation of the second millennium BCE is often better than the first millennium BCE.
cbozeman 6y ago
> He may be a PhD, but his theories are fringe and widely disputed. I forgot that I wanted to mention this... I can't find the video on YouTube - its probably been lost to time, but there was a video where Michael Crichton was speaking to a crowd about scientific truth. I'm going to do my best to recall exactly what Dr. Crichton said, but it was something along the lines of, "The story of plate tectonics really is the story of a single person having it right and everyone else having it wrong." He's referring to Alfred Wegener, of course, who theorized continental drift back in 1912 or so. He was widely mocked and his theory totally rejected by - and it really isn't hyperbole to say this - every single geologist. Sadly, Wegener died long before he would have his theory confirmed.
- dwohnitmok 6y ago
  > He was widely mocked and his theory totally rejected by - and it really isn't hyperbole to say this - every single geologist. It is hyperbole. It is accurate to say the geological establishment was solidly against Wegener, but it was far from the case that all geologists were against Wegener; he had quite a few supporters (and even more in adjacent scientific communities such as meteorology and climatology). In fact it was a contemporary geologist supporter of the day (the oft-underappreciated Arthur Holmes) that eventually would supply the missing piece of the puzzle, namely the mechanism by which continents would drift. In general I've never really liked the simplified story of continental drift that gets passed around because it ignores the really big stumbling block that Wegener was never able to get around which is that while he was very diligent about noticing similarities between continents he kept proposing wildly impractical mechanisms (e.g. tidal forces) that had implausible empirical predictions (Wegener's estimate of continental drift speed was eventually found to be off by several orders of magnitude). It implicitly peddles the story that Wegener's theory was essentially in complete agreement with empirical observations, but was just blindly rejected by the scientific establishment, which is not true in this case. (There are other more plausible cases where this has happened, but they are usually a tad more subtle.) That is while Wegener's observations were first rate, his theory was deeply flawed, and not just in the way that "all theories are wrong" flawed; it had deep flaws that directly impacted its ability to make useful empirical predictions in the realm it claimed to be applicable. He proposed continental drift but never discovered plate tectonics. Regardless, even though Wegener had an incomplete theory, his preponderance of other evidence is what kept his theory alive and eventually led to the acceptance of continental drift with the rise of plate tectonics in the 50s and 60s.

irrational 6y ago

There is some Harvard professor that believes that Oumuamua is an alien probe. Just being educated at or teaching at an ivy league schools doesn't make you immune from being a crackpot.

opportune 6y ago
Well uncynically, a small number of crackpot theories end up being true. Science needs crackpots on some level to drive the truth forward. Cynically, after having already achieved some level of legitimacy, having one or two big crackpot theories is a good way to drum up publicity/notability. If it turns out to be true, you would also be enormously respected and influential. So it’s incentivized by more than just discovering the truth
anonunivgrad 6y ago
The pyramids are landing pads for alien spaceships.

User23 6y ago

I know that traditionalist Hindus believe human civilization is much much much older than is generally thought in the West. This doesn’t strike me as impossible. The glaciers would have obliterated all trace of any northern civilizations older than 12000 years for example. Not to mention superstitious successor cultures could plausibly have destroyed artifacts as well.

AlotOfReading 6y ago
1) The only places that were completely glaciated during the LGM were Canada and a few bits of Northern Europe, which aren't the kinds of places you'd really expect to see a precursor "civilization". 2) You can still find stuff in previously glaciated areas, under reasonable conditions. I've found artifacts in probable pre-LGM deposits myself. 3) It's very difficult / borderline impossible for human hands to erase entire cultures. North Americans spent centuries eliminating as much native culture as they could, and it's still visible almost everywhere. We'd expect lots of indications to survive, from faunal population estimates, to sophisticated material culture, to simply drawings and other creative works, not to mention houses and infrastructure. These are all things we find for upper pleistocene groups, but not for hypothetical industrial precursors.
- samatman 6y ago
  A plausible location for a pre-Sumerian agricultural civilization, perhaps the only one, is in what is now the Black Sea. It would of course be easy to have no evidence of this, just like we have very few artifacts of the Doggerlanders. It would also provide a tidy explanation for the widespread myths of catastrophic floods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis
  - AlotOfReading 6y ago
    I've never found that one particularly compelling. Flood myths are common across Africa, Asia, the Americas, and even Australia. There's isn't a reasonable argument to be made that all of these areas were in contact to share stories of this one event.

aardvark179 6y ago

Depends how long dead we’re talking about. You might like this paper[1] which asks what evidence would be left if there had been a pre-human industrial civilisation. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748 https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748

cbozeman 6y ago
I would totally love this paper. Thank you so much!

michaelpb 6y ago

Huh, not sure what podcasts you listen to, as I only know him in the context of podcasts by historians that debunk pseudo-history. He's definitely in the "crackpot" camp. Being generous, I'd say he carefully walks a tightrope between "ancient aliens" and real history. My impression is he does the former for $$$ (e.g. he's a co-author of "Lost Secrets of the Gods: [..] Ancient Astronauts" that makes extremely absurd claims to put it mildly), and as soon as he is critiqued by actual experts, he starts wildly walking back his claims or insist that he was misinterpreted or whatever to save face.