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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 ex
by 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 agoA 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 agoI'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.
- User23 6y ago> 3) ... We're not talking about time scales of a few centuries though. We're talking about hypothetical civilizations potentially dating back to the evolution of modern homo sapiens, which is now believed to at least be over 300,000 years ago[1]. I honestly don't see how this could plausibly be falsified, since an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and an awful lot of entropy can happen in a hundred thousand years or more. I'm content to idly muse about it though. [1] https://www.britannica.com/story/just-how-old-is-homo-sapiens https://www.britannica.com/story/just-how-old-is-homo-sapien...
- AlotOfReading 6y agoAre you suggesting that glaciers in Northern Europe eradicated material culture in Africa? This is very much at odds with your previous post.