12 ms·

I think it’s pretty clear that sophisticated societies existed long before recorded history. They may not have had the tools of working with metal, but they def

I think it’s pretty clear that sophisticated societies existed long before recorded history. They may not have had the tools of working with metal, but they definitely had sophisticated philosophical views and moral frameworks. I would bet this goes back even 30-50 thousand years. This idea that humanity sprang up out of nothing in Sumerian/Babylon is very contrived. There was an ice age ten thousand years ago, the cessation of which caused the floods, which destroyed large swaths of human “civilization”

arbitrage 5y ago
Your suppositions are interesting, but there's simply no proof of them.
- Naga 5y ago
  Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Unfortunately most of the (probable) evidence is under meters of water and mud.
  - LeanderK 5y ago
    But also untouched. Maybe we'll find a way to dig up evidence in the future...
  - judahmeek 5y ago
    Is there such a thing as "evidence of absence"?
    - imtringued 5y ago
      It's called a contradiction and it can only exist in the realms of logic.
    - earleybird 5y ago
      I'm thinking that would be demonstrating that there cannot be evidence.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - throwaway5752 5y ago
    As long as it has been investigated scientifically, then "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is actually not correct. To my understanding that is exactly how particle physics research is conducted. My understanding is that there is no evidence for pre-historic human societies that had advanced technologies. We have hard data in our genetics for the timeframes of human existence (statistical rate of random genetic drift vs nearest ancestors) in addition to the fossil record, we have good information from ice cores about when/what of particulates were in the atmosphere, we know general rates of tectonic movements , and it's easy to observe what's under kilometers of strata with drilling cores if anyone has a good hypothesis as to where to drill.
- TSiege 5y ago
  Why is the default assumption that since we can't prove humans had sophisticated and complex lives comparable to our own, that we must assume they are simpletons. Their minds were no less capable of our own, why shouldn't we assume they had complex morals and social structures?
  - jpollock 5y ago
    Because that's how we differentiate science from theology.
    - mynameisvlad 5y ago
      Hard disagree here. There's a lot of differences between science and theology. There is nothing divine or holy about potential past civilizations.
      - jpollock 5y ago
        Divine/Holy are how powerful people prevent others from questioning things. I didn't mention Divine or Holy, just theology. The core difference between Science and Theology is how they deal with statements of "truth" without evidence. Theology starts with "it's true because I said so" Science starts with "it's true because I can demonstrate it" That humans were complex in the past is a good hypothesis. It needs evidence before it can be accepted as fact, or even necessarily expect respect from others. The lack of recent skull changes would seem to be a good start. If someone believes the hypothesis to be true, they will go explore and find evidence to back their claims. If there was a complex society in the English Channel, it's likely well preserved, just waiting to be found!
        QuarterReptile 5y ago
        >Theology starts with "it's true because I said so" To believe this is to cut yourself off from an unfathomably rich collection of human knowledge, and it is sad to see someone committed to it.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
  And in the absence of proof, the simplest assumption would be that humans then were just as human, and so had sophisticated societies etc.
  - chucksmash 5y ago
    A simpler alternative assumption could be this: 1. sophistication is driven by specialization 2. the ability to specialize is driven by access to surplus energy 3. before the advent of agriculture bands of humans simply did not have the excess calories available to them to support a priesthood and philosophers and bureaucrats, etc.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
      > sophistication is driven by specialization Sophisticated technology is driven that way for sure, Sophisticated culture, I would argue, does not have those preconditions.
    - Planktonne 5y ago
      That is definitively not a simpler assumption. Each of those bullet points is itself a new assumption.
    - qwytw 5y ago
      Or maybe they simply choose to not spend those excess calories on philosophers and bureaucrats because doing so provided no immediate benefit? We have evidence showing that the rise of civilization and agriculture were a net negative for an average individual. It seems that at least in Egypt and Mesopotamia climate change, specifically an end of warmer and wetter climatic cycle, is what pushed people into fertile river valley. Most people would had probably preferred to remain hunter gatherers had that been possible or even independent farmers (which is what happened in the rest of the world. The people in Mesopotamia (and in other similar areas which were slowly turning into a desert) didn't really have a choice. Building and maintaining irrigation systems takes a lot of people and coordination. Since most would probably prefer to be the ones handling 'coordination' aspect rather than digging trenches in the mud priests and philosopher classes had to appear to maintain social cohesion. It's much easier to convince peasants to give X% their harvest to the local strongman when they know that he's an divinely appointed king or maybe even a living god himself.
- greatpostman 5y ago
  Actually I think platos account of Atlantis and how it coincides with the dates of the flood is evidence. How could he have known the exact years back of the flood? Sure it’s shaky, but the geology checks out.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  There's actually pretty solid archaeological evidence of at least the cognitive capacities which would prefigure in civilisation through toolmaking and their complexity. This is a long but highly informative presentation by Sander van der Leeuw from 2012: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=pOyQqPi28ug https://yewtu.be/watch?v=pOyQqPi28ug Relevant segment begins at about 8m30s.
vmception 5y ago
The ice age itself would have had glaciers grinding down all evidence to nothing. Even our metal based structures would not withstand it very well over a few thousand years. I agree that it doesn't make sense for there to be a single 6,000 year time period of human prosperity and collaboration, its much more likely that there have been multiple periods over a 200,000 time span. Perhaps some traits in humans continually set us back to a rudimentary lifestyle with thinned populations.
- 7speter 5y ago
  A good chance that the glaciers might have also grounded whole societies as well
  - vmception 5y ago
    Oh yes, any number of things could be less conducive to human life or a large population. I’m just thinking war tactics and war machines keep it in check too.
  - saalweachter 5y ago
    Eh, that doesn't get you much. Glaciers weigh heavy on the minds of North Americans and Northern Europeans, but they didn't reach much further -- no civilization south of, say, 40N would be obliterated by the glaciers themselves such that we would expect no trace to remain today. Sea level change would be a bigger global risk, but aside from sudden flooding, you would expect that to just push back an established civilization to the uplands of their territories rather than wiping them out root and branch.
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      The fact that civilisations tend to cluster near shorelines and waterways means that the impacts of sea level rise would likely be quite significant. Particularly at eliminating incidental traces of, say, groups or cultures migrating along such coastlines. I suspect virtually all of the early migrations of native Americans would be so affected, especially along the west coast of the Americas.
mc32 5y ago
We can only go by what we know and what we have evidence for. Sure, other small civs likely existed, but we don't have known evidence of them and their history, etc. At most we have tombs and archeological ruins to go by. So we go with the earliest civs for whom we have written evidence as well as lots of physical evidence for in addition to present-day influence. Otherwise things start to get very speculative.
- animal_spirits 5y ago
  Yeah we shouldn't say we "know" that advanced civilizations existed, but there's nothing wrong with hypothesizing that they did. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
  - donkeybeer 5y ago
    But we must also be careful not to get into Russel's teapot territory in the course of our hypothesizing.
- newsclues 5y ago
  Plato wrote about it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timaeus_(dialogue) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timaeus_(dialogue) “Let me begin by observing, first of all, that nine thousand was the sum of years which had elapsed since the war which was said to have taken place between all those who dwelt outside the Pillars of Heracles and those who dwelt within them: this war I am now to describe. Of the combatants on the one side the city of Athens was reported to have been the ruler, and to have directed the contest; the combatants on the other side were led by the kings of the islands of Atlantis,”
- robonerd 5y ago
  > We can only go by what we know and what we have evidence for There is nuance here, in the degree to which uncertainty due to lack of evidence is surfaced in scientific communications for the public. Take for instance, the behavior of dogs. Science cannot [yet] objectively answer the question of how much the subjective qualia of a dog is comparable to the qualia of humans. What then can we say about whether dogs feel 'love'? Some might say that science has not yet answered this question; that is fine. But others get overeager and assert that because science hasn't demonstrated that dogs feel love, the scientific position is to assume all apparent demonstrations of love from dogs are little more than elaborate food seeking behavior. This goes too far, it assumes a lack of evidence is evidence to the contrary, implicitly treating science as complete until proven otherwise. I think this overzealous sort of 'scientific' thinking reflects a dogmatic attitude which is actually antithetical to the real scientific method.
dgellow 5y ago
> This idea that humanity sprang up out of nothing in Sumerian/Babylon is very contrived. I don't think anyone believe that's the case? It's just what we have records for. You need a lot of prior development to arrive to the point where you have recorded history.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  Eh, maybe no one who's thought critically about it, but past the "earth is 6,000 years old" crowd I think you'll find a "cilization is 10,000 years old, before which we were hunter gatherers" crowd
  - bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
    I think most people are just repeating what they learned as children and haven't given it much more thought. So the answer is usually some combination of religious influences, when you were schooled, and what textbook your teacher was using. In 2008, this is what a certain group in Hollywood thought 10,000 B.C. was like... anachronisms and all.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10,000_BC_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10,000_BC_(film)
fsloth 5y ago
I warmly recommend to anyone interested in this line of thought James Scott's "Against the grain" for oldest evidence of the first agrarian states in the middle east. "Against the grain" points out that it's not obvious as number of people increases everyone wants to live in cities ruled over and taxed by someone else. "I think it’s pretty clear that sophisticated societies existed long before recorded history." If you mean beyond 12k years or so I would not say it's "pretty clear". I would go as far and say it's psychologically and biologically feasible, but we have no evidence to back this up. What archaeological evidence does prove, is that arrival of anything resembling civilization was a shambolic affair lasting thousands of years, composed of waxing and waning city-sized polities that could at maximum control only few tens of square kilometers of area. What we do have are sites like Göbekli Tepe at max 12 000 years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe The arrival of agricultural plants is around the same time during Neolithic Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution I think you would need to expand on the meaning of "sophisticated". I don't want to presume your intent with the use of this word. But, a hunter gatherer society looks quite a lot different from an agricultural society. Of course the people living in a hunter gatherer society could very well be artistically and philosophically very developed. But the likelihood of an "Atlantean supercivilization" would be very small. I think both options are pretty cool. As a species we have a history of 200 000 years. Either our past is riddled with complex emergent societies that have been ground to dust, forgotten, only for the cycle to start again a new over and over again over thousands of years. And only on our current cycle we've managed to start to reach the full potential of our species. Or, there have not been "civilizational cycles" which would make our anthropocene epoch with it's industrialization and science something even more mind blowingly astonishing. Both options are humbling.
- galaxyLogic 5y ago
  Isn't the theory that agriculture meant some book-keeping was needed, to keep track of the seasons and when to plant. This book-keeping then caused the development of writing in general. And writing caused the birth of inter-generational memory and the ability to accumulate knowledge. Of course oral histories can be cross-generational as well, but writing is much more efficient storage medium than human brain alone. Writing allows human brains to co-operate over vast geographical distances and time-scales.
drewcoo 5y ago
Civilization means people living in cities. To do that, agriculture is probably needed. There's also probably some level of specialization and accompanying social stratification. History is written records. There were many prehistoric societies, but because civilization tended to have some form of written records, the prehistoric societies are not considered civilizations. No scholars would clai that humanity sprang out of nothing in those places. I mostly hear that from bible literalists. But if some of their people weren't in cities, the society was not civilized. And if there was nobody to write about them they were prehistoric.
- MisterTea 5y ago
  > There were many prehistoric societies, but because civilization tended to have some form of written records, the prehistoric societies are not considered civilizations. What about cave paintings?
  - pas 5y ago
    That's archeology or something, not real history :)
    - usrusr 5y ago
      It's the threshold between "how much do we trust the author?" and the blanket claim of "used for ceremonial purpose" whenever something isn't entirely obvious. Yes, it's a real distinction. Archeologists and historians don't consider themselves one group at all.
  - jl6 5y ago
    I personally find cave paintings to be compelling evidence for a behaviourally modern mind. They demonstrate great skill. The artists did not live in cities or have agriculture or writing, but I have little doubt that they perceived the world as we do, and were capable of essentially the same speech and thought patterns as we are. It’s an awe-inspiring tragedy and mystery that those lives were lived in a manner so unknown to us, and yet potentially so relatable to us. They absolutely would have had conversations around campfires. Talking about what, I wonder?
HuShifang 5y ago
On the flip side, let's also not forget that the earliest civilizations (so to speak) were also rather different from later ones in some striking ways. Put simply, they were a lot more literal-minded, and didn't engage in as much abstraction as did their descendents. Ancient fertility statues (even as late as classical Greece and Rome) are grotesquely over-endowed; ritual sacrifices of food and symbolic objects have in many places taken the place of sacrificed slaves or wives. Mesopotamian city states would fight wars because, like a frat prank, one would steal a statue of a god like Marduk from the other's temple -- only, there was no notion that it was a statue, rather it was the god. Early Egyptian murals speak to the power of kings by showing piles of dicks their soldiers had cut off of defeated enemies (unlike Egyptians they were uncircumcised). And there's the whole mummification thing, which betrays a certain literal-mindedness about immortality. So yeah, it's a spectrum - but both before and after the "rise of civilization"
- Ar-Curunir 5y ago
  This seems like unjustified speculation; people could look at e.g. people leaving cookies and milk out on Christmas Eve as an example of how modern Americans are poor at abstraction and have to give literal offerings to their god Santa Claus. AFAWK there has been no significant change in the anatomy of humans in the past 200k years, and similarly nothing to indicate that we’ve had major changes in things like our ability to abstract. The bicameral theory of mind has been thoroughly discredited.
  - HuShifang 5y ago
    You can always find examples of irrational behavior, but the difference is scale. Today a major state isn't spending inordinate resources to ensure that the cookies left for Santa are prepared using the finest ingredients (say, a few million dollars' worth of gold) by the most accomplished bakers, and then placed on a dish so large that it can be seen from space (and hundreds or thousands of people died making it). If you can show me the tomb of a prominent world leader from the last, let's say, 500 years that's decorated with images of his/her enemies' severed genitalia, I'll concede the point.
api 5y ago
This fits a pattern in science: the further we look, the more we find. First we thought the Earth was the center of the universe. Then we thought it was just our solar system. Then we thought the Milky Way Galaxy was the whole of the universe. Some astronomers persisted in this belief all the way up to the 1920s. Now... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field#Hubble_eXtreme_Deep_Field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field#Hubble... ... and we've just launched the JWST which will be able to see a lot further than Hubble. Gobekli Tepe pushed the date for civilization back a few thousand years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe It'll probably get pushed back some more. Also I've always thought there are too many flood myths around the world for it to be chance. No I don't think there was a true global flood since it makes no sense, but the end of the ice age would have brought sea level rise and enormous regional floods due to things like the bursting of glacial dams. This would have occurred over the same period of time across the world, leaving behind traces in myth and legend but also physically destroying a lot of evidence of civilizations in the path of these disasters.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

arbitrage 5y ago

Your suppositions are interesting, but there's simply no proof of them.

Naga 5y ago
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Unfortunately most of the (probable) evidence is under meters of water and mud.
- LeanderK 5y ago
  But also untouched. Maybe we'll find a way to dig up evidence in the future...
- judahmeek 5y ago
  Is there such a thing as "evidence of absence"?
  - imtringued 5y ago
    It's called a contradiction and it can only exist in the realms of logic.
  - earleybird 5y ago
    I'm thinking that would be demonstrating that there cannot be evidence.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway5752 5y ago
  As long as it has been investigated scientifically, then "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is actually not correct. To my understanding that is exactly how particle physics research is conducted. My understanding is that there is no evidence for pre-historic human societies that had advanced technologies. We have hard data in our genetics for the timeframes of human existence (statistical rate of random genetic drift vs nearest ancestors) in addition to the fossil record, we have good information from ice cores about when/what of particulates were in the atmosphere, we know general rates of tectonic movements , and it's easy to observe what's under kilometers of strata with drilling cores if anyone has a good hypothesis as to where to drill.
TSiege 5y ago
Why is the default assumption that since we can't prove humans had sophisticated and complex lives comparable to our own, that we must assume they are simpletons. Their minds were no less capable of our own, why shouldn't we assume they had complex morals and social structures?
- jpollock 5y ago
  Because that's how we differentiate science from theology.
  - mynameisvlad 5y ago
    Hard disagree here. There's a lot of differences between science and theology. There is nothing divine or holy about potential past civilizations.
    - jpollock 5y ago
      Divine/Holy are how powerful people prevent others from questioning things. I didn't mention Divine or Holy, just theology. The core difference between Science and Theology is how they deal with statements of "truth" without evidence. Theology starts with "it's true because I said so" Science starts with "it's true because I can demonstrate it" That humans were complex in the past is a good hypothesis. It needs evidence before it can be accepted as fact, or even necessarily expect respect from others. The lack of recent skull changes would seem to be a good start. If someone believes the hypothesis to be true, they will go explore and find evidence to back their claims. If there was a complex society in the English Channel, it's likely well preserved, just waiting to be found!
      - QuarterReptile 5y ago
        >Theology starts with "it's true because I said so" To believe this is to cut yourself off from an unfathomably rich collection of human knowledge, and it is sad to see someone committed to it.
SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
And in the absence of proof, the simplest assumption would be that humans then were just as human, and so had sophisticated societies etc.
- chucksmash 5y ago
  A simpler alternative assumption could be this: 1. sophistication is driven by specialization 2. the ability to specialize is driven by access to surplus energy 3. before the advent of agriculture bands of humans simply did not have the excess calories available to them to support a priesthood and philosophers and bureaucrats, etc.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
    > sophistication is driven by specialization Sophisticated technology is driven that way for sure, Sophisticated culture, I would argue, does not have those preconditions.
  - Planktonne 5y ago
    That is definitively not a simpler assumption. Each of those bullet points is itself a new assumption.
  - qwytw 5y ago
    Or maybe they simply choose to not spend those excess calories on philosophers and bureaucrats because doing so provided no immediate benefit? We have evidence showing that the rise of civilization and agriculture were a net negative for an average individual. It seems that at least in Egypt and Mesopotamia climate change, specifically an end of warmer and wetter climatic cycle, is what pushed people into fertile river valley. Most people would had probably preferred to remain hunter gatherers had that been possible or even independent farmers (which is what happened in the rest of the world. The people in Mesopotamia (and in other similar areas which were slowly turning into a desert) didn't really have a choice. Building and maintaining irrigation systems takes a lot of people and coordination. Since most would probably prefer to be the ones handling 'coordination' aspect rather than digging trenches in the mud priests and philosopher classes had to appear to maintain social cohesion. It's much easier to convince peasants to give X% their harvest to the local strongman when they know that he's an divinely appointed king or maybe even a living god himself.
greatpostman 5y ago
Actually I think platos account of Atlantis and how it coincides with the dates of the flood is evidence. How could he have known the exact years back of the flood? Sure it’s shaky, but the geology checks out.
dredmorbius 5y ago
There's actually pretty solid archaeological evidence of at least the cognitive capacities which would prefigure in civilisation through toolmaking and their complexity. This is a long but highly informative presentation by Sander van der Leeuw from 2012: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=pOyQqPi28ug https://yewtu.be/watch?v=pOyQqPi28ug Relevant segment begins at about 8m30s.

vmception 5y ago

The ice age itself would have had glaciers grinding down all evidence to nothing. Even our metal based structures would not withstand it very well over a few thousand years. I agree that it doesn't make sense for there to be a single 6,000 year time period of human prosperity and collaboration, its much more likely that there have been multiple periods over a 200,000 time span. Perhaps some traits in humans continually set us back to a rudimentary lifestyle with thinned populations.

7speter 5y ago
A good chance that the glaciers might have also grounded whole societies as well
- vmception 5y ago
  Oh yes, any number of things could be less conducive to human life or a large population. I’m just thinking war tactics and war machines keep it in check too.
- saalweachter 5y ago
  Eh, that doesn't get you much. Glaciers weigh heavy on the minds of North Americans and Northern Europeans, but they didn't reach much further -- no civilization south of, say, 40N would be obliterated by the glaciers themselves such that we would expect no trace to remain today. Sea level change would be a bigger global risk, but aside from sudden flooding, you would expect that to just push back an established civilization to the uplands of their territories rather than wiping them out root and branch.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    The fact that civilisations tend to cluster near shorelines and waterways means that the impacts of sea level rise would likely be quite significant. Particularly at eliminating incidental traces of, say, groups or cultures migrating along such coastlines. I suspect virtually all of the early migrations of native Americans would be so affected, especially along the west coast of the Americas.

mc32 5y ago

We can only go by what we know and what we have evidence for. Sure, other small civs likely existed, but we don't have known evidence of them and their history, etc. At most we have tombs and archeological ruins to go by. So we go with the earliest civs for whom we have written evidence as well as lots of physical evidence for in addition to present-day influence. Otherwise things start to get very speculative.

animal_spirits 5y ago
Yeah we shouldn't say we "know" that advanced civilizations existed, but there's nothing wrong with hypothesizing that they did. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
- donkeybeer 5y ago
  But we must also be careful not to get into Russel's teapot territory in the course of our hypothesizing.
newsclues 5y ago
Plato wrote about it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timaeus_(dialogue) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timaeus_(dialogue) “Let me begin by observing, first of all, that nine thousand was the sum of years which had elapsed since the war which was said to have taken place between all those who dwelt outside the Pillars of Heracles and those who dwelt within them: this war I am now to describe. Of the combatants on the one side the city of Athens was reported to have been the ruler, and to have directed the contest; the combatants on the other side were led by the kings of the islands of Atlantis,”
robonerd 5y ago
> We can only go by what we know and what we have evidence for There is nuance here, in the degree to which uncertainty due to lack of evidence is surfaced in scientific communications for the public. Take for instance, the behavior of dogs. Science cannot [yet] objectively answer the question of how much the subjective qualia of a dog is comparable to the qualia of humans. What then can we say about whether dogs feel 'love'? Some might say that science has not yet answered this question; that is fine. But others get overeager and assert that because science hasn't demonstrated that dogs feel love, the scientific position is to assume all apparent demonstrations of love from dogs are little more than elaborate food seeking behavior. This goes too far, it assumes a lack of evidence is evidence to the contrary, implicitly treating science as complete until proven otherwise. I think this overzealous sort of 'scientific' thinking reflects a dogmatic attitude which is actually antithetical to the real scientific method.

dgellow 5y ago

> This idea that humanity sprang up out of nothing in Sumerian/Babylon is very contrived. I don't think anyone believe that's the case? It's just what we have records for. You need a lot of prior development to arrive to the point where you have recorded history.

jazzyjackson 5y ago
Eh, maybe no one who's thought critically about it, but past the "earth is 6,000 years old" crowd I think you'll find a "cilization is 10,000 years old, before which we were hunter gatherers" crowd
- bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
  I think most people are just repeating what they learned as children and haven't given it much more thought. So the answer is usually some combination of religious influences, when you were schooled, and what textbook your teacher was using. In 2008, this is what a certain group in Hollywood thought 10,000 B.C. was like... anachronisms and all.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10,000_BC_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10,000_BC_(film)

fsloth 5y ago

I warmly recommend to anyone interested in this line of thought James Scott's "Against the grain" for oldest evidence of the first agrarian states in the middle east. "Against the grain" points out that it's not obvious as number of people increases everyone wants to live in cities ruled over and taxed by someone else. "I think it’s pretty clear that sophisticated societies existed long before recorded history." If you mean beyond 12k years or so I would not say it's "pretty clear". I would go as far and say it's psychologically and biologically feasible, but we have no evidence to back this up. What archaeological evidence does prove, is that arrival of anything resembling civilization was a shambolic affair lasting thousands of years, composed of waxing and waning city-sized polities that could at maximum control only few tens of square kilometers of area. What we do have are sites like Göbekli Tepe at max 12 000 years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe The arrival of agricultural plants is around the same time during Neolithic Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution I think you would need to expand on the meaning of "sophisticated". I don't want to presume your intent with the use of this word. But, a hunter gatherer society looks quite a lot different from an agricultural society. Of course the people living in a hunter gatherer society could very well be artistically and philosophically very developed. But the likelihood of an "Atlantean supercivilization" would be very small. I think both options are pretty cool. As a species we have a history of 200 000 years. Either our past is riddled with complex emergent societies that have been ground to dust, forgotten, only for the cycle to start again a new over and over again over thousands of years. And only on our current cycle we've managed to start to reach the full potential of our species. Or, there have not been "civilizational cycles" which would make our anthropocene epoch with it's industrialization and science something even more mind blowingly astonishing. Both options are humbling.

galaxyLogic 5y ago
Isn't the theory that agriculture meant some book-keeping was needed, to keep track of the seasons and when to plant. This book-keeping then caused the development of writing in general. And writing caused the birth of inter-generational memory and the ability to accumulate knowledge. Of course oral histories can be cross-generational as well, but writing is much more efficient storage medium than human brain alone. Writing allows human brains to co-operate over vast geographical distances and time-scales.

drewcoo 5y ago

Civilization means people living in cities. To do that, agriculture is probably needed. There's also probably some level of specialization and accompanying social stratification. History is written records. There were many prehistoric societies, but because civilization tended to have some form of written records, the prehistoric societies are not considered civilizations. No scholars would clai that humanity sprang out of nothing in those places. I mostly hear that from bible literalists. But if some of their people weren't in cities, the society was not civilized. And if there was nobody to write about them they were prehistoric.

MisterTea 5y ago
> There were many prehistoric societies, but because civilization tended to have some form of written records, the prehistoric societies are not considered civilizations. What about cave paintings?
- pas 5y ago
  That's archeology or something, not real history :)
  - usrusr 5y ago
    It's the threshold between "how much do we trust the author?" and the blanket claim of "used for ceremonial purpose" whenever something isn't entirely obvious. Yes, it's a real distinction. Archeologists and historians don't consider themselves one group at all.
- jl6 5y ago
  I personally find cave paintings to be compelling evidence for a behaviourally modern mind. They demonstrate great skill. The artists did not live in cities or have agriculture or writing, but I have little doubt that they perceived the world as we do, and were capable of essentially the same speech and thought patterns as we are. It’s an awe-inspiring tragedy and mystery that those lives were lived in a manner so unknown to us, and yet potentially so relatable to us. They absolutely would have had conversations around campfires. Talking about what, I wonder?

HuShifang 5y ago

On the flip side, let's also not forget that the earliest civilizations (so to speak) were also rather different from later ones in some striking ways. Put simply, they were a lot more literal-minded, and didn't engage in as much abstraction as did their descendents. Ancient fertility statues (even as late as classical Greece and Rome) are grotesquely over-endowed; ritual sacrifices of food and symbolic objects have in many places taken the place of sacrificed slaves or wives. Mesopotamian city states would fight wars because, like a frat prank, one would steal a statue of a god like Marduk from the other's temple -- only, there was no notion that it was a statue, rather it was the god. Early Egyptian murals speak to the power of kings by showing piles of dicks their soldiers had cut off of defeated enemies (unlike Egyptians they were uncircumcised). And there's the whole mummification thing, which betrays a certain literal-mindedness about immortality. So yeah, it's a spectrum - but both before and after the "rise of civilization"

Ar-Curunir 5y ago
This seems like unjustified speculation; people could look at e.g. people leaving cookies and milk out on Christmas Eve as an example of how modern Americans are poor at abstraction and have to give literal offerings to their god Santa Claus. AFAWK there has been no significant change in the anatomy of humans in the past 200k years, and similarly nothing to indicate that we’ve had major changes in things like our ability to abstract. The bicameral theory of mind has been thoroughly discredited.
- HuShifang 5y ago
  You can always find examples of irrational behavior, but the difference is scale. Today a major state isn't spending inordinate resources to ensure that the cookies left for Santa are prepared using the finest ingredients (say, a few million dollars' worth of gold) by the most accomplished bakers, and then placed on a dish so large that it can be seen from space (and hundreds or thousands of people died making it). If you can show me the tomb of a prominent world leader from the last, let's say, 500 years that's decorated with images of his/her enemies' severed genitalia, I'll concede the point.

api 5y ago

This fits a pattern in science: the further we look, the more we find. First we thought the Earth was the center of the universe. Then we thought it was just our solar system. Then we thought the Milky Way Galaxy was the whole of the universe. Some astronomers persisted in this belief all the way up to the 1920s. Now... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field#Hubble_eXtreme_Deep_Field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field#Hubble... ... and we've just launched the JWST which will be able to see a lot further than Hubble. Gobekli Tepe pushed the date for civilization back a few thousand years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe It'll probably get pushed back some more. Also I've always thought there are too many flood myths around the world for it to be chance. No I don't think there was a true global flood since it makes no sense, but the end of the ice age would have brought sea level rise and enormous regional floods due to things like the bursting of glacial dams. This would have occurred over the same period of time across the world, leaving behind traces in myth and legend but also physically destroying a lot of evidence of civilizations in the path of these disasters.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]