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This is a hard subject to discuss because there’s a ton of fud and unintellectual nonsense (e.g. people who want hyperborea or Atlantis to have been real indust
by edgyquant 4y ago
This is a hard subject to discuss because there’s a ton of fud and unintellectual nonsense (e.g. people who want hyperborea or Atlantis to have been real industrial civilizations.)
There probably wasn’t some industrial level civilization as we know it. But there’s 200,000 years of human history and the there was another ~20ky period like ours 120,000 years ago in between ice ages. Humans migrated across the old world at this time and they likely had societies we’ll never know about.
I try to envision ways they could have achieved cool tech but primitive. So maybe there was no industrial civilization but maybe some mystic religious society devised some way to do computation (if we really wanted to we can build do computation with water and irrigation) and learned a ton about the universe.
My hot take is we do man a disservice by saying civilization began with writing. There were certainly societies that learned lots of truths about the universe and passed them on via memes and superstitions.
- acegopher 4y agoI've often wondered... what is the most advanced civilization (human or not) that could have existed some number of years back and not left evidence, or the evidence was destroyed through natural processes, or the evidence would remain in places we can't/haven't discovered? Conversely, at each known stage of human civilization, how long will it be before evidence of that civilization becomes unknowable through future archaeology?
- aaaaaaaaata 4y agoThese "jungle people" don't need to clock in to a single desk to get their food/do day to day, or have their leisure conversations captured by a friend-wielded listening device. They seem like the natural frontrunner, in my eyes.
- JoeyJoJoJr 4y agoI wonder what they would think about my eyes becoming short sighted because I stare at a computer screen all day, or my neck aches because I sit in a chair in a room all day.
- corpMaverick 4y agoIMHO, any civilization that advances to the industrial era would be leaving artifacts all over the world. It wouldn't be confined to an island or a region in a continent.
- corrral 4y agoWe've recovered air trapped in ice cores up to 2 million years old. Odds are if there had been an advanced ancient civilization of any size (and an advanced one is going to tend to be large) and for any length of time, they'd have done quite a bit of lead smelting (lead's really useful and super-easy to smelt... shame it's poisonous), and we'd see it in the ice core record. Let alone something like fossil fuel use. Plus probably dozens of other markers of iron-age industry or later, that I don't know about. I very much doubt any very-ancient humans/hominids got past Bronze Age tech, at best. If I had to place a bet on it, I'd bet against them having gotten past stone-age tech at all. I think we'd see evidence of it.
- cogman10 4y agoAny civ that discovers iron smelting leaves land scars that are easy to recognize. Charcoal and iron mining is simply highly visible.
- bcrosby95 4y agoReminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis
- krisoft 4y ago> what is the most advanced civilization What is "advanced"? Is it a property everyone would agree on? Is it a single scale or some multi-dimensional ordering? If a civilisation has beautiful spoken-word poetry, while the other has a tradition to play a complex game with baskets and grass knots which one is more advanced?
- edgyquant 4y agoTo me advanced means has an caloric surplus through which they get separation of skillsets. Civilization arose from this.
- BurningFrog 4y agoThere was clearly no civilization that routinely travelled between continents. Because animal and plant species were very separated, until the "invasive species" phenomenon the last few centuries.