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It’s never sat well with me that anatomically modern humans are supposedly at least 300,000 years old but nobody got much past banging rocks together until arou

by User23 4y ago

It’s never sat well with me that anatomically modern humans are supposedly at least 300,000 years old but nobody got much past banging rocks together until around ten thousand years ago. I’m not an archeologist and I’m not claiming there were relatively advanced prehistoric civilizations, but I find the blanket claim that there can’t possibly have been ridiculous. With a glaciation or two along with various other weathering it sounds plausible to me that virtually all physical traces of, to give an example, the ancient civilizations the Vedas mention, could have been obliterated.

nradov 4y ago
Not just weathering, but also sea level rise. Settlements built on the coastline when sea levels were lower than today would leave little or no trace after millennia underwater. I'm not necessarily claiming that such settlements had any technology more advanced than stone tools, but it's difficult to conclusively prove that they didn't. Another possibility to consider is that while human skeletons might not have changed much in 300K years, it's also possible that some more recent mutations gave us the mental capacity to advance technology and build civilizations. Maybe our ancient ancestors just weren't very smart?
Ar-Curunir 4y ago
If these societies were that advanced, would they not have figured out a fraction of the things that we have in modern times? The fact of the matter is that for a long time we simply did not have the population density to scale up to modern civilization standards
- 0thgen 4y ago
  This is probably the best counter argument Ive heard thus far in the comments (not that the others were bad)
- User23 4y ago
  > The fact of the matter is that for a long time we simply did not have the population density to scale up to modern civilization standards That's true and I agree. But how would we know what the population density was of a conjectured civilization that would have been virtually totally destroyed over a hundred thousand years ago by catastrophic climate change?[1] I'm not positing some super society with flying cars and crystal skyscrapers or anything, but something more like the ancient Egyptian or Mesopotamian kingdoms that we do know about. There is a difference in kind and not degree between stating that it's absolutely impossible for any complex human civilization to have existed before 12,000 years ago and it's possible but we have little to no evidence for it. In the former world view any evidence to the contrary is immediately ignored as being impossible, whereas in the latter lines of inquiry remain open, despite being admittedly rather barren. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Period
- dilippkumar 4y ago
  > If these societies were that advanced, would they not have figured out a fraction of the things that we have in modern times? The interesting question from Graham Hancock’s books is along the lines of: “If these societies were that advanced, how would we know?” Until Gobekli Tepi was discovered, there was no evidence that humans did anything other than bang rocks together till the end of the last ice age. We can not use radio carbon dating on inorganic material. We can’t look at a stone monument and determine it’s age purely by looking at the stones. For big monuments, the best we do is “the oldest thing we found here that shouldn’t be here unless someone put it here is xxxx years old. Therefore this is at least xxxx years old” Graham Hancock and others pointed out that several monuments were aligned astronomically if you assume they were built at the end of the ice age. We didn’t believe anyone could have built the monuments that early because we hadn’t discovered Gobekli Tepi yet. Basically the current problem isn’t absence of evidence that people were advanced back in the ice age. The problem is determining what is evidence and what is coincidence - and a lot of things that should have been evidence were brushed aside as coincidence because that determination was done pre gobekli tepi.
eddiewithzato 4y ago
It’s not that ridiculous, there are human tribes today that do not build structure and are still hunterer/gatherer like the australian aboriginal

by User23 4y ago

nradov 4y ago

Not just weathering, but also sea level rise. Settlements built on the coastline when sea levels were lower than today would leave little or no trace after millennia underwater. I'm not necessarily claiming that such settlements had any technology more advanced than stone tools, but it's difficult to conclusively prove that they didn't. Another possibility to consider is that while human skeletons might not have changed much in 300K years, it's also possible that some more recent mutations gave us the mental capacity to advance technology and build civilizations. Maybe our ancient ancestors just weren't very smart?

Ar-Curunir 4y ago

If these societies were that advanced, would they not have figured out a fraction of the things that we have in modern times? The fact of the matter is that for a long time we simply did not have the population density to scale up to modern civilization standards

0thgen 4y ago
This is probably the best counter argument Ive heard thus far in the comments (not that the others were bad)
User23 4y ago
> The fact of the matter is that for a long time we simply did not have the population density to scale up to modern civilization standards That's true and I agree. But how would we know what the population density was of a conjectured civilization that would have been virtually totally destroyed over a hundred thousand years ago by catastrophic climate change?[1] I'm not positing some super society with flying cars and crystal skyscrapers or anything, but something more like the ancient Egyptian or Mesopotamian kingdoms that we do know about. There is a difference in kind and not degree between stating that it's absolutely impossible for any complex human civilization to have existed before 12,000 years ago and it's possible but we have little to no evidence for it. In the former world view any evidence to the contrary is immediately ignored as being impossible, whereas in the latter lines of inquiry remain open, despite being admittedly rather barren. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Period
dilippkumar 4y ago
> If these societies were that advanced, would they not have figured out a fraction of the things that we have in modern times? The interesting question from Graham Hancock’s books is along the lines of: “If these societies were that advanced, how would we know?” Until Gobekli Tepi was discovered, there was no evidence that humans did anything other than bang rocks together till the end of the last ice age. We can not use radio carbon dating on inorganic material. We can’t look at a stone monument and determine it’s age purely by looking at the stones. For big monuments, the best we do is “the oldest thing we found here that shouldn’t be here unless someone put it here is xxxx years old. Therefore this is at least xxxx years old” Graham Hancock and others pointed out that several monuments were aligned astronomically if you assume they were built at the end of the ice age. We didn’t believe anyone could have built the monuments that early because we hadn’t discovered Gobekli Tepi yet. Basically the current problem isn’t absence of evidence that people were advanced back in the ice age. The problem is determining what is evidence and what is coincidence - and a lot of things that should have been evidence were brushed aside as coincidence because that determination was done pre gobekli tepi.

eddiewithzato 4y ago

It’s not that ridiculous, there are human tribes today that do not build structure and are still hunterer/gatherer like the australian aboriginal