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As is increasingly speculated, humanity has had sophisticated societies for far longer than a few thousand years. Zero chance we just sprung up out of the dirt

As is increasingly speculated, humanity has had sophisticated societies for far longer than a few thousand years. Zero chance we just sprung up out of the dirt one day. Guaranteed the ice age destroyed huge swaths of technically primitive but socially advanced civilizations. Two issues with this hypothesis: 1. Over 10,000 years few artifacts can survive degradation 2. There are political motivations for controlling the narrative around evolution and the birth of civilization

rightbyte 4y ago
3300 years ago the oldest pyramids were thousands of years old. Or do you mean in general and not tied to the article?
- fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
  I'm more so discussing 10k+ years ago, with supporting evidence of sophistication thousands of years ago
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    Ye well they were probably not less intelligent than we are. And we can more or less only estimate their sofistication by their tools we find at burial sites etc. Obviously complex societies could have existed on a social level.
    - someotherperson 4y ago
      > Ye well they were probably not less intelligent than we are It's important to emphasise that they were definitely not less intelligent, nor did they have different behaviour. You can take a child from 50,000 years ago and they would perform the same as the average child today. The modern homo sapien sapien reached its point as early as 160,000 years ago. The idea here is that we're expected to believe that modern humans -- like me and you -- sat idle for at least 80,000 to as much as 150,000 years before reaching a point in the last 10k years and suddenly forming civilizations (of which there are about six known, independent origin points around the globe). We lack evidence to the contrary -- sure -- but if we find evidence it will just be construed as a black swan event that would, in hindsight, be obvious.
Mistletoe 4y ago
Do you have any evidence for what you are saying? It sounds like the rabbit hole I went down after watching the recent Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse and discovering pretty much all of his assertions can be refuted by just reading the Wikipedia for each “ancient” site such as this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunung_Padang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunung_Padang This gives a very different picture of the site than the one in the episode.
- lproven 4y ago
  Is that the Graham Hancock series? I've seen him speak. (It was, IIRC, at a Fortean Times Unconvention, an event that -- in part -- intentionally gives nutcases a chance to speak publicly, for the audience's amusement.) He is a 100% total fraud, a laughing stock among genuine historians and archaeologists. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Graham_Hancock https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Graham_Hancock I am unconvinced whether he is a lunatic or intentionally a fraudster, but I am deeply concerned to learn he's on TV.
  - Mistletoe 4y ago
    Yes he got a Netflix series haha.
browserman 4y ago
For those unaware, OP is referring to a crackpot theory most recently advanced by the journalist Graham Hancock. The idea of sophisticated pre-ice age civilizations is universally regarded by the archaeologists and experts to be roughly on par with the "ancient aliens" hypothesis.
- fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
  This has nothing to do with the recent Netflix show, which I have never seen
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Crackpot theory? It's a straightforward inference from human behavioral modernity, and the fact that some places have always been resource-rich enough to allow for at least some effort to be spent on things other than brute survival. Those who suppose the contrary as a default are merely transporting our naïve, self-serving stereotypes about "savage" societies to the very far past.
  - AlotOfReading 4y ago
    There's two different ways to interpret the GP post. Using the term "civilization" instead of "sophisticated societies", the first is that civilization == the traditional childe definition. The academic timelines around that sort of stuff are well-established and people like graham Hancock do push ideas best described as crackpot about these sorts of societies existing before the LGM. But there's also the redefinitional arguments that the Childe definition of civilization is wrong. That's the vein you're working in and where books like Dawn of Everything are arguing from. They're much more agreeable to modern archaeologists and most wouldn't disagree too strongly (if at all). Wengrow has a good opinion piece on this dichotomy in [1]. [1] https://aeon.co/ideas/a-history-of-true-civilisation-is-not-one-of-monuments https://aeon.co/ideas/a-history-of-true-civilisation-is-not-...
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      AIUI, Childe proposed a number of criteria for civilization, all of them correlating one way or another with 'increasingly complex society'. Some of those we'll never know if the very ancient past had them (and I think even Graham Hancock would acknowledge this), the others are pretty much in line with the article you link to. So I'm not sure how much genuine disagreement is involved, as opposed to scholars holding on to untenable viewpoints and neglecting to put two and two together.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
guessbest 4y ago
Göbekli Tepe dates to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, between c. 9500 and 8000 BC, which would make it over 10k years old. It didn't get built overnight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
- mhuffman 4y ago
  I am not some "ancient aliens" kook, but many comments above seem to overlook the fact that until relatively recently we thought that people 10k years ago, world wide, were fresh out of caves/hunter-gathers and some of the more brighter ones were starting to farm and do animal husbandry. Then, Göbekli Tepe is unearthed and it is obvious that, as you say, that shit did not happen one day with just some super talented hunter-gatherer having an artistic streak. I do not understand why academics think all people on Earth were always at the same technological level at the same time. Add to that that most things (wood, iron, basically anything other than hard rock) disappear pretty quickly in large timescales and it gets really murky to think about and archaeologists in particular seem to become outraged at anything that isn't currently in vogue.
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    Complex society -- legislatures, economics, the works, even writing -- could easily have occurred hundreds of times over the millennia, without building with stone and so leaving no trace after they collapsed or were wiped out by invaders. We know about a precious few that did build with stone, that could have been as socially sophisticated as you like, but left no trace of that. We know extremely little about people in the Amazon basin, beyond that they had already domesticated orchard trees by 10,000 years ago, built over wide areas, and had no access to stone. They had ceramics, but did not favor bricks. They left us a few enigmatic inventions including curare and terra preta. Assuming primitive social relations is very close to racism. Sophistication seems to need nothing more than population.
    - AlotOfReading 4y ago
      Population demographics are one of the things archaeologists are most interested in. There's lots of independent methodologies that we've developed to tell us when people were present and in what numbers. Many don't even rely on finding artifacts. Things like genetic work directly tell us effective population sizes at various points in human history (low), charcoal analysis tells us how many fires were burning, hearth counts (indicated by rock or soil discoloration) tell us how many people were cooking, pollen analysis tells us what the plant landscape looked like in areas, etc. There's even an incredible technique based on eDNA analysis that can directly measure how many people were in the area when a soil sample was deposited by measuring the DNA from their shed cells. I've only seen that one used for results back to 30-40kya, but it's still pretty cool. As you might have guessed from how I've written this, all these different lines of evidence consistently point to low population densities and overall populations, especially before the main human expansion out of Africa. Advanced ice age societies aren't impossible, but there would need to be some pretty strong evidence and a good explanation to account for all the data we have against them.
Gravey 4y ago
“2. There are political motivations for controlling the narrative around evolution and the birth of civilization” Could elaborate on this?

rightbyte 4y ago

3300 years ago the oldest pyramids were thousands of years old. Or do you mean in general and not tied to the article?

fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
I'm more so discussing 10k+ years ago, with supporting evidence of sophistication thousands of years ago
- rightbyte 4y ago
  Ye well they were probably not less intelligent than we are. And we can more or less only estimate their sofistication by their tools we find at burial sites etc. Obviously complex societies could have existed on a social level.
  - someotherperson 4y ago
    > Ye well they were probably not less intelligent than we are It's important to emphasise that they were definitely not less intelligent, nor did they have different behaviour. You can take a child from 50,000 years ago and they would perform the same as the average child today. The modern homo sapien sapien reached its point as early as 160,000 years ago. The idea here is that we're expected to believe that modern humans -- like me and you -- sat idle for at least 80,000 to as much as 150,000 years before reaching a point in the last 10k years and suddenly forming civilizations (of which there are about six known, independent origin points around the globe). We lack evidence to the contrary -- sure -- but if we find evidence it will just be construed as a black swan event that would, in hindsight, be obvious.

Mistletoe 4y ago

Do you have any evidence for what you are saying? It sounds like the rabbit hole I went down after watching the recent Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse and discovering pretty much all of his assertions can be refuted by just reading the Wikipedia for each “ancient” site such as this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunung_Padang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunung_Padang This gives a very different picture of the site than the one in the episode.

lproven 4y ago
Is that the Graham Hancock series? I've seen him speak. (It was, IIRC, at a Fortean Times Unconvention, an event that -- in part -- intentionally gives nutcases a chance to speak publicly, for the audience's amusement.) He is a 100% total fraud, a laughing stock among genuine historians and archaeologists. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Graham_Hancock https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Graham_Hancock I am unconvinced whether he is a lunatic or intentionally a fraudster, but I am deeply concerned to learn he's on TV.
- Mistletoe 4y ago
  Yes he got a Netflix series haha.

browserman 4y ago

For those unaware, OP is referring to a crackpot theory most recently advanced by the journalist Graham Hancock. The idea of sophisticated pre-ice age civilizations is universally regarded by the archaeologists and experts to be roughly on par with the "ancient aliens" hypothesis.

fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
This has nothing to do with the recent Netflix show, which I have never seen
zozbot234 4y ago
Crackpot theory? It's a straightforward inference from human behavioral modernity, and the fact that some places have always been resource-rich enough to allow for at least some effort to be spent on things other than brute survival. Those who suppose the contrary as a default are merely transporting our naïve, self-serving stereotypes about "savage" societies to the very far past.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  There's two different ways to interpret the GP post. Using the term "civilization" instead of "sophisticated societies", the first is that civilization == the traditional childe definition. The academic timelines around that sort of stuff are well-established and people like graham Hancock do push ideas best described as crackpot about these sorts of societies existing before the LGM. But there's also the redefinitional arguments that the Childe definition of civilization is wrong. That's the vein you're working in and where books like Dawn of Everything are arguing from. They're much more agreeable to modern archaeologists and most wouldn't disagree too strongly (if at all). Wengrow has a good opinion piece on this dichotomy in [1]. [1] https://aeon.co/ideas/a-history-of-true-civilisation-is-not-one-of-monuments https://aeon.co/ideas/a-history-of-true-civilisation-is-not-...
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    AIUI, Childe proposed a number of criteria for civilization, all of them correlating one way or another with 'increasingly complex society'. Some of those we'll never know if the very ancient past had them (and I think even Graham Hancock would acknowledge this), the others are pretty much in line with the article you link to. So I'm not sure how much genuine disagreement is involved, as opposed to scholars holding on to untenable viewpoints and neglecting to put two and two together.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

guessbest 4y ago

Göbekli Tepe dates to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, between c. 9500 and 8000 BC, which would make it over 10k years old. It didn't get built overnight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

mhuffman 4y ago
I am not some "ancient aliens" kook, but many comments above seem to overlook the fact that until relatively recently we thought that people 10k years ago, world wide, were fresh out of caves/hunter-gathers and some of the more brighter ones were starting to farm and do animal husbandry. Then, Göbekli Tepe is unearthed and it is obvious that, as you say, that shit did not happen one day with just some super talented hunter-gatherer having an artistic streak. I do not understand why academics think all people on Earth were always at the same technological level at the same time. Add to that that most things (wood, iron, basically anything other than hard rock) disappear pretty quickly in large timescales and it gets really murky to think about and archaeologists in particular seem to become outraged at anything that isn't currently in vogue.
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  Complex society -- legislatures, economics, the works, even writing -- could easily have occurred hundreds of times over the millennia, without building with stone and so leaving no trace after they collapsed or were wiped out by invaders. We know about a precious few that did build with stone, that could have been as socially sophisticated as you like, but left no trace of that. We know extremely little about people in the Amazon basin, beyond that they had already domesticated orchard trees by 10,000 years ago, built over wide areas, and had no access to stone. They had ceramics, but did not favor bricks. They left us a few enigmatic inventions including curare and terra preta. Assuming primitive social relations is very close to racism. Sophistication seems to need nothing more than population.
  - AlotOfReading 4y ago
    Population demographics are one of the things archaeologists are most interested in. There's lots of independent methodologies that we've developed to tell us when people were present and in what numbers. Many don't even rely on finding artifacts. Things like genetic work directly tell us effective population sizes at various points in human history (low), charcoal analysis tells us how many fires were burning, hearth counts (indicated by rock or soil discoloration) tell us how many people were cooking, pollen analysis tells us what the plant landscape looked like in areas, etc. There's even an incredible technique based on eDNA analysis that can directly measure how many people were in the area when a soil sample was deposited by measuring the DNA from their shed cells. I've only seen that one used for results back to 30-40kya, but it's still pretty cool. As you might have guessed from how I've written this, all these different lines of evidence consistently point to low population densities and overall populations, especially before the main human expansion out of Africa. Advanced ice age societies aren't impossible, but there would need to be some pretty strong evidence and a good explanation to account for all the data we have against them.

Gravey 4y ago

“2. There are political motivations for controlling the narrative around evolution and the birth of civilization” Could elaborate on this?