3 ms·

I've always been confused by the idea that we know all civilisation that has happened on earth, human or otherwise. Written record doesn't go back very far at a

I've always been confused by the idea that we know all civilisation that has happened on earth, human or otherwise. Written record doesn't go back very far at all, and even archeological evidence is lacking. Its believed that homo sapiens have been around for at least 300,000 years and yet we think almost all of that was entirely without civilization. We find fossil records of dinosaurs but we have little to no evidence of what would have been before them, presumably there was an extinction event prior to them as well. It seems foolish to think we are the latest incarnation of the only chain of civilization that had ever happened on Earth.

shimman 2mo ago
You would like the book "Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber. It does a lot to talk about modern anthropological studies that corrected a lot of misconceptions about early humans. Really fascinating book, basically postulates that humans have always been imaginative social creatures that were routinely well travelled; and the idea that early humans weren't also politically or culturally advance is wrong. In fact some societies were purposely designed to ensure things like hierarchy wouldn't exist for example; these societies persisted for thousands of years. Really interesting book.
- culi 2mo ago
  Yes exactly. The myths of native people being hyperegalitarian, one-with-nature types started because colonists came upon cultures in the North East woodlands. Those same people, just a few decades before that were living in Cahokia which was at one point larger than any city in Europe. It was a massive urban city that was also very hierarchical. The hyperegalitarian Algonquian and Haudenosaunee/Iroquois people were basically the result of a successful political revolution that decided to organize themselves like that in response to the hierarchies they experienced.
  - suddenlybananas 2mo ago
    The Iroquois had slaves, they weren't hyperegalitarian.
    - I-M-S 2mo ago
      The Iroquois did not have slaves. You might be thinking of individuals that were sometimes taken as compensation for people killed in battle. However, these people were then fully assimilated into the society with all the rights and obligations of anyone in the clan (in most cases, they would even take the name of the deceased). To call these people "slaves" is much more revealing of the Western civilization than that of First Nations.
      - suddenlybananas 2mo ago
        Did those people have the right to leave or do what they wanted? https://www.jstor.org/stable/482790?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/482790?seq=1 Read this paper and the contemporary accounts and tell me that's not slavery. >To modern Westerners, the use of such a kinship metaphor suggests and is believed to reflect genuine nurturing and closeness; however, in Africa and elsewhere it conveys an entirely different meaning: authority and subordination. >Villagers, forming a gauntlet and armed with clubs, fire-brands, sticks, and other weapons, greeted the prisoners and rained down on these hapless individuals blows designed to inflict pain but not to kill This was often followed by torture and public humiliation and then deliverance to the grieving families, whose "matrons then chose either to adopt or to execute them," or both If you look at pages 11-13, there's a discussion of ritual torture to prevent captives from escaping. 13-14 deal with the torture and execution of unruly captives. 15-16 deal with the etymological relationship between "slave" and "pet/livestock" in Iroquonian languages like Mohawk. Pages 17 and 18 discuss people preferring suicide to capture and the sexual exploitation of female captives.
        I-M-S 2mo ago
        I put much more credence into lived experiences than into academic journals. There's plethora of examples in which children/teens of the settlers taken by First Nations would refuse to go back (especially females, which had little rights in the American society back then). Conversely, First Nations children/teens that were taken by the settlers would almost without exception risk life and limb to escape their newfound circumstances.
  - curioadu 2mo ago
    While many Amerindians had impressive achievements considering their almost complete isolation from the rest of the world, your claim seems misleading. > At its apex around 1100 AD, the city [Cahokia] covered about 6 square miles (16 km2), included about 120 earthworks in a wide range of sizes, shapes, and functions, and had a population of between 15,000 and 20,000 people.[5][a] > During the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, the population of the city of Rome is conventionally estimated at one million inhabitants. And there are much better examples according to some sources of large cities in the Americas than Cahokia. > Hernan Cortés arrived in Tenochtitlan on 8 November 1519. Although there are no precise numbers, the city's population has been estimated at between 200,000 and 400,000 inhabitants,[27] placing Tenochtitlan among the largest cities in the world at that time.[28] Compared to the cities of Europe, only Paris, Venice and Constantinople might have rivaled it. > In the 9th and 10th centuries, Constantinople had a population of between 500,000 and 800,000.[60] > With the restoration of firm central government, the empire became fabulously wealthy. The population was rising (estimates for Constantinople in the 12th century vary from some 100,000 to 500,000), and towns and cities across the realm flourished. > Kaifeng-Dongjing became largest and most prosperous city in China, with a population of over 400,000 living both inside and outside the city wall. The historian Jacques Gernet provides a lively picture of life in this period in his Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250-1276, which often draws on Dongjing Meng Hua Lu, a nostalgic memoir of the city.[14] > Around 750 AD, Chang'an was called a "million-man city" in Chinese records; most modern estimates put the population within the walls of the Tang city at around 800,000–1,000,000.[1]
- _heimdall 2mo ago
  Thanks! I'll have to check it out.
gaigalas 2mo ago
Our earliest record is the Rigveda (a written down oral tradition, we don't know exactly how far back it goes). I suggest you try to read it at least once. It's almost incomprehensible.
- rishav_sharan 2mo ago
  No. And it's not even close. Rigveda would be around 1500Bce. Even Sumerian cuneiform would be far older at 3000 bce. If you want oldest oral records, some Australian aboriginal stories would be the ones at 8000 bce
  - rishav_sharan 2mo ago
    Oh and some researchers are putting down the story of "seven sisters"/pleiades to around 100k years ago, back when the 7th star in the constellation was visible
    - gaigalas 2mo ago
      The recovery of a possible oral tradition regarding this is likely drawn from comparative mythology techniques, which is super interesting (I'm fascinated by it, personally), but in another category.
  - gaigalas 2mo ago
    The Rigveda is the the earliest unbroken kept record. The Sumerian tablets are likely older, but they were forgotten and then re-deciphered. The transliterations still carry educated choices made by a scholar (there's only so much you can do when the record breaks for a long time). Meanwhile, we know exactly how people spoke those early vedas because there is a tradition that keeps chanting it, without stopping, since before it was written down. That chanting has error correction mechanisms, redundancy and other impressive features that further place the Rigveda in a unique place among earlier works.
    - rishav_sharan 2mo ago
yreg 2mo ago
So what do you claim as 'not foolish' to think? That there were non-human civilizations before the dinosaurs? Do you consider ants/bees to have civilizations or is it just humans currently? Or do you mean that there were human civilizations in the prehistory? And what do you mean by that – is it foolish to think that they were hunter gatherers for hundreds of years? I don't mean to make strawmans, that's why I'm asking.
- _heimdall 2mo ago
  Well for starters I'd say my basic point is that its foolish to assume nothing came before what we do know about. There could have been past human civilizations, with enough time any natural building materials would effectively vanish. More interesting to me, though, would be non-human civilizations that could have existed well before humans ever came around. I don't consider animals to have civilizations simply for having complex groups (ants or bees, for example). Though separately they do absolutely have emotions, family bonds, and long memories. My cows have proven that, each one is a different personality with their own clicks among the herd, and each cow treats the me and my wife differently so its not like "this one's always mean, this one wants to be petted" etc.
graemep 2mo ago
> Its believed that homo sapiens have been around for at least 300,000 years and yet we think almost all of that was entirely without civilization. Depends what you call civilization. If there was a civilization what happened to it and why did it leave no trace. > We find fossil records of dinosaurs but we have little to no evidence of what would have been before them, presumably there was an extinction event prior to them as well. Actually we do have evidence of what came before them, and there were extinction events. > It seems foolish to think we are the latest incarnation of the only chain of civilization that had ever happened on Earth. We might not know about previous civilizations (that is the point of the Silurian Hypothesis - a lot of traces will disappear over time) but we have no evidence that there was any previous civilization, or of any sufficiently intelligent animal to build one. The oldest stone tools we have found are only about 3m years old.
- m0llusk 2mo ago
  Actually, house mice appear to have a common ancestor which lived somewhere around India roughly 400,000 years ago.
rbanffy 2mo ago
> human or otherwise This is a fascinating idea. > and even archeological evidence is lacking. A couple million years and your surface will be forever lost under a subduction zone. There is little sign of a global civilisation predating humans, but there is plenty spacetime for smaller societies that would have completely disappeared without a trace.

shimman 2mo ago

You would like the book "Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber. It does a lot to talk about modern anthropological studies that corrected a lot of misconceptions about early humans. Really fascinating book, basically postulates that humans have always been imaginative social creatures that were routinely well travelled; and the idea that early humans weren't also politically or culturally advance is wrong. In fact some societies were purposely designed to ensure things like hierarchy wouldn't exist for example; these societies persisted for thousands of years. Really interesting book.

culi 2mo ago
Yes exactly. The myths of native people being hyperegalitarian, one-with-nature types started because colonists came upon cultures in the North East woodlands. Those same people, just a few decades before that were living in Cahokia which was at one point larger than any city in Europe. It was a massive urban city that was also very hierarchical. The hyperegalitarian Algonquian and Haudenosaunee/Iroquois people were basically the result of a successful political revolution that decided to organize themselves like that in response to the hierarchies they experienced.
- suddenlybananas 2mo ago
  The Iroquois had slaves, they weren't hyperegalitarian.
  - I-M-S 2mo ago
    The Iroquois did not have slaves. You might be thinking of individuals that were sometimes taken as compensation for people killed in battle. However, these people were then fully assimilated into the society with all the rights and obligations of anyone in the clan (in most cases, they would even take the name of the deceased). To call these people "slaves" is much more revealing of the Western civilization than that of First Nations.
    - suddenlybananas 2mo ago
      Did those people have the right to leave or do what they wanted? https://www.jstor.org/stable/482790?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/482790?seq=1 Read this paper and the contemporary accounts and tell me that's not slavery. >To modern Westerners, the use of such a kinship metaphor suggests and is believed to reflect genuine nurturing and closeness; however, in Africa and elsewhere it conveys an entirely different meaning: authority and subordination. >Villagers, forming a gauntlet and armed with clubs, fire-brands, sticks, and other weapons, greeted the prisoners and rained down on these hapless individuals blows designed to inflict pain but not to kill This was often followed by torture and public humiliation and then deliverance to the grieving families, whose "matrons then chose either to adopt or to execute them," or both If you look at pages 11-13, there's a discussion of ritual torture to prevent captives from escaping. 13-14 deal with the torture and execution of unruly captives. 15-16 deal with the etymological relationship between "slave" and "pet/livestock" in Iroquonian languages like Mohawk. Pages 17 and 18 discuss people preferring suicide to capture and the sexual exploitation of female captives.
      - I-M-S 2mo ago
        I put much more credence into lived experiences than into academic journals. There's plethora of examples in which children/teens of the settlers taken by First Nations would refuse to go back (especially females, which had little rights in the American society back then). Conversely, First Nations children/teens that were taken by the settlers would almost without exception risk life and limb to escape their newfound circumstances.
- curioadu 2mo ago
  While many Amerindians had impressive achievements considering their almost complete isolation from the rest of the world, your claim seems misleading. > At its apex around 1100 AD, the city [Cahokia] covered about 6 square miles (16 km2), included about 120 earthworks in a wide range of sizes, shapes, and functions, and had a population of between 15,000 and 20,000 people.[5][a] > During the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, the population of the city of Rome is conventionally estimated at one million inhabitants. And there are much better examples according to some sources of large cities in the Americas than Cahokia. > Hernan Cortés arrived in Tenochtitlan on 8 November 1519. Although there are no precise numbers, the city's population has been estimated at between 200,000 and 400,000 inhabitants,[27] placing Tenochtitlan among the largest cities in the world at that time.[28] Compared to the cities of Europe, only Paris, Venice and Constantinople might have rivaled it. > In the 9th and 10th centuries, Constantinople had a population of between 500,000 and 800,000.[60] > With the restoration of firm central government, the empire became fabulously wealthy. The population was rising (estimates for Constantinople in the 12th century vary from some 100,000 to 500,000), and towns and cities across the realm flourished. > Kaifeng-Dongjing became largest and most prosperous city in China, with a population of over 400,000 living both inside and outside the city wall. The historian Jacques Gernet provides a lively picture of life in this period in his Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250-1276, which often draws on Dongjing Meng Hua Lu, a nostalgic memoir of the city.[14] > Around 750 AD, Chang'an was called a "million-man city" in Chinese records; most modern estimates put the population within the walls of the Tang city at around 800,000–1,000,000.[1]
_heimdall 2mo ago
Thanks! I'll have to check it out.

gaigalas 2mo ago

Our earliest record is the Rigveda (a written down oral tradition, we don't know exactly how far back it goes). I suggest you try to read it at least once. It's almost incomprehensible.

rishav_sharan 2mo ago
No. And it's not even close. Rigveda would be around 1500Bce. Even Sumerian cuneiform would be far older at 3000 bce. If you want oldest oral records, some Australian aboriginal stories would be the ones at 8000 bce
- rishav_sharan 2mo ago
  Oh and some researchers are putting down the story of "seven sisters"/pleiades to around 100k years ago, back when the 7th star in the constellation was visible
  - gaigalas 2mo ago
    The recovery of a possible oral tradition regarding this is likely drawn from comparative mythology techniques, which is super interesting (I'm fascinated by it, personally), but in another category.
- gaigalas 2mo ago
  The Rigveda is the the earliest unbroken kept record. The Sumerian tablets are likely older, but they were forgotten and then re-deciphered. The transliterations still carry educated choices made by a scholar (there's only so much you can do when the record breaks for a long time). Meanwhile, we know exactly how people spoke those early vedas because there is a tradition that keeps chanting it, without stopping, since before it was written down. That chanting has error correction mechanisms, redundancy and other impressive features that further place the Rigveda in a unique place among earlier works.
  - rishav_sharan 2mo ago

yreg 2mo ago

So what do you claim as 'not foolish' to think? That there were non-human civilizations before the dinosaurs? Do you consider ants/bees to have civilizations or is it just humans currently? Or do you mean that there were human civilizations in the prehistory? And what do you mean by that – is it foolish to think that they were hunter gatherers for hundreds of years? I don't mean to make strawmans, that's why I'm asking.

_heimdall 2mo ago
Well for starters I'd say my basic point is that its foolish to assume nothing came before what we do know about. There could have been past human civilizations, with enough time any natural building materials would effectively vanish. More interesting to me, though, would be non-human civilizations that could have existed well before humans ever came around. I don't consider animals to have civilizations simply for having complex groups (ants or bees, for example). Though separately they do absolutely have emotions, family bonds, and long memories. My cows have proven that, each one is a different personality with their own clicks among the herd, and each cow treats the me and my wife differently so its not like "this one's always mean, this one wants to be petted" etc.

graemep 2mo ago

> Its believed that homo sapiens have been around for at least 300,000 years and yet we think almost all of that was entirely without civilization. Depends what you call civilization. If there was a civilization what happened to it and why did it leave no trace. > We find fossil records of dinosaurs but we have little to no evidence of what would have been before them, presumably there was an extinction event prior to them as well. Actually we do have evidence of what came before them, and there were extinction events. > It seems foolish to think we are the latest incarnation of the only chain of civilization that had ever happened on Earth. We might not know about previous civilizations (that is the point of the Silurian Hypothesis - a lot of traces will disappear over time) but we have no evidence that there was any previous civilization, or of any sufficiently intelligent animal to build one. The oldest stone tools we have found are only about 3m years old.

m0llusk 2mo ago
Actually, house mice appear to have a common ancestor which lived somewhere around India roughly 400,000 years ago.

rbanffy 2mo ago

> human or otherwise This is a fascinating idea. > and even archeological evidence is lacking. A couple million years and your surface will be forever lost under a subduction zone. There is little sign of a global civilisation predating humans, but there is plenty spacetime for smaller societies that would have completely disappeared without a trace.