We thought civilization required agriculture until…

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg,

Please, nobody mention Graham Hancock or his Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse where he misrepresents archaeology and undermines Indigenous heritage. He tends to creep into these conversations.

It’s high time that someone “Just ask questions” back to Joe Rogan, Graham Hancock, Erik Van Däniken, and others like them.

For instance, if it was “superior ancient alien Atlanteans” who made all the great findings of human Archeology, why wouldn’t they have had sufficient knowledge of conditions on Earth to be able to predict and avoid the Younger Dryas?

And if the “superior ancient alien Atlanteans” had spacecraft resilient enough to survive light-speed travel, black holes, comets, gravitational pull of megaplanets and stars, and flying asteroids and meteorites to get safely to Earth, why wouldn’t they have other artifacts that were just as resilient?

Why would they work in a medium as crummy and crumbly as stone and not steel or maybe even stronger Elements and Compounds from elsewhere in the Universe heretofore unknown by humans?

Above all, the true marks of superiority is persistence and prevalence. So, where you at today, Atlanteans?

Questions like these would send them back to their drug dens and bunkers!

• This reply was modified 6 months, 1 week ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Addenda

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

Unseen wrote:

If there were diagrams, we would be finding at least some of them.

There are loads.

Unseen wrote:

Your comment about Stonehenge seems to imply that it was used as a diagram of sorts… to pass along astronomical knowledge? If so, how did that designer (or designers) of Stonehenge gain the knowledge needed to do the alignment correctly, because certainly some knowledge of astronomy would be needed to even start the project intentionally.

They would have had landmarks on the land by which to compare the movements of the stars.  I’m sure they would have been fascinated with what was going on in the sky, regularly, year after year.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Simon,

They would have had landmarks on the land by which to compare the movements of the stars. I’m sure they would have been fascinated with what was going on in the sky, regularly, year after year.

Very true. And a simple stick perpendicular in the ground casting a shadow on the ground was the first sun dial to determine daytime hours, and, by inference, nighttime hours. And as Carl Sagan wisely pointed out, a perpendicular stick was how Eratosthenes determined both that the Earth was curved and also how he calculated the almost exact circumference of the Earth:

So much knowledge to be derived from simple observations. Ancient people had far more smarts than the Graham Hancocks and Erik Von Dänikens of the world give them credit, which makes their Pseudoarcheology all the more laughable.

[UnseenParticipant]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

It looks like we Homo sapiens may be much older species that previously understood to be.

Careful, or we’ll be joining Graham Hancock in talking about a long lost civilization and the so-called “Annunaki.”

You wonder how the Egyptians were able to move such large stones from the quarry site to the construction site? The Annunaki did it for them.

Actually, they built the pyramids next to the quarry and then the Annunaki moved the finished pyramids to their final positions next to the Sphinx. (Okay, I made that last part up.)

 

[UnseenParticipant]

What if the first signs of human civilization weren’t measured in thousands of years or even tens of thousands of years? What if archaeologists are finding evidence of human settlements and the rudiments of culture 800,000 years ago? That’s before we believe homo sapiens evolved.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

Unseen wrote:

What if archaeologists are finding evidence of human settlements and the rudiments of culture 800,000 years ago?

I’m sure that other species of human beings were capable of making settlements, if the conditions were temporarily right for it, i.e., if there were rich resources in one place, like next to a waterway or sea.  Culture – why not?  In the sense of making artwork.  I’m not sure they would have had cultural markers to mark themselves out from other groups, since the groups may not have been big enough.

[UnseenParticipant]

Simon Paynton wrote:

I’m sure that other species of human beings were capable of making settlements, if the conditions were temporarily right for it, i.e., if there were rich resources in one place, like next to a waterway or sea.  Culture – why not?  In the sense of making artwork.  I’m not sure they would have had cultural markers to mark themselves out from other groups, since the groups may not have been big enough.

Well, for me, the most interesting aspect is that 800,000 years ago homo sapiens hadn’t even evolved yet. We can’t expect many indices of culture to survive 800,000 years unless they were made of stone. Most of their clothing and dwellings would have been made of organic materials, I suppose.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

It is remarkable that a flourishing and sophisticated human civilization existed at Gesher Benot Yaʽaqov some 780,000 years ago. They had a controlled use of fire, the ability to organize and hunt and gather a broad spectrum of food types.

What is most remarkable is that ‘only’ 120,000 years earlier, our human lineage had undergone a severe genetic bottleneck, reducing the global breeding population to as few as 1,280 individuals. The climate may have stabilized very quickly, and resource-rich regions like the Jordan Rift Valley became ecological havens. The seasons must have become predictable.

If they were that sophisticated, it would have allowed for cultural evolution too, which can advance faster than biological evolution. It is what Stephen Jay Gould called ‘Punctuated Equilibrium’, a theory that suggests Evolution proceeds with long periods of stasis, Interrupted by short, sharp bursts of rapid change. Maybe after a good supper, someone was lying by the bridge along the banks of the Jordan and wondered “where did we come from”?

[UnseenParticipant]

@Reg

Science is coming around to the view that these pre-homo sapiens humans didn’t really fit the traditional “cave man” notion of stupid no account lunks. I mean, if bees and termites can have a social order and organize to create a place to live, why not human beings?

[UnseenParticipant]

• This reply was modified 6 months, 1 week ago by  Unseen.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

It is what Stephen Jay Gould called ‘Punctuated Equilibrium’, a theory that suggests Evolution proceeds with long periods of stasis, Interrupted by short, sharp bursts of rapid change.

If the environment changes in stops and starts, then it makes sense for evolution to do the same.

Unseen wrote:

I mean, if bees and termites can have a social order and organize to create a place to live, why not human beings?

There is currently a lot of debate on this subject.  Manvir Singh says that they must have had social hierarchy, because there were a lot of people in one place.  I don’t buy that.  There was no farming, so no-one could control the food supply.  If there was enough food for everyone, there was no need to fight or compete, and nobody could lord it over anyone else.

It was probably a free anarchist state, with no hierarchy.  We assume that egalitarianism was the default position, and this is psychologically hard to break as each man and woman is as good as anyone else.  It’s only when you get delayed-return technology (meaning that you have to do complicated things to get food, that you control) that hierarchy is introduced.  Under these circumstances, the economy can’t support egalitarianism any more.

 

[UnseenParticipant]

Simon Paynton wrote:

It was probably a free anarchist state, with no hierarchy.  We assume that egalitarianism was the default position, and this is psychologically hard to break as each man and woman is as good as anyone else.

You are delusional. There will always be a power dynamic which results in the populace being divided in leaders/followers, dominant/submossive, powerful/weak. This makes anarchism a practicsl impossibility.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

Unseen wrote:

This makes anarchism a practicsl impossibility.

It’s a practical impossibility within a delayed-return economy, because, at least: 1) hierarchical coordination is necessary to get the jobs done; 2) a small group of people is always going to control the means of production; 3) if they’re lucky, a small group of people can control a localised, persistent source of resources.

But in a nomadic band of hunter-gatherers, it’s how they live.  When they try to introduce farming and machinery, it doesn’t work, because the rest of the group won’t let the new farmers hold onto their crops long enough to ripen or to save for next year.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

A bunch of hippies are smoking weed and chilling out….very calm and egalitarian. One of them opens a box of chocolate cookies. He becomes the leader. Humans just cannot cope without having a leader. And if he (or she) can do the thinking for them too, then the happier they all will be.

[UnseenParticipant]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

A bunch of hippies are smoking weed and chilling out….very calm and egalitarian. One of them opens a box of chocolate cookies. He becomes the leader. Humans just cannot cope without having a leader. And if he (or she) can do the thinking for them too, then the happier they all will be.

It’s sometimes pointed out when one argues that matriarchies simply don’t work that they worked in Polynesian societies. To that, I explain that, yeah, because the men would rather crack coconuts and go fishing. If the women are running the show back in the village,it’s because that’s the role the men gave them  because they weren’t as good at climbing coconut palms and fishing.

• This reply was modified 6 months, 1 week ago by  Unseen.

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