https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H5LCLljJho
-Ancient Civilizations and all the historical and mythological ramifications of that which were knocked out in the same era that "mythic" places like Atlantis got destroyed due to a comet hitting the Earth around 13,000 years ago.
-Science tend to ignore this as well as ignore the fact that just because we "know" there are no comets near us, we won't be hit by one... despite the fact that spotting a comet is not exactly the most easy thing to do in the world, nor one we accurately do with multiple "Near Miss" comets not being seen until about 10 days before they flew past us.
-Twice a year, we fly through the broken up remains of a comet that struck the Earth.
-We have the technology to address cataclysmic contact, and we could making massive amounts of money on it, yet instead we want to close our eyes and pretend it won't happen or didn't happen before, and this is largely in part to the "Secularism", or rather the anti-theist ideology that dictated how top scientists view mythology but also our past.
I definitely recommend just watching a few minutes of the beginning and seeing if they interest you if any of those things sounded interesting.
Fact is, a comet can have a big impact at the time, and leave no crater. See the Siberian event of 100 years ago. Of course early people wouldn't articulate the experience of that, in modern terms. In very early Indian mythology there are things that sound like volcanic eruptions and tidal waves ... things we know actually happen in India, or nearby in Indonesia.
The Exodus story clearly seems to relate natural disaster events ... though it probably didn't happen all at once, or as described. But I don't denigrate the imaginations of early people, who describe things in their own culture, or reuse unrelated events to make a good story. Whether or not the Santorini volcanic eruption is the main idea behind Atlantis or not, I don't know. There is more than one candidate. Another being just on the other side of the Pillars of Hercules in S Spain ... which sounds more like a tidal wave tragedy.
There was a tidal wave disaster in Indonesia just this past month ... can you imagine the stories that would come out of that, in the hands of a good storyteller?
It's not up to science to debunk claims of "ancient civilizations", it's up to the claimant to prove their case. Having followed this kind of thing since the 1960s I see that the current available "evidence" doesn't stand up to inspection. It consists mostly of "gotchas".
QuoteIt's not up to science to debunk claims of "ancient civilizations", it's up to the claimant to prove their case.
That's what they are doing, and science admits that alot of it seems to be right... it's just not accepted into the mainstream curriculum. Everything they say essentially fit's all of today's geological historical models, but the geological models crash with what people want to be right so it get's ignored or reworded to fit the existing train of thought rather than expands on it.
That's not particularly rare for either science or history.
http://discovermagazine.com/2016/janfeb/96-what-lies-beneath
Quote"It’s not the fabled Atlantis, but it is tantalizing: Researchers studying the Mediterranean’s Sicilian Channel, an area now underwater but partially exposed as recently as 9,000 years ago, found a 40-foot-long monolith, broken in two, with uniform, regularly spaced holes that could not be explained through any natural process. Analysis confirmed the monolith was quarried from a rock formation about 1,000 feet from its resting place.
The Sicilian Channel, where the monolith was discovered, has experienced great variation in sea level. About 19,000 years ago, water levels were 130 meters lower than now (red line). When the monolith was quarried, levels were roughly 50 meters lower than today.
These stone structures were placed there, at least, 9,000 years ago... these are not simple stone structures but monoliths that involve carving and inserting other rocks into them. That requires craftsmen, which requires civilizations... and civilization that is relatively quite advanced compared to hunters and gatherers. That is, at least, 5,000 years older than the oldest known civilizations, and then you also have Gobekli Tepe which was built around 10-8,000 bc... again, at least 4,000 years before the first known Mesopotamian civilizations.
There is also evidence that the English Isles had proper civilizations before the Romans came, and that this idea of them as being tribal barbarians is purely a Roman exaggeration and slandering. These are people that stood up to the Roman Empire for a very long time... do you really think people without civilization could do that?
Quote from: Shiranu on October 15, 2018, 09:39:23 AM
That's what they are doing, and science admits that alot of it seems to be right... it's just not accepted into the mainstream curriculum. Everything they say essentially fit's all of today's geological historical models, but the geological models crash with what people want to be right so it get's ignored or reworded to fit the existing train of thought rather than expands on it.
That's not particularly rare for either science or history.
Yes.
The model of human history is already wrong; we put civilization around 5000 Bc, and yet we have signs of civilization that go back 9000 and earlier BC.
The geological record, the mythos of early civilizations, the sudden surge in technology all point to civilizations having existed before 12,800, when a cataclysmic event wiped out the majority of mankind.
Likewise a lot of the pre-Cataclysmic civilization, or immediately post, are located in Africa and the surrounding area, which is consistent with the model of humans migrating out of the continent. If it's where humans originated, it only stands to reason that civilization would develop there first.
You know that archeology isn't static, right?
Quote from: Gawdzilla Sama on October 15, 2018, 04:06:13 PM
You know that archeology isn't static, right?
Yes, which means when geological record and mythological record are consistent with a cataclysmic event possible of wiping out civilization, we should try to incorporate that and learn from it, particularly when new (90s, 2015) archeological evidence questions the existing model.
The current archeological record indicates that the 5000 BC Mesopotamia origin of civilization is wrong. The geological record are consistent with a cataclysmic wipe out. The mythological record collaborates this happened at roughly the same time.
I would say at this point the burden of proof is on the people who insist that civilization originated in Mesopotamia around 5000 years ago, even taking out the idea of a cataclysmic wipe out, given how much evidence points to older civilizations in India, China, and Turkey. And yet that's the dominate theory of human history.
This is not some irrelevant topic, this is perhaps the single most important question one can ask about humanity...
Seriously? Try not to hyperfocus.
Quote from: Gawdzilla Sama on October 15, 2018, 05:38:23 PM
Seriously? Try not to hyperfocus.
I'm guessing continuing to provide evidence, or pointing out that even by the current model there are discrepancies thanks to Gobekli Tepe and other "pre-civilization" ruins, will just be met with, "nuh uh!"?
I think I'll wait for evidence of early civilization that's better than "Huh, that's weird." An isolated monolith does not a protocivilization make; it lacks context. A civilization capable of mining and moving a monolith of that scale should have left other traces somewhere; if and when those are identified, then there's a decent case for early civilization. Color me open-minded but not yet convinced.
Quote from: Shiranu on October 15, 2018, 06:20:14 PM
I'm guessing continuing to provide evidence, or pointing out that even by the current model there are discrepancies thanks to Gobekli Tepe and other "pre-civilization" ruins, will just be met with, "nuh uh!"?
You would be guessing.
Gobekli Tepe is a full-sized temple complex, with relatively advanced architecture and art work, that predates civilization by 5000 years.
Dwarka, a city that is mentioned in the Hindu epics, is believed to have been found off the coast of India... The ruins again predate civilization by about 4000 years.
The Sphinx is believed to predate the Pyramids by many years, perhaps by thousands, which puts it's construction possibly before the Mesopotamian civilizations.
There is evidence that the British isles had a full on civilization before the Romans, that they had independently developed farming and simple societies thousands of years ago, but this is largely ignored because it doesn't fit the barbarian stereotype of British history.
This is not just a weird monolith... These are entire sites being discovered that clash with the current mainstream model. These are sites that coincide with mythological cities. These are cultures that the ancients talked about coming before them.
Think about how little we know of the Bronze Age, and yet that was not a cataclysmic event but rather a rapid collapse of society. Look at how little survived of those societies, and yet they were empire's and cultures that interacted from central Europe to East Asia and had extensive trade relationships amongst them.
Our current model of human civilization is based on work from the 1800s. The world as we know it has changed significantly since then. The geological, archeological, historical/mythological evidence all points to this being possible.
It's never good to have a mind so open your brain falls out, but a mind so skeptical it would deny reality if it questions it's conceptions is no more useful. The simple truth is that, regardless of if you buy the idea of these ancient civilizations or not, the current model becomes more and more flawed as more and more evidence points to humanity being civilized longer than we realised.
That is a discovery as monumental as the Earth revolving around the sun, and it's being met with the same skepticism because it doesn't fit the accepted models. But if skeptics want to argue Ocams Razor when it's convenient, then they must also accept it when it's not; this model is the least complicated and simplest theory with the evidence we have, and it requires less mental gymnastics than thinking these pre-civilization ruins were built by hunter gatherers (neither the numbers nor the resources to build them), or that our ancestors were just making shit up when they talked about people before them.
Keep wavin' that banner, dude.
If anyone is actually interesting in discussing the topic, then I want to start from the "earliest" and work my way back. I feel starting at Gobekli Tepe seems like a good of place as any, since it is something overwhelmingly agreed upon by the scientific community as a legitimate location yet causes problems with the human history of civilization model.
(https://ahvalnews.com/sites/default/files/styles/is_article_featured_top_1920x600/public/2018-01/644.jpg?h=a1c4a234&itok=9H5MnfTW)
These are what remains of Gobekli Tepe, a 10th millennium BC temple complex in southern Turkey. At it's sister site, Nevali Cori (500 years younger), the oldest domesticated wheat remains were found. Besides the 50-ton pillars found at Gobekli Tepe were pottery remains and some absolutely beautiful sculptures.
(https://hiddenincatours.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Nemrut-dag-double-copy.jpg)
(https://cdnuploads.aa.com.tr/uploads/Contents/2017/10/26/thumbs_b_c_ba3240279ee1c31e09c88d44d766e475.jpg?v=133045)
(http://eden-saga.com/wp-content/uploads/animal-sculpte-inde-688po.jpg)
(http://thinkingsidewayspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Gobekli-Tepe.jpg)
Now then, all of this was built about 5000 years or more before human civilization using the current model.
Does that make sense to you?
Look at the amount of work that went into creating a structure this large; there are quarries hundreds of feet, a thousand plus at times, away where 50-ton pillars were moved. There is intricate carvings in the stone (look at the heads and the giant statues sitting behind them). This was something that required hundreds of people to build, that required well-trained craftsmen, miners, organizers, and someone powerful enough to oversee all this... while also requiring a steady influx of resources that you just don't get from hunter-gatherer societies. And then there is the fact that there is domesticated wheat located at it's sister site, which means that agriculture was not something foreign to these people.
The current model says this was built by hunter-gatherers 5000+ years before people discovered how to settle down and form civilization. That in itself proves there is a fundamental flaw in our system, and that is only one site out of several that predate civilization and yet require a civilization to even be possible.
I am going to bed, but if anyone is interested... feel more than free to address any bit you disagree with, I am more than happy to research it more and have an open dialog, hopefully starting with the most recent and working my way back.
This is what I am actually studying to possibly do for a living, and either way to have a degree in, so the experience is never a bad thing.
Pre-Fertile Cresent anthropology is a completely open subject (for new empirical evidence). The proper study of man is ... man. Psychology and anthropology are key to what is interesting about the human world. Of course if one despises humankind or despises history, this wouldn't be a field to get into. University of Pennsylvania has a long series of lectures on anthropology, as does the University of Chicago.
On the N American event ... there are tiny fragments of meteorite found in the tusks of mammoths/mastodons.
Shiranu, I hope you get your degree. I have a Masters in History from Purdue.
Quote from: Shiranu on October 15, 2018, 07:55:15 PM
The Sphinx is believed to predate the Pyramids by many years, perhaps by thousands, which puts it's construction possibly before the Mesopotamian civilizations.
That is not a majority opinion. The majority opinion is that the Sphinx is a construction of Pharaoh Khafre (c. 2558-2532 BCE), which given that Khafre was Pharaoh Khufu's son, and the Great Pyramids are thought to be Khufu's, it kinda can't be built earier than that.
Yes, there's some anomalies for the Sphinx, but not the "thousands of years before" anomalies that are required. The majority of (non-crank) opinions all center around the Old Kingdom, forth dynasty.
Quote
There is evidence that the British isles had a full on civilization before the Romans, that they had independently developed farming and simple societies thousands of years ago, but this is largely ignored because it doesn't fit the barbarian stereotype of British history.
Just about nobody fits the barbarian stereotype. Just about everyone had culture of some kind.
And that's really the sticking point. What counts as the beginning of civilization? Yes, there are settlements and structures around the world â€"some quite impressiveâ€" that predate the conventional start of civilization, but do they count as civilization beginning earlier than we thought, or are they pre-civilization settlements and structures? It's like deciding what counts as a planet â€" it's mostly a matter of what you want to call a planet. There's going to be a continuum between the small tribal bands and the full-on civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt.
Egypt is a civilization because it was a spread-out affair where there is quite definitely one overarching culture stretching down the Nile flood plane, and it was a society that could definitely project its power across not only the Nile valley but also to other nations. We know that the casing stones for the Great Pyramids came from the limestone quarries at Tura, indicating a civilization, with the ability to organize large groups of people towards a single end.
Now, the Great Pyramids differ from the Gobekli Tepe temple and Dwarka in one important respect: the Great Pyramids were single tombs. They were built to be the final resting place for a single pharaoh, and as such you do kinda have to get them finished within the reign of that single pharaoh, otherwise you're going to be perpetually slipping behind laying to rest all your dead pharaohs. The Gobekli Tepe temple is small compared to the Great Pyramid; it's maybe the size of the Khufu pyramid's funerary temple. It also need not be completed within the lifetime of any individual person, but piece by piece over the course of generations or centuries. Same with Dwarka â€" being a city, it mostly likely was built piece by piece over the course of centuries, as it grew from settlement to village to town to city. This a quite different logistical challenge compared to the Great Pyramids.
Again, whether Gobekli Tepe and Dwarka can be counted as civilizations is an argument about whether or not they count as works of civilizations or if it doesn't cross the threshold of civilization. It's not that we are denying that such things exist, but rather whether they were built by societies that count as civilizations. That is, whether it suits some rather admittedly arbitrary definition of the word "civilization."
If the societies that built Gobekli Tepe or Dwarka can be shown to cross some arbitrary threshold for "civilization," great; if not, then it's not really a slight against them. They're still impressive achievements. You gotta start somewhere.
Quote from: Shiranu on October 15, 2018, 09:15:30 PM
The current model says this was built by hunter-gatherers 5000+ years before people discovered how to settle down and form civilization. That in itself proves there is a fundamental flaw in our system, and that is only one site out of several that predate civilization and yet require a civilization to even be possible.
No, people were settling down prior to 5000 years ago, and it's no great revelation. There is a continuum between hunter-gatherer tribes and civilizations. There are in-between states that a society can go through that makes them not quite civilizations, but more sophisticated than hunter-gatherers.
5000 years ago is taken to be the start of civilization because that's when
writing was clearly invented. When writing was invented, that when history can actually start in ernest because at that point we can read things in people's own words â€" anything prior to that point is mere archeology. Once writing is invented, knowledge becomes much harder to destroy, and you can maintain history and technology across generations. You also get what you deserve: bureaucrats â€" you can also maintain a bureaucracy across generations. It suddenly becomes possible to have this large scale and long lived organization that lasts beyond the rule of a single cheiftain. While exceptions occur, writing does tend to be the norm in civilizations.
The Sphinx silliness is based on erroneous assumptions about erosion rates of various layers of stone on the Plateau.
Quote from: Gawdzilla Sama on October 16, 2018, 03:56:10 PM
The Sphinx silliness is based on erroneous assumptions about erosion rates of various layers of stone on the Plateau.
There is a chamber under the Sphinx, filled with rubble and water, unexplored. What it might show nobody can tell in advance. Proponents of X theory or Y theory are just that ... special pleadings. For the known unknowns ... we don't know. And we can't even imagine the unknown unknowns. Meanwhile our narrative is distorted by the unknown knowns.
I'll still wait for the weight of professional consensus to come around. As it might be over the dating of the eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45874858).
Quote from: trdsf on October 17, 2018, 12:09:24 AM
I'll still wait for the weight of professional consensus to come around. As it might be over the dating of the eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45874858).
The proper way of dating, from that time forward, is by "Julian Days". But we don't have a complete Julian day count from the reign of Julius Caesar's last year (he brought the solar calendar from Egypt to Rome, thanks to Cleopatra). This is why even by 725 CE, the Venerable Bede, using the calendar of Dionysius Exiguus from 525 CE, got the year count off by 4 years or more.
The prior Roman calendar was terrible. The solar calendar was a great improvement. And a pure day count is accurate, apart from the Julian year vs Gregorian year correction.
Quote from: trdsf on October 17, 2018, 12:09:24 AM
I'll still wait for the weight of professional consensus to come around. As it might be over the dating of the eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45874858).
That, indeed, is the rational position. Lay people tend to get excited about "new evidence!" but don't have the discipline to wait for confirmation and contextualization of the material.
I'm rusty, haven't used English for ages, so bear with me. I'll throw a few random thoughts. Hakurei pretty much nailed it. I get Shiranu's point, but yeah as traditional definition of 'civilisation' goes, they are all going to get filed under the most influential and long lasting ones. In this case, unless there is a very distinct, hard evidence about the culture that built Göbeklitepe, it won't be named under a new civilisation.
It seems that there is this idea, actually a strong feeling, most modern people have when they look at these monuments. In a nutshell, 'how the fuck they managed to do that thousands of years ago'. I don't know if it would make any sense to you, but the thing is they managed to do that because it was thousands of years ago. Building religious monuments of these scale, tombs is the result of not being 'advanced'. Because this is about religion. All these monuments are for/about faith-belief which makes the life itself in a nutshell. If it is the technical scale, to me after humans discovered to put one stone on another, rest is imagination and planning. I don't see anything 'mind boggling' or 'impossible'. (And an architect who lived in 19th century had a very good explanation about how architecture actually was born, which he was strongly persecuted for it, but that's another subject of course.)
You are talking about Ancient Egyptians. Ancient Egyptian culture is based on a funeral cult. Everything is for the after life. It's a closed society. For example, they have an idea of human anatomy, but they never depicted it or sculpted it in a natural looking way. They have refused to imitate nature. When I look at the three pyramids the only thing I see is challenging time; endurance. Well every civilisation have a problem with time; we humans have big issues with time. But look at the pyramids. It's the best, refined, economic form of saying 'this must survive!'. When I say economic, I mean if you want to build something huge and want it to last for thousands of years, don't you think pyramid is a very good solution to go?
But on the other hand, look at the Greek and Roman civilisations. Their life is based on religion too. But their culture produced the best imitations of nature in terms of architecture and sculpture.
There is a very famous cliché example given to underline the differences between these two 'opposite' cultures. There is this Greek bas relief depicting Aphrodite's birth. It's something like this:
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-PG3vr1IoObc/UnaeIko8o-I/AAAAAAAAX-U/W9aY5KxxbOE/s640/1121O%2520P8077.jpg
Look at it. There this half naked female body emerging from somwhere. It could be a woman getting out of a bath. Of course nudity is important but the most important part is goddess or not, the relief is showing a momentary action. yes there are countless formal, iconographic, dull, motionless scenes in Greek or later Roman art, but this manner of depiction only found in these cultures.
You can't find anything resembling this in Ancient Egyptian art or the art of the cultures it influenced. Can't they technically do that? Of course they can. But the point is they didn't. Because it didn't make sense to them.
I'm not making this comparison to praise one of them or to imply one is superior to the other. I am making it because these are not just two different form of expressions, they are two different forms of interpretation of a world vision; life. And that is what makes a civilisation, civilisation. Also consistency. And evidence to prove that consistency. We use the term 'civilisation' very loosely, but if you take it in this sense there has actually been a few civilisation in human history.
Quote from: Gawdzilla Sama on October 17, 2018, 08:07:06 AM
That, indeed, is the rational position. Lay people tend to get excited about "new evidence!" but don't have the discipline to wait for confirmation and contextualization of the material.
If there's a better pathway to knowledge than the scientific method, I don't know what it is. Also, I am perfectly aware that I am not especially well read with regard to ancient civilizations, so I'm not in a position to properly judge new findings relative to current models â€" all the more reason to leave it to the professionals to sort it out.
Quote from: trdsf on October 24, 2018, 06:06:36 AM
If there's a better pathway to knowledge than the scientific method, I don't know what it is. Also, I am perfectly aware that I am not especially well read with regard to ancient civilizations, so I'm not in a position to properly judge new findings relative to current models â€" all the more reason to leave it to the professionals to sort it out.
This is why we can't judge the present. You need the perspective of 100 years after you are gone, to assess it.