Well you could stick agree with the first statement and believe we only have a 20% of finding something if they’ve built their grand structures of wood or other short lasting materials
We know quite a lot about the vikings. We have a few texts that date back to that period in their origin, and a lot of texts written by their descendants a century or two after the end of the viking period. Do we have anything from ancient Egypt comparable to the saga literature?
They built in wood, but enough of their structures survived to be excavated and studied by modern archaeologists. Along with their weapons, jewelry, clothing, ... .
> "Do we have anything from ancient Egypt comparable to the saga literature?"
Sort of. We have huge amounts of preserved Egyptian writing, including both letters and the longer sorts of funerary inscriptions. But as far as actual literature goes, in Middle Egyptian? We have a couple hundred pages of moderately good literature, but the drop-off after that is steep. This includes a couple of saga-like tales, some collections of interesting annecdotes, some very deft political satire, and a couple of spiritual works. Taken together, it fills roughly the same niche as the Elder Edda. There's nothing directly analogous to the collected Icelandic sagas.
The ancestral Puebloans, Cahokians, and Polynesians were all having their “golden ages” centuries after the fall of Rome - I don’t see how their existence implies that similar societies must have existed 10 millennia earlier.
That’s what’s being talked about here - Puebloans confining themselves to narrow strips of coastline in a world where everyone else was barely beyond “caveman”.
The Vikings may have had some technology the Egyptians lacked, but Egyptian civilization was clearly on a different scale from vikings. That's why sea peoples sought to raid the Egyptians, while the vikings themselves were raiders.
IIUC, the vikings were not a culture. They was a fringe group on the edge of a culture that was mainly in southern/central Sweden. They were largely younger sons of noblemen that lived in Norway and their followers. The older sons stayed home and kept the family estate. We know about them because Odin was patron of nobles and bards.
Now the Norse culture did have skills that the Egyptians lacked, but it's not clear how many. The ones we know about are from groups that had to leave before the Christians came in and killed everyone. (Well, not everyone. See the "ordeal of the horn" (sorry, I couldn't find a good reference. Maybe you'll do better.) The guy who wanted to convert to Christianity rather than just being killed had a drinking horn forced down his throat, and a serpent was put in the bell of the horn, which was then sealed and heated until the serpent tried to escape. (I suspect this only happened to nobles, but "records are scarce".) And everything suspected of pagan influence was destroyed.
Lol Vikings were the ones who were killing Christians. Anyways no foreign Christians ever conquered their lands. Norse leadership converted to Christianity followed by the subjects. It was the Christian descendants of these Vikings who wrote down the pagan stories of their ancestors that the ancestors themselves could never bother to.
"Viking" is a profession, not a nationality or even a culture — there were Irish and Welsh vikings. But in this context, "Viking" refers to the Norse culture that most of the vikings came from in the period when vikings were active, ending sometime in the 11th century.
The culture was not mainly in Sweden, it was in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, and various of the islands. A good deal of what we know about it is due to the fact that the Icelandic branch produced quite a lot of good literature in the couple of centuries after the end of the viking period. I don't think Odin's preferences had much to do with that, since by the time that literature was written Iceland was Christian.
It is not true that everything suspected of pagan influence was destroyed. The original settlement of the Pagan/Christian dispute in Iceland in the year 1000 included toleration for private (but not public) pagan worship. Skaldic poetry continued to make heavy use of pagan materials long after all of the Norse lands were officially Christian.
To the extent that the Norse culture was in Ireland (not minor) it was the culture of the invaders. The Fingols, or "light haired foreigners". They did rule Ireland for awhile, but they were always seen as foreigners.
I thought Denmark was Vanir country rather than Aesir country. (There was a lot of slop, of course. And the invaders were often the Norse.) Iceland is from a later period than I was thinking of, but various islands are in period. Also Scotland and parts of England. But those *were* viking settlements. The Danes were a different culture ("Dane" I take as from "wain", the wagons lived in by the people of the Vanir.) Some time around the period of the Romans (eddas are a bit vague as to timing) the Norse (i.e. the Aesir) fought the people of the Vanir (i.e. the Vanir) to a draw, and came to a truce.
Also, well past the expansion of central Anatolian farmers using the Levantine farmer tool kit. Which, genetically the people there are descended from.
Not sure it is such a mystery anyway. You would expect with earlier civs for there to be both a wider variety in potential cultural practices, and access to resource of an accessibility and richness that was not later possible.
The Varna finds are very cool, but I don’t really think there is anything odd about them or they challenge previous info.
Fascinating, but still within the accepted span of human civilisation and after agriculture got started. This is not "ancient Atlantis had flying saucers" levels that the usual "lost prehistoric civilisations" go for. Generally, because "okay humans were using stone tools a millenium before we thought they did" is not sexy for the kind of National Geographic Special, the proponents of such lost civilisations go for "they had tech equivalent to our modern level (where "modern" covers anything from the 1930s to today) or even more advanced", not "so they were chipping really good flint hand axes earlier than the consensus had it".
I think people are open to "pre-Ice Age civilisations on a Stone Age level", but while we all had the dream of the "lost in the depths of Darkest Africa, an ancient lost civilisation remains to be found" and so forth, that's not probable. We can extrapolate large, culturally complex, past societies but nothing like "ancient laser beam technology".
The other problem with these theories is - where did they go? The sea level rise was fast on a geological scale, but not a human one. Yes, some sites would get flooded but presumably not fast enough to drown their inhabitants and make them forget how to do all the civilization things that would be leaving large monuments behind. We’d expect to find sites inland, or we’d have to explain why the civilizations completely collapsed prior to the sea level rise.
There are civilizations that we know existed from the records of other civilizations, which we cannot seem to find. See things like "The Sea People" as an example.
Especially if war was involved, where the victor may have destroyed the loser and carried off the people. Early stone buildings, even very advanced ones, may not look like much if all of the stones are torn down.
ETA: and obviously buildings with less durable materials would almost certainly all be gone by now.
I think there is a significant distinction between a civilization declining, even quite sharply, and a civilization disappearing completely from the archaeological record. Even after something like the Late Bronze Age Collapse or the Dark Ages or the collapse of various indigenous civilizations in the Americas, it’s not as if the people after the collapse become invisible.
It’s not impossible of course but I agree with Scott that it puts a hard upper bound on how advanced such a civilization would be. Any civilization would need to have sprung up during the ice age, rose to whatever level of advancement you theorize, and then utterly collapse, all while never leaving the fairly narrow strip of coastal elevation that would later be reflooded. It raises the question of “what happened” and the answer almost certainly can’t be just welp their old cities flooded and they never bothered moving inland.
War or disease might do it I suppose but again that upper bound - something like Ancient Egypt would need an unprecedented plague to just totally disappear, and any enemy strong enough to absolutely wipe them out would probably themselves be advanced enough to leave a lot of evidence behind. (The mystery of the Sea Peoples is almost certainly limited to “from which civilization we already know about did the Sea People come”, they are probably not a phantom civilization that rose, raided, and then vanished except for a few vague notes in Egyptian inscriptions).
This all ignores my actual beef with the Ice Age civilization theories, which is their path dependence. In large part, belief in these civilizations doesn’t come from “hey look at all this archaeological evidence we have that only really works if there is was an advanced civilization that got flooded after the Ice Age ended”, but rather from people who believe deeply that Atlantis existed and are trying to shoehorn that myth into something vaguely plausible.
There are lots of other "hard bounds". Quarries don't move around much, and can often be dated. We can tell that they didn't use various easily available resources, because they were there to be used at a later date. Etc.
For just about any resource, you can track when the easily accessible parts got used. (Well, *I* can't track that, but for each resource there are those who can.) Just consider what the post-apocalypse civilization will need to do to get oil or anthracite. Or even good gravel.
The steelman the argument of the "shoehorn atlantis" people is that there seem to have been a lot of sites with later investigations that are regularly found (by mainstream folks) to be older than earlier studies (and the reverse is also at times true). None of that invalidates the overall evidence and trend, but we should make a slight Bayesian adjustment to thinking that there may be older pockets of civilization than we know about, but not the overfitting of "everything is older." A site found to be occupied a couple hundred years earlier than previously known is not the same thing as thousands of years earlier, and might not be same people or people of similar technical sophistication.
I think the best case for some of these things is that in many parts of the world, the areas that were flooded in post-Ice Age sea level rise isn't a "narrow strip" - rather, it's an even wider area than the areas that are currently between sea level and 100 meters.
If there were notable civilizations on Dogger Bank or the Mediterranean or the Bahamas, and if those civilizations didn't build significant sites more than a few dozen miles from the coast, then it's conceivable that they all got hidden by sea level rise.
That said, it would be surprising if there was any *big* civilization that didn't get too far from the coast along the rivers.
During an Ice Age, you'd want to be at as low an elevation as possible to stay warm, which would often be below current sea levels. On the other hand, you'd probably want to put your big buildings on top of hills and outcroppings for defense. So, yeah, the idea that there were a lot of impressive buildings built during the Ice Age and every single one of them happened to be below the current sea level is implausible.
I agree that this kind of analysis should limit how big such a civilization would be expected to get (I'm not quite to "hard limit" but close enough for our purposes).
I really don't think an 1700s major international civilization would be possible. I'm pretty skeptical of the Egyptian pyramid scenario as well, but think that could come down to definitions and timing. As Scott mentioned, the Sphinx may be much older than previously thought.
I do think that we would have a very hard time disproving a Stonehenge-level society. It would be incredibly easy to have lost the physical evidence of such a society. As I said above, this is especially true if they built with materials unlikely to survive that length of time or in the conditions (underwater) that we would be likely to find them in.
Most of these pictures are of Americans and other Westerners living in Afghanistan in the 70s. Like the last picture is of (American) boys and girls attending the (American) School in Kabul. Most Afghanis didn't even attend school much less coeducational ones during that period.
No doubt, but it *is* an example of some thing becoming unrecognizable in a fairly short time. You can also look at ISIS intentionally destroying thousands of years of archeological history in a few days.
My point is not that Afghanistan was completely different, but to find an example of fairly substantial change in a short time period. We're talking about thousands of years for these sites to disappear, which means a lot more can happen.
This doesn't follow- displaced people aren't just the same people doing the same things. If you have a sedentary agriculture wealthy enough to raise monuments it doesn't hold that if you lose that agriculrual base and have to restructure your entire society that you will rise to that level of wealth again. If the lands which were flooded were particularly fertile, or particularly well suited to the crops you domesticated then the flooding could well reset you to a much poorer agricultural lifestyle or even force your descendants into a H/G lifestyle and you are basically three generations away from losing all the knowledge that was useful for the first lifesytle but not the second.
See my previous reply - decline yes, vanish probably not. They might not rise to the same level ever again, but they wouldn’t completely forget the very concept of farming or that metalworking existed or that writing things down was a good idea or whatever. Even that assumes a pretty rapid change from “farming works” to “agriculture is unsustainable”. Post Ice Age sea level rise was tens of meters over hundreds of years - this would have been a gradual shift inland over generations not an “oh shit a volcano killed most of us and buried our fields and now we must abandon civilization”.
Consider something like the ancient Puebloan people of the southwest US - fairly rapid and severe climate change seems to have caused them to voluntarily abandon a lot of their larger dwellings that are now left behind, and they didn’t seem to build anything equivalent afterwards. But they just moved somewhere else more temperate and started farming there, they didn’t forget how to grow crops or how to make pots and baskets.
The “collapses” we’ve actually witnessed are much less severe than the cataclysm that would have had to befall these civilizations - knocking them (and anybody who interacted with them) back literally thousands of years on the “tech tree”.
This is just an assertion. We have lots of historical evidence of building types going out of style in very short order when situations deteriorated. After the collapse of the Roman empire building with stone drops way, way down and building with mud/wood goes way up, and that is a trivail inconvience (the fall of Rome) compared to every major city being underwater.
To the rest of the post- the hypothesis is generally that a large impact(s) either caused or coincided with the sea level rise, which very plausibly could cause crop failures and large population declines. By the time you get a population rebound large enough to rebuild even a shadow of the former society the sea level rise will have wiped out all the low lying cities which means all the trade routes which depended on those cities for goods or as resupply points are done with in addition to the lower population leading to less surplus activity which means its not likely that new routes will be sought out (and even if they were they would continually be interrupted as sea level rise continued to flood other population centers.
There absoultely is the chance that a people could face devestation to the extent that they would 'forget' all kids of things, anything that isn't in active use quickly becomes forgotten. Toss in that the hypothesis includes the fact that examples of their older work would be completely inacessessible to them and it is a reasonable outcome that specific skills would simply be lost.
Writing is one of the things that has repeatedly gotten lost. It's often restricted to a small elite group, and for everybody else it's what tells the tax collector how much you owe.
Lost doesn't mean totally lost. Merchants can find pieces of it valuable. But effectively lost. Linear B is one classic example, but it's not the only one. There's currently a claim that the Neanderthals or possibly Cro-magnon had a limited form of writing that they used to track when the prey would be giving birth, etc. If so writing in one form or another has been around a LONG time, and we don't know anything about most of the earlier forms. (How are you at Ogham?)
Well, there's a few places that did "just collapse", but the ones I thinking of are a lot later, and the explanation is "the river dried up or got diverted". (In at least one case I suspect enemy action, but the proof is missing.)
However, in those cases there's no clear evidence where the folks went. So I don't find this a compelling argument. (I have a friend who believes they treked from India to Israel, and that Exodus is a lot longer ago that the begats indicate and... well, that's an answer, but I don't find it compelling.)
Not quite - ice dam bursts on the north American continent have been known to release a lot of water from ocean size lakes - in a human relevant time period.
For example, per Wikipedia
"This final drainage of Lake Agassiz has been associated with an estimated 0.8 to 2.8 m (2.6 to 9.2 ft) rise in global sea levels.[13]"
Pre-glacial maximum agriculture would probably have lost the domesticated crops. CO2 levels were too low during the glacial max to allow high enough productivity to make agriculture worth pursuing.
So we'd need to be looking for signs of ag from roughly 100,000 years ago when CO2 levels were similar to the current era.
But presumably in that period, not many of the sites would be flooded, so if there's some significantly denser population somewhere, that should show up in excavations of sites from that period, right?
I imagine so. At least traces. On the other hand, we just recently discovered a major new civilization in the Amazon that was present just hundreds of years ago. No one had bothered to look before. Gobekli Tepe was thought to be a Roman-era construction, until someone actually dug it up. So, it's possible.
Personally I doubt there were 100,000-year-old civilizations.
Exactly - the world clearly has a richer past than we currently understand. There are enough places were we have some _some_ evidence of interesting cultures with almost no details that are certainly many more that we don't even know we are missing. But at the same time that doesn't mean that there are lost high-tech civilizations when current evidence is pointing to hunter-gathering being the norm. Yet there might very well be some interesting civil works we know nothing about today that will be discovered in coming decades. The increasingly low cost of things like drone surveys of remote sites using broad-spectrum and magnetic imaging as well as ground-penetrating technologies is going to turn up more and more interesting finds, it should be exciting.
Wouldn't they end up destroyed by later melt waters. I mean you don't need anything as extreme as the giant floods that created the bad lands to totally destroy evidence of human habitation. Our evidence for neolithic sites is often as little as different colored dirt from post holes and some animal teeth. Bury it in ice and then flood it with melt water and it's undetectable.
Behavioral modernity is generally dated to ~50k years ago, so any hypothetical 100k year old human civilization didn't engage in any advanced burial practices, leave behind art, or wear personal ornamentation (e.g. beads) as far as the record shows.
1. I think there's increasingly evidence that domestication (genetic changes resulting from patterns of human cultivation/resource management) runs deep. One of the coolest but underrated findings, I think, is evidence of incipient grain domestication at the Last Glacial Maximum at Ohalo II in Israel more than 10,000 years before the onset of the Holocene (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0131422&xid=17259,15700019,15700124,15700149,15700168,15700173,15700186,15700190,15700201). The title and abstract are all about weeds, but just as striking is the proportion of domestic-type rachises, which is much higher than in wild populations (although still quite low compared to "fully" domesticated situations). This site's discovery was a serendipitous fluke (it has a fascinating backstory); many instances of Pleistocene domestication have probably eluded us.
2. I wouldn't discount how sophisticated societies can become without domesticated plants. In my Aeon essay, I focus on the Calusa, who had what seems like a tributary state/kingdom (they are also covered in The Dawn of Everything). They inhabited modern-day Florida, collected tribute from an area the size of Belgium, and were capable of profound feats, constructing huge mounds and a 4-km-long canal. But their resource base was, for the most part, fish. To your point about how easy it is to record such societies, they were observed during the Spanish colonial era and were near modern-day centers of anthropological research. Yet they were largely unknown to archaeologists until the 1970s. So I think we should expect to have overlooked lots of sophisticated non-agricultural peoples, especially in the Pleistocene.
I think “domestication runs deep” actually works against the Ice Age civilization theory, because it makes it even harder to explain why it would have popped up thousands of years early but only very specifically in areas that would be flooded slowly over hundreds of years when the ice sheets melted.
Am I the only one who thinks Shermer is overrated as a Skeptic and a Rationalist?
While I was criticising the racialists, I read his critique in "Why People Believe Weird Things", and it was just terrible. He made logical errors one could drive a truck through (his essay in "The Borderlands of Science" is much better, though it focuses only on sports).
And don't even get me started on his chapter on Objectivism. He literally writes a chapter on a philosophy while never discussing what that philosophy is, while relying on third hand accounts of the founder's personal circle, third hand accounts that are from sources he knows are biased.
You're not the only one. I'm usually unimpressed with what I've read of him.
He also sometimes does a bait and switch, and maybe that's what you're objecting to in his Objectivism essay (which I haven't read). His book on Holocaust denial, for example, is a book proving the Holocaust happened. I have no objection to people making that argument and the more, the better. And as far as I could tell, his reasoning and facts were good in that case. But the book wasn't really about the phenomenon of Holocaust denial, and when I picked it up at the library, that's what I wanted to read about.
That's exactly it - he does bait-and-switch all the time. Which is extremely irritating, especially if you agree with the overall point he is making. There is something particularly vexing about seeing shoddy arguments defending a case you respect.
I have a standing challenge to anyone to clearly state what Objectivism is - what the core of Rand's philosophy is - and then present a rational case against it.
I have looked for 20 years, and found exactly nothing. You might be the first. But I doubt it.
Do you have any recommendations for works which (even if they don’t argue against it) clearly state what Objectivism is? If nobody can define it clearly, that might be more of a problem for Objectivism than for its critics
Ayn Rand has a long, almost 100 page section in "Atlas Shrugged" where she uses her main protagonist John Galt as a mouthpiece to lay out Objectivism in one long, boring speech.
There isn't really a "core" for Objectivism, Rand lays out her entire metaphysics (which she sums up as "A is A", which she says she learned from Aristotle), Epistemology (which I can't really recall, but it wasn't very sophisticated - for the most part her Epistemology from my recollection is "I believe this, therefore it is true", and she relies heavily on stating things are "self-evident", many such statements are in my view not self-evident. For example, she states that smoking is self evidently good, because it is a promethean symbol of man's creativity and industry.
She also lays out a system of Aesthetics in her Objectivist system, but its one small book, and doesn't come up much in her main works "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead", at least from my recollection.
The meat and potatoes of Rand's Objectivism is her Ethics, which is a modified version of ethical egoism. Egoism suffers from circular reasoning and many other problems. I found egoism to be seductive when I first learned of it, but the shine wears off, and my own life experience doesn't jive with it.
I don't pretend that I am providing a full and accurate characterization of objectivism or that I am providing great arguments against it, but maybe this will help anyone who hasn't gone through their "Ayn Rand" phase. Every philosophy teacher I spoke with was less than impressed with Rand and had good arguments for why her system was just generally lacking and fails to wrestle adequately with most difficult philosophical problems (argument from authority, this is just food for thought rather than an argument, consider it context).
The only things I know about Ayn Rand are from reading "Atlas Shrugged", "The Fountainhead", and a couple of her essay compilations, I forget which ones. All years ago now.
I'm sure my characterization of her Epistemology is incomplete.
Ayn Rand gets dunked on by a lot of people who haven't read her work, and from people who dislike her for political reasons (her influence on the current far-right and libertarians). I can imagine for fans of hers it must be frustrating to see people setting up strawmen version of Rand's views and destroying them easily with lots of self congratulating.
Again, personally I liked her work some time ago, but after long consideration I no longer resonate with her system of beliefs. I am all about disagreeing with people in good faith and for the right reasons - I'm not the best person to argue against Objectivism though, I don't have a sophisticated knowledge of it, or good arguments against it. I saw Ghost's comment below that I thought was quite good, I recommend engaging respectfully with them, as their arguments and characterization appears to be in good faith, and of a high quality.
I actually read her philosophy. Please...she claims that the gold standard follows from considerations of pure logic. Umm, ok that's funny since you can't even deduce the existence of gold from pure logic.
Sure you could imagine a more careful claim like the use of a currency standard satisfying such and such properties follows by logic from assumptions A-E but she doesn't do anything like that.
FWIW, after reading a couple of Ayn Rand books, and a few RAWilson books, I was more favorably impressed by Discordianism than by Objectivism. But I can't define either of them, Even though I've got a copy of Principia Discordia.
Chunks of RAWs stuff are reactions to Rand ("Telemachus Sneezed!")...but it took me a while to realise that, because I read them in the wrong order , as it were. Rand is little known in Europe, and I didn't find out about Objectivism till going online in the nineties.
Sure. One can start with everything Ayn Rand wrote. Try reading Atlas Shrugged, and if that's too long, Galt's Speech, and if that's too long The Objectivist Ethics.
Wikipedia is also pretty good - by which I mean better than 99% of online detractors. I do find it irritating that they write "So and so said Objectivism is wrong here" without ever saying how, but one cannot have everything.
I still insist that Objectivism is not a thing at all. I did a Master's Degree in Political Science in Italy, without ever hearing of it.
The first time while leaving in the US when I heard of "Randians" I thought it was Rand Paul's political faction, and I was really puzzled about why someone should base their political thought around an obscure sci-fi writer.
Rand's books have sold something like 37 million copies, which makes her one of the least obscure sf writers of the 20th century. Terry Pratchett beats her, but I'm not sure how many other writers do.
Ayn Rand doesn't appear to make this list, but I don't think the list claims to be exhaustive. It does seem to contain close to a hundred names who each sold over 100 million copies (interestingly, Agatha Christie might beat out William Shakespeare for the number 1 spot!) I'm only familiar with about half the names on the top 10, but I am familiar with close to half the names for the whole list.
I didn’t recognize as many of the names as you did, but the only SF writer I noticed was Michael Crichton. But then I’m not sure I’d have called either Rand or Pratchett SF either. The exploration of the use of Reardenite in Atlas Shrugged is plausibly SF but it has little to do with the plot, and the static-electricity free energy is just silly.
It's interesting that Rand gets such a bad rap as an author given the standard theories most ppl advanced about the value of literature. I don't put any real stock in her ideas but it's hard to argue that she exposes the reader to a dramatically different way of looking at the world that some ppl genuinely have (no to mention what a Dexedrine habit feels like) so it seems like if ppl really meant that theory she should rate pretty highly as literature.
(to be clear I don't buy such theories...I think it's basically just fun and reject the idea there is some deeper benefit from art...but many ppl feel differently).
Objectivism is a philosophy, not a political system. Rand rejected anarchy but there is no reason why someone could not share her philosophy but reject the details of her political proposal — a government that funded itself by selling the service of rights enforcement, of which it had a monopoly — as unworkable or inconsistent with Objectivism. I think that was Roy Childs' position, at least at one point.
"But then how could it be that Oedipus could believe what (J) asserts without believing what (M) asserts, if they assert the same thing?"
Because knowledge is something held by an individual consciousness? There's no such thing as knowledge "out there", nor is there a collective brain. Every bit of knowledge that is known is known by someone.
To put it simply, Oedipus didn't know he'd married his mother. Ta-dah! Solved.
5.1 one is better, but still wrong. It asks, "Well, how can you prove that life is good?" And Rand does answer: "You can't. You have to make that choice completely alone. It is the one truly free choice you have. You can't say, 'I choose to live because of my children, my work, my family, whatever', because those all presuppose that you have chosen life. They are values that make life worth living, and make it easier and better to do so, but they are only possible once you have made that choice - to live. You have the choice to die, you have the choice to live self-destructively, which is slow death by self-imposed torture. You have those choices, but you have no choice about the nature of the choice."
I'll look at the rest later. As I say, I have looked for 20 years.
I have a better idea! Why don't you, I don't know, read the relevant text yourself? It's "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology", if you are curious.
There is no contradiction here whatsoever. Huemer is misquoting Rand. A concept is an integration of concretes.
Concrete whats? Concrete perceptions. Perceptions which are held where? In an individual consciousness.
Objectivism, as described by Rand herself, is the idea that humans are uniquely vital agents in a soulless material world, and that each individual, as a sealed unit of motive, meaning, and rationality is a sort of god-unto-oneself. Meaning and right, therefore, are derived on an individual basis by the exertion of agency, through the tools of rationality, upon the external world towards goals that satisfy the appetites of this central agent. In other words, each person is the heroic centre of their own universe, equipped with the ability to reshape the world to promote their own happiness, and with a moral compass that can only point towards that happiness.
I can't resurrect Rand, but I'm reasonably confident she would be broadly okay with that high level characterisation. And, in the abstract, it's compelling. At it's heart, it's not that different from modern rationalism, especially when we allow that, of course, the happiness of any given agent can be (and is) contingent on the happiness of other (or all) agents.
The problem with this philosophy is twofold.
First, it's sort of fundamentally philosophically ungrounded. It posits an external world, and not just in the "we all posit an external world to survive" sense. Objectivism requires that an objective reality of referents and means exist independent of us, that we have direct access to that world through sense data, and that there be no meaning, morality, or sense in this world before we put it there. It also requires that meaning and morality be things that can exist within a single individual, without requiring outside reference and collaboration. None of the are particularly young or radical ideas in the fields of ethics, ontology, and epistemology. All of them are also open, and quite possibly unresolvable, questions despite millennia of attention from many of humanity's greatest minds.
The last of these premises, that meaning and ethics are the domain of an individual mind, is particularly troublesome. This is an idea which has proven to be a real sticking point for a lot of philosophical models, and recognizing it as a hurdle is one of the more significant forces that has advanced modern philosophy in the last few hundred years. In fact, depending on how you read, interpret, and value Wittgenstein, it can be argued that this question is one of the few big philosophical disputes that has actually been conclusively resolved, and not in the way that objectivism requires. Of course, not everyone agrees, this is philosophy. So we can proceed as though this remains an open question. It changes little
In the realm of philosophy, a schematic of ethics and meaning that posits answers to unresolved questions as axioms and then builds from there is basically a toy. A toy can be a useful rhetorical device for inestigating these questions, but it’s not a coherent and stable philosophy of its own. It doesn’t stand on the same ground as actual philosophical models. Note that, through this same lens, religious philosophies are also toys, and the difference in scope is why religious thought struggles so much in philosophical debate. I’m not exactly trying to make an inflammatory statement like “objectivism is a religion,” but, honestly, the two broadly occupy the same space.
Which brings us to the second problem of objectivism. Maybe it’s not coherent as a philosophical model, but how does it work as a personal philosophy. This is where the actual history and sociology of it becomes relevant. There are a lot of things that follow very easily from the core tenets that are... not great. They aren’t necessary conclusions from the premises, but they certainly seem to be common ones. These are ideas like selfishness being the best path to altruism. Ideas like the worth of individuals being measurable, in how effective they are at shaping the world. Ideas like an overclass/underclass structure of society being not only inevitable but morally desirable. In practise, these themes come up again and again in objectivist thought. From the intellectual tower of “pure objectivism” some of these might be considered missteps, and others might be considered stepping stones on the way to the greater good that only look ugly because of flawed assumptions from the observer. Judging these things is always going to be subjective. From my point of view though, objectivism certainly seems to enable and provide permission for a lot more bad behaviour than it does encourage good behaviour.
So, if objectivism as a personal philosophy works for you, and if it encourages you towards good behaviour, then great. But I really think it does very much the opposite for most people who subscribe to it. That’s plenty good reason to be uncomfortable with its signal being amplified.
To summarize:
1. Objectivism is philosophically void as an ontological and ethical framework.
2. Objectivism is net harmful as a sociological movement.
The big problem with objectivism appears (to me) to be that it assumes the individual has no obligations towards society. This is clearly a recipe for the collapse of society, and I'm not in favor of that.
Is that quite right? Could it instead assume that any person’s duty to society is determined solely by that person? It might be hard to tell the two apart in practice, but in theory they are quite different — with the latter there could be tons of duty guiding people’s actions, just none that is legitimately imposed by a central authority.
Edit: I should have read farther. ThePrussian’s answer says pretty much what I meant rather better than I did.
Thank you! Which answer in particular were you referring to?
Just to summarise: Rand argues - and, again, in 20 years I haven't heard a counterargument against this - that life, which is to say individual human life, living your life successfully means practicing as hard as you can, 7 virtues: Rationality, Independence, Integrity, Honesty, Justice, Productiveness, and Pride.
Now, imagine a society full of honest and productive and just people. I don't really see how such a society is doomed to collapse...
You are wrong about that. An individual has the obligation - this assumes he is being moral, i.e., that he has chosen to live rationally - to treat all other members of said society with justice and honesty, and to respect their rights. More, having a stake in said society's nature, reason obliges us to defend it an maintain it.
I go a little further than most Objectivists and argue that the whole basis for human society is mutual protection, so all members of a society have the obligation to defend the rights of all others. Not merely to passively _accept_ them, but to actively _defend_ them. Paine's line is brilliant: "A Bill of Rights is also a Prescription of Duties". Mind you, this is my own derivation, which I am certain follows logically from Objectivism, but it isn't shared that much.
>You are wrong about that. An individual has the obligation - this assumes he is being moral, i.e., that he has chosen to live rationally - to treat all other members of said society with justice and honesty, and to respect their rights
Even ifs its against there owninterests? You need to choose one,again.
I am hesitant to respond to the above, since it contains a lot of terms whose meanings are not quite clear to me. So instead I'll put the case positively.
Ethics - morality - if it is about anything is about what we should do, what the right behaviour is, what 'the Good' is. There are three basic questions:
1. What is the Good?
2. How do we know?
3. Why should we care?
And with neat symmetry, there are three traditional types of answer:
1. the Religious,
2. the Social
3. the Intrinsic.
The religious answer says the Good is whatever the man in the sky says it is, we know because he occaisionally sticks random ideas in the heads of Special People, and we have to follow what these special people say, or we'll be tortured forever.
The social answer says the Good is whatever the group (nation, race, society, class, whatever) says it is, we know this because certain Special People get random ideas that express the will of the group, and we should do this because, among other things, the group - at the direction of the Special People - has the right to mess you up good if you don't.
The intrinsic answer says that the Good is something you just somehow know, you know through random ideas that pop into your head, and you just somehow know from random ideas that you should do all this. This is the approach Scott takes in the Consequentialist F.A.Q., easily his weakest piece of writing (go look: just read "random idea" for "intuition" throughout).
In pracice, since different kinds of intrinsic types have different kinds of random ideas, the one who shouts the loudest tends to take over as a new Special Person and you go back to answers 1 and 2.
Okay.
And what about Rand? Well, she says what is the Good is what is required for you to live which is also what is required to live the best life possible, that you can know this by using your mind to carefully examine reality, including the reality of your own life, and you should do this because it is the path to a long, happy, fulfilled life, the best life for you and all other good people whom you will ever meet.
"And what about Rand? Well, she says what is the Good is what is required for you to live "
The good-for-me is whatever is whatever required for me to live. If I am starving and I steal food from another starving man, that is good-for-me, because I live another day. It's no so good for the victim of my theft.
With respect, this is the "If human beings evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" argument for us Objectivists.
Right off the bat I can think of things much better for both you and this other starving chap. You could appeal to your fellow human beings for help, until you can get back on your feet. Better, you could trade your work for food, the way many day labourers did, so both you and he would now have a stable source of food and a chance to better your prospects.
Better question: how did you and this guy end up in this situation? Theft isn't usually the result of starvation - more often, theft is the _cause_ of starvation. In a civilised society, the chronic thief finds himself unemployable and starving. In other societies, starvation is usually the result of truly grand-scale theft by the state, by the people with guns.
But - say you - what if there's just you and this guy, and one's going to die... Yeah, I know the argument. Rand called it "life boat ethics". What if there are two men stranded at sea in a lifeboat that only holds one?
Okay. But are you in this situation right now? How often does this occur? Is this the expected course of your life? Modelling your ethics on the extreme exception of an extreme exception is... questionable.
Basically, a parallel would be the "If Dr Evil will nuke a city unless I rape this woman, does that make rape okay?" This isn't a situation that happens often, and at some point you start to wonder why the person is asking the question...
"The last of these premises, that meaning and ethics are the domain of an individual mind, is particularly troublesome. [...] it can be argued that this question is one of the few big philosophical disputes that has actually been conclusively resolved [...]"
(Further and further off-topic) Could you say more about this? I'm particularly interested in meaning (ethics to me is precisely a concept that only makes sense within the collective). I think you implied that Wittgenstein solved this problem, how?
You're right that we're way off topic, so I won't go into any real detail, but this is generally seen to be the crux of the private language argument. It's not so much that Wittgenstein solved this problem as that he very convincingly showed that there cannot exist a coherent solution in an single isolated mind.
The definitive exploration of this is "Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language" by Saul Kripke. It's short and relatively accessible.
Yes. For practical purposes, concepts are taught socially. You have to tell kids that "dog" is relatively narrow concept, and "animal" is a relatively broad one.
>Objectivism, as described by Rand herself, is the idea that humans are uniquely vital agents in a soulless material world, and that each individual, as a sealed unit of motive, meaning, and rationality is a sort of god-unto-oneself. Meaning and right, therefore, are derived on an individual basis by the exertion of agency, through the tools of rationality, upon the external world towards goals that satisfy the appetites of this central agent. In other words, each person is the heroic centre of their own universe, equipped with the ability to reshape the world to promote their own happiness, and with a moral compass that can only point towards that happiness
That's very eloquent!
A simpler way of putting the point is that Rand ignores biology...you start off as a helpless baby, you end up as an unemployable oldster. Without help from other people you're going to have a bad time at either end of your productive years.
> The last of these premises, that meaning and ethics are the domain of an individual mind
I don't think this is quite correct. Objectivism is definitely a form of ethical egoism, but her form of it still entails certain universal prescriptions that are required by reason, and which she's goes into at length. For instance, that "productive achievement as his noblest activity".
When I was younger, I could more or less make a formal argument against Objectivism. I had some friends who had gotten into Objectivism, and I read Rand's major fiction, plus some of her philosophical essays (which made a more formal version of the argument she makes in Galt's interminable speech).
If I recall correctly, Rand attempted to derive her philosophy from a fundamental choice between life and death. If the reader chose life, she argued that they also chose values consistent with life. And this was the first big philosophical sleight of hand: deciding which values are "consistent" with choosing life. For example, she argued that it was worth risking your life to avoid being enslaved, because being a slave was not consistent with that initial choice to live. I think there's actually a germ of interesting argument here, but I wouldn't call the version I read philosophy any more than I'd call a lot of C.S. Lewis's best work philosophy.
The problem for Rand's argument is that the initial choice of "life" is smuggling in an entire value system, and that value system is not uniquely determined. For example, someone from a society built around extended families might just as convincingly argue that the choice to live meant placing the interests of the extended family before the individual's. So the whole argument breaks down in the first 20 pages or so, as most amateur philosophical arguments do.
Which leaves me to evaluate Objectism as social movement, not as a philosophy. As a social movement, I find it tedious and uninspiring. The early leadership made a spectacular mess of their personal lives, mostly by trying to invent poly and making many of the classic newbie mistakes. Objectist art does not particularly inspire me, with the possible exception of one or two songs by Rush. I do not, in practice, enjoy spending time socially around Objectivists.
And perhaps unfairly, I politically lump Objectivists in with libertarians. And as I've aged, I've noticed that time and time again, libertarians have an alarming tendancy to transform into authoritarians, and/or to start spewing the most remarkable sorts of bigotry. None of this ought be inherent in libertarism, but it keeps happening to people I've known.
But this latter part is _not_ a philosophical argument against Objectivism. It's merely the list of reasons why (having read and rejected the philosophical argument), I do not usually bother to spend my time arguing about it. One of the lessons I've learned in life is that if a social movement makes my skin crawl in a particular way, it's rarely worth my time to engage with its arguments, for reasons described by G.K. Chesterton in "Orthodoxy":
> Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. I mean that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument.
To me, much Objectivist argument feels very tight and circular in this way.
I'm going to home in on the essential mistake here, and leave the rest of this to one side, since it isn't an argument:
" For example, someone from a society built around extended families might just as convincingly argue that the choice to live meant placing the interests of the extended family before the individual's."
Here's the flaw: Life is only available to individuals. There is no such thing as a collective life, or a collective mind.
Yes, an extended family, assuming it's healthy, may be a great value. A great value... to whom? To an individual member of it. Or to someone else, who likes seeing a good family.
You know to whom - or what - it isn't a value? To a stone, or a river, or a dead person.
As I wrote above, the choice to live or not is your only 100% free one, the only one that isn't mixed up in other values - because all values presuppose the choice to live.
Oh, and an extended family that demanded an individual member subordinate his only life to its demands would not be any sort of value.
> leave the rest of this to one side, since it isn't an argument:
This is fine! The rest of my post was intended to explain why, even though I think Objectivism is wrong, I almost never bother to argue against it. The question is uninteresting to me in the way that debates about how a silver standard is ethically inferior to a gold standard are uninteresting to me.
> Here's the flaw: Life is only available to individuals. There is no such thing as a collective life, or a collective mind.
OK, so we're definitely discussing the same part of the argument. This is a good thing! (Especially because I'm relying on decades-old memories of the essays in question.)
But I don't think I explained my argument clearly. Let me try another metaphor.
The "100% free choice" between life and death essentially provides 1 bit of information. The philosophy of Objectivism is much larger—let's go by John Galt's speech and say it's roughly 90 pages long. Cut that in half to account for rhetoric, and apply some assumptions about information density of English text, and we get about 10kB of philosophy.
Rand's argument is essentially that a 1-bit choice implies at least 10kB of consequences.
But the mathematical problem is that you can't get 10kB out of a single bit unless you smuggle a bunch of information in by a side channel. "Choose life" is compatible with a great many philosophies. For example:
- "Dying on my feet is better than dying in chains, because a life in chains isn't really a life." (Rand argued something like this, IIRC. But it implies complex ideas about what lives are worth living, and what life means.)
- Many people have believed that it is better to die defending your homeland than to run and save your own skin. This closely analogous to the "better to die on my feet than in chains" argument, but I don't know how Rand would have felt about it. Would it matter if you were defending a free country against Stalin, and if you ran to save your life, allowing other people fully committed to the fight to die?
- For a silly example, in the Order of the Stick #652, the lich Xylon argues, "Be a vampire, or a ghost, or an immortal with a paint-by-numbers portrait in the rec room. Hell, even a brain-in-a-jar, in a pinch. Anything to avoid the Big Fire below." His philosophy is life at absolutely any cost.
Rand's argument is "choose life, but only a life that's worth living." In a mathematical sense, the resulting philosophy is "underdetermined." You can't derive a 90-page speech from a 1-bit choice. You need to add something to flesh it out. And I do not think that the next steps in Rand's argument justify her ultimate philosophy, any more than I think Xylon's choice of (un)life at all costs justifies his larger philosophy.
Anyway, I hope this makes my argument clearer. I'm not expecting this argument to be especially convincing, which is fine—as mentioned above, I am perfectly happy to ignore the question.
Well put again..this is the problem with axioms: she has these quite short, supposedly indisputable axioms, and she claims to derive all sorts of complex things from them.
> But the mathematical problem is that you can't get 10kB out of a single bit unless you smuggle a bunch of information in by a side channel.
I think this is the wrong model for thinking about this because it's misleading. As a loose metaphor, think of ethics as a decision tree whose content and structure is defined by her metaphysics and epistemology.
When she talks about choosing to live as man qua man, her metaphysics and epistemology define what it means to be human and human potential, and that is what defines the structure of the decision tree. Ethics is then the process of navigating this decision tree.
The binary choice to live as man qua man or not (your 1 bit) is the difference of living up to human potential, or giving up your humanity.
So trying to separate ethics from epistemology and metaphysics is the mistake that left you confused as to where all of those other bits are coming from. No matter what your philosophy, those three subjects are the inseparable pillars of any complete philosophy.
My main problem with Objectivism is how it was practiced, even by its founder. Little consideration for principles of charity, in the sense of an assumption of good faith and acceptance of disagreements or mistakes. You can see this in how Rand and her followers "excommunicated" other members that disagreed with her.
Yes, Rand totally didn't live up to her ideals. She only, err.. *checks notes*... escaped from totalitarian tyranny to the United States, built herself up to be a writer whose work still inspires millions to this day, developed a whole new philosophy to allow her to write her books...
...wait, what were you saying? Because that sounds pretty much like something one of her characters might do.
To the other point, it's true that charity is rejected wholesale by Objectivists, because what it has come to mean is "giving of the undeserved". But Rand did accept, and practice _generosity_, which is a necessary facet of Justice.
Please read what I wrote more carefully. I didn't use charity in the same sense that you are using it, nor did I say Rand was not consistently applying her principles.
An interesting and thought provoking article on a topic that attracts craziness and bullshit science. I was particularly impressed by your point about livestock and crops. I follow developments in paleogenomics and you are absolutely correct.
There is NO EVIDENCE of any Ice Age domesticated plants.
As you say, that pretty much kills scenarios two and three. However, I am not convinced that societies of greater numbers and complexity than we imagine possible did not exist. We have wildly underestimated the abilities of Paleolithic peoples to shape and exploit their environment. Their numbers and social complexity were probably much greater than we currently estimate.
For example, did you know that Neanderthals "farmed"?
The groundbreaking research in Gibraltar has proven through paleopollen analysis, that Neanderthals living there over 100kya created an extremely high concentration of nut bearing trees around their settlements. Not only trees, there are high pollen markers for a range of other edible/useful plants concentrated around these Neanderthal settlement sites. Including wild grasses, the partially burned grains of which have been found around these Neanderthal hearths.
Silviculture or the "farming of trees" is probably the earliest form of "agriculture". Deliberately planting nuts or seedlings for nut trees around your dwelling places is "farming" in the broadest sense and it doesn't domesticate the trees. Unlike say, what we can see happened with wheat, barley, oats, corn, and rice.
Here/s the "thing", silviculture combined with seasonally flooding wetlands (like in the Amazon or Cambodia) can generate HUGE surpluses of food in those areas. You can build a fairly big population and society on nuts, fish, natural fruits, natural grains, and wild game. In Turkey, the nut would have been the pistachio.
So, while I agree with you that scenarios two and three are pretty much "off the table", I think that something like Gobekli Tepe was "doable" by Paleolithic Ice Age cultures. I think we "lowball" their numbers in our population estimates and that they were capable of more than we give them credit for.
One obvious area of investigation would be Beringia. Paleogenetic evidence shows that ALL Native American populations are descended from an ancestral population of "Beringians" who became genetically distinct from the East Asian populations around 35-40kya.
Beringia didn't "sink beneath the waves" until around 15kya. So, for around 20,000 years there was a human population in Beringia that we know next to nothing about. I'm not going to rule out the possibility that they had "kingdoms" and built their own version of Gobekli Tepe. In human terms 20kya is a VERY long time.
This argument is basically the whole part 2 of the Graeber & Wengrow book reviewed some time ago here (the dawn of everything). There were, and still are to some extent, huge populations supported by a variety of means from hunting-gathering to forestry, some agriculture (which does not equate domestication - domestication of a culture is defined as the loss of ability to reproduce outside of human intervention) seasonal or sedentary, etc. And it was not fixed: the entire island of britain apparently started agriculture, found it was not to their taste (understandable, it's very hard work, difficult to justify when you have other, easier resources around) and went back to eating basically hazelnuts...
And Goblecki Tepe is not the only large site without agriculture - Poverty Point in the US; the whole of Dordogne valley in France.
Anyway, I feel like the "nothing can support an advanced architectural civilization except systematic agriculture" should have a low prior, as modern scholarship goes against it. makes for a nice just so story though, which kind of enshrines it in the mind...
> Neanderthals .. created an extremely high concentration of nut bearing trees
Without wishing to diss Neanderthals, a high concentration of nut bearing trees doesn't necessarily imply they deliberately planted them. They could have been collecting nuts from far and wide, and then those trees grew naturally in the vicinity of their dwellings from nuts accidently discarded or even pinched from their stashes and buried by squirrels!
Probably early agriculture was a lot like this - people doing things that happened to create a local concentration of some edible plants, without necessarily quite realizing what they were doing.
I heard some decades ago about how wheat was probably domesticated, which largely means that the grains are large and easy to remove from the stalk — if you gather wild grasses and bring them back, the ones with these properties are the ones that will be more likely to fall off on the way home, so they grow preferentially in the areas near home.
That's been the argument against "deliberate intent" for a very long time. The researcher/s were aware that they would have to find a lot of supporting evidence to make their case. Personally, as someone with a doctorate in anthropology and a major interest in archeology, I think they have.
Because it's not just the trees. There is a whole "package" of plants that are concentrated around this group of Neanderthal sites. Sites which are separated by 10's of thousands of years during the time of their occupation. Something which implies "cultural memory" a feat Neanderthals were thought to be incapable of, due to not having "language".
The researcher has really revolutionized the way we view Neanderthals and the other hominid cousins that we subsumed when we spread out across the planet.
We he started his digs back in the early 90's the common paradigm was that Neanderthals were too primitive to even hunt birds. Hunting birds it was argued was a HUGE measure of cognitive ability. One that humans displayed and Neanderthals did not.
He has conclusively shown that Neanderthals did indeed hunt birds and also that they used the feathers of certain birds as adornment. They weren't "retarded cousins" that we swept aside. They were equals that we interbred with. So much so, that we basically fucked them to death.
They exist now only as a "ghost" in our genome. Like 9 other hominid species that we also subsumed by interbreeding after the "near extinction event" of 75Kya.
The typical European has about 2.5% Neanderthal genes in their genome. The typical African has about 1.5%. Australian Aboriginals and American Indians have about 1%. In the European population about 28% of the Neanderthal genome can still be found in composite among the population.
The “Clan of the Cave Bear” was actually right, we interbred with the Neanderthal. So much so, that they vanished as a species and became only a ghost in our genome.
Paleogenomics and the Human Genome Project have revolutionized our understanding of human evolution. With the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome, we have been able to compare the human (Sapiens) genome with that of another species of intelligent hominids in the Homo family. To perhaps understand why we are alone, and all the others have vanished.
There have been massive breakthroughs in our ability to read DNA from ancient fossils. They have advanced so much, that in a twist reminiscent of the movie Gattaca, paleontologists are now able to read the DNA in ancient soils.
Basically, from the “skin dust” of cells all mammals shed that winds up on the ground and apparently lasts forever. The progress has been incredible, and a lot of questions have been answered.
What we found is that there are ghosts in our genes. Sections of our genome that are the result of interbreeding with other hominid species. They now think we had 9 to 11 "cousins" in the hominid family.
Including: Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo Floresiensis, and 5 or 6 in Africa.
All of these hominid populations were very close to us genetically and we interbred with all of them. We know this because EVERY HUMAN on Earth carries these genes. This happened VERY early in the story. Before we expanded out of Africa.
With the sequencing of the Neanderthal and Sapiens genomes we can see clearly now how the two species interacted over a several hundred-thousand-year time span. The fossil record may be murky, but the genes don’t lie.
What they tell us, is that each time the ice swept over Europe it pushed the Neanderthals south into the Middle East and Southern Europe. At the same time the Sahara would turn green and pull up humans from Southern Africa.
The main reason that humans didn’t spread into Europe before 50,000BCE was most likely that the land North of the Middle East was already taken by Neanderthal communities. What we know from the genetic traces is that they intermingled, and they interbred. We know this because we can see Neanderthal genes flowing back into the African gene pool each time the ice retreated, and the Middle East became inhospitable again.
Some mixed-race humans returned to Africa and spread Neanderthal genes back into the African gene pool, where they can be detected today. We know that others moved back into Europe because their human heritage has been detected in Neanderthal remains in Eastern Europe that are over a hundred thousand years old.
That’s right, the flow of genes went both ways. We hybridized with the Neanderthals and other Homo species multiple times. We slept with our cousins. A lot.
The genetic evidence tells us this happened multiple times in prehistory. Each time the door out of Africa was open, some humans would move into the Middle East, interbreed with the people they found there, and then vanish as the climate changed and the region became desert once again.
Some would go back to Africa, carrying the new genes they had acquired back to the “root stock”. Others would go to Europe and their “humanism” would fade as they blended into the Neanderthal population. Spreading human genes through the Neanderthal gene pool.
This happened multiple times in a 200,000-year dance of hybridization, isolation, inbreeding, and re-hybridization. The two populations\species profoundly affected each other genetically. They is us, and we are them.
What finally put an end to the dance was the disaster that nearly killed us about 74,000 years ago. Recent research suggests it was a massive eruption of a volcano in Indonesia. The Toba eruption likely released 100 times as much SO2 as the Pinatubo event, and was the greatest natural disaster of the last 2.5 million years.
Temperatures dropped between 3.5 and nine degrees Celsius worldwide, and global rainfall decreased by 25 percent. What’s worse, computer simulations of the Toba super-eruption, found this event could have wiped out up to half the ozone in the Earth’s atmosphere. Remember the concerns about “destroying the ozone”?
We were right to worry, recent studies suggest that if we hadn’t stopped destroying it, things would be going very badly for us right now.
The Montreal Protocol was designed to heal the ozone layer. It may have also fended off several degrees of warming — and a collapse of forests and croplands.
The effects on the human genome indicate that the human population shrank down to a remnant group of a no more than ten to twenty thousand, probably living in Southern Africa.
We know this because it caused a “genetic bottleneck” trace in the human genome
When a species suffers a “near extinction event” and only a small population survives, genetic diversity goes way down. The surviving population carries only a subset of the genes that the pre-disaster population had. The species has gone through a genetic “bottleneck” and is less diverse.
Cheetahs are a good example of this. Some disaster nearly caused their extinction about 25,000 years ago. They survived, but have so little genetic diversity that essentially, they are clones.
Humanity survived but we are not a genetically diverse species. The most genetically diverse human populations are the African ones. Because they are the oldest and have evolved/retained the most diversity.
The European and Asian populations have less diversity than the African because they are younger and because they went through a second genetic bottleneck when they migrated out of Africa. The Amerindian genome is the least diverse of all because it went through a third genetic bottleneck when it’s ancestral populations migrated out of Asia.
Human genetic diversity is actually really low for a species.
My understanding of the current genetics data is that we only have evidence of interbreeding with our species for neandertal, denisovan and one unanmed old African population, and not for florensis (who might have been a rather distinct cousin), but I am nitpicking!
Yes, given the history of dirt farmers screwing up, 'a 'high concentration of nut-bearing trees that all die out at once' is a better sign of silviculture than just 'a high concentration of nut-bearing trees'. The US 1930's Dust Bowl was what normally happens to farmers- sooner or later they make a mistake and it all dies.
So when the mammoths and giant sloths and Giant Beavers of Doom died out as humans came down from the land bridge, that's a data point suggesting maybe they were ranched, and then the ranchers made one mistake and they all died. It's possible. Mass hunts using grass fires like the Mongols, the Romans, and Native Americans observed by the first settlers are of course more likely.
But I personally like the idea of early stone age mammoth ranching. Giant beavers building dams for humans. Ground sloths digging their caves. And then they overstock the ranches and run out of food and all die, oh the embarrassment.
Neanderthals may have cleared a European forest with fire or tools
When Neanderthals lived at a site called Neumark-Nord in Germany, the region had far fewer trees than surrounding areas, suggesting they may have cleared the forest on purpose.
If there was no pre ice age civilisation, why not? After the ice-age we domesticated several different crops in different parts of the world within a couple of thousand years. Yet humans have been humans for at least 50k years. Was there never a 2000 year period with favourable conditions before that? What changed?
I suspect that part of the story may be that we needed to kill off all the mega-fauna before farming would seem like a good idea. Kill one mammoth and invite all your friends to a 3-month feast, or toil in the fields day after day - which would you choose?
Yes, megafaunae mass-extinction was very probably a key element in the development of civilization, and I think it's hard to credit the existence of sophisticated societies coexisting with mammoths and glycodonts and the like. Perhaps the one place isolated and vast enough that it might have hosted civilizations millennia before they appeared elsewhere is Australia, but it is my understanding that we have a surfeit of evidence, both archeological and from indigenous oral tradition, that this did not occur in the 65 thousand years that humans have been there.
Right, and perhaps I made my case too strongly, but I think that there is good reason to suspect that civilization first arose in places where extinction of megafaunae drove humans to develop agriculture: That it later spread elsewhere doesn't disprove that. That said, it megafauna-dieoff seems to have been much worse in Europe, where civilization was relatively late to arise, than it was in the Middle East and Asia, so I admit that there must have been other factors in play (such as the Fertile Crescent)
The Australian Indigenous people were also getting more sophisticated in the last 5,000 years or so. They developed huge dam systems as fish traps, and started having larger gatherings. I’m not sure if this is due to interactions with other civilisations, or if a climatic/genetic clock was synchronising it.
…this is true? Does it bear on whether there was an Aboriginal technological flourishing in the past 5,000 years, or why that was if so?
Also, there was plenty of trade between northern mainland Australia, and Papua New Guinea and the surrounding region. This trade included weapons (Australia exported spears and spear throwers), and they had bows and arrows in Papua New Guinea. I’ve seen claims that bows and arrows would be less effective than spears and spear throwers against large animals like kangaroos, at least compared to the smaller animals on the islands to the north. Spears thrown with a woomera carry a lot more force than arrows do. Also, I don’t know much about European bow-and-arrow hunting, but I understand it involves shooting the same animal over and over, hoping to find a weak spot or just to wear it down. Spears and woomeras might be more effective.
Tasmania did go backwards, but I think that might be partly because they were cut off from their trading networks by climate change.
Bows & arrows are used against large animals in both the Old World & Americas. Arrows are smaller than spears, so they require less energy to accelerate fast enough to penetrate an animal's exterior (bullets are an even more extreme example of that principle). There are actually more large megafauna in the Old World than Australia (because they weren't adapted to humans and thus got quickly wiped out). Megafauna in the New World were mostly wiped out as well, but the bison (hunted with bows) is hardly smaller than a kangaroo. Finally, weapons are also used against other humans, and bows were extremely useful for that prior to the introduction of firearms.
Bison are much slower than kangaroos, and would find it easier to run away. One-hit kills would be more important against kangaroos than against bison. And human-on-human conflict was much rarer, so learning a separate skill just to do it more effectively would likely have been a waste of resources.
Edit: also, bullets penetrate by having much higher kinetic energy than arrows.
I have no idea how we'd know if Aborigines of 1700 AD were more or less sophisticated than the Aborigines of 10,000 BC. Neither large gatherings nor fish traps (built in rivers where they'll disintegrate) leave a lot of archaeological trace that's going to be obvious after 5000+ years.
They had a strong oral tradition which matches with archaeological evidence in other ways, and an unusually low level of warfare. I would expect stories about large gatherings or fish traps to persist, if only to preserve the reasons they failed. I would also be surprised if the memory of how to make or preserve them was lost.
Your suspicion is on spot. Mainstream theory in history/anthropology ("theory" as in "theory of evolution"). For some decades at least. I remember best the writings of Marvin Harris about this. - Theory 2 and 3 deserve a 0% imho. Theory one: Gobekli Tepe is around 11,000 years old. One more find pretty much as old and advanced as GT and the question resolves: Yes. So, followers of theory 1 shall rejoice now: their Atlantis is found! - I suspect: they are underwhelmed. Why?
Indeed. I read a rationalist knows when the use of probabilities (Bayesian or not) make sense. And when not. Theories 2 and 3 do not need those. imvho. They are, how to say it polite: silly. I am grateful that Scott took the time to show why. That said, a lot of things may sound like "unlikely, but who knows" if one lacks information. - If it were not Robins Hanson I would think his post from 2020 "nuts". https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/lost-advanced-civilizationshtml
Now I tried hard to update and it remains nuts to me. A zero. Sorry. Maybe my mistake. But if one gives Theory 2 or 3 a probability higher than winning a jackpot at powerball (1 in 292,201,338 last time I checked) then one should not call ppl playing powerball irrational. Heck, I sometimes do. :O - Would I wager one cent on Theory 2 if I were to get 3 million $ if it resolved true? Geez, I might. But certainly not 100 cent. So, If not zero, then 0.00000003 or so. Which is much closer to zero than to 0.5% or even 0.001%. You really feel it makes sense to assign that low a value to such a big question? I prefer: zero - and let's move on.
That's a specialized argument. In many other parts of physical theory, we use -- indeed can't easily do without -- probabilities that are strictly zero. The first that comes to my mind is any node of a quantum mechanical wavefunction. If the Bayesian philosopher asks the physicists to define a "probability amplitude" which is discontinuous because it cannot be defined at wavefunction nodes, I assure you we will all laugh at the philosopher and do no such thing.
I think I'd rather toil in the fields than eat three-month-old unrefrigerated mammoth meat.
Honestly, hunting deer or kangaroos or proto-cows seems like a better food source for humans than mammoth. You can kill it with a spear, you can (with a reasonable size group) eat it before it goes off, and you can (with a reasonable size group) transport it back to camp. There's honestly not much you can do with a dead mammoth except cut a few small pieces off it to take back to camp and leave the rest for the hyenas/lions/sabre-toothed-tigers.
Salting and smoking as conservation techniques for meat have been around for millenia, and a civilization that doesn't have them doesn't count as much of a civilization in my book.
Mammoths more a 'metaphor for the cheese-making-industry', err, as a stone-age-meme.
All kind of hunting down Megafauna - including deers, kangaroos, proto-cows - is fine: great food. The trouble in known (pre-)history began when all of those were mostly hunted down and eaten already, by a population that had gone up from all those successful megafauna-hunts. And could not be sustained on chasing rabbits for long: Ergo FAMINE or/and doing more of that gatherer-stuff morphing into agriculture.
"Ice age" does not mean that the entire planet was perpetually covered in ice. Temperatures were colder on average and more of the surface was glaciated, but refrigeration temperatures did not persist year-round in most of the places that humans lived, let alone deep-freeze temperatures.
Not snow, permafrost. The Eskimo today bury whale meat and blubber in the permafrost. One whale can feed a community for most of a year. I was just reading about how Climate Change melting the permafrost is taking this away from them.
They did. Tents at least - with tusks holding the structure. Visit the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna. Many reasons to do so. And its twin building opposite for art.
Google Neandertal mammoth butchering camp and look at the articles from 22' and 23'. They were very organized, there were many of them (groups of 50-100) and they feasted for a month or more on Mammoth kills/finds.
(Sub-Saharan) Africa has held onto land megafauna far longer than any other region. Why is SSA different than the other areas?
I suggest that the environment, the humans, and the animals have interacted differently there than other places.
First, SSA has had a higher load of human-limiting pathogens than arguably anyplace else. This impacted a second point, which is that population density in the late antiquity and early modern periods was comparably quite a bit lower than the rest of the world.
And thirdly, very possibly because of the abet low level but still constant human pressure, African megafauna are more dangerous than those of other regions.
To be sure, tigers, elephants and crocs exist elsewhere. Bison, bears, auroucs and terrible birds were/are feared and respected. And a lot of SSA wilderness perception is shaped by early European experiences, which were not quite historically accurate due to recent bio catastrophes akin to the Columbian exchange. (In the case of SSA, it was the cattle who died of plagues, not so much the people, and the cattle grazing pressure impacted pathogens, human density, and wildlife presence.)
Tldr- SSA is an exception on a lot of levels. They are probably not a good model for the rest of human activity in this case.
But also: megafauna in Africa co-evolved with humans. They're used to humans, and know how to not be driven into extinction by humans. The megafauna in the Americas and Australia had no clue that a bunch of tiny naked apes could be a danger to them until they got a spear in the behind.
I suspect this is because of the tse-tse fly and sleeping-sickness. Large parts of Africa were nearly uninhabitable to people. OTOH, it also affects cattle, so it might not have created much of a refuge.
50K years ago agriculture was impractical. Labor required to calories output would have been too low. CO2 was too low so plant productivity was also low.
Darn it, I sound like a one-trick pony in this discussion. Last comment on this topic.
So, new theory; salmon return to their point of birth because they were engineered that way by the Ice Age Civilizations. The fish that weren't eaten were ground up to power their Mako Reactors.
I have Robin Hanson's blog open in the other tab, so the obvious explanation is that returning to their point of birth is considered high status for the salmon. It is a signal of good navigation skills, conformity, and conscientiousness.
When you consider why an advanced ancient civilization would want their *fish* to develop these character traits, it seems to hint that the civilization was aquatic.
So, unlike the traditional hypothesis "the ancient civilizations sank in the ocean and died", we should consider that they instead adapted to life under water (a rational choice, considering that 2/3 of this planet is oceans) and perhaps sank their lands on purpose.
Schoch is living proof of the scope of academic freedom facilitated by faculty tenure. Early in his career he went off on a frolic and a folly with his claims about the weathering regime and seismic properties of the Sphinx site. This descended to fascination with parapyschology and the paranormal. At least when Linus Pauling went off the rails on the virtues of Vitamin C to cure the common cold, he had racked up two Nobel Prizes, in chemistry and the peace medal.
I feel like all this "you can't look into something too outlandish, its okay to look into even really dumb and offensive ideas if someone believes in it" is going to end up with Scott doing race science on the blog.
He already did, it's one of his best posts in fact. But because it was an unorthodox approach to the topic, it flew under the radar of the perpetually offended.
Medium warning (50% of ban) for low-effort, high-temperature comment that seems like it's trying to use social pressure to insult people who believe weird things, plus brings up a much more inflammatory culture war topic.
My substantive comment here is that like lots of "historical" "conspiracy theories" there appear to be two things going on 1) essentially speculative fiction with a tenuous relationship to the facts and 2) a small amount of archaeological work that occasionally reveals important new things, and I'm not sure that the latter benefits from the former.
For example, some really interesting archaeology has revealed some settlements that predate agriculture that turn on the head many ideas about the origins of civilisation, but archaeologists were just out there doing tough work without needing inspiration of people who think there was a pre-industrial revolution society out there.
There's lots of material culture that doesn't get left behind or leave a detectable presence in the atmosphere or soil, and its likely we'll just never know what happened. That's sad, but there's lots more we'll never know than will know. 99% of classical greek literature is lost, the pre-christian 5th century Irish law code now only survive in fragments of 9th century christian commentaries. Lots of African cultures have lacked a written history and there's been some interesting work building off histories recorded by the Griot oral tradition. But fundamentally some things are just lost, and speculating about what has lost can be fun but its not history. Its sad, but the speculative fiction that passes for hsitorical writing in some of these areas is not really assessible as statements about the past. Its close to YA fiction than history, which is fine, but its weird to use historical tools rather than literary ones to assess it.
Its like stolen valour.
The enjoyment people get from this stuff is really understandable, its cool to think about! Mighty African kingdoms sunk beneath the sands, exciting and rich pre-christian cultures, pre-modern steam engines! But you're always going to hit a wall when you're describing this run stuff as history or archaeology; these people are tourists.
There really *were* steam engines in Hellenistic Egypt, though (with the hugely important caveat that they couldn't power anything and were used as party tricks...) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
It's not clear that they couldn't have been used to power anything, but doing so in a culture that depended on slave labor wouldn't have been very profitable. And, IIUC, the design would have needed a LOT of work. (And perhaps better metallurgy than was easily available.)
What is the relevance of slave labor? Does this imply they didn't pursue any other sources of energy? But they did: they had ox power, water power, and probably wind power for grinding grain and pumping water.
Slaves were a plentiful source of labor. You don't want to do anything that would result in the slaves being more powerful. So either you have important parts of your civilization run by highly skilled slaves, you you create a new class with power. Both are choices to be avoided.
When you say "Does this imply they didn't pursue any other sources of energy?" you are implying a unified vew of "energy" that didn't exist. Yes, they used animal power. And the animal power was supervised by widely available (and therefore considered "unskilled") labor. If you create a need for a new skill set, you create a power imbalance. And the empire was brand new and already a bit teetery. This isn't far from the time of Spartacus or the civil ware of Marius vs. Sulla. This is around a period of a lot of civil strife in Palestine. I think Augustus was about to pronounce the sumptary acts, to prevent anyone who wasn't a senator from wearing purple in an attempt to stabilize the empire. (A search is a bit confusing, as apparently there were several different sumpary laws, some a lot earlier.)
They definitely weren't able to power anything. It was eighteen hundred years until a strong enough pressure vessel to do useful work was developed. Using steam jets to spin pinwheels was possible but their metallurgy was simply not up to the task of building an expansion engine.
Yeah but so what? Industrial revolution was powered by water and marketing agriculture, cheap communications and an improving mindset. The focus on things like steam engines just illustrates that these people are bad historians of development. If you're an amateur then you hear about rudimental steam engines and think that is a signal of economic development that matters rather than not really being important. Hence why I'd say its closer to speculative fiction than decent history. Sort of thing a fiction author thinks is important to their world building.
"without needing inspiration of people who think there was a pre-industrial revolution society out there."
"Its like stolen valour"
"these people are tourists"
Your objection seems to be that you personally dislike some of the people talking about it, b/c it is immoral for them to think about the question. And that, rather than the counter-evidence, is what makes the idea a really dumb and offensive conspiracy theory.
Thought I was clear, people are free to do creative writing and imagine alternative paths but they're not doing history or being useful in diving what was actually happening.
Huh, it appears that Hanson moved his blog to Substack and retroactively transferred all the old posts. And this didn't include the Disqus comments, which Web Archive doesn't save also, so presumably those are lost forever?
1) The sites would be a) underwater, b) reincorporated into later sites, c) not yet found. I think there's an effect at play whereby we take absence of evidence (of older sites) as evidence of absence - and it is - but its also evidence that older stuff may be harder to find. We have the near-complete archaeological record for everything built yesterday, and decent for the Romans, but little for the Harappans.
Also, I read once that the world mid ice-age would be far drier, dustier and windier than ours. I'm fairly sure that would only increase the pressure for low-lying coastal cities, making them more vulnerable to sea-level increase.
2) The crops and livestock would probably go feral, or vegetable equivalent? We push things so far out of their evolutionary niche that there must be some fairly strong pressures for them to revert. That and the fact that these modifications were relatively easy to achieve suggest this is fairly possible. Same for livestock, and Younger Dryas extinction event could have taken away the livestock animals of choice (Aurochs, various Buffalo etc).
Maybe a better angle is animal hybrids/ invasive species? Then again, who knows how obvious it would be 12 millennia down the line, and if the invaders would survive the YD event.
3) Don't have much of an opinion against the lead stuff.
A more general point - I think most of the 'oh shit!' factor would be captured by a Gobekli Tepe style civ at 20k ya: something that doesn't seem very unlikely to me. There's probably a fixed rate of GT arising from hunter-gatherer when there's not a world civ at play like ours. in the 12k years after the YD, we get multiple geographically separate agricultures and written languages starting up, so it seems like you have to swallow the bitter 'ancestor civ' pill, or accept a relatively high rate of GT from HG
I want to bring up the Polynesians as an example of a culture (or group of cultures) that reached a quite advanced level, well beyond the average hunter-gatherer tribe, without creating much that would be clear to archaeologists of ten thousand years in the future.
They had complex societies, built quite sophisticated structures (buildings and ships) out of wood, lived in permanent villages, and had some forms of agriculture (but mostly sweet potatoes, yams, taro etc) supplemented with plentiful seafood. They seem to have got their standard of living quite high in most places.
But they never figured out metal, and they (almost) never built monuments out of rocks. The exception of course was Easter Island, where they went absolutely crazy for building monuments out of rocks; other Polynesian people from Hawaii to New Zealand presumably could have built rock monuments if they felt like it, but they never bothered.
Anyway, when I think about Goblecki Tepe I think about a Polynesian-style society, existing in a state that's well beyond primitive hunter-gatherism, but not yet quite a civilisation. It's easy to imagine the Mediterranean or Middle East might have been full of societies at this sort of level of development, ten thousand years ago, but the Goblecki Tepe people were like the Easter Islanders of the bunch -- some weird obsessives who decided to move big rocks around instead of carving stuff out of wood.
"Except for Gobekli Tepe" risks sounding like "Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln..." Karahan Tepe is beginning to make it look like GT is just part of something much much bigger, and eventually you get to the stage you have to extrapolate back into the ice age even if your date for the finished sites comes just afterwards.
Separate point, are your three categories of civilization enough? GT/KT occupants may have been doing highly organised and very cool stuff which counts as a wholly new way of being civilized, vs being primitive but still amazingly cool. Compare naive approaches to SETI which specify the universal sweet spot where species have invented TV broadcasting, but not cable.
I just don’t think GT is that radical and that whole cool and amazing, how much it “changes out perceptions/assumptions” is super overblown because that sort of thing sounds great in a grant proposal or as a magazine cover.
IDK I always assumed some lost places like that were out there somewhere, but just that we would likely never find them or they were mostly wood. So that it exists isn’t that much new info on a theoretical level, more of a specific on instantiation level.
But maybe archeologists are just dumber and less thoughtful than expected if it really is super surprising to them.
You miss my point; I was saying that the GT guys may have been doing supercivilized stuff which we know nothing about and cannot deduce from GT itself.
If you want to be unimpressed by what we do know about GT, fair enough, but that's about your interest in the whole subject (which puzzles me in itself if you are interested enough to be reading this thread). It is astonishing for its extent and date, and I think its importance is understated because nobody knows what to make of it, because there is no existing academic specialism in thngs of its kind (we didn't know they existed), and because of its slightly offbeat location. I have been there. it's work, and of course now it's an earthquake zone.
I just think people love to overstate how revolutionary findings are because it makes for good grant proposals and articles.
If you had asked me in say 1998 when I knew all about this stuff but didn’t know about GT. And had said “actually Jericho ( or wherever) wasn’t the oldest city and actually we found a huge stone complex of some sort indicating a highly advanced pre agrarian culture much earlier and farther away”.
I would have been very interested!
If you had then told me this “older” was only a couple hundred years older, and “farther away” was “right next door”. Welll I would have been very underwhelmed about how revolutionary it was. It fits VERY smoothly into our pre existing knowledge and anyone claiming otherwise has their brain turned off or is trying to rise money.
So you are telling me the most advanced HG complex we have ever found is found exactly in the area and place HG were first domesticating crops and settling down? OMG what are the odds!?!?!?
I love archeology and GT. It is super interesting. But only because it gives us details about stuff we assumed was happening, not because it represents any great change.
Everyone has the right not to be interested. If someone surprisingly found a small pterodactyl which has survived down to modern times, i could say So? Closely related to birds, flies like a bird, same diet as lots of birds, lays eggs like a bird, boring brown colour? What's the big deal?
I know it’s not a city. And I am interested. I was very clear about that.
You are sort of talking tangentially to my main point regardless. I suspect because you don’t actually have a response, but want to keep pretending it is some mind blowing discovery because you just buy hook line and sinker anything you see in an academic article rather than thinking.
Academic statements about how “important/revolutionary” their research is are frequently highly sensationalized. That’s how you get normies interested and/or keep funders interested.
If it is not a city, how does comparing it to the well known city Jericho advance the debate? My pterodactyl analogy looks more and more in point.
I have been there. I have spent 3 days there in April 2013, with professional archaeologists. It is absolutely certain that I am 50 times, conservatively, better informed about it than you are. And (I wouldn't normally say this, but you seem to have raised the game on the frankness front) that much more intelligent than you, too. Finis.
Eh, Polynesians crossed the Pacific in like 1000 AD, right? What was their material tech level?
There's also myths/linguistic evidence that the Sumerians came from somewhere, maybe Arabia maybe India? And that they were a more successful civilization before. What's under the sands in the Arabian and Sahara deserts? Did people settle around the Nile after abandoning civilizations that are now under the Sahara?
This is difficult to think about without numbers that I don't know. How efficient is hunting/fishing/foraging in the now submerged environments? How many free hours did people have available x what population could be sustained?
Stone construction seems to be more of a lack-of-adequate-plant-materials thing, so maybe in the earliest days of forested Europe you just did everything with wood and mammoth bone or something.
We also can't really compare modern hunter gatherer environments with primeval ones. Modern hunter gatherers live in the most marginal territories. Really fertile locations have all been taken over by agriculture. How productive is an 11000BC fishery? How productive is would-be-prime farmland left fallow for mammoth and deer and whatnot to use?
I somewhat adhere to a desperation theory of farming's evolution: humans come into extremely fertile environments and their population booms, they exhaust the environment and now you have large groups of people struggling to not starve. Then you get war, slavery and desperate innovation and eventually that stabilizes into farming communities.
Maybe there's a more wobbly cycle of population boom and bust with agricultural/pastoral tech slowly developing throughout the cycles until suddenly it's fully developed Agriculture and the cycle is broken and we get cities and pyramids.
Regardless flood myths and garden of Eden myths abound. It seems feasible to think that during humanity's expansion across the Earth there were long periods of time where a new environment was colonized and life was good for centuries or more.
It is my understanding that except really constrained environments, like Polynesians, h/g societies do not really reach a Malthusian crisis. Population growth is painstakingly slow, and new family groups just move slightly over the next hill.
It's never "fully developed agriculture" , i'ts always "on the agriculture spectrum" . This is true all the way from "moving near to the trees that have lots of fruits and nuts" to "designing a from of cotton that's resistive to bugs and will grow well under conditions of low water and high CO2". And it's probably true further back, (and further forwards) I just haven't thought of the conditions. When you draw a line and say "agriculture starts here" you're making an arbitrary decision. Sometimes you need to, but it's likely to confuse things. (Is he an adult or a juvenile? Well, he turns 21 [or some other age] at midnight, and the stuff happened at 11:59, but he wasn't arrested until 12:01.)
Yes! That's a good point. I'll restate it in the negative: Hunting & Gathering contributes less and less to people's lives until you end up them 'mostly' dependent on agricultural output, possibly to the point of losing the skills needed for H&G.
Tho to be fair hunting and gathering probably remains a part of people's lives for a long time. Certainly peasants in medieval Europe hunted and foraged.
"The top 80m of the Great Pyramid would rise above the waterline, forming a little island. The part of the Pyramid above the water would still be taller than the entire Leaning Tower of Pisa. It would be pretty hard to miss!"
However, as you're previously established, underwater pyramids are natural. Nobody would agree that it's proof of anything!
If the Great Pyramid were submerged so that only the top 80m stood out of otherwise uninterrupted sea, that top would be rapidly eroded by sea action -- it is after all merely a pile of boulders at an angle well above the angle of repose -- until it subsided beneath the surface. This happens to new volcanic islands all the time.
Tekeli-li! Tekekl-li! No cyclopean cities sunken to the depths of the ocean or buried beneath Antarctic sheet ice? Ah, well!
I broadly agree with this - it's not impossible we had more developed human societies further back than we currently think, but they would be at the very low level. No Atlantis, Lemuria or Mu. No fantastic lost technologies more advanced than what we have now. But cultures on the level of Australian Aboriginal clans? That seems feasible, especially if we're proposing a civilisation/civilisations that lived along coastal regions which were later flooded and thus wiped out evidence of their existence:
"The regions of heaviest Aboriginal population were the same temperate coastal regions that are currently the most heavily populated, the Murray River valley in particular.
...Aboriginal Australians were limited to the range of foods occurring naturally in their area, but they knew exactly when, where and how to find everything edible. …But food was not obtained without effort. In some areas both men and women had to spend from half to two-thirds of each day hunting or foraging for food. Each day, the women of the group went into successive parts of one countryside with wooden digging sticks and plaited dilly bags or wooden coolamons. Larger animals and birds, such as kangaroos and emus, were speared or disabled with a thrown club, boomerang, or stone. Many Indigenous hunting devices were used to get within striking distance of prey. The men were excellent trackers and stalkers, approaching their prey running where there was cover, or "freezing" and crawling when in the open. They were careful to stay downwind and sometimes covered themselves with mud to disguise their smell.
Fish were sometimes taken by hand by stirring up the muddy bottom of a pool until they rose to the surface, or by placing the crushed leaves of poisonous plants in the water to stupefy them. Fish spears, nets, wicker or stone traps were also used in different areas. Lines with hooks made from bone, shell, wood or spines were used along the north and east coasts. Dugong, turtle and large fish were harpooned, the harpooner launching himself bodily from the canoe to give added weight to the thrust. Both Torres Strait Island populations and mainland Aboriginal peoples were predominantly hunter & gatherers, who relied on wild foods.
…In present-day Victoria, there were two separate communities who farmed eels in complex and extensive irrigated pond systems; one on the Murray River in the state's north, the other in the south-west near Hamilton in the territory of the Djab Wurrung, which traded with other groups from as far away as the Melbourne area (see Gunditjmarad. A primary tool used in hunting is the spear, launched by a woomera or spear-thrower in some locales. Boomerangs were also used by some mainland Indigenous Australians. The non-returnable boomerang (known more correctly as a Throwing Stick), more powerful than the returning kind, could be used to injure or even kill a kangaroo.
…The typical Aboriginal diet included a wide variety of foods, including introduced pigs, kangaroo, emu, wombats, goanna, snakes, birds, and many insects such as honey ants, Bogong moths and witchetty grubs. Many varieties of plant foods such as taro, coconuts, nuts, fruits and berries were also eaten.
Permanent villages were the norm for most Torres Strait Island communities. In some areas mainland Aboriginal Australians also lived in semi-permanent villages, most usually in less arid areas where fishing could provide for a settled existence, with places like Budj Bim in particular growing to comparatively large settlements. Most Indigenous communities were semi-nomadic, moving in a regular cycle over a defined territory, following seasonal food sources and returning to the same places at the same time each year. From the examination of middens, archaeologists have shown that some localities were visited annually by Indigenous communities for thousands of years. In the more arid areas Aboriginal Australians were nomadic, ranging over wide areas in search of scarce food resources."
So a semi-nomadic, semi-settled (along the coasts where fishing provided a plentiful and reliable food source to support settled population) at a relatively low technological level (no metal-working) which was later flooded out of existence? That is not beyond the bounds of possibility.
Plus, it shows that the notion of the idyllic hunter-gatherer lifestyle where you spend a couple of hours max gathering food then can loll around with plenteous leisure is a bit of a just-so story; food gathering and hunting can take up most of your day, then you have to weave baskets, make implements, and do other work to support your lifestyle even if it's not settled agriculture. I think that's a lot closer to the truth of our ancestors than the Noble Savage versus the Puny Farmers modern version of myths.
On the crops point, a decent sized coastal civilization could survive on fishing with no access to crops.
There isn't huge civilisation that has managed to but the Jomon of Japan and the Indians of the Pacific Northwest had sedentary societies based on fish (and tree nuts). The Jomon were reasonably sophisticated.
It might also explain why their sites are hard to find as they would be coastal or in deltas.
One could go as far as asking what the end-Pleistocene people who were producing ceramics in the north China plain, Amur basin, and Japan weren't doing, that one would require them to do before calling them a proto-civilization.
Hancocks view seems (to me) to be that converging cultural evolution must be explained by som previous civilisation (Atlantis). I dont think we need Atlantis to explain that convergence. If we have cataclysmic events such as the YD (agnostic to YDIH...), we would expect genetic bottle necks and thus less genetic variation. Different cultural norms and technologies would then account for more of the variation in outcome for different human groups, and it would also be necessary to accelerate innovation and cultural learning. So, cultural evolution would speed up when populations decrease.
I think there is indirect evidence for this alternative explanation, for example that the Toba eruption seem to have caused increased cultural development in South Asia. (A counter effext would probably be that smaller population tolerate less division of labour, but that might be more important after scaling of food production post domestication of crops - i dont think hunter-gatherers could increase division of labour significantly, by just having larger groups.)
Also, I think my explanation has more parsimony (?) because we only need the general mechanism of shifted levels of selection throught less genetic diversity - we dont need to postulate Atlantis. And as I said, we can still allow for the YDIH, which I personally find plausible and not at all debunked.
I suspect embyronic agriculture prior to around 10,000 BC was mostly about cultivating what we would call herbs, i.e. small scale additives to their food, for taste variety and to disguise the taste of slightly off meat, and for specialised medicine. Staple food crops, and human digestion capable of processing them in bulk, then gradually developed from this.
The other problem with supposed early civilizations at that time is robbers. The wonder is that agrarian societies were _ever_ able to take off, when they would have been sitting targets surrounded by nomadic hunter gatherer tribes all too eager to grab any of their produce! One can only assume there were many hostile takeovers, until eventually the agrarians themselves became as fierce as, and more than equal to, the tribesmen assailing them.
I think this probably is simply reasoning from the Fremen Mirage. There's no particular reason to believe the (almost definitionally) more numerous agrarians would be subordinate to the non-agrarians (especially as the reverse appears to be more generally true and land which was good for agriculture was generally good land, in order to have it you have to be able to defend it and this is generally going to predate the main tool of the successful nomadic raider, the domesticated horse).
I don't know why people seem focused on grain as early agriculture. I just got around to reading the subreddit thread, and the apparent reason for believing Goblecki Tepe was built by non-farmers is that there was no pottery for grain storage.
Grain is an optimal crop in some sort of calories-per-acre sense but it's an absolute pain to deal with. You gotta harvest it, separate it, grind it (all without appropriate tools), store it, et cetera. All of that is probably even worse with proto-wheat instead of modern wheat.To farm grain successfully you've got to arrange your whole damn society around it.
Whereas, as any home gardener will tell you, farming fruits and vegetables is something you can do in your spare time with a patch of soil. Maintaining a patch of (whatever edible fruit/veg is native to your area) is something you can do in your spare time to provide additional sustenance, and you don't need any fancy tools or infrastructure to make them edible. Nobody grows wheat, barley or (lord help us) rice in their back yard.
Perhaps, but it's rather difficult to grow *enough* fruits and vegetables to feed a family, and if hunting means moving around to follow the game, you probably can't afford to give that up to tend an apple orchard the way you can a wheat field.
And when people do get around to farming for apples (or whatever), they pretty quickly wind up with apples that are almost as different from their crababble-esque ancestors as wheat is from grass. This seems to have happened about ten thousand years ago, which again raises the question of what the hypothetical ancient civilizations were eating.
Crabapples are actually a great example of a wild-type plant that requires little to no effort on the part of the "farmer" to provide nutritionally impactful yields - in the PNW they were frequently cultivated along with nut trees and berry bushes to allow sedentary societies without grain agriculture. You don't need to "tend" trees as carefully as grains or annual vegetable crops. The trees weren't enough to feed people alone, but together with other abundant wild resources (fish, various game animals, lots of other plants, mushrooms) they were enough to feed substantial numbers of people without doing what we think of as "farming."
Say you as a modern person knew about wheat and rice and experienced a cataclysm / ice age where you and your family migrated and lived as hunter gatherers for 500 years or 2,000 years. Would you what..save the seeds for that long? If you travelled from a wheat friendly growing area across ice to a mountainous region or desert region or swampy region and could no longer grow wheat, then it is quite possible for that food source to die out. We are not talking about a bloody empire collapsing due to war, that’s simply not a valid comparison to there being a 1 mile thick sheet of ice extending halfway down North America where nothing can be grown.
We in fact do not even need to speculate and already major food and medicinal herbs from Ancient Rome and from ancient India are well known to have gone extinct. Even now we see foods going out of use and are no longer grown for various reasons. Swine breeding skills hit an all time low in the Middle East after the rise of the Islamic world and Ottoman Empire, what if thst was the only place swine were bred in the ancient world?. Khamut, millet, teff, amaranth, and other far less popular grains have nearly fallen out of use for human consumption. Even some very popular breeds of dogs from only 500 years ago are extinct and we only have old descriptions and drawings of big work dogs used to turn stone mills which were replaced by horses, oxen, and machinery.
Looking to ancient Roman birth control plants to soma in India to the Keykeon of the ancient Eleusinian mysteries. We find a wide range of key medicinal and culturally significant plants where people were once highly motivated to cultivate them which are now extinct, gone, or unknown. Look to kombucha Scobie cultivars which are purely a human construct snd if we lost them all and couldn’t maintain them for even 5 years then they’d be gone forever and need to be reinvented, leaving zero trace on wild populations of bacteria-fungal hybrids.
Heck even look to the Torah for foods which can and cannot be eaten from only 3k to 5k years ago! We can’t even agree on the identity of such animals now or even what they looked like or if they have any modern equivalent. But we have no reason to doubt ancient Jews knew what animals they ate and didn’t eat and they weren’t making up mythical antelope or birds they ate which we can’t figure out now. So the idea host we would doubt the total loss of knowledge and cultivation of animals, fungi, and plants by ancient peoples is very silly in the face of all the evidence of key foods being lost far more recently.
The idea that plants of human internet and cultivation could not be lost to time over 10,000 or 20,000 years leaving no record or wild plants with clear DNA evidence of cultivation is not far fetched at all. It is what we would expect.
I find this argument to be very weak and armchair based with no grounding in well known biology and history. A few other points, cultivated plants and animals often do very poorly in the wild and would be expected to die off or go feral. They would quickly die off and leave minimal to no DNA impact on the general wild population, if it still exists. Take wild cows such as the auroch which is now extinct.
Also what evidence are we using here? Worse than the lead studies which have not been done, has anyone really done extensive DNA evaluation of wild plants with zero current or known historical cultivation to evaluate their DNA for any evidence of human cultivation? This has not been done, the vast majority of wild plants haven’t even been sequenced for DNA and plant DNA is rather weird vs animal DNA anyway. So not only would such evidence be logically unlikely to persist with cultivated varieties being less competitive than wild types, the attempt hasn’t even been done to collect vast DNA samples for loads of wild plants to look for unknown human cultivation impacts.
But why would anybody have had to “migrate and live as hunter gatherers for 500 or 2000 years”? The ice age didn’t work that way, it wasn’t an overnight or even single generation change that would require people to forget how to farm for a couple millennia. And we aren’t talking about “a few herbs went extinct”, it would have to be “the concept of an agrarian society completely disappeared”.
And this is already a goalpost shift (not by you personally necessarily) from “ancient Atlanteans” to “well maybe some hunter gatherers were actually semi-sedentary earlier than we thought. Which is quite possible but for precisely that reason, not all that “impressive”.
If I have wheat seeds, I'm not living my life as a hunter-gatherer for even 5 or 20 years. I'm going to walk to someplace where I can plant wheat, or die trying. I may *also* hunt and gather, but I'm going to grow wheat because I really really like knowing where my daily bread is going to come from the next few hundred days. My kids will grow up knowing how to plant wheat,
Has anyone, anywhere, ever completely lost agriculture as a result of catastrophe?
> Has anyone, anywhere, ever completely lost agriculture as a result of catastrophe
Would we know it if they did? Non-rhetorical question, I’m leaning towards “unlikely” but I’m not super confident. I have vague memories of hearing about vast irrigation complexes abandoned in jungles for (many?) centuries, discovered only in the last century or so. Could we tell if more recently-attested irrigation techniques in close-by areas are descendent or were re-invented? My (again, vague) impression is that, as best as we can tell, those techniques were lost with whoever abandoned them. Worse, could we tell after a kilometer tall glacier grew over the land and then, while melting, scoured the land under it?
"has anyone really done extensive DNA evaluation of wild plants with zero current or known historical cultivation to evaluate their DNA for any evidence of human cultivation?"
Thanks for bringing this up, it seemed an obvious oversight in the original article. It's very hard to study plant genetics outside the world of currently profitable crops, because no one wants to pay for that.
If my math intuition is right, your “ever” predictions can never be evaluated on the negative side (no shares never pay out).
If you limit with “within the next X years”, how much do your percentages go down? (X=25 seems reasonable to me).
Not just a pedantic point. I wonder sometimes what shape the curve of knowledge about our origins has into the future. Do we reach some
horizontal asymptote of sadly imperfect knowledge about ice age peoples not much beyond present understanding? Or do we learn more and more as we develop highly sensitive reconstructive techniques?
Pretty much the only thing I know about this debate is from reading this OP, and I don't have strong opinions about it. But here are some questions/thoughts I have that are maybe irrelevant, but seem to me worth discussing:
#1. Scott says 80m of the great pyramid would still be above water if sea levels rose. I'm sure he's right. But how long would that pyramid last? Would the seawater erode the pyramid within a few centuries? [ETA: to be clear, when I say the pyramids might have eroded in a few centuries, I don't mean they would have been reduced to silt, only that the foundations of the pyramid would have weakened enough for the top of the pyramid would sink below sea level and no longer be visible.]
#2. Scott mentions civilizations and localities that wouldn't be directly affected by the rise of sea levels. But I can bet they'd be affected somehow, and quite possibly for the worse. If the low-lying lands provide a lot of resources the higher-lying lands need, maybe the higher-lying lands' civilizations would decline, too.
#3. Scott wrote that "civilizations don't lose agriculture." Do we know that to be true? I mean, I grant that if there's no evidence of it ever happening, then that fact favors the "don't lose agriculture" argument. It probably favors it quite strongly. I'm just not ready to accept it happening.
Again, maybe the above concerns are already well answered in the discussions on this topic. And I'm not particularly invested in any of the answers. But I thought I'd mention them.
on #3 I think Jared Diamond claims that the aboriginal Australians who colonised Tasmania lost all sorts of core skills (not including agriculture). At first they could make fishhooks and catch fish, later generations lost this.
Good points. I also find "can't lose agriculture" to be a poorly supported position. That we know China didn't lose rice seems like weak evidence that an actually lost civilization didn't also lose its agriculture.
We're positing one or more advanced civilizations for which we can find no evidence. That we also don't find evidence of their crops seems...obvious?
There is probably a hard cap on how much agriculture you can lose? Like I can see a semi-sedentary society that lived on wild game and maybe some minor local cultivation going back to true hunter gatherer, but going from “domesticated crops and animals and intentional landscaping and irrigation” to hunter gathering (without even an oral tradition of this past lifestyle) is a much bigger ask.
The Maori arrived in New Zealand and found 500 pound flightless birds that were easy to kill. They had given up some of their Polynesian agricultural skills before the moa birds went extinct.
There was agriculture in eastern North America before maize. The crops were largely abandoned in favor of maize. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Agricultural_Complex). We have good archaeological evidence that these plants were used as crops. Civilization makes garbage. But if we didn't have the archaeology, we'd have a collection of plants notable for their weediness in cultivated fields, and maybe have inconclusive debates as to whether their genetics indicate a past history of cultivation.
On the Where are the remains question Hancock's reply is, Gunung Padang on high ground, Gulf of Cambay if you want to look underwater, buried under a mile of ice at the South Pole (but I think he has retracted that).
I think the primary source of lead pollution in ancient metallurgy is thought to be a byproduct of the recovery of silver and perhaps copper from sulfide ores, e.g. Ag2S is often found in combination with PbS (galena, the major lead ore of antiquity) and CuFe2 (chalcopyrite, historically the most common copper ore). However, the *first* copper ore was probably malachite, which is chemically distinct from chalcopyrite, and appears to be more likely to be found as encrustations grown from Cu leached from elsewhere (including chalcopyrite). It's not clear that smelting malachite would've lead to significant lead pollution since it wouldn't occur mixed with galena. Also, copper *can* be found in the native form, although it is rare.
My impression is that the most ancient metallurgy centered around using metals only for adornment, since silver and copper are soft metals (and it would've been very expensive to extract either). Until bronze -- a relatively hard metal, readily worked -- comes along you probably do better and certainly much cheaper using stone, horn, and wood for your tools.
I would think rocks would be a lot cheaper! Lead is useful in the sense that it can be readily shaped just by hammering, and it doesn't easily oxidize away, so you can use it for making various specialized vessels and tubes, stuff you want to be more durable than pottery. I think that was its primary use in the ancient world. It's too soft to use for tools. It's also not pretty, like both silver and copper, and it's sort of obnoxiously dense. It's way less useful than bronze, once you get that far.
It's easier to make e.g. pipes from lead than from bronze. Being extra soft/malleable, and melting over an ordinary flame, are sometimes compelling advantages.
I would say this mostly comes down to how you classify a civilization. But if we by civilization mean any form of human cooperation involving more than the tribal amount of people (100-150 individuals) then civilization most probably involves agriculture (although some river-dwelling cultures can sustain surprisingly large populations only from fishing). Most people would probably also make a civilizational requirement of some sort of institutions meaning some sort of organized religion and/or communal building works.
This is a very low bar to pass. And it is also more or less impossible to prove that this has never happened. You point to paleogenomics as proof that agriculture is no older than 10-12 ka old. But this assumes that ice age civilizations cultivated the same crops as later civilizations, which is far from certain, especially since the climatological conditions were vastly different.
Archeological remains are an equally uncertain way to determine if ice age civilizations have existed. The sea-level rise is a weak defense. Not only because vast areas have not been flooded but also because archeologists are quite adept at finding things under water. Especially in the Mediterranean most coastal areas are thoroughly looked over in the hunt for shipwrecks. Any major building works there would surely have been found as well. But major building works are not an absolute prerequisite for a civilization. Even more, building works do not have to be in perpetual stone. They could just as well have been made of perishable wood.
Even if absolute proof against ice age civilizations can not be found I still find them highly improbable. Agriculture was invented by humans in numerous places on this planet. The very earliest agriculture took place around 12,000 years ago in the Levant. But agriculture was independently invented in China at least 10,000 years ago, in America 9,000 years ago and even in Papua 8,000 years ago.
Considering that humans have collected and eaten grains for several hundred thousand years it is remarkable that farming was invented in so many places in the span of just a few thousand years. This is a very strong indication that it was something unique to this period of time, most likely the end of the ice age, that made agriculture worthwhile. This, in turn, is a very strong indication that agriculture was not developed before its assumed origin around 12,000 years ago.
"But major building works are not an absolute prerequisite for a civilization."
True, but people are hoping to find some cool ruins.
If it were (somehow) proven that people lived in permanent villages of thatch huts 20,000 years ago and fed themselves by, say, fishing, well, that would be moderately interesting, I guess. But it wouldn't be as galvanizing as finding a 20,000 year old stone building or megalith site or whatever. Scott's Level I is Stonehenge, precisely because a pre-Ice Age Stonehenge would be awesome and that's about what he hoped would be found when he got interested in the topic years ago.
My impression from all the things I have read (and perhaps things I have misread) is: It’s not that civilization requires agriculture but that intensive agriculture requires civilization, because you just can’t make it work without some hierarchy and, I guess, enforcement. Also, at least the middle eastern societies coming off of the ice age found themselves in a climate-change trap where hunter-gatherer didn’t fly in that particular locale any more but agriculture did, and as climate continued to change their only choice was to double-down. I think maybe where I read this more carefully explained was in David Christian’s “Maps of Time”.
I don’t remember reading anything specific about interglacial climate change in, say, China, but it seems plausible that the same trappy conditions might have pertained in more than one place. The end of the ice age must have been pretty unsettling.
I believe one strain of the Atlantis theory is that somewhere like the Mediterranean or Black Sea was a valley enclosed by higher land and remained below sea level for some time, but at some point the oceans rose enough to "breach the levees" and flood these areas. Not literally overnight, but quickly enough that civilization collapsed rather than migrated in an orderly fashion. So it would not be as simple as "if you were X+i meters above water, and the sea level rises X meters, you're still above water."
Marshlands and shallow water can be very productive for gathering, though this runs kind of counter to the thinking in the previous paragraph.
I'm curious: if the Romans hadn't had such thorough written records, what would we know about Carthage? If Western civilization hadn't traced itself back to the Iliad, when would we have found Troy? I guess you could argue that civilizations develop myths and literature before the capability to "delenda est", but probably some peoples exterminated their neighbors and the memory of that didn't survive because they themselves were conquered later.
Yeah, that one isn't a great example. Just trying to game out if a civilization is significant enough to get mythic status, but it's not something Westerners grow up reading about, how likely is it that the ancient site will get excavated and we'll understand how things worked there. I guess we've found this Gobekli Tepe place, but it took a long time to stumble upon and it's not clear how much easier it would be to find (and excavate) a site with another city built on top of it.
From Bronze Age civilizations, we have evidence of wide-ranging trade networks, where tin, glass, copper, amber, sea shells, and the like was transported between Western Europe and the Middle East, and women lived and were buried a thousand kilometers from where they were born. Where are the stone-age sites (however small) that have goods that are clearly from thousands of kilometers away?
It doesn't take large quantities. A stone-age burial site of a high-ranking person with some jewelry from thousands of kilometers away, crafted using techniques that are more advanced than previously known from that age, would go a long way to making the theories more plausible.
IIRC, that very kind of thing has been found more than once. It's just that the techniques didn't appear that unreasonably advanced. Just too advanced for the locals to have done. But some of the evidence for obsidian that has been traded over long distances came from that kind of site. (OK, it was weapons rather than jewlery, but I think the idea's the same.)
A problem here is that lots of the stuff decayed. So you've got pieces of this and that, but the stuff that held them into context has been eaten by mold and bugs. So the wood, glue, cloth, etc. is gone. This makes it really difficult to make a firm claim that "the techniques used here were too advanced". The oldest really convincing thing like that (of which I'm aware) is a pair of trousers designed to allow horseback riding. But that was fairly late. People were still impressed by the wide-ranging trade networks that were implied by the construction. For the older stuff you've mainly got shaped stones, and occasional shell, and if you're REALLY lucky a bit of metal (but metal tends to decay away too). So we've got pieces of shell stained with dye that people guess was part of a piece of jewelry dating back far into the old stone age. (I'd need to locate the link again before I'd claim more, but Neanderthal times wouldn't surprise me.) We've got pieces of shaped feathers, and guesses about what they were used for. Some of them were long distances from their most likely origin, but claims about how they got from there to here are speculation.
Personally, I believe that trade networks have existed as long as people have been people. But often it's been person-to-person trading rather than merchants. Proving that merchants existed is a bit difficult, and quite possibly they didn't. Things just traded hand-to-hand repeatedly, tending to move from where they were less valuable towards where they were more valuable. (A shaped piece of obsidian is valuable, but I can pick up another chunk and shape it again. So its' worth trading it for that fancy hat with pretty feathers and and a good coat...made from an animal that doesn't live around here.) I suspect that tribal get-togethers were also swap-meets. And you'd know what you could dicker with the folks living over in the next valley for. So you'd have long distance trade by diffusion. Boats were probably the first enablers of direct long-distance trades, and that would be basically up and down the river. But trade by diffusion would be everywhere and everywhen.
I suppose the uncharitable position is that, at least as long as I can remember, say the 1970s, there’s been a consistent flow of modern sophisticated talking heads attempting to downplay the accomplishments of ancient humans, perhaps not realizing that their alternative explanations are even more far-fetched than, “They figured it out, it’s just engineering.”
I regard ancient tales of Atlantis every bit as credible as “Goliath was 3m tall.” Technically possible but probably a hyperbolic way of saying, “Taller than anyone we’ve ever seen.” See also “twice ten thousand time ten thousand” i.e. “An unimaginably big army.” I suspect at best a bunch of travelers’ tales that accumulated fancy with the retelling.
Unh...the ancient tales of Atlantis that I know of are from Solon, and aren't really THAT unbelievable. (Yeah, he probably exaggerated.) But which ones are you thinking of? (IIRC, he placed it in North Africa, near the straits of Gibraltar.)
Are they? As far as I know (and I'm nowhere even close to an expert on the matter) Plato only *attributed* the tales to Solon, but they're not anywhere is his surviving work.
A valid point, but a bit nitpicky. Yes, what we have are Plato's reports of tales of Atlantis that he attributed to Solon. And are quite possibly original fiction. Still, those are the oldest tales of Atlantis of which I'm aware, and they aren't that unreasonable.
I plead guilty to nitpickery, but I don't know, I believe that attribution to Solon is generally considered just a fictional framing device by Plato. Citing Solon as the actual source on Atlantis assumes more accuracy in Plato's account than might be warranted.
> So if there were Ice Age civilizations, what did they eat? It couldn’t have been any of our known crops, which post-date them. Could it have been their own crops, which were later lost?
They farmed silphium! And that’s why they went extinct! 😂
LOL! I meant to name silphium in a reply to an interesting post further up the thread. That post mentioned a plant used by the Romans as an abortificant, presumably referring to silphium. But they also apparently used it in cooking, which doesn't sound like an ideal way to ensure prolific offspring!
It is also sad that all twenty or so species of Frankincense trees are apparently close to extinction, due to overgrazing by goats and use for firewood. But the good news is that someone in Arizona has managed to cultivate all of them. So more strength to their elbow, and let's hope they flourish in the US even if they dissapear from Africa.
"The empire divided longs to unite, the empire united longs to divide, but the Chinese never fragmented so hard that they forget how to cultivate rice and rice went extinct."
May be a naive question, but if they did lose a crop that went extinct, how would we know? Is it just outside view that like, we don't know any crops with a gap where they were forgotten and rediscovered (or forgotten in their place of origin after having spread somewhere else)? Or just "we haven't domesticated any crops that seem like they should have been domsticatable by old civs, but weren't, so there probably weren't any "forgotten" crops."?
(Further outside view would suggest given that last line, the base rate of crop forgetfulness can't be very high, so it would be a low chance that it just so happens that *every* crop from Ice Age civs was forgotten, so even if this claim doesn't check out, the line of reasoning should, I think.)
For the sake of argument, what if the pre ice age crops were actually, maize, wheat, rice, etc all along! The newly "domesticated" staples would have simply been feral strains brought back into the fold.
Re: water level rise- listing what would remain from ancient civilizations after a 120 meter rise in sea level and then implying that we would find something isn't a good argument. Schoch's claim is that we do have something- the Sphinx! I don't particularly agree with Hancock's theories but he regularly makes the point that a lot of dating for structures relies on narrowing the band of time down to when we assume they were built based on how we think civilization progressed. Its rare to find a site like Gobekli Tepi which was used, then buried and so doesn't have millenia of subsequent use cluttering up the age range of its construction.
Also I doubt that the top of the great pyramid would be visible thousands of years after a massive flood, its limestone blocks would be worn by the waves and the top would collapse.
I think it was Rogan that had Shermer and Hancock on at the same time to debate this. It was so frustrating to listen to. They got to a point where writing in the Americas came up. I don’t even know if it’s true that there were no writing systems comparable to old world writing systems in the Americas (Olmec hieroglyphs seems to suggest it isn’t true) but they both seemed to think it was true, iirc.
Hancock proceeded to propose that a lack of writing suggested they were *more* advanced because they had to remember stuff! And Shermer let him get away with it by arguing whether that was true instead of just refusing to accept the attempt to redefine what “advanced” even means. Just so much skullduggery and semantics.
There’s a reason writing systems arose around early Bronze Age population centers. Once the population grows to more than what we evolved to be around (40-50 ppl in a tribe iirc but definitely not more than 200) it’s hard to keep track of stuff! Who owns what? How do you prove it? Etc.
First off: Thank you. I really appreciate it when you take frequently dismissed theories seriously enough to engage with and challenge them in plain language.
However, you say it’s not strawmanning to argue against an ice-age civilization capable of building Buckingham Palace. But I don’t think that’s what someone like Graham Hancock is arguing for?
He certainly suggests that there had to be someone around with far more impressive capabilities than we typically give people of the time credit for.
But unless you think capabilities can only arise along one narrow, technological “track”, that does not imply a Buckingham-level civilization.
Rather, we can imagine that the capabilities of a potential advanced, ice-age civilization might look to an 18th century British architect, much like the capabilities of a typical student at Hogwarts might look to us: Surprising and impressive, weirdly old-fashioned, and still... Most of the problems solved with magic at Hogwarts could easily be solved with science and technology instead of owls and levitating candles.
(It’s worth remembering that to students at Hogwarts, ‘magic’ or ‘sorcery’ isn’t particularly mysterious. It’s as predictable and teachable as our science and technology. When something goes wrong it’s due to boring reasons like a lack of talent, skill, training, focus, etc. and/or circumstances beyond the practitioner’s control. The Hogwarts student, then, has access to two separate “classes” of capabilities – sorcery and muggle technology – that hardly overlap or build on each other at all, but seem to be equally reliable when it comes to solving problems in the real world.)
Now, add to that:
Technological development builds on itself and stretches toward new capabilities to match our needs and wants. Once we invent the wheel and axle, we no longer prioritize inventing new ways to transport stuff using less energy – that problem has been solved. Instead we improve on the wheel, and use the wheel to stretch toward new capabilities.
However, imagine a civilization that didn’t invent wheels and axles for some reason, but instead invented the hot air balloon and used that to solve most of their transportation needs for centuries, and then built on that to solve other problems, and reach ever new capabilities.
If we discovered that civilization millennia after they invented the hot air balloon instead of the wheel, it would probably feel even stranger than arriving at Hogwarts. Everything would be different: food production, architecture, the economy, residential patterns, wants and needs, problems and solutions.
What I hear when Graham Hancock describes an “advanced civilization” living 12.000 years ago, is not a description of a civilization on the brink of our kind of Industrial Revolution. Rather, I picture a people that would have seemed like a weird Hogwarts to someone from pre-industrial Britain: Surprising and impressive, weirdly old-fashioned, and still...
To their hunter-gatherer contemporaries, the hypothetical ice-age civilization could have had a staggering understanding of geometry, astronomy, navigation, mathematics, engineering (all stuff that a sea-faring civilization would do well to learn), maybe politics, economy, job specialization ... And yet, for all kinds of reasons, they might not have engaged in much mining, or building their own megalithic structures, or agriculture on a large scale...
(Put another way, the hypothetical ice age civilization’s way of thinking about something like geometry and engineering – unrecognizable to us – might provide *some* 1700s capabilities, without necessarily being accompanied by all the other capabilities and motivations required to build a structure like Buckingham Palace.)
The motivations and capabilities to build megalithic structures and scale up agriculture could instead have emerged when mostly fish-eating survivors from such an ice-age civilization brought their capabilities to grain- and meat-eating tribes with other wants and needs, and became their wizards and demigods.
I’m not sure I believe it, but it seems like a more generous way to understand the argument than to evoke the picture of Enlightenment-era London, and it is a seductive way to explain what seems like an architectural and developmental missing link.
Also: I would find it surprising if there weren’t peoples living along the coast, living off the sea in some way, prior to a younger dryas impact, or if these peoples were not more advanced than contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes. That would go against the pattern, and would require some explanation. So my doubt isn’t so much about whether younger dryas coastal dwellers were more technologically advanced than more nomadic tribes inland, but about how large a technological lead they had.
"If we discovered that civilization millennia after they invented the hot air balloon instead of the wheel, it would probably feel even stranger than arriving at Hogwarts. Everything would be different: food production, architecture, the economy, residential patterns, wants and needs, problems and solutions."
The thing is, we do know about advanced civilisations that did not invent the wheel, and they didn't invent hot air balloons or novel transportation methods:
They were advanced, they were recognised as such by the incoming Europeans, but they were not "and they invented different high-tech". And that's the level that the proponents of "lost civilisations" do sell - that the pre-Ice Age or further back civilisations *were* at a high level. Look at our pal Graham Hancock - he might have toned down his propositions today, but he did do the whole "the lost ancients had flying vehicles and nuclear weapons" bit in earlier books:
"And what of the Enola Gay which carried the Hiroshima bomb? How might our descendants remember that strange aircraft and the squadrons of others like it that swarmed through the skies of planet earth during the twentieth century of the Christian era? Isn’t it possible, probable even, that they might preserve traditions of ‘celestial cars’ and ‘heavenly chariots’ and ‘spacious flying machines’, and even of ‘aerial cities’. If they did, would they perhaps speak of such wonders in mythical terms a little like these:
‘Oh you, Uparicara Vasu, the spacious aerial flying machine will come to you – and you alone, of all the mortals, seated on that vehicle will look like a deity.’
‘Visvakarma, the architect among the Gods, built aerial vehicles for the Gods.’
‘Oh you descendant of the Kurus, that wicked fellow came on that all-traversing automatic flying vehicle known as Saubhapura and pierced me with weapons.’
‘He entered into the favourite divine palace of Indra and saw thousands of flying vehicles intended for the Gods lying at rest.’
‘The Gods came in their respective flying vehicles to witness the battle between Kripacarya and Arjuna. Even Indra, the Lord of Heaven, came with a special type of flying vehicle which could accommodate 33 divine beings.’
All these quotations have been taken from the Bhagavata Puranu and from the Mahabaratha, two drops in the ocean of the ancient wisdom literature of the Indian subcontinent. And such images are replicated in many other archaic traditions. To give one example (as we saw in Chapter Forty-two), the Pyramid Texts are replete with anachronistic images of flight:
The King is a flame, moving before the wind to the end of the sky and to the end of the earth … the King travels the air and traverses the earth … there is brought to him a way of ascent to the sky …
Is it possible that the constant references in archaic literatures to something like aviation could be valid historical testimony concerning the achievements of a forgotten and remote technological age?"
And Hancock *does* propose that the lost civilisation left markers of its existence behind, so that we would know about them and be warned of future cosmic disasters. He believes there is evidence for his theories; he doesn't say "well and of course there wouldn't be anything left behind because of the disaster". And that this advanced civilisation left warnings of disasters to come (unhappily for him, when he veers off into prophecy mode, he falls foul of the same problems as al foretellers of the End Days - they never come on the date foretold):
"I am also impressed by the enormous lengths they went to to provide us with convincing proof that theirs was a serious and scientifically advanced civilization. And I am even more impressed by the sense of urgency – of a vitally important mission – that seems to have enlightened all their works and deeds.
I go on intuition again, not on evidence.
It’s my guess that their underlying objective could have been to transmit a warning to the future, and that this warning could be to do with a global cataclysm, perhaps even a recurrence of the same cataclysm that so clearly devastated mankind at the end of the last Ice Age when ‘Noah saw that the earth had tilted, and that its destruction was near, and cried out in a bitter voice: “Tell me what is being done on the earth that the earth is so afflicted and shaken … ” ‘ These words are from the Hebrew Book of Enoch, but similar afflictions and shakings have been foretold in al1 the Central American traditions that speak of the demise of the present epoch of the world – an epoch, as the reader will recall, in which ‘the elders say [that] there will be a movement of the earth and from this we shall all perish.’
The reader will also not have forgotten the date calculated by the Ancient Maya calendar for the end of the world:
The day will be 4 Ahau 3 Kankin [corresponding to 23 December AD 2012], and it will be ruled by the Sun God, the ninth Lord of the Night. The moon will be eight days old, and it will be the third lunation in a series of six …
In the Mayan scheme of things we are already living in the last days of the earth."
Okay. I did not know Hancock had made so outrageous suggestions. My bad.
As for the wheels and hot-air balloons: I did not mean to suggest that anyone who didn’t invent the wheel would invent the hot-air balloon instead. The point was rather that there may be more than one technology to achieve a capability, and while capabilities can seem to be a package deal, different technological solutions to a problem can lead to very different packages. (You can have a sophisticated architecture package that doesn’t include ability to build Buckingham palace.)
Hmmmm...I think there have been enough separate cradles of (known, historical) civilization that have all converged on similar enough lines that it would be surprising if there were totally different routes that civilization could go down. One exception might be the Polynesians, who did very good oceanic navigation without the rest of the tech stack. But they didn't have much else beyond their tech level.
Hancock seems quite interested in ideas that pre-ice-agers built various megalithic monuments, including Tiwanaku, the Sphinx, the supposed ruins in the Gulf of Cambay, etc. So I don't think he's envisioning a civilization without urban centers. I think it's hard to view him as arguing for anything else than an Egypt-level civilization with super-Polynesian seafaring ability, and I'm not sure whether Polynesian seafaring alone gets you to the New World and Antarctica.
I’m not sure technology would have converged so nicely without communication. I can imagine China and the Mediterranean diverging far more without something like the Silk Road to sync them up. And an ice age civilization would be separated from others not by a continent, but by time, a cataclysm, and a dramatic loss of the people who had the knowledge.
I guess something like “Super-Polynesian” captures what I probably wanted to interpret Hancock as saying (and wouldn’t it be ironic if our modern civilizations basically started out as cargo cults, emulating the original Super-Polynesians?) but, yes, I realize now that I have been *far* too generous in my interpretation of Hancock.
Interesting suggestions include artificial climate change being responsible for a spike in Earth's temperature about 56 million years ago (and a bunch of similar events spaced throughout Earth's history), an alleged intelligent arrangement of ichthyosaur bones in a Triassic site, and a Precambrian. cycle of complex life resulting from an earlier development of multicellularity (the Francevillian Biota).
It all ranges between wild speculation and outright fiction, obviously, but it makes for interesting stories.
My limited reading suggests that the most advanced hunter-gatherer cultures relied heavily on fishing. Especially if obtaining a fish surplus is easier from the ocean than from rivers or lakes, we’d expect these civilizations to be more heavily concentrated in coastal areas than agrarian ones. It makes it more likely they all could have flooded.
The fact that the continents were biologically separate until the last few centuries introduced "invasive species" everywhere is clear proof that there were no ancient civilizations that routinely travelled between continents before that.
Argument 1 states that most of Athens, except the Acropolis, would have been destroyed. So it shows that we would have one restruture to know of the existence of ancient Greeks and nothing else.
2) Any sites that would have "barely survived" by sea-level rise only (like the tip of a pyramid example), could have been destroyed in a different fashion. Assume cataclysm, it could have been a massive wave that destroys even the acropolis (massive wave could have happened by YD rapid sea-level rise). Assume slow and steady sea-level rise, simple soil deterioration would cause the and collapse of any shallow foundation structures. As far as we know, none of ancient sites are underpinned on bedrock.
3) If everything but the tip of building gets destroyed, you are suggesting everything but a small part of the most majestic building mankind has made would have survived. This argument makes a strong case against your point, that it is in fact perfectly normal that in cataclysm chances of survival of regular buildings are null. As far as crops and organic material, decay under the ocean would have taken care of it. Very hard to determine what crops they used in ancient Sundaland, doggerland or Caribbean if it is all underwater.
4) Agriculture could have fled with the survivors from the now underwater areas to the higher elevation regions in Mesopotamia where they start. Not a coincidence that the site of the oldest megalithic structure we know of is very close to the first known agricultural hub.
Lead argument is interesting and first time I see it. The most interesting argument is the lack of ironwork from any site older than 3000BC. We have no record of steel or harder metals which would show an Great Britain level of civilization.
While some may argue the Pyramids are older than they are (as Schoch does with the Sphinx) let's just assume their current dating, 5000 years BP. It is in a plateau of that lead use graph. a site like this assuming methods of construction and civilization would have lead to increase in use of lead, but it does not.
The fact that Giza was built in absence of these metals (lead or iron) is of itself fascinating. We cannot rule out that a Great Britain level civilization could have looked different if they are using different materials and methods to create their build-environment. It is hard to find preserved organic matter, even harder underneath the ocean.
I think you have to start with basic skepticism in that we have zero records of advanced human societies dating before the onset of the Holocene. That's an incredible evidentiary bar to be overcome by anyone arguing the opposite. But the Pleistocene epoch lasted for 2.5 million years, only ending 11,700 years ago, and humans and proto-humans were around for all of it. We don't know a lot in relative terms about human life in the Pleistocene, but we do know that the environment in which those humans lived was very different from our own. It was very cold, icy, windy and filled with giant animals quite capable of killing a human being in seconds. Not an environment likely to be conducive to advanced human civilizations.
But however much we know about the Pleistocene from geology and genetics, the archeological record from it is almost nil, nor do we have even the roughest of sketches from other ways of knowing. Most of our myths and religions, even if you were take them literally, don't extend back in time into the Pleistocene. The line of cultures in all parts of the world stops well short of there. Any way you cut it, a 2.5 million year long epoch across all corners of the Earth is a lot of time and space for which we have very little information with respect to how we were existing within it.
And it could be a mistake to think that because much of the Holocene archeological record would survive a 400 foot rise in sea levels, therefore were there to have been advanced human societies in the Pleistocene, those records would've survived as well. In relative terms, the geology and climate of the Holocene has been warm and stable (it's probably not a coincidence that it has given rise to such human flourishing). Do we really understand the cataclysms that would be associated with the transition from a 2.5 million year long geological age into the next? Do we really understand the dissipating effects of tens or even hundreds of thousands of years of Ice Age pressures on archeological artifacts as compared to the impact of thousands of years in a warm and stable climate?
Yeah, and if our civilization were to be wiped out, and someone searched our deep caves 40,000 years from now, not sure they'd find anything all that different!
"Graham Hancock suggests “ancient sea kings” drew the Piri Reis map which seems to depict Antarctica; anyone who can explore Antarctica must be at least close to 1700s-British level."
I wouldn't lean too heavily on Hancock; his 1995 book "Fingerprints of the Gods" went on a long ramble from the Piri Reis map to the then-popular Mayan Calendar end of the world foretold, where SOMETHING was going to happen in 2012:
"The reader will also not have forgotten the date calculated by the Ancient Maya calendar for the end of the world:
The day will be 4 Ahau 3 Kankin [corresponding to 23 December AD 2012], and it will be ruled by the Sun God, the ninth Lord of the Night. The moon will be eight days old, and it will be the third lunation in a series of six …
In the Mayan scheme of things we are already living in the last days of the earth.
In the Christian scheme of things too, the last days are understood to be upan us. According to the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Peansylvania: ‘This world will perish just as surely as did the world before the Flood … Many things were foretold to occur during the last days, and all of these are being fulfilled. This means that the end of the world is near … ‘
Similarly the Christian psychic Edgar Cayce prophesied in 1934 that around the year 2000: ‘There will be a shifting of the poles. There will be upheavals in the Arctic and the Antarctic that will make for the eruption of volcanos in the Torrid areas … The upper portion of Europe will be changed in the twinkling of an eye. The earth will be broken up in the western portion of America. The greater portion of Japan must go into the sea.’
Curiously the epoch of the year 2000, which figures in these Christian prophecies, also coincides with the Last Time (or highest point) in the great upwards cycle of the belt stars of the Orion constellation, just as the epoch of the eleventh millennium BC coincided with the First Time (or lowest point) of that cycle.
And curiously, also, as we saw in Chapter Twenty-eight:
A conjunction of five planets that can be expected to have profound gravitational effects will take place on 5 May in the year 2000, when Neptune, Uranus, Venus, Mercury and Mars will align with the Earth on the other side of the sun, setting up a sort of cosmic tug-of-war …
Could the recondite influences of gravity, when combined with our planet’s precessional wobble, the torsional effects of its axial rotation, and the rapidly growing mass and weight of the Antarctic ice-cap, be enough to spark off a full-scale crustal displacement?"
I've enjoyed previous books of his, especially about the Sphinx, but it's best to take him as writing entertainment (no matter how seriously he may or may not take it). He's had to trim his sails over the decades as new pop culture theories have come into and fallen out of fashion (e.g. the Mayan Calendar bit) and as archaeological discoveries unfold new material, so whatever he says today may or may not be modified from what he said in the past, and what he will say in the future.
If the lost civilisations crowd stuck to the boring but possible "human civilisation extends back further than the official record", they'd have better success. But that's not half as interesting as "amazing lost high tech societies that have left traces all over the world and possibly secret mystic cults handing down their hidden knowledge not to be openly revealed until we achieve a level of progress comparable to theirs!". The more colourful story will always do better.
I don't know for sure, but it seems to me like islands surrounded by ocean are going to be more vulnerable to erosion than hills are, and that a region that is under water on average is going to tend to flatten out over time.
In other words, even if an Acropolis-like monument were high enough up that it would be above water if you instantly flooded the existing terrain, the land around it would still wash away pretty quickly. If there's hard enough bedrock underneath the dirt, you might still have an island, but it probably wouldn't be shaped much like the original hill, and the ground probably wouldn't stay stable enough to continue supporting the monument for very long.
You know, your predictions technically weren't limited to Earth - would you give the same odds for ever finding alien precursor structures more advanced than Buckingham Palace :p
They were technically limited to Earth! I wrote "All of the following predictions are about structures on Earth built by homo sapiens without time travel"
So, on the broader question, I agree, there most likely weren't even Stonehenge-level civilizations around 11,000 years ago. There just seems to be a general dearth of positive evidence for that across numerous criteria.
But, I wouldn't assign much weight to specific criteria like lack of evidence for lead mining. Ancient civilizations may have mostly made use of lead, but that doesn't mean that you can't have something similar the the level of cultural sophistication of Pharaonic Egypt without it. Technology doesn't progress according to a precise ordering which is consistent across civilizations. Some innovations, like the wheel and axle for transport, seem quite basic, but were actually quite complicated to come up with, and were gradually spread from a point of origin rather than being developed independently in numerous civilizations once they reached an adequate level of sophistication. There have been large and powerful empires which got by without the wheel, or systems of writing capable of expressing most of their spoken language. So for many specific criteria like use of lead, we don't necessarily have to defy the data that suggests their absence to posit that powerful civilizations might have gotten by without those things.
But as a broad picture, any large civilization which did manage to get by without those things would have to have left surprisingly little trace of its existence.
The thing missing here is what glaciers can _erase_; glaciers are incredible at eroding mountains, and leave permanent grooves in solid bedrock. Any stonehenge type structure in Minnesota or Ontario would have been completely destroyed by the ice sheet, as would any evidence of crops... but that only works for non-equatorial latitudes.
All of this is an indirect argument that a greater EA cause area should be writing down extremely important knowledge on long-lasting storage (e.g., stone etchings in a geologically stable desert area). Even weak evidence of past civilizations that had scale but Didn't Make It To Technology should motivate us to preserve knowledge!
The agricultural argument is definitely the strongest of the three.
The argument from lack of identified sites is not terribly strong. If there are any lost cities away from the former coast, they could just be lost. 13000 years is a long time for a city to be razed, eroded, quarried for materials, or buried. There’s certainly a lot more 4000-year-old cities which have not been found or which have been destroyed entirely. Archaeologists knew about the Gobekle Tepe site for 30 years but assumed it was a neolithic graveyard of minor importance before it was eventually excavated in full. Shimao was only excavated in 2011. In this context the absence of direct evidence for 13000-year-old cities is no more than mildly suggestive.
The lead argument would need someone to actually check the prehistoric lead levels, as you mention. (If there are future ACX grants then this could be a great project to fund.) It seems likely but not certain that this would find no evidence of emissions—in which case it would suggest there was no very old civilization *with relatively advanced metallurgy*, not that there was no very old civilization at all. The pre-Columbian civilizations show that it’s possible to have a very advanced civilization with extensive empires, monumental architecture, etc using basically neolithic tech which would not show up in the lead measurements.
I agree with all of this - remember, I'm trying to address some combination of reasonable people like you and maximalists like Graham Hancock - I agree only the agricultural argument really speaks to your point.
If there’d been an agricultural society in the east during the Green Sahara period wouldn’t their agriculture be lost as a result of such substantial environmental change?
Major Climatic disruption that end civilisations seem like they would be enough for agriculture to be lost
On civilisation: The Danish public intellectual Georg Brandes, 1846-1927 (responsible for making Friedrich Nietzsche and Henrik Ibsen known to a larger European public & famous himself in his day), was once asked by a journalist what he himself believed in. Brandes tried as best he could to ignore the question, but the journalist kept coming back to it, and in the end Brandes gave in and said: "I believe in the stupidity of man and the possibility of cultural decline."
Lead is chemically pretty similar to calcium and ends up in much the same places in the body. One of the easiest ways to ingest lead is to have it react with vinegar, forming lead tetraacetate which is soluble in water.
Interestingly, lead tetraacetate is also slightly sweet-tasting, and it is suggested that the Romans used it deliberately in cooking. See Wikipedia page on "defrutum":
"In ancient Rome, grape syrup was often boiled in lead pots, which sweetened the syrup through the leaching of the sweet-tasting chemical compound lead acetate into the syrup. [...] A 2009 History Channel documentary produced a batch of historically accurate defrutum in lead-lined vessels and tested the liquid, finding a lead level of 29,000 parts per billion (ppb), which is 2,900 times higher than contemporary American drinking water limit of 10 ppb."
I haven't seen the documentary, unfortunately. I do wonder what the taste threshold is for lead acetate; if its supposed to be "slightly" sweet then maybe its undetectable at 29 mg/L against all that grape sugar. When diluted into the wine, the final concentration would be even lower.
They report batches up to 1g/L of lead, which were said to be "tasty".
"By simmering grape-juice in a lead-lined pot until it was reduced to one-third of its
original volume, we obtained a dark brown and tasty syrup with the consistency of
thin honey and a fragrance resembling that of molasses."
One of the first people to figure out that adding lead to wine as a preservative was a bad idea was named Gockel. In Table 1 of that paper above, his recipe gives wine at a final lead level of 20-70 mg/L. His tasting notes are reported as follows:
" Being a practical man, Gockel tested this recipe on the "worst and sourest wine" which he could find, and reported that within a few minutes he had converted it into "the best and loveliest wine"! This judgment of Gockel's is borne out by numerous other reports, including modern ones, which attest to the fact that lead can indeed improve the flavour of wines. Gockel also recorded that wine, corrected in this manner, retains its "süsselechtenlieblichen"
(sweetish-lovely) taste for no more than three or four months."
Lots to unpack in there; maybe mg/L concentrations (i.e. ppm) are detectable by taste, but since the taste goes away after a few months, maybe some significant chemistry is happening instead (unwanted acids being precipitated as lead salts? I don't know).
Thats a fantastic German word though, "süsselechtenlieblichen".
What brought this post on? Is this something that's in the news or something? It seems only remotely more plausible than Flat Eartherism or the Covid vaccine giving you 5G reception.
Here's something I wonder about sometimes: Archaeologists/paleontologists tend to say “X is Y years old” when Y is the (estimated) age of the earliest instance of X that we have found so far. But obviously based on that evidence Y is a lower bound on the age of X, not our best estimate of its age. Couldn't we use some statistical technique to actually estimate when X began, given the observations of it that we have found?
Like to take a really dumb/oversimplified version of this, suppose that we have findings of arrowheads roughly every 10,000 years, up until 60,000 years ago (these are made-up numbers). Then you might say that “arrowheads (and presumably arrows) are between 60–70 thousand years old.” Doing this right would be much more nuanced and sophisticated, and would probably involve some factors like the expected rate of decay of such things, how hard we have looked for them in various places, etc.
Has anyone done this? Or even seriously discussed it?
This post made me realize that I always picture the ice age in terms of snowy landscapes and mammoth hunters, but indeed it’s not like the whole earth was covered in snow. I guess it’s because the places I have lived were such climates during that time? Maybe that biases what we see in archeology museums.
Tic-Tac Man likely evolved from dinosaurs not primates and didn't feel the impulse to build monuments. The World Soul then was interested in converting spirit into light. Highly evolved primates, OTOH, are mostly here to make noises and pro wrestling matches.
Per my understanding there is actually no consensus of what kinds of human populations existested before and during the Last Glacial Maximum (19,000 to 14,000 ago), because the ice sheets have wiped out even the mountain tops in the Northern areas. The historical consensus of the human population during this period of ice sheet and global climate fluxes seems to be a debated and evolving scene
This of course has created plenty of more or less credible academic theories and even cult-like pseudohistories.
Regarding the pseudohistories, most of them are harmless speculative prehistory or linguistics, but some of these were connected to the idea of Great Finland, which was popular in some circles when Finland allied with Germany in the second world war- and now these "sagas" have gained followers in the ultranationalist web forums.
Forgive me if someone has mentioned it, and I missed this, but surely the clincher for the absence of advanced civilizations much before around 10,000 BC is that human populations simply weren't high enough.
The stone age was a hard time to survive, especially in the colder climate back then in temperate regions, and probably most population levels barely held their own, even with every fertile woman pregnant throughout their child bearing age.
They would also likely have been spread out too thinly for various reasons, such as competition for food and the avoidance of social strife that would otherwise have occurred in communities larger than most people's then wilder natures to handle. It isn't just crops and animals such as dogs that were being domesticated back then, but ourselves! Members of a small community may have been content and loving in each other's company, but those detestable strangers living in the next valley could have been fair game (perhaps literally!)
Also, despite a few carefully arranged burials that have been discovered, primitive people back then must often have been fairly lackadaisical about hygiene, with discarded food remains and even bodies left lying around near homes. So epidemics of diseases would have been an ever present threat, increasing in proportion to population density in a given area.
By pure serendipity, Youtube recommendations came up trumps this week. Here's a two-parter (I think it's two parts anyway) about Graham Hancock's new TV series:
I didn't go looking for a rebuttal to Hancock, I don't know who this guy is, and frankly some of his mannerisms are a bit irritating, so this is not me putting up someone I follow and like to show "See, see? Hancock is wrong!"
I don't think I'm giving anything away by revealing he doesn't accept Hancock's hypothesis, but he does try to give it a fair shake:
- Who is Hancock?
- What are his qualifications?
- What is his hypothesis?
- How do you prove a lost civilisation?
It also helps that Hancock is pinning his dates down to around 12,000 years ago as the beginning of the end for his lost civilisation, so we're not dealing with "something that was around 40,000 years ago but all traces have been obliterated because of environmental change over that span". His lost civilisation overlaps with the accepted beginnings of civilisations as we know them, so there should be remaining evidence somewhere. The big question then becomes - is there, and if so, where?
"anyone who can explore Antarctica must be at least close to 1700s-British level."
Not to nitpick, but when I see an unexplained, undefended assumption this large in an opinion piece, it throws doubts on other opinions in areas I lack the background knowledge to evaluate. High arctic Inuit survived and colonized a harsh environment without being "1700s-British level" and Polynesians engaged in impressive ocean navigation. This is, as far as I can tell, a completely unwarranted assumption, and it raises the question of how many others are lurking that I missed.
The artic isn’t the Antarctic. You need to get to the Antarctic across 1000km of hostile sea, and then to explore it you need clothing and equipment suitable to the task. 1700s British explorers couldn’t do it despite what Scott suggests. 22nd humans can’t do it either, not permanently.
Polynesians could have crossed those distances, but lacked warm clothing. A possible exception would be the Maoris of the South Island, who managed to make things like seal-skin cloaks to get them through cold winters.
Hypothetically, you could imagine that the Maori would eventually have set off south to explore; maybe they did! It definitely wouldn't require 1700s level technology though, just Maori canoes combined with Eskimo clothing.
Captain Cook was sent to look for the theorized unknown giant continent in the Southern Hemisphere that keeps the Earth from being top heavy. He circled the Antarctic ice pack and reported back that there wasn't anything worth having there. It's not impossible that Polynesians got that far south too and reported back there was nothing but ice, so why bother?
I don’t think you guys understand the difference between the artic and the Antarctic. The artic is, in the edge, fit for human habitation. The Antarctic is nowhere fit for human habitation.
Curious that someone walked to the S Pole 50 years earlier than the N, then
I wouldn't attach too much weight to the habitability of the outermost Arctic circle. Sure, you can ship provisions and materials in without that ocean crossing, but that's the only difference. It's not an inherently nice place. 18th century Antarctic exploring was tricky because nobody really knew it was there, but technologically Amundsen could have done in 1710 what he did in 1910.
Not mission critical I would argue. But on reflection I think kerosene and primus stoves to burn it in were crucial which means 1890s, couldn't have done it with solid fuel. I suspect Norwegian ski design and technique probably also developed enormously throughout 19C.
On land, Scott had a motor sled that broke down on day 3. Otherwise, sleds and dogs and ponies. Actually Amundsen succeeded by adhering more closely to inuit tradition - fur clothing, fresh vs tinned meat, traditional eye protectors rather than rubbing cocaine into his eyeballs. Very little that wasn't to be had in the 1700s.
19th century explorers couldn't do it, witness the fate of the Franklin Expedition in the Arctic seeking for the North West Passage, much less the Antarctic. To claim that there was a lost civilisation based in the Antarctic before the ice covered it is making a huge claim, that needs evidence to back it up.
People living in the Arctic regions didn't stick at one level of development, as they acclimatised to the region and the environment over time, they became more sophisticated. They might not have had the level of tech of late 17th century/early 18th century Britain, but they were at a level of development that did not strike Europeans as being as wretched as that of, say, the Tierra del Fuegans.
Minor point on "civilizations don't lose agriculture".
In the first chapter or so of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" Jared Diamond makes the case that environment shapes civilization by pointing to the Polynesians. That it was the same origin civilization, but on some islands the culture regressed to primitive hunter-gatherer state whereas other Polynesian cultures grew and became complex and thriving, and attributed the difference to the geography and resources of the islands they colonized.
(Not expecting civilizations, I'd still not be thinking about wheat or barley. More like, Atriplex, Chenopodium, beetroot and so on. I'd look into edible plants from brackish sites, based on the map.)
Non-pollen palynomorphs (NPPs) are widely used to detect human activities, in addition to the anthropogenic indicators used in palynology. This paper first tries to determine the best way to approach most probable number (MPN) counting for young scientists. It then looks at the anthropogenic indicators and the different types of human activity that can reveal the studied taxa. Among the different fungal spores, coprophilous fungi are very useful to evidence pastoral activities and grazing pressure. Numerous taxa related to dung are also indicators of decaying organic matter and deserve our attention. Erosion processes due to human activities increase the representation of fungal spores. Development of carbonicolous fungal spores in association with fire and algal assemblages due to eutrophication are also considered. Indeed, studies focusing on modern analogues have greatly improved our understanding of spore taphonomy, and the relationship between spore abundance and local livestock biomass and composition.
I agree, but for the sake of argument, I also realize how fragile and small early civilisations are. If some of the key farming tribes of the fertile crescent were wiped out, at a certain time, by decease or a catastrophe, the development of agriculture might have been stalled by perhaps millennia. And there are actually food that have more or less disappeared in certain areas, like the Taro and Carob in Europe.
But we also need a sudden disaster, not sea levels increasing 'slowly' for thousands of years. This could happen if high levels were reached in the Mediterranean, and then a barrier broke (for example at the Strait of Messina) and flooded a certain area (East of Tunisia?)
If we can find a region somewhere, that fit into that description, there might have been some pre-ice-age civilisation that died out. Not very highly advanced though, but above the level of hunter gathering.
Amundsen got to the South Pole in 190x with Inuit technology. Possibly with the slight edge of better rifles for seal shooting and better nav instruments than the 1700s. It was modern technology which actually scuppered British ant/arctic exploration in the 19th century, state of the art tinned meat with no vitamin c in it.
But that's a side issue. If you actually read Hancock the idea is the Antarctic was ice free when it was mapped.
Do you mean that Amundsen used mostly Inuit technology to get to the South Pole, or that he could have gotten to the South Pole with only Inuit technology? The first is true, as far as I can tell; the second is wildly implausible, starting with the fact that Inuits had no way of measuring where the south pole even was, let alone charting a path to the pole from another continent and back.
My case (from which I have now resiled) was 1700s technology of whatever kind. By that stage the developed West had pretty much solved navigation (geopositioning) on land and sea, and ocean voyages. My point was that post 1700 developments (tinned food, useless motor sleds, "advanced" new clothing) were a net disbenefit to Scott (RF Scott, not our host) vs Amundsen with his seal meat and furs and dog sleds only.
I still think that is true, but amundsen did take tinned food and "gabardine" clothes, and probably benefitted from C19th ski developments. The killer, however, is kerosene (mid 19th C) and primus stoves (1890). I don't think any expedition would work if you were limited to burning blubber or bringing your own solid fuel.
When that came in, I got huffy for about five seconds before I started laughing.
We can't use BC and AD anymore, because that is prioritising one particular religion and Western colonialist (they'd probably say 'white supremacist' today, that seems to be the term slipping into favour) and it ignores non-Western cultures and that there are other faith systems out there.
Fine, so we'll change it in order to keep old-fashioned dating intelligible but not be offensive. What do we change it to? "BC will now be BCE, which is 'Before Christian Era' and AD will now be CE which is 'Christian Era'" - oh wait, that's bad too, now it's "Before Current Era" and "Current Era".
So, uh, what current era we talkin' about, Willis? This one. Dated how? On the Western calendar. Which is calculated how, like from the foundation of the Roman republic or what? No, from the religious calendar dated - before Christ and then after Christ. So in effect we're still using BC and AD? .... Yes.
Reminds me of the humorous Isaac Asimov short story about the Devil getting ready for the end of the world, which has to happen in accordance with Biblical dating in the second millennium (can't remember exact date, it's been so long since I read it). But wait! second millennium since when? The world doesn't all use the same dating, every nation will be on a different date!
So the Devil has to get the entire world to accept a new dating system from the beginning of the Atomic Age, and once that is in place, then the countdown to the End of the World can begin 😁
As an atheist, I don't have a problem with using a dating system that begins with the birth of Jesus. Jesus is a real historical figure who was probably born within a few years of 1 AD, and even if he wasn't, fictional characters in fictional works can have birthdates too. I do have a problem with acknowledging Jesus as either the Messiah ("Before Christ") or as the Lord ("Anno Domini"). Not enough of a problem that I'd stop using AD/BC, but still, objecting to calling Jesus Messiah or Lord is more reasonable than objecting to the date of the calendar's zero point.
For starters, the Arctic is not a sort of entry-level version of the Antarctic. For second, why do you think a mission failure is always evidence of insufficient technology, which is what we are talking about? Do you think NASA tech took a sharp step backwards after Apollo 12? For thirds, that is not the claim we are discussing.
They don't need to be high up, just made of wood and steel - Disintegrated.
> Argument 2: Where Are The Crops And Livestock?
Part of a fragile circular ecosystem which wasn't robust to the collapse of civilization - or else, evolved into something else over the intervening millennia.
> Argument 3: Lead Levels. Many ancient civilizations mined lead
Maybe they weren't even interested in lead.
I do agree with your predictions; "0.5% chance we ever find something demonstrating equal or greater architectural advancement to the Great Pyramid, dating from before 11,000 BC" seems basically OK, because even if there was anything, the fact that we haven't found signs of it suggests all traces would simply be gone - or else, we wouldn't know what to look for, and thus can't be expected to find signs even if they do exist. Try looking, for example, at the global temperature fluctuations over the last million years; we aren't sure why they're doing that, and we assume natural causes. If a civilization in the future was looking back for evidence of us, would they even realize lead was the smoking gun?
To be a bit pedantic I think it would help alot to define "about as advanced" especially for case 1. I mean, suppose that they generally have all the other tech and social organization that the stonehenge people did except it just takes a long ass time/different conditions to manage agriculture and without that the incentives don't favor the creation of large monuments?
In other words is "about as advanced" about their level of monument building, their mastery of basic crafts or their social organization? It seems plausible these diverge.
The Sphinx and Pyramid of Giza are scientifically (politically) claimed to be built in 2500 BC with zero recorded accreditation from that era (makes perfect sense).
Both found with damage from flooding. Both "abandoned" and "re-discovered" in an excavation in 1400 BC by a later pharoah. The Sphinx was completely buried in sand, forgotten.
The "ancient" Egyptians have zero ancestral memories or recorded knowledge of building them. They didn't know what a Sphinx was or the purpose of the Pyramid. And they never rediscovered the "lost" technology to make them again.
Isn't Science awesome, the best (Omniscient); can fill in for every gaping hole in history.
What makes you think the pyramid was "rediscovered" ever? Was it buried in sand all the way to the top?
You are half a century out of date. Mid to late 20th C excavations have uncovered the tombs of dozens of friends and relations and high officials of khufu around the pyramid, not to mention multiple futher examples of his cartouche inside and outside the pyramid. Your "zero recorded accreditation" is simply wrong. In fact documentation relating to anything 4.5k years old is usually impossible to come by, and the pyramid is strikingly well documented for its age.
I'm not dodging the sphinx rediscovery. It got buried in sand. So what?
If the only inscriptions on Windsor were by people expressly identifying as her work teams, and if there were separate testimony as old as Herodotus that it was believed at that time that she built it, and carbon dating as a third quite separate line of evidence put the building in the right ballpark, I would be starting to wonder whether perhaps she had something to do with it. Meser was sure as hell doing something with all that stone.
How does an entire nation, the most advanced civilization known for the world's leading scientific, mathematical, cultural knowledge and wealth, completely forget its greatest monument in a short thousand years? It wasn't just some forgotten pottery in the sand.
There is zero inscription accrediting the Sphinx or the Pyramid's builders. The diary mentions nothing, zero hard evidence. Just assumptions by modern Science.
Well, your own claim is that they had forgotten is it not? What did they think it was?
You do accept Khufu's cartouche was found inside the pyramid in 1837? We have that plus Herodotus plus carbon dating all as independent of each other as possible and all converging
"So a 120m sea level rise wouldn’t be enough to wipe out evidence of our crop of ancient civilizations, and shouldn’t be enough to wipe out evidence of a previous crop, unless they had a very different geographic distribution than ours."
If there were ice age civilizations, they had a very different geographic distribution than ours.
Coastlines weren't the only thing that changed. Climate zones, wet and dry spots, biomes moved all over the place. Amazonia was a steppe, Sahara was green, Anatolia was forested. There is very limited overlap between "places optimal for habitation in 15 000 BC" and "places optimal for habitation today", and they just happen to be the places with the oldest known civilizations (Levant and Anatolia). They're also the most heavily archaeologically surveyed. We barely touched the ground in e.g. Central Asia and North Africa.
The spike in lead levels in 1000BC is due to Phoenicians opening silver mines in Spain. Did this produce a dramatic increase in the availability of silver? Or was it just that the mine was much dirtier than older mines? (Yet another possibility is that it is closer to Greenland, as the wind blows.)
I really like your willingness to assign probabilities, including your efforts to assess the outcome of your predictions. Personally I would assign different probabilities to the three discoveries:
Gobekli Tepe: You put 20%. I think that's too low. The place wasn't even discovered until 1963, suggesting that there very likely are other undiscovered sites (my impression is that that region of Anatolia has had a grossly disproportionate amount of archeological study). Your probability was based on finding a site 2,000 years older, but still. I'd bump it up to 40%.
The other two sound extremely unlikely to me. This raises the problem of how to estimate rare outcomes, because if an outcome is rare, the estimate generally is made without empirical data. That said, I'd put "pyramids" at 0.01%, and Buckingham Palace at <0.0001%. Though you had a "less than" estimate for the latter.
Hi Scott, wouldn’t the fact that all those agricultural crops start at exactly the same time across the globe support pre 10k bc agriculture and the younger dryas?
The Jared Diamond article reads like something I might have written after watching a Disney movie. The logic is riddled with holes. Agriculture led to malnutrition. I got that. Settlements led to intellectual pursuits and the systematic acquisition of knowledge-- nowhere mentioned.
I agree with this.
Certainly with the last paragraph and not the first? “Ice Age Cahokia was definitely a thing” is much stronger than your “20% chance of Gobekli Tepe”
Well you could stick agree with the first statement and believe we only have a 20% of finding something if they’ve built their grand structures of wood or other short lasting materials
How much more can we expect to learn about the Vikings over time? Is this all we can know (lacking time travel)?
We are learning more over time as more graves and stuff are found. A few new connections to other manuscripts and stuff.
We know quite a lot about the vikings. We have a few texts that date back to that period in their origin, and a lot of texts written by their descendants a century or two after the end of the viking period. Do we have anything from ancient Egypt comparable to the saga literature?
They built in wood, but enough of their structures survived to be excavated and studied by modern archaeologists. Along with their weapons, jewelry, clothing, ... .
> "Do we have anything from ancient Egypt comparable to the saga literature?"
Sort of. We have huge amounts of preserved Egyptian writing, including both letters and the longer sorts of funerary inscriptions. But as far as actual literature goes, in Middle Egyptian? We have a couple hundred pages of moderately good literature, but the drop-off after that is steep. This includes a couple of saga-like tales, some collections of interesting annecdotes, some very deft political satire, and a couple of spiritual works. Taken together, it fills roughly the same niche as the Elder Edda. There's nothing directly analogous to the collected Icelandic sagas.
The ancestral Puebloans, Cahokians, and Polynesians were all having their “golden ages” centuries after the fall of Rome - I don’t see how their existence implies that similar societies must have existed 10 millennia earlier.
That’s what’s being talked about here - Puebloans confining themselves to narrow strips of coastline in a world where everyone else was barely beyond “caveman”.
The Vikings may have had some technology the Egyptians lacked, but Egyptian civilization was clearly on a different scale from vikings. That's why sea peoples sought to raid the Egyptians, while the vikings themselves were raiders.
IIUC, the vikings were not a culture. They was a fringe group on the edge of a culture that was mainly in southern/central Sweden. They were largely younger sons of noblemen that lived in Norway and their followers. The older sons stayed home and kept the family estate. We know about them because Odin was patron of nobles and bards.
Now the Norse culture did have skills that the Egyptians lacked, but it's not clear how many. The ones we know about are from groups that had to leave before the Christians came in and killed everyone. (Well, not everyone. See the "ordeal of the horn" (sorry, I couldn't find a good reference. Maybe you'll do better.) The guy who wanted to convert to Christianity rather than just being killed had a drinking horn forced down his throat, and a serpent was put in the bell of the horn, which was then sealed and heated until the serpent tried to escape. (I suspect this only happened to nobles, but "records are scarce".) And everything suspected of pagan influence was destroyed.
Lol Vikings were the ones who were killing Christians. Anyways no foreign Christians ever conquered their lands. Norse leadership converted to Christianity followed by the subjects. It was the Christian descendants of these Vikings who wrote down the pagan stories of their ancestors that the ancestors themselves could never bother to.
"Viking" is a profession, not a nationality or even a culture — there were Irish and Welsh vikings. But in this context, "Viking" refers to the Norse culture that most of the vikings came from in the period when vikings were active, ending sometime in the 11th century.
The culture was not mainly in Sweden, it was in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, and various of the islands. A good deal of what we know about it is due to the fact that the Icelandic branch produced quite a lot of good literature in the couple of centuries after the end of the viking period. I don't think Odin's preferences had much to do with that, since by the time that literature was written Iceland was Christian.
It is not true that everything suspected of pagan influence was destroyed. The original settlement of the Pagan/Christian dispute in Iceland in the year 1000 included toleration for private (but not public) pagan worship. Skaldic poetry continued to make heavy use of pagan materials long after all of the Norse lands were officially Christian.
To the extent that the Norse culture was in Ireland (not minor) it was the culture of the invaders. The Fingols, or "light haired foreigners". They did rule Ireland for awhile, but they were always seen as foreigners.
I thought Denmark was Vanir country rather than Aesir country. (There was a lot of slop, of course. And the invaders were often the Norse.) Iceland is from a later period than I was thinking of, but various islands are in period. Also Scotland and parts of England. But those *were* viking settlements. The Danes were a different culture ("Dane" I take as from "wain", the wagons lived in by the people of the Vanir.) Some time around the period of the Romans (eddas are a bit vague as to timing) the Norse (i.e. the Aesir) fought the people of the Vanir (i.e. the Vanir) to a draw, and came to a truce.
5th millennium BC is well past the Ice Age, so that finding is unrelated to this essay.
Also, well past the expansion of central Anatolian farmers using the Levantine farmer tool kit. Which, genetically the people there are descended from.
> 5th millennium BC is well past the Ice Age
What do we mean by this? According to the standard definition, the most recent Ice Age is still going on right now.
"Ice age" is colloquially used to refer to the last glacial maximum. Not technically correct, but its common usage.
Last glaciation, not last glacial maximum. Glacial periods (just like interglacial ones) have their ups and down. The LGM was merely the maximum.
Not sure it is such a mystery anyway. You would expect with earlier civs for there to be both a wider variety in potential cultural practices, and access to resource of an accessibility and richness that was not later possible.
The Varna finds are very cool, but I don’t really think there is anything odd about them or they challenge previous info.
Fascinating, but still within the accepted span of human civilisation and after agriculture got started. This is not "ancient Atlantis had flying saucers" levels that the usual "lost prehistoric civilisations" go for. Generally, because "okay humans were using stone tools a millenium before we thought they did" is not sexy for the kind of National Geographic Special, the proponents of such lost civilisations go for "they had tech equivalent to our modern level (where "modern" covers anything from the 1930s to today) or even more advanced", not "so they were chipping really good flint hand axes earlier than the consensus had it".
I think people are open to "pre-Ice Age civilisations on a Stone Age level", but while we all had the dream of the "lost in the depths of Darkest Africa, an ancient lost civilisation remains to be found" and so forth, that's not probable. We can extrapolate large, culturally complex, past societies but nothing like "ancient laser beam technology".
Going to read all of this later, but an archeology channel on youtube is doing a series on Graham Hancock's Netflix series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iCIZQX9i1A
The other problem with these theories is - where did they go? The sea level rise was fast on a geological scale, but not a human one. Yes, some sites would get flooded but presumably not fast enough to drown their inhabitants and make them forget how to do all the civilization things that would be leaving large monuments behind. We’d expect to find sites inland, or we’d have to explain why the civilizations completely collapsed prior to the sea level rise.
I don't know, civilizations can disappear. Consider Afghanistan in the 1970s, which had significant advancements and appeared quite westernized compared to today (https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/see-how-afghanistan-looked-like-before-the-taliban-ever-came-to-power-1842766-2021-08-19).
There are civilizations that we know existed from the records of other civilizations, which we cannot seem to find. See things like "The Sea People" as an example.
Especially if war was involved, where the victor may have destroyed the loser and carried off the people. Early stone buildings, even very advanced ones, may not look like much if all of the stones are torn down.
ETA: and obviously buildings with less durable materials would almost certainly all be gone by now.
I think there is a significant distinction between a civilization declining, even quite sharply, and a civilization disappearing completely from the archaeological record. Even after something like the Late Bronze Age Collapse or the Dark Ages or the collapse of various indigenous civilizations in the Americas, it’s not as if the people after the collapse become invisible.
It’s not impossible of course but I agree with Scott that it puts a hard upper bound on how advanced such a civilization would be. Any civilization would need to have sprung up during the ice age, rose to whatever level of advancement you theorize, and then utterly collapse, all while never leaving the fairly narrow strip of coastal elevation that would later be reflooded. It raises the question of “what happened” and the answer almost certainly can’t be just welp their old cities flooded and they never bothered moving inland.
War or disease might do it I suppose but again that upper bound - something like Ancient Egypt would need an unprecedented plague to just totally disappear, and any enemy strong enough to absolutely wipe them out would probably themselves be advanced enough to leave a lot of evidence behind. (The mystery of the Sea Peoples is almost certainly limited to “from which civilization we already know about did the Sea People come”, they are probably not a phantom civilization that rose, raided, and then vanished except for a few vague notes in Egyptian inscriptions).
This all ignores my actual beef with the Ice Age civilization theories, which is their path dependence. In large part, belief in these civilizations doesn’t come from “hey look at all this archaeological evidence we have that only really works if there is was an advanced civilization that got flooded after the Ice Age ended”, but rather from people who believe deeply that Atlantis existed and are trying to shoehorn that myth into something vaguely plausible.
There are lots of other "hard bounds". Quarries don't move around much, and can often be dated. We can tell that they didn't use various easily available resources, because they were there to be used at a later date. Etc.
For just about any resource, you can track when the easily accessible parts got used. (Well, *I* can't track that, but for each resource there are those who can.) Just consider what the post-apocalypse civilization will need to do to get oil or anthracite. Or even good gravel.
The steelman the argument of the "shoehorn atlantis" people is that there seem to have been a lot of sites with later investigations that are regularly found (by mainstream folks) to be older than earlier studies (and the reverse is also at times true). None of that invalidates the overall evidence and trend, but we should make a slight Bayesian adjustment to thinking that there may be older pockets of civilization than we know about, but not the overfitting of "everything is older." A site found to be occupied a couple hundred years earlier than previously known is not the same thing as thousands of years earlier, and might not be same people or people of similar technical sophistication.
I think the best case for some of these things is that in many parts of the world, the areas that were flooded in post-Ice Age sea level rise isn't a "narrow strip" - rather, it's an even wider area than the areas that are currently between sea level and 100 meters.
If there were notable civilizations on Dogger Bank or the Mediterranean or the Bahamas, and if those civilizations didn't build significant sites more than a few dozen miles from the coast, then it's conceivable that they all got hidden by sea level rise.
That said, it would be surprising if there was any *big* civilization that didn't get too far from the coast along the rivers.
During an Ice Age, you'd want to be at as low an elevation as possible to stay warm, which would often be below current sea levels. On the other hand, you'd probably want to put your big buildings on top of hills and outcroppings for defense. So, yeah, the idea that there were a lot of impressive buildings built during the Ice Age and every single one of them happened to be below the current sea level is implausible.
I agree that this kind of analysis should limit how big such a civilization would be expected to get (I'm not quite to "hard limit" but close enough for our purposes).
I really don't think an 1700s major international civilization would be possible. I'm pretty skeptical of the Egyptian pyramid scenario as well, but think that could come down to definitions and timing. As Scott mentioned, the Sphinx may be much older than previously thought.
I do think that we would have a very hard time disproving a Stonehenge-level society. It would be incredibly easy to have lost the physical evidence of such a society. As I said above, this is especially true if they built with materials unlikely to survive that length of time or in the conditions (underwater) that we would be likely to find them in.
Afghanistan didn't disappear. In fact, there are more people there now than in the 1970s.
Way too many
Most of these pictures are of Americans and other Westerners living in Afghanistan in the 70s. Like the last picture is of (American) boys and girls attending the (American) School in Kabul. Most Afghanis didn't even attend school much less coeducational ones during that period.
No doubt, but it *is* an example of some thing becoming unrecognizable in a fairly short time. You can also look at ISIS intentionally destroying thousands of years of archeological history in a few days.
My point is not that Afghanistan was completely different, but to find an example of fairly substantial change in a short time period. We're talking about thousands of years for these sites to disappear, which means a lot more can happen.
This doesn't follow- displaced people aren't just the same people doing the same things. If you have a sedentary agriculture wealthy enough to raise monuments it doesn't hold that if you lose that agriculrual base and have to restructure your entire society that you will rise to that level of wealth again. If the lands which were flooded were particularly fertile, or particularly well suited to the crops you domesticated then the flooding could well reset you to a much poorer agricultural lifestyle or even force your descendants into a H/G lifestyle and you are basically three generations away from losing all the knowledge that was useful for the first lifesytle but not the second.
See my previous reply - decline yes, vanish probably not. They might not rise to the same level ever again, but they wouldn’t completely forget the very concept of farming or that metalworking existed or that writing things down was a good idea or whatever. Even that assumes a pretty rapid change from “farming works” to “agriculture is unsustainable”. Post Ice Age sea level rise was tens of meters over hundreds of years - this would have been a gradual shift inland over generations not an “oh shit a volcano killed most of us and buried our fields and now we must abandon civilization”.
Consider something like the ancient Puebloan people of the southwest US - fairly rapid and severe climate change seems to have caused them to voluntarily abandon a lot of their larger dwellings that are now left behind, and they didn’t seem to build anything equivalent afterwards. But they just moved somewhere else more temperate and started farming there, they didn’t forget how to grow crops or how to make pots and baskets.
The “collapses” we’ve actually witnessed are much less severe than the cataclysm that would have had to befall these civilizations - knocking them (and anybody who interacted with them) back literally thousands of years on the “tech tree”.
This is just an assertion. We have lots of historical evidence of building types going out of style in very short order when situations deteriorated. After the collapse of the Roman empire building with stone drops way, way down and building with mud/wood goes way up, and that is a trivail inconvience (the fall of Rome) compared to every major city being underwater.
To the rest of the post- the hypothesis is generally that a large impact(s) either caused or coincided with the sea level rise, which very plausibly could cause crop failures and large population declines. By the time you get a population rebound large enough to rebuild even a shadow of the former society the sea level rise will have wiped out all the low lying cities which means all the trade routes which depended on those cities for goods or as resupply points are done with in addition to the lower population leading to less surplus activity which means its not likely that new routes will be sought out (and even if they were they would continually be interrupted as sea level rise continued to flood other population centers.
There absoultely is the chance that a people could face devestation to the extent that they would 'forget' all kids of things, anything that isn't in active use quickly becomes forgotten. Toss in that the hypothesis includes the fact that examples of their older work would be completely inacessessible to them and it is a reasonable outcome that specific skills would simply be lost.
Writing is one of the things that has repeatedly gotten lost. It's often restricted to a small elite group, and for everybody else it's what tells the tax collector how much you owe.
Lost doesn't mean totally lost. Merchants can find pieces of it valuable. But effectively lost. Linear B is one classic example, but it's not the only one. There's currently a claim that the Neanderthals or possibly Cro-magnon had a limited form of writing that they used to track when the prey would be giving birth, etc. If so writing in one form or another has been around a LONG time, and we don't know anything about most of the earlier forms. (How are you at Ogham?)
Well, there's a few places that did "just collapse", but the ones I thinking of are a lot later, and the explanation is "the river dried up or got diverted". (In at least one case I suspect enemy action, but the proof is missing.)
However, in those cases there's no clear evidence where the folks went. So I don't find this a compelling argument. (I have a friend who believes they treked from India to Israel, and that Exodus is a lot longer ago that the begats indicate and... well, that's an answer, but I don't find it compelling.)
Not quite - ice dam bursts on the north American continent have been known to release a lot of water from ocean size lakes - in a human relevant time period.
For example, per Wikipedia
"This final drainage of Lake Agassiz has been associated with an estimated 0.8 to 2.8 m (2.6 to 9.2 ft) rise in global sea levels.[13]"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Agassiz
A quickish five foot rise is sea level could really devastate a costal civilization, especially if the rise is non globally uniform.
Pre-glacial maximum agriculture would probably have lost the domesticated crops. CO2 levels were too low during the glacial max to allow high enough productivity to make agriculture worth pursuing.
So we'd need to be looking for signs of ag from roughly 100,000 years ago when CO2 levels were similar to the current era.
But presumably in that period, not many of the sites would be flooded, so if there's some significantly denser population somewhere, that should show up in excavations of sites from that period, right?
I imagine so. At least traces. On the other hand, we just recently discovered a major new civilization in the Amazon that was present just hundreds of years ago. No one had bothered to look before. Gobekli Tepe was thought to be a Roman-era construction, until someone actually dug it up. So, it's possible.
Personally I doubt there were 100,000-year-old civilizations.
This. There is a lot more places we haven't looked than places we have.
Exactly - the world clearly has a richer past than we currently understand. There are enough places were we have some _some_ evidence of interesting cultures with almost no details that are certainly many more that we don't even know we are missing. But at the same time that doesn't mean that there are lost high-tech civilizations when current evidence is pointing to hunter-gathering being the norm. Yet there might very well be some interesting civil works we know nothing about today that will be discovered in coming decades. The increasingly low cost of things like drone surveys of remote sites using broad-spectrum and magnetic imaging as well as ground-penetrating technologies is going to turn up more and more interesting finds, it should be exciting.
Wouldn't they end up destroyed by later melt waters. I mean you don't need anything as extreme as the giant floods that created the bad lands to totally destroy evidence of human habitation. Our evidence for neolithic sites is often as little as different colored dirt from post holes and some animal teeth. Bury it in ice and then flood it with melt water and it's undetectable.
Behavioral modernity is generally dated to ~50k years ago, so any hypothetical 100k year old human civilization didn't engage in any advanced burial practices, leave behind art, or wear personal ornamentation (e.g. beads) as far as the record shows.
Interesting post! I've written on this topic, both for popular audiences (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513822000447) and for academic ones (https://aeon.co/essays/not-all-early-human-societies-were-small-scale-egalitarian-bands). I don't want to argue here for Pleistocene Great Pyramids or Buckingham Palaces, but here are two points that I think should increase priors about Gobekli Tepe- or Stonehenge-levels:
1. I think there's increasingly evidence that domestication (genetic changes resulting from patterns of human cultivation/resource management) runs deep. One of the coolest but underrated findings, I think, is evidence of incipient grain domestication at the Last Glacial Maximum at Ohalo II in Israel more than 10,000 years before the onset of the Holocene (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0131422&xid=17259,15700019,15700124,15700149,15700168,15700173,15700186,15700190,15700201). The title and abstract are all about weeds, but just as striking is the proportion of domestic-type rachises, which is much higher than in wild populations (although still quite low compared to "fully" domesticated situations). This site's discovery was a serendipitous fluke (it has a fascinating backstory); many instances of Pleistocene domestication have probably eluded us.
2. I wouldn't discount how sophisticated societies can become without domesticated plants. In my Aeon essay, I focus on the Calusa, who had what seems like a tributary state/kingdom (they are also covered in The Dawn of Everything). They inhabited modern-day Florida, collected tribute from an area the size of Belgium, and were capable of profound feats, constructing huge mounds and a 4-km-long canal. But their resource base was, for the most part, fish. To your point about how easy it is to record such societies, they were observed during the Spanish colonial era and were near modern-day centers of anthropological research. Yet they were largely unknown to archaeologists until the 1970s. So I think we should expect to have overlooked lots of sophisticated non-agricultural peoples, especially in the Pleistocene.
Great reply! I'll check out your articles!
I think “domestication runs deep” actually works against the Ice Age civilization theory, because it makes it even harder to explain why it would have popped up thousands of years early but only very specifically in areas that would be flooded slowly over hundreds of years when the ice sheets melted.
Minor Correction: It is "Mohenjo-daro" not "Mojeno-Daro"
Thanks, fixed.
Am I the only one who thinks Shermer is overrated as a Skeptic and a Rationalist?
While I was criticising the racialists, I read his critique in "Why People Believe Weird Things", and it was just terrible. He made logical errors one could drive a truck through (his essay in "The Borderlands of Science" is much better, though it focuses only on sports).
And don't even get me started on his chapter on Objectivism. He literally writes a chapter on a philosophy while never discussing what that philosophy is, while relying on third hand accounts of the founder's personal circle, third hand accounts that are from sources he knows are biased.
You're not the only one. I'm usually unimpressed with what I've read of him.
He also sometimes does a bait and switch, and maybe that's what you're objecting to in his Objectivism essay (which I haven't read). His book on Holocaust denial, for example, is a book proving the Holocaust happened. I have no objection to people making that argument and the more, the better. And as far as I could tell, his reasoning and facts were good in that case. But the book wasn't really about the phenomenon of Holocaust denial, and when I picked it up at the library, that's what I wanted to read about.
That's exactly it - he does bait-and-switch all the time. Which is extremely irritating, especially if you agree with the overall point he is making. There is something particularly vexing about seeing shoddy arguments defending a case you respect.
Well, I managed to be unimpressed with objectivism without reading Shermer.
And here we go...
I have a standing challenge to anyone to clearly state what Objectivism is - what the core of Rand's philosophy is - and then present a rational case against it.
I have looked for 20 years, and found exactly nothing. You might be the first. But I doubt it.
Do you have any recommendations for works which (even if they don’t argue against it) clearly state what Objectivism is? If nobody can define it clearly, that might be more of a problem for Objectivism than for its critics
Ayn Rand has a long, almost 100 page section in "Atlas Shrugged" where she uses her main protagonist John Galt as a mouthpiece to lay out Objectivism in one long, boring speech.
There isn't really a "core" for Objectivism, Rand lays out her entire metaphysics (which she sums up as "A is A", which she says she learned from Aristotle), Epistemology (which I can't really recall, but it wasn't very sophisticated - for the most part her Epistemology from my recollection is "I believe this, therefore it is true", and she relies heavily on stating things are "self-evident", many such statements are in my view not self-evident. For example, she states that smoking is self evidently good, because it is a promethean symbol of man's creativity and industry.
She also lays out a system of Aesthetics in her Objectivist system, but its one small book, and doesn't come up much in her main works "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead", at least from my recollection.
The meat and potatoes of Rand's Objectivism is her Ethics, which is a modified version of ethical egoism. Egoism suffers from circular reasoning and many other problems. I found egoism to be seductive when I first learned of it, but the shine wears off, and my own life experience doesn't jive with it.
I don't pretend that I am providing a full and accurate characterization of objectivism or that I am providing great arguments against it, but maybe this will help anyone who hasn't gone through their "Ayn Rand" phase. Every philosophy teacher I spoke with was less than impressed with Rand and had good arguments for why her system was just generally lacking and fails to wrestle adequately with most difficult philosophical problems (argument from authority, this is just food for thought rather than an argument, consider it context).
You're wrong about her Epistemology. You read S.A.'s review of "Surfing Uncertainty"? Rand anticipated all of that by 26 years.
That said, you are much fairer than most people I meet online when it comes to discussing Rand.
The only things I know about Ayn Rand are from reading "Atlas Shrugged", "The Fountainhead", and a couple of her essay compilations, I forget which ones. All years ago now.
I'm sure my characterization of her Epistemology is incomplete.
Ayn Rand gets dunked on by a lot of people who haven't read her work, and from people who dislike her for political reasons (her influence on the current far-right and libertarians). I can imagine for fans of hers it must be frustrating to see people setting up strawmen version of Rand's views and destroying them easily with lots of self congratulating.
Again, personally I liked her work some time ago, but after long consideration I no longer resonate with her system of beliefs. I am all about disagreeing with people in good faith and for the right reasons - I'm not the best person to argue against Objectivism though, I don't have a sophisticated knowledge of it, or good arguments against it. I saw Ghost's comment below that I thought was quite good, I recommend engaging respectfully with them, as their arguments and characterization appears to be in good faith, and of a high quality.
I actually read her philosophy. Please...she claims that the gold standard follows from considerations of pure logic. Umm, ok that's funny since you can't even deduce the existence of gold from pure logic.
Sure you could imagine a more careful claim like the use of a currency standard satisfying such and such properties follows by logic from assumptions A-E but she doesn't do anything like that.
FWIW, after reading a couple of Ayn Rand books, and a few RAWilson books, I was more favorably impressed by Discordianism than by Objectivism. But I can't define either of them, Even though I've got a copy of Principia Discordia.
Chunks of RAWs stuff are reactions to Rand ("Telemachus Sneezed!")...but it took me a while to realise that, because I read them in the wrong order , as it were. Rand is little known in Europe, and I didn't find out about Objectivism till going online in the nineties.
Sure. One can start with everything Ayn Rand wrote. Try reading Atlas Shrugged, and if that's too long, Galt's Speech, and if that's too long The Objectivist Ethics.
Wikipedia is also pretty good - by which I mean better than 99% of online detractors. I do find it irritating that they write "So and so said Objectivism is wrong here" without ever saying how, but one cannot have everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism
There is definitely a lot of argument between Rand's followers. You can't say "it" is 100% true when there is no agreement about what "it" is.
Yeah, no. The arguments are about less than 1%. 99% is agreed on.
I still insist that Objectivism is not a thing at all. I did a Master's Degree in Political Science in Italy, without ever hearing of it.
The first time while leaving in the US when I heard of "Randians" I thought it was Rand Paul's political faction, and I was really puzzled about why someone should base their political thought around an obscure sci-fi writer.
Deep, profound arguments. Earth-shattering. Why, you floor me, Sir, with the sheer brilliance of your insight.
Now. Do you have an actual point?
Rand's books have sold something like 37 million copies, which makes her one of the least obscure sf writers of the 20th century. Terry Pratchett beats her, but I'm not sure how many other writers do.
This comment provoked me to check out the Wikipedia list of authors with the most book sales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_fiction_authors
Ayn Rand doesn't appear to make this list, but I don't think the list claims to be exhaustive. It does seem to contain close to a hundred names who each sold over 100 million copies (interestingly, Agatha Christie might beat out William Shakespeare for the number 1 spot!) I'm only familiar with about half the names on the top 10, but I am familiar with close to half the names for the whole list.
I didn’t recognize as many of the names as you did, but the only SF writer I noticed was Michael Crichton. But then I’m not sure I’d have called either Rand or Pratchett SF either. The exploration of the use of Reardenite in Atlas Shrugged is plausibly SF but it has little to do with the plot, and the static-electricity free energy is just silly.
It's interesting that Rand gets such a bad rap as an author given the standard theories most ppl advanced about the value of literature. I don't put any real stock in her ideas but it's hard to argue that she exposes the reader to a dramatically different way of looking at the world that some ppl genuinely have (no to mention what a Dexedrine habit feels like) so it seems like if ppl really meant that theory she should rate pretty highly as literature.
(to be clear I don't buy such theories...I think it's basically just fun and reject the idea there is some deeper benefit from art...but many ppl feel differently).
Enjoying something as fiction, and taking it seriously as philosophy are different things...but there are many points inbetween.
STP outsold Rand, but isn't taken seriously on the mainstream either.
Rand was not, however, an obscure sf writer, which was the claim I was responding to.
That's not a good argument.
OTOH, I feel that "Objectivism" would work much less well than pure anarchy. Which is NOT praise of anarchy.
Objectivism is a philosophy, not a political system. Rand rejected anarchy but there is no reason why someone could not share her philosophy but reject the details of her political proposal — a government that funded itself by selling the service of rights enforcement, of which it had a monopoly — as unworkable or inconsistent with Objectivism. I think that was Roy Childs' position, at least at one point.
Objectivism definitely isn't mainstream...opinions vary as to whether that's a bug or a feature.
https://owl232.net/papers/rand.htm
Right out of the gate, this is terrible:
"But then how could it be that Oedipus could believe what (J) asserts without believing what (M) asserts, if they assert the same thing?"
Because knowledge is something held by an individual consciousness? There's no such thing as knowledge "out there", nor is there a collective brain. Every bit of knowledge that is known is known by someone.
To put it simply, Oedipus didn't know he'd married his mother. Ta-dah! Solved.
5.1 one is better, but still wrong. It asks, "Well, how can you prove that life is good?" And Rand does answer: "You can't. You have to make that choice completely alone. It is the one truly free choice you have. You can't say, 'I choose to live because of my children, my work, my family, whatever', because those all presuppose that you have chosen life. They are values that make life worth living, and make it easier and better to do so, but they are only possible once you have made that choice - to live. You have the choice to die, you have the choice to live self-destructively, which is slow death by self-imposed torture. You have those choices, but you have no choice about the nature of the choice."
I'll look at the rest later. As I say, I have looked for 20 years.
,"Objectivists say that "the meaning of a concept is all of the concretes" Huemer, quoting Rand)
"Because knowledge is something held by an individual consciousness"
Choose one. How can knowledge be internal when meaning is external? (Prussian)
I have a better idea! Why don't you, I don't know, read the relevant text yourself? It's "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology", if you are curious.
There is no contradiction here whatsoever. Huemer is misquoting Rand. A concept is an integration of concretes.
Concrete whats? Concrete perceptions. Perceptions which are held where? In an individual consciousness.
Objectivism, as described by Rand herself, is the idea that humans are uniquely vital agents in a soulless material world, and that each individual, as a sealed unit of motive, meaning, and rationality is a sort of god-unto-oneself. Meaning and right, therefore, are derived on an individual basis by the exertion of agency, through the tools of rationality, upon the external world towards goals that satisfy the appetites of this central agent. In other words, each person is the heroic centre of their own universe, equipped with the ability to reshape the world to promote their own happiness, and with a moral compass that can only point towards that happiness.
I can't resurrect Rand, but I'm reasonably confident she would be broadly okay with that high level characterisation. And, in the abstract, it's compelling. At it's heart, it's not that different from modern rationalism, especially when we allow that, of course, the happiness of any given agent can be (and is) contingent on the happiness of other (or all) agents.
The problem with this philosophy is twofold.
First, it's sort of fundamentally philosophically ungrounded. It posits an external world, and not just in the "we all posit an external world to survive" sense. Objectivism requires that an objective reality of referents and means exist independent of us, that we have direct access to that world through sense data, and that there be no meaning, morality, or sense in this world before we put it there. It also requires that meaning and morality be things that can exist within a single individual, without requiring outside reference and collaboration. None of the are particularly young or radical ideas in the fields of ethics, ontology, and epistemology. All of them are also open, and quite possibly unresolvable, questions despite millennia of attention from many of humanity's greatest minds.
The last of these premises, that meaning and ethics are the domain of an individual mind, is particularly troublesome. This is an idea which has proven to be a real sticking point for a lot of philosophical models, and recognizing it as a hurdle is one of the more significant forces that has advanced modern philosophy in the last few hundred years. In fact, depending on how you read, interpret, and value Wittgenstein, it can be argued that this question is one of the few big philosophical disputes that has actually been conclusively resolved, and not in the way that objectivism requires. Of course, not everyone agrees, this is philosophy. So we can proceed as though this remains an open question. It changes little
In the realm of philosophy, a schematic of ethics and meaning that posits answers to unresolved questions as axioms and then builds from there is basically a toy. A toy can be a useful rhetorical device for inestigating these questions, but it’s not a coherent and stable philosophy of its own. It doesn’t stand on the same ground as actual philosophical models. Note that, through this same lens, religious philosophies are also toys, and the difference in scope is why religious thought struggles so much in philosophical debate. I’m not exactly trying to make an inflammatory statement like “objectivism is a religion,” but, honestly, the two broadly occupy the same space.
Which brings us to the second problem of objectivism. Maybe it’s not coherent as a philosophical model, but how does it work as a personal philosophy. This is where the actual history and sociology of it becomes relevant. There are a lot of things that follow very easily from the core tenets that are... not great. They aren’t necessary conclusions from the premises, but they certainly seem to be common ones. These are ideas like selfishness being the best path to altruism. Ideas like the worth of individuals being measurable, in how effective they are at shaping the world. Ideas like an overclass/underclass structure of society being not only inevitable but morally desirable. In practise, these themes come up again and again in objectivist thought. From the intellectual tower of “pure objectivism” some of these might be considered missteps, and others might be considered stepping stones on the way to the greater good that only look ugly because of flawed assumptions from the observer. Judging these things is always going to be subjective. From my point of view though, objectivism certainly seems to enable and provide permission for a lot more bad behaviour than it does encourage good behaviour.
So, if objectivism as a personal philosophy works for you, and if it encourages you towards good behaviour, then great. But I really think it does very much the opposite for most people who subscribe to it. That’s plenty good reason to be uncomfortable with its signal being amplified.
To summarize:
1. Objectivism is philosophically void as an ontological and ethical framework.
2. Objectivism is net harmful as a sociological movement.
The big problem with objectivism appears (to me) to be that it assumes the individual has no obligations towards society. This is clearly a recipe for the collapse of society, and I'm not in favor of that.
Is that quite right? Could it instead assume that any person’s duty to society is determined solely by that person? It might be hard to tell the two apart in practice, but in theory they are quite different — with the latter there could be tons of duty guiding people’s actions, just none that is legitimately imposed by a central authority.
Edit: I should have read farther. ThePrussian’s answer says pretty much what I meant rather better than I did.
Thank you! Which answer in particular were you referring to?
Just to summarise: Rand argues - and, again, in 20 years I haven't heard a counterargument against this - that life, which is to say individual human life, living your life successfully means practicing as hard as you can, 7 virtues: Rationality, Independence, Integrity, Honesty, Justice, Productiveness, and Pride.
Now, imagine a society full of honest and productive and just people. I don't really see how such a society is doomed to collapse...
You are wrong about that. An individual has the obligation - this assumes he is being moral, i.e., that he has chosen to live rationally - to treat all other members of said society with justice and honesty, and to respect their rights. More, having a stake in said society's nature, reason obliges us to defend it an maintain it.
I go a little further than most Objectivists and argue that the whole basis for human society is mutual protection, so all members of a society have the obligation to defend the rights of all others. Not merely to passively _accept_ them, but to actively _defend_ them. Paine's line is brilliant: "A Bill of Rights is also a Prescription of Duties". Mind you, this is my own derivation, which I am certain follows logically from Objectivism, but it isn't shared that much.
Yes. The notion that inner-directedness necessarily implies a war of all against all is one of the most pernicious mistakes of modern times.
>You are wrong about that. An individual has the obligation - this assumes he is being moral, i.e., that he has chosen to live rationally - to treat all other members of said society with justice and honesty, and to respect their rights
Even ifs its against there owninterests? You need to choose one,again.
I am hesitant to respond to the above, since it contains a lot of terms whose meanings are not quite clear to me. So instead I'll put the case positively.
Ethics - morality - if it is about anything is about what we should do, what the right behaviour is, what 'the Good' is. There are three basic questions:
1. What is the Good?
2. How do we know?
3. Why should we care?
And with neat symmetry, there are three traditional types of answer:
1. the Religious,
2. the Social
3. the Intrinsic.
The religious answer says the Good is whatever the man in the sky says it is, we know because he occaisionally sticks random ideas in the heads of Special People, and we have to follow what these special people say, or we'll be tortured forever.
The social answer says the Good is whatever the group (nation, race, society, class, whatever) says it is, we know this because certain Special People get random ideas that express the will of the group, and we should do this because, among other things, the group - at the direction of the Special People - has the right to mess you up good if you don't.
The intrinsic answer says that the Good is something you just somehow know, you know through random ideas that pop into your head, and you just somehow know from random ideas that you should do all this. This is the approach Scott takes in the Consequentialist F.A.Q., easily his weakest piece of writing (go look: just read "random idea" for "intuition" throughout).
In pracice, since different kinds of intrinsic types have different kinds of random ideas, the one who shouts the loudest tends to take over as a new Special Person and you go back to answers 1 and 2.
Okay.
And what about Rand? Well, she says what is the Good is what is required for you to live which is also what is required to live the best life possible, that you can know this by using your mind to carefully examine reality, including the reality of your own life, and you should do this because it is the path to a long, happy, fulfilled life, the best life for you and all other good people whom you will ever meet.
Obviously Rand is the bonkers evil one.
"And what about Rand? Well, she says what is the Good is what is required for you to live "
The good-for-me is whatever is whatever required for me to live. If I am starving and I steal food from another starving man, that is good-for-me, because I live another day. It's no so good for the victim of my theft.
With respect, this is the "If human beings evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" argument for us Objectivists.
Right off the bat I can think of things much better for both you and this other starving chap. You could appeal to your fellow human beings for help, until you can get back on your feet. Better, you could trade your work for food, the way many day labourers did, so both you and he would now have a stable source of food and a chance to better your prospects.
Better question: how did you and this guy end up in this situation? Theft isn't usually the result of starvation - more often, theft is the _cause_ of starvation. In a civilised society, the chronic thief finds himself unemployable and starving. In other societies, starvation is usually the result of truly grand-scale theft by the state, by the people with guns.
But - say you - what if there's just you and this guy, and one's going to die... Yeah, I know the argument. Rand called it "life boat ethics". What if there are two men stranded at sea in a lifeboat that only holds one?
Okay. But are you in this situation right now? How often does this occur? Is this the expected course of your life? Modelling your ethics on the extreme exception of an extreme exception is... questionable.
Basically, a parallel would be the "If Dr Evil will nuke a city unless I rape this woman, does that make rape okay?" This isn't a situation that happens often, and at some point you start to wonder why the person is asking the question...
"The last of these premises, that meaning and ethics are the domain of an individual mind, is particularly troublesome. [...] it can be argued that this question is one of the few big philosophical disputes that has actually been conclusively resolved [...]"
(Further and further off-topic) Could you say more about this? I'm particularly interested in meaning (ethics to me is precisely a concept that only makes sense within the collective). I think you implied that Wittgenstein solved this problem, how?
You're right that we're way off topic, so I won't go into any real detail, but this is generally seen to be the crux of the private language argument. It's not so much that Wittgenstein solved this problem as that he very convincingly showed that there cannot exist a coherent solution in an single isolated mind.
The definitive exploration of this is "Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language" by Saul Kripke. It's short and relatively accessible.
Thank you.
Is that answer coherent?
Yes. For practical purposes, concepts are taught socially. You have to tell kids that "dog" is relatively narrow concept, and "animal" is a relatively broad one.
>Objectivism, as described by Rand herself, is the idea that humans are uniquely vital agents in a soulless material world, and that each individual, as a sealed unit of motive, meaning, and rationality is a sort of god-unto-oneself. Meaning and right, therefore, are derived on an individual basis by the exertion of agency, through the tools of rationality, upon the external world towards goals that satisfy the appetites of this central agent. In other words, each person is the heroic centre of their own universe, equipped with the ability to reshape the world to promote their own happiness, and with a moral compass that can only point towards that happiness
That's very eloquent!
A simpler way of putting the point is that Rand ignores biology...you start off as a helpless baby, you end up as an unemployable oldster. Without help from other people you're going to have a bad time at either end of your productive years.
> The last of these premises, that meaning and ethics are the domain of an individual mind
I don't think this is quite correct. Objectivism is definitely a form of ethical egoism, but her form of it still entails certain universal prescriptions that are required by reason, and which she's goes into at length. For instance, that "productive achievement as his noblest activity".
Well yes, but that's all based on smuggling in extra information by narrowing the definition of a term, from the original, broad and vague one.
When I was younger, I could more or less make a formal argument against Objectivism. I had some friends who had gotten into Objectivism, and I read Rand's major fiction, plus some of her philosophical essays (which made a more formal version of the argument she makes in Galt's interminable speech).
If I recall correctly, Rand attempted to derive her philosophy from a fundamental choice between life and death. If the reader chose life, she argued that they also chose values consistent with life. And this was the first big philosophical sleight of hand: deciding which values are "consistent" with choosing life. For example, she argued that it was worth risking your life to avoid being enslaved, because being a slave was not consistent with that initial choice to live. I think there's actually a germ of interesting argument here, but I wouldn't call the version I read philosophy any more than I'd call a lot of C.S. Lewis's best work philosophy.
The problem for Rand's argument is that the initial choice of "life" is smuggling in an entire value system, and that value system is not uniquely determined. For example, someone from a society built around extended families might just as convincingly argue that the choice to live meant placing the interests of the extended family before the individual's. So the whole argument breaks down in the first 20 pages or so, as most amateur philosophical arguments do.
Which leaves me to evaluate Objectism as social movement, not as a philosophy. As a social movement, I find it tedious and uninspiring. The early leadership made a spectacular mess of their personal lives, mostly by trying to invent poly and making many of the classic newbie mistakes. Objectist art does not particularly inspire me, with the possible exception of one or two songs by Rush. I do not, in practice, enjoy spending time socially around Objectivists.
And perhaps unfairly, I politically lump Objectivists in with libertarians. And as I've aged, I've noticed that time and time again, libertarians have an alarming tendancy to transform into authoritarians, and/or to start spewing the most remarkable sorts of bigotry. None of this ought be inherent in libertarism, but it keeps happening to people I've known.
But this latter part is _not_ a philosophical argument against Objectivism. It's merely the list of reasons why (having read and rejected the philosophical argument), I do not usually bother to spend my time arguing about it. One of the lessons I've learned in life is that if a social movement makes my skin crawl in a particular way, it's rarely worth my time to engage with its arguments, for reasons described by G.K. Chesterton in "Orthodoxy":
> Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. I mean that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument.
To me, much Objectivist argument feels very tight and circular in this way.
I'm going to home in on the essential mistake here, and leave the rest of this to one side, since it isn't an argument:
" For example, someone from a society built around extended families might just as convincingly argue that the choice to live meant placing the interests of the extended family before the individual's."
Here's the flaw: Life is only available to individuals. There is no such thing as a collective life, or a collective mind.
Yes, an extended family, assuming it's healthy, may be a great value. A great value... to whom? To an individual member of it. Or to someone else, who likes seeing a good family.
You know to whom - or what - it isn't a value? To a stone, or a river, or a dead person.
As I wrote above, the choice to live or not is your only 100% free one, the only one that isn't mixed up in other values - because all values presuppose the choice to live.
Oh, and an extended family that demanded an individual member subordinate his only life to its demands would not be any sort of value.
> leave the rest of this to one side, since it isn't an argument:
This is fine! The rest of my post was intended to explain why, even though I think Objectivism is wrong, I almost never bother to argue against it. The question is uninteresting to me in the way that debates about how a silver standard is ethically inferior to a gold standard are uninteresting to me.
> Here's the flaw: Life is only available to individuals. There is no such thing as a collective life, or a collective mind.
OK, so we're definitely discussing the same part of the argument. This is a good thing! (Especially because I'm relying on decades-old memories of the essays in question.)
But I don't think I explained my argument clearly. Let me try another metaphor.
The "100% free choice" between life and death essentially provides 1 bit of information. The philosophy of Objectivism is much larger—let's go by John Galt's speech and say it's roughly 90 pages long. Cut that in half to account for rhetoric, and apply some assumptions about information density of English text, and we get about 10kB of philosophy.
Rand's argument is essentially that a 1-bit choice implies at least 10kB of consequences.
But the mathematical problem is that you can't get 10kB out of a single bit unless you smuggle a bunch of information in by a side channel. "Choose life" is compatible with a great many philosophies. For example:
- "Dying on my feet is better than dying in chains, because a life in chains isn't really a life." (Rand argued something like this, IIRC. But it implies complex ideas about what lives are worth living, and what life means.)
- Many people have believed that it is better to die defending your homeland than to run and save your own skin. This closely analogous to the "better to die on my feet than in chains" argument, but I don't know how Rand would have felt about it. Would it matter if you were defending a free country against Stalin, and if you ran to save your life, allowing other people fully committed to the fight to die?
- For a silly example, in the Order of the Stick #652, the lich Xylon argues, "Be a vampire, or a ghost, or an immortal with a paint-by-numbers portrait in the rec room. Hell, even a brain-in-a-jar, in a pinch. Anything to avoid the Big Fire below." His philosophy is life at absolutely any cost.
Rand's argument is "choose life, but only a life that's worth living." In a mathematical sense, the resulting philosophy is "underdetermined." You can't derive a 90-page speech from a 1-bit choice. You need to add something to flesh it out. And I do not think that the next steps in Rand's argument justify her ultimate philosophy, any more than I think Xylon's choice of (un)life at all costs justifies his larger philosophy.
Anyway, I hope this makes my argument clearer. I'm not expecting this argument to be especially convincing, which is fine—as mentioned above, I am perfectly happy to ignore the question.
Well put again..this is the problem with axioms: she has these quite short, supposedly indisputable axioms, and she claims to derive all sorts of complex things from them.
> But the mathematical problem is that you can't get 10kB out of a single bit unless you smuggle a bunch of information in by a side channel.
I think this is the wrong model for thinking about this because it's misleading. As a loose metaphor, think of ethics as a decision tree whose content and structure is defined by her metaphysics and epistemology.
When she talks about choosing to live as man qua man, her metaphysics and epistemology define what it means to be human and human potential, and that is what defines the structure of the decision tree. Ethics is then the process of navigating this decision tree.
The binary choice to live as man qua man or not (your 1 bit) is the difference of living up to human potential, or giving up your humanity.
So trying to separate ethics from epistemology and metaphysics is the mistake that left you confused as to where all of those other bits are coming from. No matter what your philosophy, those three subjects are the inseparable pillars of any complete philosophy.
> Life is only available to individuals.
Individuals can support or destroy each others' lives.
My main problem with Objectivism is how it was practiced, even by its founder. Little consideration for principles of charity, in the sense of an assumption of good faith and acceptance of disagreements or mistakes. You can see this in how Rand and her followers "excommunicated" other members that disagreed with her.
Yes, Rand totally didn't live up to her ideals. She only, err.. *checks notes*... escaped from totalitarian tyranny to the United States, built herself up to be a writer whose work still inspires millions to this day, developed a whole new philosophy to allow her to write her books...
...wait, what were you saying? Because that sounds pretty much like something one of her characters might do.
To the other point, it's true that charity is rejected wholesale by Objectivists, because what it has come to mean is "giving of the undeserved". But Rand did accept, and practice _generosity_, which is a necessary facet of Justice.
Please read what I wrote more carefully. I didn't use charity in the same sense that you are using it, nor did I say Rand was not consistently applying her principles.
An interesting and thought provoking article on a topic that attracts craziness and bullshit science. I was particularly impressed by your point about livestock and crops. I follow developments in paleogenomics and you are absolutely correct.
There is NO EVIDENCE of any Ice Age domesticated plants.
As you say, that pretty much kills scenarios two and three. However, I am not convinced that societies of greater numbers and complexity than we imagine possible did not exist. We have wildly underestimated the abilities of Paleolithic peoples to shape and exploit their environment. Their numbers and social complexity were probably much greater than we currently estimate.
For example, did you know that Neanderthals "farmed"?
The groundbreaking research in Gibraltar has proven through paleopollen analysis, that Neanderthals living there over 100kya created an extremely high concentration of nut bearing trees around their settlements. Not only trees, there are high pollen markers for a range of other edible/useful plants concentrated around these Neanderthal settlement sites. Including wild grasses, the partially burned grains of which have been found around these Neanderthal hearths.
Silviculture or the "farming of trees" is probably the earliest form of "agriculture". Deliberately planting nuts or seedlings for nut trees around your dwelling places is "farming" in the broadest sense and it doesn't domesticate the trees. Unlike say, what we can see happened with wheat, barley, oats, corn, and rice.
Here/s the "thing", silviculture combined with seasonally flooding wetlands (like in the Amazon or Cambodia) can generate HUGE surpluses of food in those areas. You can build a fairly big population and society on nuts, fish, natural fruits, natural grains, and wild game. In Turkey, the nut would have been the pistachio.
So, while I agree with you that scenarios two and three are pretty much "off the table", I think that something like Gobekli Tepe was "doable" by Paleolithic Ice Age cultures. I think we "lowball" their numbers in our population estimates and that they were capable of more than we give them credit for.
One obvious area of investigation would be Beringia. Paleogenetic evidence shows that ALL Native American populations are descended from an ancestral population of "Beringians" who became genetically distinct from the East Asian populations around 35-40kya.
Beringia didn't "sink beneath the waves" until around 15kya. So, for around 20,000 years there was a human population in Beringia that we know next to nothing about. I'm not going to rule out the possibility that they had "kingdoms" and built their own version of Gobekli Tepe. In human terms 20kya is a VERY long time.
This argument is basically the whole part 2 of the Graeber & Wengrow book reviewed some time ago here (the dawn of everything). There were, and still are to some extent, huge populations supported by a variety of means from hunting-gathering to forestry, some agriculture (which does not equate domestication - domestication of a culture is defined as the loss of ability to reproduce outside of human intervention) seasonal or sedentary, etc. And it was not fixed: the entire island of britain apparently started agriculture, found it was not to their taste (understandable, it's very hard work, difficult to justify when you have other, easier resources around) and went back to eating basically hazelnuts...
And Goblecki Tepe is not the only large site without agriculture - Poverty Point in the US; the whole of Dordogne valley in France.
Anyway, I feel like the "nothing can support an advanced architectural civilization except systematic agriculture" should have a low prior, as modern scholarship goes against it. makes for a nice just so story though, which kind of enshrines it in the mind...
PS: a pseudo-history of Doggerland has been made into a really nice trilogy of books: https://www.goodreads.com/series/49789-northland
Also super interesting, I love this thread! Can you suggest some reading about the failed first agriculture experience in Great Britain?
The original source, afaik, is this: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Stevens+fuller+2012&btnG=#d=gs_qabs&t=1677920206823&u=%23p%3DAkkYqjV5358J
Very interesting, thank you very much!
> Neanderthals .. created an extremely high concentration of nut bearing trees
Without wishing to diss Neanderthals, a high concentration of nut bearing trees doesn't necessarily imply they deliberately planted them. They could have been collecting nuts from far and wide, and then those trees grew naturally in the vicinity of their dwellings from nuts accidently discarded or even pinched from their stashes and buried by squirrels!
Probably early agriculture was a lot like this - people doing things that happened to create a local concentration of some edible plants, without necessarily quite realizing what they were doing.
I heard some decades ago about how wheat was probably domesticated, which largely means that the grains are large and easy to remove from the stalk — if you gather wild grasses and bring them back, the ones with these properties are the ones that will be more likely to fall off on the way home, so they grow preferentially in the areas near home.
That's been the argument against "deliberate intent" for a very long time. The researcher/s were aware that they would have to find a lot of supporting evidence to make their case. Personally, as someone with a doctorate in anthropology and a major interest in archeology, I think they have.
Because it's not just the trees. There is a whole "package" of plants that are concentrated around this group of Neanderthal sites. Sites which are separated by 10's of thousands of years during the time of their occupation. Something which implies "cultural memory" a feat Neanderthals were thought to be incapable of, due to not having "language".
The researcher has really revolutionized the way we view Neanderthals and the other hominid cousins that we subsumed when we spread out across the planet.
We he started his digs back in the early 90's the common paradigm was that Neanderthals were too primitive to even hunt birds. Hunting birds it was argued was a HUGE measure of cognitive ability. One that humans displayed and Neanderthals did not.
He has conclusively shown that Neanderthals did indeed hunt birds and also that they used the feathers of certain birds as adornment. They weren't "retarded cousins" that we swept aside. They were equals that we interbred with. So much so, that we basically fucked them to death.
They exist now only as a "ghost" in our genome. Like 9 other hominid species that we also subsumed by interbreeding after the "near extinction event" of 75Kya.
The typical European has about 2.5% Neanderthal genes in their genome. The typical African has about 1.5%. Australian Aboriginals and American Indians have about 1%. In the European population about 28% of the Neanderthal genome can still be found in composite among the population.
"Like 9 other hominid species that we also subsumed by interbreeding after the "near extinction event" of 75Kya."
This seems really strange to me. Which were the 9 species??
The “Clan of the Cave Bear” was actually right, we interbred with the Neanderthal. So much so, that they vanished as a species and became only a ghost in our genome.
Paleogenomics and the Human Genome Project have revolutionized our understanding of human evolution. With the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome, we have been able to compare the human (Sapiens) genome with that of another species of intelligent hominids in the Homo family. To perhaps understand why we are alone, and all the others have vanished.
There have been massive breakthroughs in our ability to read DNA from ancient fossils. They have advanced so much, that in a twist reminiscent of the movie Gattaca, paleontologists are now able to read the DNA in ancient soils.
Basically, from the “skin dust” of cells all mammals shed that winds up on the ground and apparently lasts forever. The progress has been incredible, and a lot of questions have been answered.
What we found is that there are ghosts in our genes. Sections of our genome that are the result of interbreeding with other hominid species. They now think we had 9 to 11 "cousins" in the hominid family.
Including: Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo Floresiensis, and 5 or 6 in Africa.
All of these hominid populations were very close to us genetically and we interbred with all of them. We know this because EVERY HUMAN on Earth carries these genes. This happened VERY early in the story. Before we expanded out of Africa.
With the sequencing of the Neanderthal and Sapiens genomes we can see clearly now how the two species interacted over a several hundred-thousand-year time span. The fossil record may be murky, but the genes don’t lie.
What they tell us, is that each time the ice swept over Europe it pushed the Neanderthals south into the Middle East and Southern Europe. At the same time the Sahara would turn green and pull up humans from Southern Africa.
The main reason that humans didn’t spread into Europe before 50,000BCE was most likely that the land North of the Middle East was already taken by Neanderthal communities. What we know from the genetic traces is that they intermingled, and they interbred. We know this because we can see Neanderthal genes flowing back into the African gene pool each time the ice retreated, and the Middle East became inhospitable again.
Some mixed-race humans returned to Africa and spread Neanderthal genes back into the African gene pool, where they can be detected today. We know that others moved back into Europe because their human heritage has been detected in Neanderthal remains in Eastern Europe that are over a hundred thousand years old.
That’s right, the flow of genes went both ways. We hybridized with the Neanderthals and other Homo species multiple times. We slept with our cousins. A lot.
The genetic evidence tells us this happened multiple times in prehistory. Each time the door out of Africa was open, some humans would move into the Middle East, interbreed with the people they found there, and then vanish as the climate changed and the region became desert once again.
Some would go back to Africa, carrying the new genes they had acquired back to the “root stock”. Others would go to Europe and their “humanism” would fade as they blended into the Neanderthal population. Spreading human genes through the Neanderthal gene pool.
This happened multiple times in a 200,000-year dance of hybridization, isolation, inbreeding, and re-hybridization. The two populations\species profoundly affected each other genetically. They is us, and we are them.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/fossil-dna-reveals-new-twists-in-modern-human-origins-20190829/
What finally put an end to the dance was the disaster that nearly killed us about 74,000 years ago. Recent research suggests it was a massive eruption of a volcano in Indonesia. The Toba eruption likely released 100 times as much SO2 as the Pinatubo event, and was the greatest natural disaster of the last 2.5 million years.
Bottleneck in Human Population May be Due to Ozone-Destroying Volcano https://thecosmiccompanion.net/bottleneck-in-human-population-may-be-due-to-ozone-destroying-volcano/
Temperatures dropped between 3.5 and nine degrees Celsius worldwide, and global rainfall decreased by 25 percent. What’s worse, computer simulations of the Toba super-eruption, found this event could have wiped out up to half the ozone in the Earth’s atmosphere. Remember the concerns about “destroying the ozone”?
We were right to worry, recent studies suggest that if we hadn’t stopped destroying it, things would be going very badly for us right now.
The Montreal Protocol was designed to heal the ozone layer. It may have also fended off several degrees of warming — and a collapse of forests and croplands.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/18/1032168/montreal-protocol-warming-lessons-climate-change-ozone/
The effects on the human genome indicate that the human population shrank down to a remnant group of a no more than ten to twenty thousand, probably living in Southern Africa.
We know this because it caused a “genetic bottleneck” trace in the human genome
When a species suffers a “near extinction event” and only a small population survives, genetic diversity goes way down. The surviving population carries only a subset of the genes that the pre-disaster population had. The species has gone through a genetic “bottleneck” and is less diverse.
Cheetahs are a good example of this. Some disaster nearly caused their extinction about 25,000 years ago. They survived, but have so little genetic diversity that essentially, they are clones.
Humanity survived but we are not a genetically diverse species. The most genetically diverse human populations are the African ones. Because they are the oldest and have evolved/retained the most diversity.
The European and Asian populations have less diversity than the African because they are younger and because they went through a second genetic bottleneck when they migrated out of Africa. The Amerindian genome is the least diverse of all because it went through a third genetic bottleneck when it’s ancestral populations migrated out of Asia.
Human genetic diversity is actually really low for a species.
Thank you for this detailed answer :-)
My understanding of the current genetics data is that we only have evidence of interbreeding with our species for neandertal, denisovan and one unanmed old African population, and not for florensis (who might have been a rather distinct cousin), but I am nitpicking!
Yes, given the history of dirt farmers screwing up, 'a 'high concentration of nut-bearing trees that all die out at once' is a better sign of silviculture than just 'a high concentration of nut-bearing trees'. The US 1930's Dust Bowl was what normally happens to farmers- sooner or later they make a mistake and it all dies.
So when the mammoths and giant sloths and Giant Beavers of Doom died out as humans came down from the land bridge, that's a data point suggesting maybe they were ranched, and then the ranchers made one mistake and they all died. It's possible. Mass hunts using grass fires like the Mongols, the Romans, and Native Americans observed by the first settlers are of course more likely.
But I personally like the idea of early stone age mammoth ranching. Giant beavers building dams for humans. Ground sloths digging their caves. And then they overstock the ranches and run out of food and all die, oh the embarrassment.
Super interesting thank you! I had no idea about the Neanderthals sylviculture. Do youhave a link or a ref to suggest?
The Smart Neanderthal: Bird Catching, Cave Art, and the Cognitive Revolution Clive Finlayson Oxford University Press (2019) is the place to start.
Neanderthals ate barbecued pigeon
Charred bones suggest our ancient relatives cooked the ancestors of feral pigeons on the embers of their fires
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/aug/07/neanderthals-barbecued-pigeon-gibraltar
Neanderthals may have cleared a European forest with fire or tools
When Neanderthals lived at a site called Neumark-Nord in Germany, the region had far fewer trees than surrounding areas, suggesting they may have cleared the forest on purpose.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2302065-neanderthals-may-have-cleared-a-european-forest-with-fire-or-tools/
Study finds Neanderthals ate their veggies.
https://phys.org/news/2010-12-neanderthals-ate-veggies.html
Proof that Neanderthals ate crabs is another 'nail in the coffin' for primitive cave dweller stereotypes.
https://phys.org/news/2023-02-proof-neanderthals-ate-crabs-coffin.html
Neanderthals were the first to artificially transform the world, turning a forest into grassland nearly 125,000 years ago.
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/neanderthal-turned-forest-grassland-0423/
Genetic insights into the social organization of Neanderthals.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05283-y
The Neanderthal Diet—From Teeth to Guts
Neanderthals’ tooth enamel, torsos, and even fossilized poop reveal that they ate much more than meat.
https://www.sapiens.org/biology/neanderthal-diet/
Before Paleo: What Did the European Neanderthals Eat?
https://now.northropgrumman.com/before-paleo-what-did-the-european-neanderthals-eat/
Thank you very much for all these super interesting references!
If there was no pre ice age civilisation, why not? After the ice-age we domesticated several different crops in different parts of the world within a couple of thousand years. Yet humans have been humans for at least 50k years. Was there never a 2000 year period with favourable conditions before that? What changed?
I suspect that part of the story may be that we needed to kill off all the mega-fauna before farming would seem like a good idea. Kill one mammoth and invite all your friends to a 3-month feast, or toil in the fields day after day - which would you choose?
Yes, megafaunae mass-extinction was very probably a key element in the development of civilization, and I think it's hard to credit the existence of sophisticated societies coexisting with mammoths and glycodonts and the like. Perhaps the one place isolated and vast enough that it might have hosted civilizations millennia before they appeared elsewhere is Australia, but it is my understanding that we have a surfeit of evidence, both archeological and from indigenous oral tradition, that this did not occur in the 65 thousand years that humans have been there.
Sophisticated post-agricultural societies coexist with elephants in large areas of the world. mammoths were about elephant sized, glyptodons smaller.
Right, and perhaps I made my case too strongly, but I think that there is good reason to suspect that civilization first arose in places where extinction of megafaunae drove humans to develop agriculture: That it later spread elsewhere doesn't disprove that. That said, it megafauna-dieoff seems to have been much worse in Europe, where civilization was relatively late to arise, than it was in the Middle East and Asia, so I admit that there must have been other factors in play (such as the Fertile Crescent)
The Australian Indigenous people were also getting more sophisticated in the last 5,000 years or so. They developed huge dam systems as fish traps, and started having larger gatherings. I’m not sure if this is due to interactions with other civilisations, or if a climatic/genetic clock was synchronising it.
And yet they never invented the bow & arrow.
Tasmanians appear to have gone backwards from Australian technology.
…this is true? Does it bear on whether there was an Aboriginal technological flourishing in the past 5,000 years, or why that was if so?
Also, there was plenty of trade between northern mainland Australia, and Papua New Guinea and the surrounding region. This trade included weapons (Australia exported spears and spear throwers), and they had bows and arrows in Papua New Guinea. I’ve seen claims that bows and arrows would be less effective than spears and spear throwers against large animals like kangaroos, at least compared to the smaller animals on the islands to the north. Spears thrown with a woomera carry a lot more force than arrows do. Also, I don’t know much about European bow-and-arrow hunting, but I understand it involves shooting the same animal over and over, hoping to find a weak spot or just to wear it down. Spears and woomeras might be more effective.
Tasmania did go backwards, but I think that might be partly because they were cut off from their trading networks by climate change.
Bows & arrows are used against large animals in both the Old World & Americas. Arrows are smaller than spears, so they require less energy to accelerate fast enough to penetrate an animal's exterior (bullets are an even more extreme example of that principle). There are actually more large megafauna in the Old World than Australia (because they weren't adapted to humans and thus got quickly wiped out). Megafauna in the New World were mostly wiped out as well, but the bison (hunted with bows) is hardly smaller than a kangaroo. Finally, weapons are also used against other humans, and bows were extremely useful for that prior to the introduction of firearms.
Bison are much slower than kangaroos, and would find it easier to run away. One-hit kills would be more important against kangaroos than against bison. And human-on-human conflict was much rarer, so learning a separate skill just to do it more effectively would likely have been a waste of resources.
Edit: also, bullets penetrate by having much higher kinetic energy than arrows.
I have no idea how we'd know if Aborigines of 1700 AD were more or less sophisticated than the Aborigines of 10,000 BC. Neither large gatherings nor fish traps (built in rivers where they'll disintegrate) leave a lot of archaeological trace that's going to be obvious after 5000+ years.
They had a strong oral tradition which matches with archaeological evidence in other ways, and an unusually low level of warfare. I would expect stories about large gatherings or fish traps to persist, if only to preserve the reasons they failed. I would also be surprised if the memory of how to make or preserve them was lost.
Your suspicion is on spot. Mainstream theory in history/anthropology ("theory" as in "theory of evolution"). For some decades at least. I remember best the writings of Marvin Harris about this. - Theory 2 and 3 deserve a 0% imho. Theory one: Gobekli Tepe is around 11,000 years old. One more find pretty much as old and advanced as GT and the question resolves: Yes. So, followers of theory 1 shall rejoice now: their Atlantis is found! - I suspect: they are underwhelmed. Why?
0% is not a real probability:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QGkYCwyC7wTDyt3yT/0-and-1-are-not-probabilities
Indeed. I read a rationalist knows when the use of probabilities (Bayesian or not) make sense. And when not. Theories 2 and 3 do not need those. imvho. They are, how to say it polite: silly. I am grateful that Scott took the time to show why. That said, a lot of things may sound like "unlikely, but who knows" if one lacks information. - If it were not Robins Hanson I would think his post from 2020 "nuts". https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/lost-advanced-civilizationshtml
Now I tried hard to update and it remains nuts to me. A zero. Sorry. Maybe my mistake. But if one gives Theory 2 or 3 a probability higher than winning a jackpot at powerball (1 in 292,201,338 last time I checked) then one should not call ppl playing powerball irrational. Heck, I sometimes do. :O - Would I wager one cent on Theory 2 if I were to get 3 million $ if it resolved true? Geez, I might. But certainly not 100 cent. So, If not zero, then 0.00000003 or so. Which is much closer to zero than to 0.5% or even 0.001%. You really feel it makes sense to assign that low a value to such a big question? I prefer: zero - and let's move on.
That's a specialized argument. In many other parts of physical theory, we use -- indeed can't easily do without -- probabilities that are strictly zero. The first that comes to my mind is any node of a quantum mechanical wavefunction. If the Bayesian philosopher asks the physicists to define a "probability amplitude" which is discontinuous because it cannot be defined at wavefunction nodes, I assure you we will all laugh at the philosopher and do no such thing.
Does it even make sense to assign probabilities to such "we ever find" statements? there is literally a 0% chance they can ever be judged false.
I think I'd rather toil in the fields than eat three-month-old unrefrigerated mammoth meat.
Honestly, hunting deer or kangaroos or proto-cows seems like a better food source for humans than mammoth. You can kill it with a spear, you can (with a reasonable size group) eat it before it goes off, and you can (with a reasonable size group) transport it back to camp. There's honestly not much you can do with a dead mammoth except cut a few small pieces off it to take back to camp and leave the rest for the hyenas/lions/sabre-toothed-tigers.
Salting and smoking as conservation techniques for meat have been around for millenia, and a civilization that doesn't have them doesn't count as much of a civilization in my book.
Mammoths more a 'metaphor for the cheese-making-industry', err, as a stone-age-meme.
All kind of hunting down Megafauna - including deers, kangaroos, proto-cows - is fine: great food. The trouble in known (pre-)history began when all of those were mostly hunted down and eaten already, by a population that had gone up from all those successful megafauna-hunts. And could not be sustained on chasing rabbits for long: Ergo FAMINE or/and doing more of that gatherer-stuff morphing into agriculture.
Isn't one of the benefits of an ice age that refrigeration's pretty easy? You just bury it in the snow.
"Ice age" does not mean that the entire planet was perpetually covered in ice. Temperatures were colder on average and more of the surface was glaciated, but refrigeration temperatures did not persist year-round in most of the places that humans lived, let alone deep-freeze temperatures.
Not snow, permafrost. Dig down a few feet and permanent freezer. Ask the Eskimo. They store whale meat there for years.
"Ice Age" does not mean the entire planet is perpetually covered in permafrost.
Not snow, permafrost. The Eskimo today bury whale meat and blubber in the permafrost. One whale can feed a community for most of a year. I was just reading about how Climate Change melting the permafrost is taking this away from them.
Presumably they could use mammoth tusks and bones, and even skin, suitably treated, to make quite large dwellings.
They did. Tents at least - with tusks holding the structure. Visit the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna. Many reasons to do so. And its twin building opposite for art.
Google Neandertal mammoth butchering camp and look at the articles from 22' and 23'. They were very organized, there were many of them (groups of 50-100) and they feasted for a month or more on Mammoth kills/finds.
But Africa still has its megafauna.
(Sub-Saharan) Africa has held onto land megafauna far longer than any other region. Why is SSA different than the other areas?
I suggest that the environment, the humans, and the animals have interacted differently there than other places.
First, SSA has had a higher load of human-limiting pathogens than arguably anyplace else. This impacted a second point, which is that population density in the late antiquity and early modern periods was comparably quite a bit lower than the rest of the world.
And thirdly, very possibly because of the abet low level but still constant human pressure, African megafauna are more dangerous than those of other regions.
To be sure, tigers, elephants and crocs exist elsewhere. Bison, bears, auroucs and terrible birds were/are feared and respected. And a lot of SSA wilderness perception is shaped by early European experiences, which were not quite historically accurate due to recent bio catastrophes akin to the Columbian exchange. (In the case of SSA, it was the cattle who died of plagues, not so much the people, and the cattle grazing pressure impacted pathogens, human density, and wildlife presence.)
Tldr- SSA is an exception on a lot of levels. They are probably not a good model for the rest of human activity in this case.
We're an African animal that evolved in and with African ecosystems.
I can't make a full argument out of that fact, but I suspect it's a major reason Africa is different in many ways.
My impression too. Humans killed very quickly the megafauna almost as soon as they arrived in new environments, but we have 'always' been in Africa.
The animals of Africa evolved alongside humans. They are not like the easily-killed & naive dodo, even when they aren't especially dangerous.
But also: megafauna in Africa co-evolved with humans. They're used to humans, and know how to not be driven into extinction by humans. The megafauna in the Americas and Australia had no clue that a bunch of tiny naked apes could be a danger to them until they got a spear in the behind.
I suspect this is because of the tse-tse fly and sleeping-sickness. Large parts of Africa were nearly uninhabitable to people. OTOH, it also affects cattle, so it might not have created much of a refuge.
50K years ago agriculture was impractical. Labor required to calories output would have been too low. CO2 was too low so plant productivity was also low.
Darn it, I sound like a one-trick pony in this discussion. Last comment on this topic.
https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/24/graphic-the-relentless-rise-of-carbon-dioxide/#:~:text=They%20tell%20us%20that%20levels,see%20fluctuations%20in%20the%20graph So 110k years ago? Even 80k ago it was okayish. CO2 hoovered between 180 and 280 ppm the last 1 million years, it seems. No 300 ppm during the first 20k years of agriculture But sure: higher CO2 , greener planet: https://www.warpnews.org/human-progress/nasa-the-earth-is-greener-now-than-it-was-20-years-ago/#:~:text=The%20Earth%20has%20become%20five,large%20as%20the%20Amazon%20rainforests. "The Earth has become five percent greener in 20 years. In total, the increase in leaf area over the past two decades corresponds to an area as large as the Amazon rainforests". Do it again TBri!
So, new theory; salmon return to their point of birth because they were engineered that way by the Ice Age Civilizations. The fish that weren't eaten were ground up to power their Mako Reactors.
As for what happened to them.... um... Chtulhu.
I have Robin Hanson's blog open in the other tab, so the obvious explanation is that returning to their point of birth is considered high status for the salmon. It is a signal of good navigation skills, conformity, and conscientiousness.
When you consider why an advanced ancient civilization would want their *fish* to develop these character traits, it seems to hint that the civilization was aquatic.
So, unlike the traditional hypothesis "the ancient civilizations sank in the ocean and died", we should consider that they instead adapted to life under water (a rational choice, considering that 2/3 of this planet is oceans) and perhaps sank their lands on purpose.
Atlantis being submerged on purpose is the plot of Stargate: Atlantis.
Schoch is living proof of the scope of academic freedom facilitated by faculty tenure. Early in his career he went off on a frolic and a folly with his claims about the weathering regime and seismic properties of the Sphinx site. This descended to fascination with parapyschology and the paranormal. At least when Linus Pauling went off the rails on the virtues of Vitamin C to cure the common cold, he had racked up two Nobel Prizes, in chemistry and the peace medal.
I feel like all this "you can't look into something too outlandish, its okay to look into even really dumb and offensive ideas if someone believes in it" is going to end up with Scott doing race science on the blog.
He already did, it's one of his best posts in fact. But because it was an unorthodox approach to the topic, it flew under the radar of the perpetually offended.
Medium warning (50% of ban) for low-effort, high-temperature comment that seems like it's trying to use social pressure to insult people who believe weird things, plus brings up a much more inflammatory culture war topic.
Yeah, fair enough.
My substantive comment here is that like lots of "historical" "conspiracy theories" there appear to be two things going on 1) essentially speculative fiction with a tenuous relationship to the facts and 2) a small amount of archaeological work that occasionally reveals important new things, and I'm not sure that the latter benefits from the former.
For example, some really interesting archaeology has revealed some settlements that predate agriculture that turn on the head many ideas about the origins of civilisation, but archaeologists were just out there doing tough work without needing inspiration of people who think there was a pre-industrial revolution society out there.
There's lots of material culture that doesn't get left behind or leave a detectable presence in the atmosphere or soil, and its likely we'll just never know what happened. That's sad, but there's lots more we'll never know than will know. 99% of classical greek literature is lost, the pre-christian 5th century Irish law code now only survive in fragments of 9th century christian commentaries. Lots of African cultures have lacked a written history and there's been some interesting work building off histories recorded by the Griot oral tradition. But fundamentally some things are just lost, and speculating about what has lost can be fun but its not history. Its sad, but the speculative fiction that passes for hsitorical writing in some of these areas is not really assessible as statements about the past. Its close to YA fiction than history, which is fine, but its weird to use historical tools rather than literary ones to assess it.
Its like stolen valour.
The enjoyment people get from this stuff is really understandable, its cool to think about! Mighty African kingdoms sunk beneath the sands, exciting and rich pre-christian cultures, pre-modern steam engines! But you're always going to hit a wall when you're describing this run stuff as history or archaeology; these people are tourists.
There really *were* steam engines in Hellenistic Egypt, though (with the hugely important caveat that they couldn't power anything and were used as party tricks...) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
Hero says they were used to open temple doors. I guess that's a still a party trick, but it's relevant to establishing scale.
It's not clear that they couldn't have been used to power anything, but doing so in a culture that depended on slave labor wouldn't have been very profitable. And, IIUC, the design would have needed a LOT of work. (And perhaps better metallurgy than was easily available.)
What is the relevance of slave labor? Does this imply they didn't pursue any other sources of energy? But they did: they had ox power, water power, and probably wind power for grinding grain and pumping water.
Slaves were a plentiful source of labor. You don't want to do anything that would result in the slaves being more powerful. So either you have important parts of your civilization run by highly skilled slaves, you you create a new class with power. Both are choices to be avoided.
When you say "Does this imply they didn't pursue any other sources of energy?" you are implying a unified vew of "energy" that didn't exist. Yes, they used animal power. And the animal power was supervised by widely available (and therefore considered "unskilled") labor. If you create a need for a new skill set, you create a power imbalance. And the empire was brand new and already a bit teetery. This isn't far from the time of Spartacus or the civil ware of Marius vs. Sulla. This is around a period of a lot of civil strife in Palestine. I think Augustus was about to pronounce the sumptary acts, to prevent anyone who wasn't a senator from wearing purple in an attempt to stabilize the empire. (A search is a bit confusing, as apparently there were several different sumpary laws, some a lot earlier.)
They definitely weren't able to power anything. It was eighteen hundred years until a strong enough pressure vessel to do useful work was developed. Using steam jets to spin pinwheels was possible but their metallurgy was simply not up to the task of building an expansion engine.
Yeah but so what? Industrial revolution was powered by water and marketing agriculture, cheap communications and an improving mindset. The focus on things like steam engines just illustrates that these people are bad historians of development. If you're an amateur then you hear about rudimental steam engines and think that is a signal of economic development that matters rather than not really being important. Hence why I'd say its closer to speculative fiction than decent history. Sort of thing a fiction author thinks is important to their world building.
"without needing inspiration of people who think there was a pre-industrial revolution society out there."
"Its like stolen valour"
"these people are tourists"
Your objection seems to be that you personally dislike some of the people talking about it, b/c it is immoral for them to think about the question. And that, rather than the counter-evidence, is what makes the idea a really dumb and offensive conspiracy theory.
wat
Thought I was clear, people are free to do creative writing and imagine alternative paths but they're not doing history or being useful in diving what was actually happening.
Huh, it appears that Hanson moved his blog to Substack and retroactively transferred all the old posts. And this didn't include the Disqus comments, which Web Archive doesn't save also, so presumably those are lost forever?
ETA no, apparently they're still at https://disqus.com/home/forums/overcoming-bias/, for however long that'll last.
Ah, I was worried my decade+ worth of Disqus comments were gone.
1) The sites would be a) underwater, b) reincorporated into later sites, c) not yet found. I think there's an effect at play whereby we take absence of evidence (of older sites) as evidence of absence - and it is - but its also evidence that older stuff may be harder to find. We have the near-complete archaeological record for everything built yesterday, and decent for the Romans, but little for the Harappans.
Also, I read once that the world mid ice-age would be far drier, dustier and windier than ours. I'm fairly sure that would only increase the pressure for low-lying coastal cities, making them more vulnerable to sea-level increase.
2) The crops and livestock would probably go feral, or vegetable equivalent? We push things so far out of their evolutionary niche that there must be some fairly strong pressures for them to revert. That and the fact that these modifications were relatively easy to achieve suggest this is fairly possible. Same for livestock, and Younger Dryas extinction event could have taken away the livestock animals of choice (Aurochs, various Buffalo etc).
Maybe a better angle is animal hybrids/ invasive species? Then again, who knows how obvious it would be 12 millennia down the line, and if the invaders would survive the YD event.
3) Don't have much of an opinion against the lead stuff.
A more general point - I think most of the 'oh shit!' factor would be captured by a Gobekli Tepe style civ at 20k ya: something that doesn't seem very unlikely to me. There's probably a fixed rate of GT arising from hunter-gatherer when there's not a world civ at play like ours. in the 12k years after the YD, we get multiple geographically separate agricultures and written languages starting up, so it seems like you have to swallow the bitter 'ancestor civ' pill, or accept a relatively high rate of GT from HG
I want to bring up the Polynesians as an example of a culture (or group of cultures) that reached a quite advanced level, well beyond the average hunter-gatherer tribe, without creating much that would be clear to archaeologists of ten thousand years in the future.
They had complex societies, built quite sophisticated structures (buildings and ships) out of wood, lived in permanent villages, and had some forms of agriculture (but mostly sweet potatoes, yams, taro etc) supplemented with plentiful seafood. They seem to have got their standard of living quite high in most places.
But they never figured out metal, and they (almost) never built monuments out of rocks. The exception of course was Easter Island, where they went absolutely crazy for building monuments out of rocks; other Polynesian people from Hawaii to New Zealand presumably could have built rock monuments if they felt like it, but they never bothered.
Anyway, when I think about Goblecki Tepe I think about a Polynesian-style society, existing in a state that's well beyond primitive hunter-gatherism, but not yet quite a civilisation. It's easy to imagine the Mediterranean or Middle East might have been full of societies at this sort of level of development, ten thousand years ago, but the Goblecki Tepe people were like the Easter Islanders of the bunch -- some weird obsessives who decided to move big rocks around instead of carving stuff out of wood.
Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nan_Madol - I don't know if they're technically Polynesian, but definitely in the same category.
> According to Pohnpeian legend, Nan Madol was constructed by twin sorcerers Olisihpa and Olosohpa
So that's what the Blue Wizards were up to!
I love that comment!
"Except for Gobekli Tepe" risks sounding like "Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln..." Karahan Tepe is beginning to make it look like GT is just part of something much much bigger, and eventually you get to the stage you have to extrapolate back into the ice age even if your date for the finished sites comes just afterwards.
Separate point, are your three categories of civilization enough? GT/KT occupants may have been doing highly organised and very cool stuff which counts as a wholly new way of being civilized, vs being primitive but still amazingly cool. Compare naive approaches to SETI which specify the universal sweet spot where species have invented TV broadcasting, but not cable.
I just don’t think GT is that radical and that whole cool and amazing, how much it “changes out perceptions/assumptions” is super overblown because that sort of thing sounds great in a grant proposal or as a magazine cover.
IDK I always assumed some lost places like that were out there somewhere, but just that we would likely never find them or they were mostly wood. So that it exists isn’t that much new info on a theoretical level, more of a specific on instantiation level.
But maybe archeologists are just dumber and less thoughtful than expected if it really is super surprising to them.
You miss my point; I was saying that the GT guys may have been doing supercivilized stuff which we know nothing about and cannot deduce from GT itself.
If you want to be unimpressed by what we do know about GT, fair enough, but that's about your interest in the whole subject (which puzzles me in itself if you are interested enough to be reading this thread). It is astonishing for its extent and date, and I think its importance is understated because nobody knows what to make of it, because there is no existing academic specialism in thngs of its kind (we didn't know they existed), and because of its slightly offbeat location. I have been there. it's work, and of course now it's an earthquake zone.
I just think people love to overstate how revolutionary findings are because it makes for good grant proposals and articles.
If you had asked me in say 1998 when I knew all about this stuff but didn’t know about GT. And had said “actually Jericho ( or wherever) wasn’t the oldest city and actually we found a huge stone complex of some sort indicating a highly advanced pre agrarian culture much earlier and farther away”.
I would have been very interested!
If you had then told me this “older” was only a couple hundred years older, and “farther away” was “right next door”. Welll I would have been very underwhelmed about how revolutionary it was. It fits VERY smoothly into our pre existing knowledge and anyone claiming otherwise has their brain turned off or is trying to rise money.
So you are telling me the most advanced HG complex we have ever found is found exactly in the area and place HG were first domesticating crops and settling down? OMG what are the odds!?!?!?
I love archeology and GT. It is super interesting. But only because it gives us details about stuff we assumed was happening, not because it represents any great change.
GT is not a city.
Everyone has the right not to be interested. If someone surprisingly found a small pterodactyl which has survived down to modern times, i could say So? Closely related to birds, flies like a bird, same diet as lots of birds, lays eggs like a bird, boring brown colour? What's the big deal?
I know it’s not a city. And I am interested. I was very clear about that.
You are sort of talking tangentially to my main point regardless. I suspect because you don’t actually have a response, but want to keep pretending it is some mind blowing discovery because you just buy hook line and sinker anything you see in an academic article rather than thinking.
Academic statements about how “important/revolutionary” their research is are frequently highly sensationalized. That’s how you get normies interested and/or keep funders interested.
If it is not a city, how does comparing it to the well known city Jericho advance the debate? My pterodactyl analogy looks more and more in point.
I have been there. I have spent 3 days there in April 2013, with professional archaeologists. It is absolutely certain that I am 50 times, conservatively, better informed about it than you are. And (I wouldn't normally say this, but you seem to have raised the game on the frankness front) that much more intelligent than you, too. Finis.
elegant analysis
Cayonu Tepesi is also in Turkiye, not Iraq
Eh, Polynesians crossed the Pacific in like 1000 AD, right? What was their material tech level?
There's also myths/linguistic evidence that the Sumerians came from somewhere, maybe Arabia maybe India? And that they were a more successful civilization before. What's under the sands in the Arabian and Sahara deserts? Did people settle around the Nile after abandoning civilizations that are now under the Sahara?
This is difficult to think about without numbers that I don't know. How efficient is hunting/fishing/foraging in the now submerged environments? How many free hours did people have available x what population could be sustained?
Stone construction seems to be more of a lack-of-adequate-plant-materials thing, so maybe in the earliest days of forested Europe you just did everything with wood and mammoth bone or something.
We also can't really compare modern hunter gatherer environments with primeval ones. Modern hunter gatherers live in the most marginal territories. Really fertile locations have all been taken over by agriculture. How productive is an 11000BC fishery? How productive is would-be-prime farmland left fallow for mammoth and deer and whatnot to use?
I somewhat adhere to a desperation theory of farming's evolution: humans come into extremely fertile environments and their population booms, they exhaust the environment and now you have large groups of people struggling to not starve. Then you get war, slavery and desperate innovation and eventually that stabilizes into farming communities.
Maybe there's a more wobbly cycle of population boom and bust with agricultural/pastoral tech slowly developing throughout the cycles until suddenly it's fully developed Agriculture and the cycle is broken and we get cities and pyramids.
Regardless flood myths and garden of Eden myths abound. It seems feasible to think that during humanity's expansion across the Earth there were long periods of time where a new environment was colonized and life was good for centuries or more.
It is my understanding that except really constrained environments, like Polynesians, h/g societies do not really reach a Malthusian crisis. Population growth is painstakingly slow, and new family groups just move slightly over the next hill.
It's never "fully developed agriculture" , i'ts always "on the agriculture spectrum" . This is true all the way from "moving near to the trees that have lots of fruits and nuts" to "designing a from of cotton that's resistive to bugs and will grow well under conditions of low water and high CO2". And it's probably true further back, (and further forwards) I just haven't thought of the conditions. When you draw a line and say "agriculture starts here" you're making an arbitrary decision. Sometimes you need to, but it's likely to confuse things. (Is he an adult or a juvenile? Well, he turns 21 [or some other age] at midnight, and the stuff happened at 11:59, but he wasn't arrested until 12:01.)
Yes! That's a good point. I'll restate it in the negative: Hunting & Gathering contributes less and less to people's lives until you end up them 'mostly' dependent on agricultural output, possibly to the point of losing the skills needed for H&G.
Tho to be fair hunting and gathering probably remains a part of people's lives for a long time. Certainly peasants in medieval Europe hunted and foraged.
"The top 80m of the Great Pyramid would rise above the waterline, forming a little island. The part of the Pyramid above the water would still be taller than the entire Leaning Tower of Pisa. It would be pretty hard to miss!"
However, as you're previously established, underwater pyramids are natural. Nobody would agree that it's proof of anything!
Presumably upon closer inspection we could determine its non-natural origins. Tool marks, precision of the stonework, and such.
I suspect though that the Great Pyramid would not have survived to the present day if it were mostly underwater for the last 2000 years.
If the Great Pyramid were submerged so that only the top 80m stood out of otherwise uninterrupted sea, that top would be rapidly eroded by sea action -- it is after all merely a pile of boulders at an angle well above the angle of repose -- until it subsided beneath the surface. This happens to new volcanic islands all the time.
Tekeli-li! Tekekl-li! No cyclopean cities sunken to the depths of the ocean or buried beneath Antarctic sheet ice? Ah, well!
I broadly agree with this - it's not impossible we had more developed human societies further back than we currently think, but they would be at the very low level. No Atlantis, Lemuria or Mu. No fantastic lost technologies more advanced than what we have now. But cultures on the level of Australian Aboriginal clans? That seems feasible, especially if we're proposing a civilisation/civilisations that lived along coastal regions which were later flooded and thus wiped out evidence of their existence:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Indigenous_Australians
"The regions of heaviest Aboriginal population were the same temperate coastal regions that are currently the most heavily populated, the Murray River valley in particular.
...Aboriginal Australians were limited to the range of foods occurring naturally in their area, but they knew exactly when, where and how to find everything edible. …But food was not obtained without effort. In some areas both men and women had to spend from half to two-thirds of each day hunting or foraging for food. Each day, the women of the group went into successive parts of one countryside with wooden digging sticks and plaited dilly bags or wooden coolamons. Larger animals and birds, such as kangaroos and emus, were speared or disabled with a thrown club, boomerang, or stone. Many Indigenous hunting devices were used to get within striking distance of prey. The men were excellent trackers and stalkers, approaching their prey running where there was cover, or "freezing" and crawling when in the open. They were careful to stay downwind and sometimes covered themselves with mud to disguise their smell.
Fish were sometimes taken by hand by stirring up the muddy bottom of a pool until they rose to the surface, or by placing the crushed leaves of poisonous plants in the water to stupefy them. Fish spears, nets, wicker or stone traps were also used in different areas. Lines with hooks made from bone, shell, wood or spines were used along the north and east coasts. Dugong, turtle and large fish were harpooned, the harpooner launching himself bodily from the canoe to give added weight to the thrust. Both Torres Strait Island populations and mainland Aboriginal peoples were predominantly hunter & gatherers, who relied on wild foods.
…In present-day Victoria, there were two separate communities who farmed eels in complex and extensive irrigated pond systems; one on the Murray River in the state's north, the other in the south-west near Hamilton in the territory of the Djab Wurrung, which traded with other groups from as far away as the Melbourne area (see Gunditjmarad. A primary tool used in hunting is the spear, launched by a woomera or spear-thrower in some locales. Boomerangs were also used by some mainland Indigenous Australians. The non-returnable boomerang (known more correctly as a Throwing Stick), more powerful than the returning kind, could be used to injure or even kill a kangaroo.
…The typical Aboriginal diet included a wide variety of foods, including introduced pigs, kangaroo, emu, wombats, goanna, snakes, birds, and many insects such as honey ants, Bogong moths and witchetty grubs. Many varieties of plant foods such as taro, coconuts, nuts, fruits and berries were also eaten.
Permanent villages were the norm for most Torres Strait Island communities. In some areas mainland Aboriginal Australians also lived in semi-permanent villages, most usually in less arid areas where fishing could provide for a settled existence, with places like Budj Bim in particular growing to comparatively large settlements. Most Indigenous communities were semi-nomadic, moving in a regular cycle over a defined territory, following seasonal food sources and returning to the same places at the same time each year. From the examination of middens, archaeologists have shown that some localities were visited annually by Indigenous communities for thousands of years. In the more arid areas Aboriginal Australians were nomadic, ranging over wide areas in search of scarce food resources."
So a semi-nomadic, semi-settled (along the coasts where fishing provided a plentiful and reliable food source to support settled population) at a relatively low technological level (no metal-working) which was later flooded out of existence? That is not beyond the bounds of possibility.
Plus, it shows that the notion of the idyllic hunter-gatherer lifestyle where you spend a couple of hours max gathering food then can loll around with plenteous leisure is a bit of a just-so story; food gathering and hunting can take up most of your day, then you have to weave baskets, make implements, and do other work to support your lifestyle even if it's not settled agriculture. I think that's a lot closer to the truth of our ancestors than the Noble Savage versus the Puny Farmers modern version of myths.
On the crops point, a decent sized coastal civilization could survive on fishing with no access to crops.
There isn't huge civilisation that has managed to but the Jomon of Japan and the Indians of the Pacific Northwest had sedentary societies based on fish (and tree nuts). The Jomon were reasonably sophisticated.
It might also explain why their sites are hard to find as they would be coastal or in deltas.
One could go as far as asking what the end-Pleistocene people who were producing ceramics in the north China plain, Amur basin, and Japan weren't doing, that one would require them to do before calling them a proto-civilization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caral-Supe_civilization
May have lived on fish.
Hancocks view seems (to me) to be that converging cultural evolution must be explained by som previous civilisation (Atlantis). I dont think we need Atlantis to explain that convergence. If we have cataclysmic events such as the YD (agnostic to YDIH...), we would expect genetic bottle necks and thus less genetic variation. Different cultural norms and technologies would then account for more of the variation in outcome for different human groups, and it would also be necessary to accelerate innovation and cultural learning. So, cultural evolution would speed up when populations decrease.
I think there is indirect evidence for this alternative explanation, for example that the Toba eruption seem to have caused increased cultural development in South Asia. (A counter effext would probably be that smaller population tolerate less division of labour, but that might be more important after scaling of food production post domestication of crops - i dont think hunter-gatherers could increase division of labour significantly, by just having larger groups.)
Also, I think my explanation has more parsimony (?) because we only need the general mechanism of shifted levels of selection throught less genetic diversity - we dont need to postulate Atlantis. And as I said, we can still allow for the YDIH, which I personally find plausible and not at all debunked.
I suspect embyronic agriculture prior to around 10,000 BC was mostly about cultivating what we would call herbs, i.e. small scale additives to their food, for taste variety and to disguise the taste of slightly off meat, and for specialised medicine. Staple food crops, and human digestion capable of processing them in bulk, then gradually developed from this.
The other problem with supposed early civilizations at that time is robbers. The wonder is that agrarian societies were _ever_ able to take off, when they would have been sitting targets surrounded by nomadic hunter gatherer tribes all too eager to grab any of their produce! One can only assume there were many hostile takeovers, until eventually the agrarians themselves became as fierce as, and more than equal to, the tribesmen assailing them.
I think this probably is simply reasoning from the Fremen Mirage. There's no particular reason to believe the (almost definitionally) more numerous agrarians would be subordinate to the non-agrarians (especially as the reverse appears to be more generally true and land which was good for agriculture was generally good land, in order to have it you have to be able to defend it and this is generally going to predate the main tool of the successful nomadic raider, the domesticated horse).
I'd have guessed fruits and vegetables.
I don't know why people seem focused on grain as early agriculture. I just got around to reading the subreddit thread, and the apparent reason for believing Goblecki Tepe was built by non-farmers is that there was no pottery for grain storage.
Grain is an optimal crop in some sort of calories-per-acre sense but it's an absolute pain to deal with. You gotta harvest it, separate it, grind it (all without appropriate tools), store it, et cetera. All of that is probably even worse with proto-wheat instead of modern wheat.To farm grain successfully you've got to arrange your whole damn society around it.
Whereas, as any home gardener will tell you, farming fruits and vegetables is something you can do in your spare time with a patch of soil. Maintaining a patch of (whatever edible fruit/veg is native to your area) is something you can do in your spare time to provide additional sustenance, and you don't need any fancy tools or infrastructure to make them edible. Nobody grows wheat, barley or (lord help us) rice in their back yard.
Perhaps, but it's rather difficult to grow *enough* fruits and vegetables to feed a family, and if hunting means moving around to follow the game, you probably can't afford to give that up to tend an apple orchard the way you can a wheat field.
And when people do get around to farming for apples (or whatever), they pretty quickly wind up with apples that are almost as different from their crababble-esque ancestors as wheat is from grass. This seems to have happened about ten thousand years ago, which again raises the question of what the hypothetical ancient civilizations were eating.
Crabapples are actually a great example of a wild-type plant that requires little to no effort on the part of the "farmer" to provide nutritionally impactful yields - in the PNW they were frequently cultivated along with nut trees and berry bushes to allow sedentary societies without grain agriculture. You don't need to "tend" trees as carefully as grains or annual vegetable crops. The trees weren't enough to feed people alone, but together with other abundant wild resources (fish, various game animals, lots of other plants, mushrooms) they were enough to feed substantial numbers of people without doing what we think of as "farming."
Say you as a modern person knew about wheat and rice and experienced a cataclysm / ice age where you and your family migrated and lived as hunter gatherers for 500 years or 2,000 years. Would you what..save the seeds for that long? If you travelled from a wheat friendly growing area across ice to a mountainous region or desert region or swampy region and could no longer grow wheat, then it is quite possible for that food source to die out. We are not talking about a bloody empire collapsing due to war, that’s simply not a valid comparison to there being a 1 mile thick sheet of ice extending halfway down North America where nothing can be grown.
We in fact do not even need to speculate and already major food and medicinal herbs from Ancient Rome and from ancient India are well known to have gone extinct. Even now we see foods going out of use and are no longer grown for various reasons. Swine breeding skills hit an all time low in the Middle East after the rise of the Islamic world and Ottoman Empire, what if thst was the only place swine were bred in the ancient world?. Khamut, millet, teff, amaranth, and other far less popular grains have nearly fallen out of use for human consumption. Even some very popular breeds of dogs from only 500 years ago are extinct and we only have old descriptions and drawings of big work dogs used to turn stone mills which were replaced by horses, oxen, and machinery.
Looking to ancient Roman birth control plants to soma in India to the Keykeon of the ancient Eleusinian mysteries. We find a wide range of key medicinal and culturally significant plants where people were once highly motivated to cultivate them which are now extinct, gone, or unknown. Look to kombucha Scobie cultivars which are purely a human construct snd if we lost them all and couldn’t maintain them for even 5 years then they’d be gone forever and need to be reinvented, leaving zero trace on wild populations of bacteria-fungal hybrids.
Heck even look to the Torah for foods which can and cannot be eaten from only 3k to 5k years ago! We can’t even agree on the identity of such animals now or even what they looked like or if they have any modern equivalent. But we have no reason to doubt ancient Jews knew what animals they ate and didn’t eat and they weren’t making up mythical antelope or birds they ate which we can’t figure out now. So the idea host we would doubt the total loss of knowledge and cultivation of animals, fungi, and plants by ancient peoples is very silly in the face of all the evidence of key foods being lost far more recently.
The idea that plants of human internet and cultivation could not be lost to time over 10,000 or 20,000 years leaving no record or wild plants with clear DNA evidence of cultivation is not far fetched at all. It is what we would expect.
I find this argument to be very weak and armchair based with no grounding in well known biology and history. A few other points, cultivated plants and animals often do very poorly in the wild and would be expected to die off or go feral. They would quickly die off and leave minimal to no DNA impact on the general wild population, if it still exists. Take wild cows such as the auroch which is now extinct.
Also what evidence are we using here? Worse than the lead studies which have not been done, has anyone really done extensive DNA evaluation of wild plants with zero current or known historical cultivation to evaluate their DNA for any evidence of human cultivation? This has not been done, the vast majority of wild plants haven’t even been sequenced for DNA and plant DNA is rather weird vs animal DNA anyway. So not only would such evidence be logically unlikely to persist with cultivated varieties being less competitive than wild types, the attempt hasn’t even been done to collect vast DNA samples for loads of wild plants to look for unknown human cultivation impacts.
But why would anybody have had to “migrate and live as hunter gatherers for 500 or 2000 years”? The ice age didn’t work that way, it wasn’t an overnight or even single generation change that would require people to forget how to farm for a couple millennia. And we aren’t talking about “a few herbs went extinct”, it would have to be “the concept of an agrarian society completely disappeared”.
And this is already a goalpost shift (not by you personally necessarily) from “ancient Atlanteans” to “well maybe some hunter gatherers were actually semi-sedentary earlier than we thought. Which is quite possible but for precisely that reason, not all that “impressive”.
If I have wheat seeds, I'm not living my life as a hunter-gatherer for even 5 or 20 years. I'm going to walk to someplace where I can plant wheat, or die trying. I may *also* hunt and gather, but I'm going to grow wheat because I really really like knowing where my daily bread is going to come from the next few hundred days. My kids will grow up knowing how to plant wheat,
Has anyone, anywhere, ever completely lost agriculture as a result of catastrophe?
> Has anyone, anywhere, ever completely lost agriculture as a result of catastrophe
Would we know it if they did? Non-rhetorical question, I’m leaning towards “unlikely” but I’m not super confident. I have vague memories of hearing about vast irrigation complexes abandoned in jungles for (many?) centuries, discovered only in the last century or so. Could we tell if more recently-attested irrigation techniques in close-by areas are descendent or were re-invented? My (again, vague) impression is that, as best as we can tell, those techniques were lost with whoever abandoned them. Worse, could we tell after a kilometer tall glacier grew over the land and then, while melting, scoured the land under it?
"has anyone really done extensive DNA evaluation of wild plants with zero current or known historical cultivation to evaluate their DNA for any evidence of human cultivation?"
Thanks for bringing this up, it seemed an obvious oversight in the original article. It's very hard to study plant genetics outside the world of currently profitable crops, because no one wants to pay for that.
If my math intuition is right, your “ever” predictions can never be evaluated on the negative side (no shares never pay out).
If you limit with “within the next X years”, how much do your percentages go down? (X=25 seems reasonable to me).
Not just a pedantic point. I wonder sometimes what shape the curve of knowledge about our origins has into the future. Do we reach some
horizontal asymptote of sadly imperfect knowledge about ice age peoples not much beyond present understanding? Or do we learn more and more as we develop highly sensitive reconstructive techniques?
Pretty much the only thing I know about this debate is from reading this OP, and I don't have strong opinions about it. But here are some questions/thoughts I have that are maybe irrelevant, but seem to me worth discussing:
#1. Scott says 80m of the great pyramid would still be above water if sea levels rose. I'm sure he's right. But how long would that pyramid last? Would the seawater erode the pyramid within a few centuries? [ETA: to be clear, when I say the pyramids might have eroded in a few centuries, I don't mean they would have been reduced to silt, only that the foundations of the pyramid would have weakened enough for the top of the pyramid would sink below sea level and no longer be visible.]
#2. Scott mentions civilizations and localities that wouldn't be directly affected by the rise of sea levels. But I can bet they'd be affected somehow, and quite possibly for the worse. If the low-lying lands provide a lot of resources the higher-lying lands need, maybe the higher-lying lands' civilizations would decline, too.
#3. Scott wrote that "civilizations don't lose agriculture." Do we know that to be true? I mean, I grant that if there's no evidence of it ever happening, then that fact favors the "don't lose agriculture" argument. It probably favors it quite strongly. I'm just not ready to accept it happening.
Again, maybe the above concerns are already well answered in the discussions on this topic. And I'm not particularly invested in any of the answers. But I thought I'd mention them.
on #3 I think Jared Diamond claims that the aboriginal Australians who colonised Tasmania lost all sorts of core skills (not including agriculture). At first they could make fishhooks and catch fish, later generations lost this.
Good points. I also find "can't lose agriculture" to be a poorly supported position. That we know China didn't lose rice seems like weak evidence that an actually lost civilization didn't also lose its agriculture.
We're positing one or more advanced civilizations for which we can find no evidence. That we also don't find evidence of their crops seems...obvious?
There is probably a hard cap on how much agriculture you can lose? Like I can see a semi-sedentary society that lived on wild game and maybe some minor local cultivation going back to true hunter gatherer, but going from “domesticated crops and animals and intentional landscaping and irrigation” to hunter gathering (without even an oral tradition of this past lifestyle) is a much bigger ask.
The Maori arrived in New Zealand and found 500 pound flightless birds that were easy to kill. They had given up some of their Polynesian agricultural skills before the moa birds went extinct.
There was agriculture in eastern North America before maize. The crops were largely abandoned in favor of maize. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Agricultural_Complex). We have good archaeological evidence that these plants were used as crops. Civilization makes garbage. But if we didn't have the archaeology, we'd have a collection of plants notable for their weediness in cultivated fields, and maybe have inconclusive debates as to whether their genetics indicate a past history of cultivation.
On the Where are the remains question Hancock's reply is, Gunung Padang on high ground, Gulf of Cambay if you want to look underwater, buried under a mile of ice at the South Pole (but I think he has retracted that).
On lead, can't find any mention of it in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_in_pre-Columbian_America so perhaps some civilizations manage without?
This article discusses precontact lead artifacts in Peru, but it sounds like it wasn't used at a large scale.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257761726_Lead_in_Ancient_Peru_the_Curamba_Smelter_and_Lead_Sling_Bullets
I think the primary source of lead pollution in ancient metallurgy is thought to be a byproduct of the recovery of silver and perhaps copper from sulfide ores, e.g. Ag2S is often found in combination with PbS (galena, the major lead ore of antiquity) and CuFe2 (chalcopyrite, historically the most common copper ore). However, the *first* copper ore was probably malachite, which is chemically distinct from chalcopyrite, and appears to be more likely to be found as encrustations grown from Cu leached from elsewhere (including chalcopyrite). It's not clear that smelting malachite would've lead to significant lead pollution since it wouldn't occur mixed with galena. Also, copper *can* be found in the native form, although it is rare.
My impression is that the most ancient metallurgy centered around using metals only for adornment, since silver and copper are soft metals (and it would've been very expensive to extract either). Until bronze -- a relatively hard metal, readily worked -- comes along you probably do better and certainly much cheaper using stone, horn, and wood for your tools.
Wouldn't lead have been useful in itself to make heavy pellets to be thrown from slings?
I would think rocks would be a lot cheaper! Lead is useful in the sense that it can be readily shaped just by hammering, and it doesn't easily oxidize away, so you can use it for making various specialized vessels and tubes, stuff you want to be more durable than pottery. I think that was its primary use in the ancient world. It's too soft to use for tools. It's also not pretty, like both silver and copper, and it's sort of obnoxiously dense. It's way less useful than bronze, once you get that far.
It's easier to make e.g. pipes from lead than from bronze. Being extra soft/malleable, and melting over an ordinary flame, are sometimes compelling advantages.
I would say this mostly comes down to how you classify a civilization. But if we by civilization mean any form of human cooperation involving more than the tribal amount of people (100-150 individuals) then civilization most probably involves agriculture (although some river-dwelling cultures can sustain surprisingly large populations only from fishing). Most people would probably also make a civilizational requirement of some sort of institutions meaning some sort of organized religion and/or communal building works.
This is a very low bar to pass. And it is also more or less impossible to prove that this has never happened. You point to paleogenomics as proof that agriculture is no older than 10-12 ka old. But this assumes that ice age civilizations cultivated the same crops as later civilizations, which is far from certain, especially since the climatological conditions were vastly different.
Archeological remains are an equally uncertain way to determine if ice age civilizations have existed. The sea-level rise is a weak defense. Not only because vast areas have not been flooded but also because archeologists are quite adept at finding things under water. Especially in the Mediterranean most coastal areas are thoroughly looked over in the hunt for shipwrecks. Any major building works there would surely have been found as well. But major building works are not an absolute prerequisite for a civilization. Even more, building works do not have to be in perpetual stone. They could just as well have been made of perishable wood.
Even if absolute proof against ice age civilizations can not be found I still find them highly improbable. Agriculture was invented by humans in numerous places on this planet. The very earliest agriculture took place around 12,000 years ago in the Levant. But agriculture was independently invented in China at least 10,000 years ago, in America 9,000 years ago and even in Papua 8,000 years ago.
Considering that humans have collected and eaten grains for several hundred thousand years it is remarkable that farming was invented in so many places in the span of just a few thousand years. This is a very strong indication that it was something unique to this period of time, most likely the end of the ice age, that made agriculture worthwhile. This, in turn, is a very strong indication that agriculture was not developed before its assumed origin around 12,000 years ago.
"But major building works are not an absolute prerequisite for a civilization."
True, but people are hoping to find some cool ruins.
If it were (somehow) proven that people lived in permanent villages of thatch huts 20,000 years ago and fed themselves by, say, fishing, well, that would be moderately interesting, I guess. But it wouldn't be as galvanizing as finding a 20,000 year old stone building or megalith site or whatever. Scott's Level I is Stonehenge, precisely because a pre-Ice Age Stonehenge would be awesome and that's about what he hoped would be found when he got interested in the topic years ago.
My impression from all the things I have read (and perhaps things I have misread) is: It’s not that civilization requires agriculture but that intensive agriculture requires civilization, because you just can’t make it work without some hierarchy and, I guess, enforcement. Also, at least the middle eastern societies coming off of the ice age found themselves in a climate-change trap where hunter-gatherer didn’t fly in that particular locale any more but agriculture did, and as climate continued to change their only choice was to double-down. I think maybe where I read this more carefully explained was in David Christian’s “Maps of Time”.
I don’t remember reading anything specific about interglacial climate change in, say, China, but it seems plausible that the same trappy conditions might have pertained in more than one place. The end of the ice age must have been pretty unsettling.
I believe one strain of the Atlantis theory is that somewhere like the Mediterranean or Black Sea was a valley enclosed by higher land and remained below sea level for some time, but at some point the oceans rose enough to "breach the levees" and flood these areas. Not literally overnight, but quickly enough that civilization collapsed rather than migrated in an orderly fashion. So it would not be as simple as "if you were X+i meters above water, and the sea level rises X meters, you're still above water."
Marshlands and shallow water can be very productive for gathering, though this runs kind of counter to the thinking in the previous paragraph.
I'm curious: if the Romans hadn't had such thorough written records, what would we know about Carthage? If Western civilization hadn't traced itself back to the Iliad, when would we have found Troy? I guess you could argue that civilizations develop myths and literature before the capability to "delenda est", but probably some peoples exterminated their neighbors and the memory of that didn't survive because they themselves were conquered later.
Isn't land below sea level always desert?
Troy was never actually lost. http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2015/11/on-losing-of-troy.html
Yeah, that one isn't a great example. Just trying to game out if a civilization is significant enough to get mythic status, but it's not something Westerners grow up reading about, how likely is it that the ancient site will get excavated and we'll understand how things worked there. I guess we've found this Gobekli Tepe place, but it took a long time to stumble upon and it's not clear how much easier it would be to find (and excavate) a site with another city built on top of it.
How about Argument 4: where are the trade goods?
From Bronze Age civilizations, we have evidence of wide-ranging trade networks, where tin, glass, copper, amber, sea shells, and the like was transported between Western Europe and the Middle East, and women lived and were buried a thousand kilometers from where they were born. Where are the stone-age sites (however small) that have goods that are clearly from thousands of kilometers away?
What would you expect to find? We know obsidian and amber were traded for long distances. But not, IIUC, in large quantities.
It doesn't take large quantities. A stone-age burial site of a high-ranking person with some jewelry from thousands of kilometers away, crafted using techniques that are more advanced than previously known from that age, would go a long way to making the theories more plausible.
IIRC, that very kind of thing has been found more than once. It's just that the techniques didn't appear that unreasonably advanced. Just too advanced for the locals to have done. But some of the evidence for obsidian that has been traded over long distances came from that kind of site. (OK, it was weapons rather than jewlery, but I think the idea's the same.)
A problem here is that lots of the stuff decayed. So you've got pieces of this and that, but the stuff that held them into context has been eaten by mold and bugs. So the wood, glue, cloth, etc. is gone. This makes it really difficult to make a firm claim that "the techniques used here were too advanced". The oldest really convincing thing like that (of which I'm aware) is a pair of trousers designed to allow horseback riding. But that was fairly late. People were still impressed by the wide-ranging trade networks that were implied by the construction. For the older stuff you've mainly got shaped stones, and occasional shell, and if you're REALLY lucky a bit of metal (but metal tends to decay away too). So we've got pieces of shell stained with dye that people guess was part of a piece of jewelry dating back far into the old stone age. (I'd need to locate the link again before I'd claim more, but Neanderthal times wouldn't surprise me.) We've got pieces of shaped feathers, and guesses about what they were used for. Some of them were long distances from their most likely origin, but claims about how they got from there to here are speculation.
Personally, I believe that trade networks have existed as long as people have been people. But often it's been person-to-person trading rather than merchants. Proving that merchants existed is a bit difficult, and quite possibly they didn't. Things just traded hand-to-hand repeatedly, tending to move from where they were less valuable towards where they were more valuable. (A shaped piece of obsidian is valuable, but I can pick up another chunk and shape it again. So its' worth trading it for that fancy hat with pretty feathers and and a good coat...made from an animal that doesn't live around here.) I suspect that tribal get-togethers were also swap-meets. And you'd know what you could dicker with the folks living over in the next valley for. So you'd have long distance trade by diffusion. Boats were probably the first enablers of direct long-distance trades, and that would be basically up and down the river. But trade by diffusion would be everywhere and everywhen.
Bolstering argument 1, we *have* sunken ice age sites, particularly in Doggerland. They don't show an advanced civilization.
I suppose the uncharitable position is that, at least as long as I can remember, say the 1970s, there’s been a consistent flow of modern sophisticated talking heads attempting to downplay the accomplishments of ancient humans, perhaps not realizing that their alternative explanations are even more far-fetched than, “They figured it out, it’s just engineering.”
I regard ancient tales of Atlantis every bit as credible as “Goliath was 3m tall.” Technically possible but probably a hyperbolic way of saying, “Taller than anyone we’ve ever seen.” See also “twice ten thousand time ten thousand” i.e. “An unimaginably big army.” I suspect at best a bunch of travelers’ tales that accumulated fancy with the retelling.
Unh...the ancient tales of Atlantis that I know of are from Solon, and aren't really THAT unbelievable. (Yeah, he probably exaggerated.) But which ones are you thinking of? (IIRC, he placed it in North Africa, near the straits of Gibraltar.)
Going to Solon, no, I don’t think the city itself is that far-fetched as he describes it.
I’m certain I’m conflating it with other stories due to my built-in pattern matching engine.
Are they? As far as I know (and I'm nowhere even close to an expert on the matter) Plato only *attributed* the tales to Solon, but they're not anywhere is his surviving work.
A valid point, but a bit nitpicky. Yes, what we have are Plato's reports of tales of Atlantis that he attributed to Solon. And are quite possibly original fiction. Still, those are the oldest tales of Atlantis of which I'm aware, and they aren't that unreasonable.
I plead guilty to nitpickery, but I don't know, I believe that attribution to Solon is generally considered just a fictional framing device by Plato. Citing Solon as the actual source on Atlantis assumes more accuracy in Plato's account than might be warranted.
> So if there were Ice Age civilizations, what did they eat? It couldn’t have been any of our known crops, which post-date them. Could it have been their own crops, which were later lost?
They farmed silphium! And that’s why they went extinct! 😂
The perfect explanation, I salute your scholarship, sir! 😁
LOL! I meant to name silphium in a reply to an interesting post further up the thread. That post mentioned a plant used by the Romans as an abortificant, presumably referring to silphium. But they also apparently used it in cooking, which doesn't sound like an ideal way to ensure prolific offspring!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium
It is also sad that all twenty or so species of Frankincense trees are apparently close to extinction, due to overgrazing by goats and use for firewood. But the good news is that someone in Arizona has managed to cultivate all of them. So more strength to their elbow, and let's hope they flourish in the US even if they dissapear from Africa.
"The empire divided longs to unite, the empire united longs to divide, but the Chinese never fragmented so hard that they forget how to cultivate rice and rice went extinct."
May be a naive question, but if they did lose a crop that went extinct, how would we know? Is it just outside view that like, we don't know any crops with a gap where they were forgotten and rediscovered (or forgotten in their place of origin after having spread somewhere else)? Or just "we haven't domesticated any crops that seem like they should have been domsticatable by old civs, but weren't, so there probably weren't any "forgotten" crops."?
(Further outside view would suggest given that last line, the base rate of crop forgetfulness can't be very high, so it would be a low chance that it just so happens that *every* crop from Ice Age civs was forgotten, so even if this claim doesn't check out, the line of reasoning should, I think.)
For the sake of argument, what if the pre ice age crops were actually, maize, wheat, rice, etc all along! The newly "domesticated" staples would have simply been feral strains brought back into the fold.
Re: water level rise- listing what would remain from ancient civilizations after a 120 meter rise in sea level and then implying that we would find something isn't a good argument. Schoch's claim is that we do have something- the Sphinx! I don't particularly agree with Hancock's theories but he regularly makes the point that a lot of dating for structures relies on narrowing the band of time down to when we assume they were built based on how we think civilization progressed. Its rare to find a site like Gobekli Tepi which was used, then buried and so doesn't have millenia of subsequent use cluttering up the age range of its construction.
Also I doubt that the top of the great pyramid would be visible thousands of years after a massive flood, its limestone blocks would be worn by the waves and the top would collapse.
I think it was Rogan that had Shermer and Hancock on at the same time to debate this. It was so frustrating to listen to. They got to a point where writing in the Americas came up. I don’t even know if it’s true that there were no writing systems comparable to old world writing systems in the Americas (Olmec hieroglyphs seems to suggest it isn’t true) but they both seemed to think it was true, iirc.
Hancock proceeded to propose that a lack of writing suggested they were *more* advanced because they had to remember stuff! And Shermer let him get away with it by arguing whether that was true instead of just refusing to accept the attempt to redefine what “advanced” even means. Just so much skullduggery and semantics.
There’s a reason writing systems arose around early Bronze Age population centers. Once the population grows to more than what we evolved to be around (40-50 ppl in a tribe iirc but definitely not more than 200) it’s hard to keep track of stuff! Who owns what? How do you prove it? Etc.
Hancock (presumably): “why are property rights a sign of civilization, some could say collective ownership is *more* advanced …”
Just stop. Stop it.
First off: Thank you. I really appreciate it when you take frequently dismissed theories seriously enough to engage with and challenge them in plain language.
However, you say it’s not strawmanning to argue against an ice-age civilization capable of building Buckingham Palace. But I don’t think that’s what someone like Graham Hancock is arguing for?
He certainly suggests that there had to be someone around with far more impressive capabilities than we typically give people of the time credit for.
But unless you think capabilities can only arise along one narrow, technological “track”, that does not imply a Buckingham-level civilization.
Rather, we can imagine that the capabilities of a potential advanced, ice-age civilization might look to an 18th century British architect, much like the capabilities of a typical student at Hogwarts might look to us: Surprising and impressive, weirdly old-fashioned, and still... Most of the problems solved with magic at Hogwarts could easily be solved with science and technology instead of owls and levitating candles.
(It’s worth remembering that to students at Hogwarts, ‘magic’ or ‘sorcery’ isn’t particularly mysterious. It’s as predictable and teachable as our science and technology. When something goes wrong it’s due to boring reasons like a lack of talent, skill, training, focus, etc. and/or circumstances beyond the practitioner’s control. The Hogwarts student, then, has access to two separate “classes” of capabilities – sorcery and muggle technology – that hardly overlap or build on each other at all, but seem to be equally reliable when it comes to solving problems in the real world.)
Now, add to that:
Technological development builds on itself and stretches toward new capabilities to match our needs and wants. Once we invent the wheel and axle, we no longer prioritize inventing new ways to transport stuff using less energy – that problem has been solved. Instead we improve on the wheel, and use the wheel to stretch toward new capabilities.
However, imagine a civilization that didn’t invent wheels and axles for some reason, but instead invented the hot air balloon and used that to solve most of their transportation needs for centuries, and then built on that to solve other problems, and reach ever new capabilities.
If we discovered that civilization millennia after they invented the hot air balloon instead of the wheel, it would probably feel even stranger than arriving at Hogwarts. Everything would be different: food production, architecture, the economy, residential patterns, wants and needs, problems and solutions.
What I hear when Graham Hancock describes an “advanced civilization” living 12.000 years ago, is not a description of a civilization on the brink of our kind of Industrial Revolution. Rather, I picture a people that would have seemed like a weird Hogwarts to someone from pre-industrial Britain: Surprising and impressive, weirdly old-fashioned, and still...
To their hunter-gatherer contemporaries, the hypothetical ice-age civilization could have had a staggering understanding of geometry, astronomy, navigation, mathematics, engineering (all stuff that a sea-faring civilization would do well to learn), maybe politics, economy, job specialization ... And yet, for all kinds of reasons, they might not have engaged in much mining, or building their own megalithic structures, or agriculture on a large scale...
(Put another way, the hypothetical ice age civilization’s way of thinking about something like geometry and engineering – unrecognizable to us – might provide *some* 1700s capabilities, without necessarily being accompanied by all the other capabilities and motivations required to build a structure like Buckingham Palace.)
The motivations and capabilities to build megalithic structures and scale up agriculture could instead have emerged when mostly fish-eating survivors from such an ice-age civilization brought their capabilities to grain- and meat-eating tribes with other wants and needs, and became their wizards and demigods.
I’m not sure I believe it, but it seems like a more generous way to understand the argument than to evoke the picture of Enlightenment-era London, and it is a seductive way to explain what seems like an architectural and developmental missing link.
Also: I would find it surprising if there weren’t peoples living along the coast, living off the sea in some way, prior to a younger dryas impact, or if these peoples were not more advanced than contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes. That would go against the pattern, and would require some explanation. So my doubt isn’t so much about whether younger dryas coastal dwellers were more technologically advanced than more nomadic tribes inland, but about how large a technological lead they had.
"If we discovered that civilization millennia after they invented the hot air balloon instead of the wheel, it would probably feel even stranger than arriving at Hogwarts. Everything would be different: food production, architecture, the economy, residential patterns, wants and needs, problems and solutions."
The thing is, we do know about advanced civilisations that did not invent the wheel, and they didn't invent hot air balloons or novel transportation methods:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pre-Columbian_cultures
They were advanced, they were recognised as such by the incoming Europeans, but they were not "and they invented different high-tech". And that's the level that the proponents of "lost civilisations" do sell - that the pre-Ice Age or further back civilisations *were* at a high level. Look at our pal Graham Hancock - he might have toned down his propositions today, but he did do the whole "the lost ancients had flying vehicles and nuclear weapons" bit in earlier books:
https://grahamhancock.com/fingerprints/
"And what of the Enola Gay which carried the Hiroshima bomb? How might our descendants remember that strange aircraft and the squadrons of others like it that swarmed through the skies of planet earth during the twentieth century of the Christian era? Isn’t it possible, probable even, that they might preserve traditions of ‘celestial cars’ and ‘heavenly chariots’ and ‘spacious flying machines’, and even of ‘aerial cities’. If they did, would they perhaps speak of such wonders in mythical terms a little like these:
‘Oh you, Uparicara Vasu, the spacious aerial flying machine will come to you – and you alone, of all the mortals, seated on that vehicle will look like a deity.’
‘Visvakarma, the architect among the Gods, built aerial vehicles for the Gods.’
‘Oh you descendant of the Kurus, that wicked fellow came on that all-traversing automatic flying vehicle known as Saubhapura and pierced me with weapons.’
‘He entered into the favourite divine palace of Indra and saw thousands of flying vehicles intended for the Gods lying at rest.’
‘The Gods came in their respective flying vehicles to witness the battle between Kripacarya and Arjuna. Even Indra, the Lord of Heaven, came with a special type of flying vehicle which could accommodate 33 divine beings.’
All these quotations have been taken from the Bhagavata Puranu and from the Mahabaratha, two drops in the ocean of the ancient wisdom literature of the Indian subcontinent. And such images are replicated in many other archaic traditions. To give one example (as we saw in Chapter Forty-two), the Pyramid Texts are replete with anachronistic images of flight:
The King is a flame, moving before the wind to the end of the sky and to the end of the earth … the King travels the air and traverses the earth … there is brought to him a way of ascent to the sky …
Is it possible that the constant references in archaic literatures to something like aviation could be valid historical testimony concerning the achievements of a forgotten and remote technological age?"
And Hancock *does* propose that the lost civilisation left markers of its existence behind, so that we would know about them and be warned of future cosmic disasters. He believes there is evidence for his theories; he doesn't say "well and of course there wouldn't be anything left behind because of the disaster". And that this advanced civilisation left warnings of disasters to come (unhappily for him, when he veers off into prophecy mode, he falls foul of the same problems as al foretellers of the End Days - they never come on the date foretold):
"I am also impressed by the enormous lengths they went to to provide us with convincing proof that theirs was a serious and scientifically advanced civilization. And I am even more impressed by the sense of urgency – of a vitally important mission – that seems to have enlightened all their works and deeds.
I go on intuition again, not on evidence.
It’s my guess that their underlying objective could have been to transmit a warning to the future, and that this warning could be to do with a global cataclysm, perhaps even a recurrence of the same cataclysm that so clearly devastated mankind at the end of the last Ice Age when ‘Noah saw that the earth had tilted, and that its destruction was near, and cried out in a bitter voice: “Tell me what is being done on the earth that the earth is so afflicted and shaken … ” ‘ These words are from the Hebrew Book of Enoch, but similar afflictions and shakings have been foretold in al1 the Central American traditions that speak of the demise of the present epoch of the world – an epoch, as the reader will recall, in which ‘the elders say [that] there will be a movement of the earth and from this we shall all perish.’
The reader will also not have forgotten the date calculated by the Ancient Maya calendar for the end of the world:
The day will be 4 Ahau 3 Kankin [corresponding to 23 December AD 2012], and it will be ruled by the Sun God, the ninth Lord of the Night. The moon will be eight days old, and it will be the third lunation in a series of six …
In the Mayan scheme of things we are already living in the last days of the earth."
Okay. I did not know Hancock had made so outrageous suggestions. My bad.
As for the wheels and hot-air balloons: I did not mean to suggest that anyone who didn’t invent the wheel would invent the hot-air balloon instead. The point was rather that there may be more than one technology to achieve a capability, and while capabilities can seem to be a package deal, different technological solutions to a problem can lead to very different packages. (You can have a sophisticated architecture package that doesn’t include ability to build Buckingham palace.)
Hmmmm...I think there have been enough separate cradles of (known, historical) civilization that have all converged on similar enough lines that it would be surprising if there were totally different routes that civilization could go down. One exception might be the Polynesians, who did very good oceanic navigation without the rest of the tech stack. But they didn't have much else beyond their tech level.
Hancock seems quite interested in ideas that pre-ice-agers built various megalithic monuments, including Tiwanaku, the Sphinx, the supposed ruins in the Gulf of Cambay, etc. So I don't think he's envisioning a civilization without urban centers. I think it's hard to view him as arguing for anything else than an Egypt-level civilization with super-Polynesian seafaring ability, and I'm not sure whether Polynesian seafaring alone gets you to the New World and Antarctica.
I’m not sure technology would have converged so nicely without communication. I can imagine China and the Mediterranean diverging far more without something like the Silk Road to sync them up. And an ice age civilization would be separated from others not by a continent, but by time, a cataclysm, and a dramatic loss of the people who had the knowledge.
I guess something like “Super-Polynesian” captures what I probably wanted to interpret Hancock as saying (and wouldn’t it be ironic if our modern civilizations basically started out as cargo cults, emulating the original Super-Polynesians?) but, yes, I realize now that I have been *far* too generous in my interpretation of Hancock.
This is an interesting argument. But how do we feel about the possibility of *dinosaur* civilizations?
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/are-we-earths-only-civilization/557180/
We feel great inside the hollow earth, only venturing out in our flying saucers. Leave the surface of the crust to the hairy mammals.
Silurian Hypothesis FTW! I have gathered a few relevant links here: https://o-craven-canto.tumblr.com/post/677631865382895616/
Interesting suggestions include artificial climate change being responsible for a spike in Earth's temperature about 56 million years ago (and a bunch of similar events spaced throughout Earth's history), an alleged intelligent arrangement of ichthyosaur bones in a Triassic site, and a Precambrian. cycle of complex life resulting from an earlier development of multicellularity (the Francevillian Biota).
It all ranges between wild speculation and outright fiction, obviously, but it makes for interesting stories.
There's also a very nice thread on that subject over at the Alternate History forum (https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/imagining-silurian-hypothesis-civilizations.537133) but unfortunately it's only visible for logged in users.
My limited reading suggests that the most advanced hunter-gatherer cultures relied heavily on fishing. Especially if obtaining a fish surplus is easier from the ocean than from rivers or lakes, we’d expect these civilizations to be more heavily concentrated in coastal areas than agrarian ones. It makes it more likely they all could have flooded.
The fact that the continents were biologically separate until the last few centuries introduced "invasive species" everywhere is clear proof that there were no ancient civilizations that routinely travelled between continents before that.
Argument 1 states that most of Athens, except the Acropolis, would have been destroyed. So it shows that we would have one restruture to know of the existence of ancient Greeks and nothing else.
Counter-arguments:
1) We have found megalithic structures underneath the ocean, they are hard to explore and to date, we mostly have no idea who built them. (one example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantelleria_Vecchia_Bank_Megalith)
2) Any sites that would have "barely survived" by sea-level rise only (like the tip of a pyramid example), could have been destroyed in a different fashion. Assume cataclysm, it could have been a massive wave that destroys even the acropolis (massive wave could have happened by YD rapid sea-level rise). Assume slow and steady sea-level rise, simple soil deterioration would cause the and collapse of any shallow foundation structures. As far as we know, none of ancient sites are underpinned on bedrock.
3) Any site that barely survives can easily be erased from the map. VIolence plus 10,000 years of decay would leave nothing but ruble. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/150901-isis-destruction-looting-ancient-sites-iraq-syria-archaeology
Argument 2
3) If everything but the tip of building gets destroyed, you are suggesting everything but a small part of the most majestic building mankind has made would have survived. This argument makes a strong case against your point, that it is in fact perfectly normal that in cataclysm chances of survival of regular buildings are null. As far as crops and organic material, decay under the ocean would have taken care of it. Very hard to determine what crops they used in ancient Sundaland, doggerland or Caribbean if it is all underwater.
4) Agriculture could have fled with the survivors from the now underwater areas to the higher elevation regions in Mesopotamia where they start. Not a coincidence that the site of the oldest megalithic structure we know of is very close to the first known agricultural hub.
In short, we need to look under the ocean in coastal regions. Another interesting area is western Sahara, where we know sand has replaced what was a tropical area. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-really-turned-sahara-desert-green-oasis-wasteland-180962668/
Lead argument is interesting and first time I see it. The most interesting argument is the lack of ironwork from any site older than 3000BC. We have no record of steel or harder metals which would show an Great Britain level of civilization.
While some may argue the Pyramids are older than they are (as Schoch does with the Sphinx) let's just assume their current dating, 5000 years BP. It is in a plateau of that lead use graph. a site like this assuming methods of construction and civilization would have lead to increase in use of lead, but it does not.
The fact that Giza was built in absence of these metals (lead or iron) is of itself fascinating. We cannot rule out that a Great Britain level civilization could have looked different if they are using different materials and methods to create their build-environment. It is hard to find preserved organic matter, even harder underneath the ocean.
I think you have to start with basic skepticism in that we have zero records of advanced human societies dating before the onset of the Holocene. That's an incredible evidentiary bar to be overcome by anyone arguing the opposite. But the Pleistocene epoch lasted for 2.5 million years, only ending 11,700 years ago, and humans and proto-humans were around for all of it. We don't know a lot in relative terms about human life in the Pleistocene, but we do know that the environment in which those humans lived was very different from our own. It was very cold, icy, windy and filled with giant animals quite capable of killing a human being in seconds. Not an environment likely to be conducive to advanced human civilizations.
But however much we know about the Pleistocene from geology and genetics, the archeological record from it is almost nil, nor do we have even the roughest of sketches from other ways of knowing. Most of our myths and religions, even if you were take them literally, don't extend back in time into the Pleistocene. The line of cultures in all parts of the world stops well short of there. Any way you cut it, a 2.5 million year long epoch across all corners of the Earth is a lot of time and space for which we have very little information with respect to how we were existing within it.
And it could be a mistake to think that because much of the Holocene archeological record would survive a 400 foot rise in sea levels, therefore were there to have been advanced human societies in the Pleistocene, those records would've survived as well. In relative terms, the geology and climate of the Holocene has been warm and stable (it's probably not a coincidence that it has given rise to such human flourishing). Do we really understand the cataclysms that would be associated with the transition from a 2.5 million year long geological age into the next? Do we really understand the dissipating effects of tens or even hundreds of thousands of years of Ice Age pressures on archeological artifacts as compared to the impact of thousands of years in a warm and stable climate?
You'd expect to find evidence in really deep caves, if anywhere. What do we find in really deep caves? 40,000 year old art.
Yeah, and if our civilization were to be wiped out, and someone searched our deep caves 40,000 years from now, not sure they'd find anything all that different!
They would find people buried with watches.
They'd find nuclear waste, no?
"Graham Hancock suggests “ancient sea kings” drew the Piri Reis map which seems to depict Antarctica; anyone who can explore Antarctica must be at least close to 1700s-British level."
I wouldn't lean too heavily on Hancock; his 1995 book "Fingerprints of the Gods" went on a long ramble from the Piri Reis map to the then-popular Mayan Calendar end of the world foretold, where SOMETHING was going to happen in 2012:
"The reader will also not have forgotten the date calculated by the Ancient Maya calendar for the end of the world:
The day will be 4 Ahau 3 Kankin [corresponding to 23 December AD 2012], and it will be ruled by the Sun God, the ninth Lord of the Night. The moon will be eight days old, and it will be the third lunation in a series of six …
In the Mayan scheme of things we are already living in the last days of the earth.
In the Christian scheme of things too, the last days are understood to be upan us. According to the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Peansylvania: ‘This world will perish just as surely as did the world before the Flood … Many things were foretold to occur during the last days, and all of these are being fulfilled. This means that the end of the world is near … ‘
Similarly the Christian psychic Edgar Cayce prophesied in 1934 that around the year 2000: ‘There will be a shifting of the poles. There will be upheavals in the Arctic and the Antarctic that will make for the eruption of volcanos in the Torrid areas … The upper portion of Europe will be changed in the twinkling of an eye. The earth will be broken up in the western portion of America. The greater portion of Japan must go into the sea.’
Curiously the epoch of the year 2000, which figures in these Christian prophecies, also coincides with the Last Time (or highest point) in the great upwards cycle of the belt stars of the Orion constellation, just as the epoch of the eleventh millennium BC coincided with the First Time (or lowest point) of that cycle.
And curiously, also, as we saw in Chapter Twenty-eight:
A conjunction of five planets that can be expected to have profound gravitational effects will take place on 5 May in the year 2000, when Neptune, Uranus, Venus, Mercury and Mars will align with the Earth on the other side of the sun, setting up a sort of cosmic tug-of-war …
Could the recondite influences of gravity, when combined with our planet’s precessional wobble, the torsional effects of its axial rotation, and the rapidly growing mass and weight of the Antarctic ice-cap, be enough to spark off a full-scale crustal displacement?"
I've enjoyed previous books of his, especially about the Sphinx, but it's best to take him as writing entertainment (no matter how seriously he may or may not take it). He's had to trim his sails over the decades as new pop culture theories have come into and fallen out of fashion (e.g. the Mayan Calendar bit) and as archaeological discoveries unfold new material, so whatever he says today may or may not be modified from what he said in the past, and what he will say in the future.
If the lost civilisations crowd stuck to the boring but possible "human civilisation extends back further than the official record", they'd have better success. But that's not half as interesting as "amazing lost high tech societies that have left traces all over the world and possibly secret mystic cults handing down their hidden knowledge not to be openly revealed until we achieve a level of progress comparable to theirs!". The more colourful story will always do better.
I don't know for sure, but it seems to me like islands surrounded by ocean are going to be more vulnerable to erosion than hills are, and that a region that is under water on average is going to tend to flatten out over time.
In other words, even if an Acropolis-like monument were high enough up that it would be above water if you instantly flooded the existing terrain, the land around it would still wash away pretty quickly. If there's hard enough bedrock underneath the dirt, you might still have an island, but it probably wouldn't be shaped much like the original hill, and the ground probably wouldn't stay stable enough to continue supporting the monument for very long.
You know, your predictions technically weren't limited to Earth - would you give the same odds for ever finding alien precursor structures more advanced than Buckingham Palace :p
They were technically limited to Earth! I wrote "All of the following predictions are about structures on Earth built by homo sapiens without time travel"
So, on the broader question, I agree, there most likely weren't even Stonehenge-level civilizations around 11,000 years ago. There just seems to be a general dearth of positive evidence for that across numerous criteria.
But, I wouldn't assign much weight to specific criteria like lack of evidence for lead mining. Ancient civilizations may have mostly made use of lead, but that doesn't mean that you can't have something similar the the level of cultural sophistication of Pharaonic Egypt without it. Technology doesn't progress according to a precise ordering which is consistent across civilizations. Some innovations, like the wheel and axle for transport, seem quite basic, but were actually quite complicated to come up with, and were gradually spread from a point of origin rather than being developed independently in numerous civilizations once they reached an adequate level of sophistication. There have been large and powerful empires which got by without the wheel, or systems of writing capable of expressing most of their spoken language. So for many specific criteria like use of lead, we don't necessarily have to defy the data that suggests their absence to posit that powerful civilizations might have gotten by without those things.
But as a broad picture, any large civilization which did manage to get by without those things would have to have left surprisingly little trace of its existence.
The thing missing here is what glaciers can _erase_; glaciers are incredible at eroding mountains, and leave permanent grooves in solid bedrock. Any stonehenge type structure in Minnesota or Ontario would have been completely destroyed by the ice sheet, as would any evidence of crops... but that only works for non-equatorial latitudes.
All of this is an indirect argument that a greater EA cause area should be writing down extremely important knowledge on long-lasting storage (e.g., stone etchings in a geologically stable desert area). Even weak evidence of past civilizations that had scale but Didn't Make It To Technology should motivate us to preserve knowledge!
Write it in sand, on the moon.
Actually there's a point there: the Silurians never left anything in LEO, unless NASA is just keeping quiet about it.
I've been thinking about this, and I think it actually should be done.
Fun read! Up for a Long Bet Scott?
https://longnow.org/ideas/category/long-bets/
Yes - I've responded to you on Facebook, happy to hash out terms there or by email.
The agricultural argument is definitely the strongest of the three.
The argument from lack of identified sites is not terribly strong. If there are any lost cities away from the former coast, they could just be lost. 13000 years is a long time for a city to be razed, eroded, quarried for materials, or buried. There’s certainly a lot more 4000-year-old cities which have not been found or which have been destroyed entirely. Archaeologists knew about the Gobekle Tepe site for 30 years but assumed it was a neolithic graveyard of minor importance before it was eventually excavated in full. Shimao was only excavated in 2011. In this context the absence of direct evidence for 13000-year-old cities is no more than mildly suggestive.
The lead argument would need someone to actually check the prehistoric lead levels, as you mention. (If there are future ACX grants then this could be a great project to fund.) It seems likely but not certain that this would find no evidence of emissions—in which case it would suggest there was no very old civilization *with relatively advanced metallurgy*, not that there was no very old civilization at all. The pre-Columbian civilizations show that it’s possible to have a very advanced civilization with extensive empires, monumental architecture, etc using basically neolithic tech which would not show up in the lead measurements.
I agree with all of this - remember, I'm trying to address some combination of reasonable people like you and maximalists like Graham Hancock - I agree only the agricultural argument really speaks to your point.
If there’d been an agricultural society in the east during the Green Sahara period wouldn’t their agriculture be lost as a result of such substantial environmental change?
Major Climatic disruption that end civilisations seem like they would be enough for agriculture to be lost
Can we get an introduction, or at least some context?
> You can separate these kinds of claims into three categories:
What kind of claims? Do I have to read all three links above in order to read this post? Just the subreddit? How much do I read on the subreddit?
On civilisation: The Danish public intellectual Georg Brandes, 1846-1927 (responsible for making Friedrich Nietzsche and Henrik Ibsen known to a larger European public & famous himself in his day), was once asked by a journalist what he himself believed in. Brandes tried as best he could to ignore the question, but the journalist kept coming back to it, and in the end Brandes gave in and said: "I believe in the stupidity of man and the possibility of cultural decline."
Re: how does lead get into human bones
Lead is chemically pretty similar to calcium and ends up in much the same places in the body. One of the easiest ways to ingest lead is to have it react with vinegar, forming lead tetraacetate which is soluble in water.
Interestingly, lead tetraacetate is also slightly sweet-tasting, and it is suggested that the Romans used it deliberately in cooking. See Wikipedia page on "defrutum":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grape_syrup#Greco-Roman
"In ancient Rome, grape syrup was often boiled in lead pots, which sweetened the syrup through the leaching of the sweet-tasting chemical compound lead acetate into the syrup. [...] A 2009 History Channel documentary produced a batch of historically accurate defrutum in lead-lined vessels and tested the liquid, finding a lead level of 29,000 parts per billion (ppb), which is 2,900 times higher than contemporary American drinking water limit of 10 ppb."
Did anyone try it to report how it tasted?
I haven't seen the documentary, unfortunately. I do wonder what the taste threshold is for lead acetate; if its supposed to be "slightly" sweet then maybe its undetectable at 29 mg/L against all that grape sugar. When diluted into the wine, the final concentration would be even lower.
I did just find a good paper, though:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1139187/pdf/medhist00086-0053.pdf
They report batches up to 1g/L of lead, which were said to be "tasty".
"By simmering grape-juice in a lead-lined pot until it was reduced to one-third of its
original volume, we obtained a dark brown and tasty syrup with the consistency of
thin honey and a fragrance resembling that of molasses."
One of the first people to figure out that adding lead to wine as a preservative was a bad idea was named Gockel. In Table 1 of that paper above, his recipe gives wine at a final lead level of 20-70 mg/L. His tasting notes are reported as follows:
" Being a practical man, Gockel tested this recipe on the "worst and sourest wine" which he could find, and reported that within a few minutes he had converted it into "the best and loveliest wine"! This judgment of Gockel's is borne out by numerous other reports, including modern ones, which attest to the fact that lead can indeed improve the flavour of wines. Gockel also recorded that wine, corrected in this manner, retains its "süsselechtenlieblichen"
(sweetish-lovely) taste for no more than three or four months."
Lots to unpack in there; maybe mg/L concentrations (i.e. ppm) are detectable by taste, but since the taste goes away after a few months, maybe some significant chemistry is happening instead (unwanted acids being precipitated as lead salts? I don't know).
Thats a fantastic German word though, "süsselechtenlieblichen".
What brought this post on? Is this something that's in the news or something? It seems only remotely more plausible than Flat Eartherism or the Covid vaccine giving you 5G reception.
Here's something I wonder about sometimes: Archaeologists/paleontologists tend to say “X is Y years old” when Y is the (estimated) age of the earliest instance of X that we have found so far. But obviously based on that evidence Y is a lower bound on the age of X, not our best estimate of its age. Couldn't we use some statistical technique to actually estimate when X began, given the observations of it that we have found?
Like to take a really dumb/oversimplified version of this, suppose that we have findings of arrowheads roughly every 10,000 years, up until 60,000 years ago (these are made-up numbers). Then you might say that “arrowheads (and presumably arrows) are between 60–70 thousand years old.” Doing this right would be much more nuanced and sophisticated, and would probably involve some factors like the expected rate of decay of such things, how hard we have looked for them in various places, etc.
Has anyone done this? Or even seriously discussed it?
The Signor-Lipps and Jaanusson effects from paleontology seem the most relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signor%E2%80%93Lipps_effect, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2699.2012.02784.x
Excellent, thanks
This post made me realize that I always picture the ice age in terms of snowy landscapes and mammoth hunters, but indeed it’s not like the whole earth was covered in snow. I guess it’s because the places I have lived were such climates during that time? Maybe that biases what we see in archeology museums.
Tic-Tac Man likely evolved from dinosaurs not primates and didn't feel the impulse to build monuments. The World Soul then was interested in converting spirit into light. Highly evolved primates, OTOH, are mostly here to make noises and pro wrestling matches.
Per my understanding there is actually no consensus of what kinds of human populations existested before and during the Last Glacial Maximum (19,000 to 14,000 ago), because the ice sheets have wiped out even the mountain tops in the Northern areas. The historical consensus of the human population during this period of ice sheet and global climate fluxes seems to be a debated and evolving scene
This of course has created plenty of more or less credible academic theories and even cult-like pseudohistories.
Regarding the pseudohistories, most of them are harmless speculative prehistory or linguistics, but some of these were connected to the idea of Great Finland, which was popular in some circles when Finland allied with Germany in the second world war- and now these "sagas" have gained followers in the ultranationalist web forums.
For the evidence of how ice-age wiped out everything in Northern areas, see for example https://www.science.org/content/article/last-ice-age-wiped-out-people-east-asia-well-europe
Forgive me if someone has mentioned it, and I missed this, but surely the clincher for the absence of advanced civilizations much before around 10,000 BC is that human populations simply weren't high enough.
The stone age was a hard time to survive, especially in the colder climate back then in temperate regions, and probably most population levels barely held their own, even with every fertile woman pregnant throughout their child bearing age.
They would also likely have been spread out too thinly for various reasons, such as competition for food and the avoidance of social strife that would otherwise have occurred in communities larger than most people's then wilder natures to handle. It isn't just crops and animals such as dogs that were being domesticated back then, but ourselves! Members of a small community may have been content and loving in each other's company, but those detestable strangers living in the next valley could have been fair game (perhaps literally!)
Also, despite a few carefully arranged burials that have been discovered, primitive people back then must often have been fairly lackadaisical about hygiene, with discarded food remains and even bodies left lying around near homes. So epidemics of diseases would have been an ever present threat, increasing in proportion to population density in a given area.
By pure serendipity, Youtube recommendations came up trumps this week. Here's a two-parter (I think it's two parts anyway) about Graham Hancock's new TV series:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iCIZQX9i1A
I didn't go looking for a rebuttal to Hancock, I don't know who this guy is, and frankly some of his mannerisms are a bit irritating, so this is not me putting up someone I follow and like to show "See, see? Hancock is wrong!"
I don't think I'm giving anything away by revealing he doesn't accept Hancock's hypothesis, but he does try to give it a fair shake:
- Who is Hancock?
- What are his qualifications?
- What is his hypothesis?
- How do you prove a lost civilisation?
It also helps that Hancock is pinning his dates down to around 12,000 years ago as the beginning of the end for his lost civilisation, so we're not dealing with "something that was around 40,000 years ago but all traces have been obliterated because of environmental change over that span". His lost civilisation overlaps with the accepted beginnings of civilisations as we know them, so there should be remaining evidence somewhere. The big question then becomes - is there, and if so, where?
Ongoing response thread to this on twitter looking interesting: https://twitter.com/samoburja/status/1632112167670673408?s=46&t=Vr6FkO5lnC-pKto0THM8ZQ
"anyone who can explore Antarctica must be at least close to 1700s-British level."
Not to nitpick, but when I see an unexplained, undefended assumption this large in an opinion piece, it throws doubts on other opinions in areas I lack the background knowledge to evaluate. High arctic Inuit survived and colonized a harsh environment without being "1700s-British level" and Polynesians engaged in impressive ocean navigation. This is, as far as I can tell, a completely unwarranted assumption, and it raises the question of how many others are lurking that I missed.
The artic isn’t the Antarctic. You need to get to the Antarctic across 1000km of hostile sea, and then to explore it you need clothing and equipment suitable to the task. 1700s British explorers couldn’t do it despite what Scott suggests. 22nd humans can’t do it either, not permanently.
Polynesians could have crossed those distances, but lacked warm clothing. A possible exception would be the Maoris of the South Island, who managed to make things like seal-skin cloaks to get them through cold winters.
Hypothetically, you could imagine that the Maori would eventually have set off south to explore; maybe they did! It definitely wouldn't require 1700s level technology though, just Maori canoes combined with Eskimo clothing.
Captain Cook was sent to look for the theorized unknown giant continent in the Southern Hemisphere that keeps the Earth from being top heavy. He circled the Antarctic ice pack and reported back that there wasn't anything worth having there. It's not impossible that Polynesians got that far south too and reported back there was nothing but ice, so why bother?
I don’t think you guys understand the difference between the artic and the Antarctic. The artic is, in the edge, fit for human habitation. The Antarctic is nowhere fit for human habitation.
Curious that someone walked to the S Pole 50 years earlier than the N, then
I wouldn't attach too much weight to the habitability of the outermost Arctic circle. Sure, you can ship provisions and materials in without that ocean crossing, but that's the only difference. It's not an inherently nice place. 18th century Antarctic exploring was tricky because nobody really knew it was there, but technologically Amundsen could have done in 1710 what he did in 1910.
Despite eating his dogs, and seal meat, he did have canned goods. Which pushes the technology to early 19C.
Not mission critical I would argue. But on reflection I think kerosene and primus stoves to burn it in were crucial which means 1890s, couldn't have done it with solid fuel. I suspect Norwegian ski design and technique probably also developed enormously throughout 19C.
On land, Scott had a motor sled that broke down on day 3. Otherwise, sleds and dogs and ponies. Actually Amundsen succeeded by adhering more closely to inuit tradition - fur clothing, fresh vs tinned meat, traditional eye protectors rather than rubbing cocaine into his eyeballs. Very little that wasn't to be had in the 1700s.
19th century explorers couldn't do it, witness the fate of the Franklin Expedition in the Arctic seeking for the North West Passage, much less the Antarctic. To claim that there was a lost civilisation based in the Antarctic before the ice covered it is making a huge claim, that needs evidence to back it up.
People living in the Arctic regions didn't stick at one level of development, as they acclimatised to the region and the environment over time, they became more sophisticated. They might not have had the level of tech of late 17th century/early 18th century Britain, but they were at a level of development that did not strike Europeans as being as wretched as that of, say, the Tierra del Fuegans.
There are no Europeans living in the Arctic?
Minor point on "civilizations don't lose agriculture".
In the first chapter or so of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" Jared Diamond makes the case that environment shapes civilization by pointing to the Polynesians. That it was the same origin civilization, but on some islands the culture regressed to primitive hunter-gatherer state whereas other Polynesian cultures grew and became complex and thriving, and attributed the difference to the geography and resources of the islands they colonized.
(Not expecting civilizations, I'd still not be thinking about wheat or barley. More like, Atriplex, Chenopodium, beetroot and so on. I'd look into edible plants from brackish sites, based on the map.)
Coprophilous fungi (in particular, fungi on domestic animals' dung) are another marker of human presence. I don't have access to the chapter, but it seems interesting from the abstract. https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsl/books/edited-volume/2347/chapter-abstract/132289786/Detecting-human-impacts-non-pollen-palynomorphs-as?redirectedFrom=PDF
Abstract:
Non-pollen palynomorphs (NPPs) are widely used to detect human activities, in addition to the anthropogenic indicators used in palynology. This paper first tries to determine the best way to approach most probable number (MPN) counting for young scientists. It then looks at the anthropogenic indicators and the different types of human activity that can reveal the studied taxa. Among the different fungal spores, coprophilous fungi are very useful to evidence pastoral activities and grazing pressure. Numerous taxa related to dung are also indicators of decaying organic matter and deserve our attention. Erosion processes due to human activities increase the representation of fungal spores. Development of carbonicolous fungal spores in association with fire and algal assemblages due to eutrophication are also considered. Indeed, studies focusing on modern analogues have greatly improved our understanding of spore taphonomy, and the relationship between spore abundance and local livestock biomass and composition.
I agree, but for the sake of argument, I also realize how fragile and small early civilisations are. If some of the key farming tribes of the fertile crescent were wiped out, at a certain time, by decease or a catastrophe, the development of agriculture might have been stalled by perhaps millennia. And there are actually food that have more or less disappeared in certain areas, like the Taro and Carob in Europe.
But we also need a sudden disaster, not sea levels increasing 'slowly' for thousands of years. This could happen if high levels were reached in the Mediterranean, and then a barrier broke (for example at the Strait of Messina) and flooded a certain area (East of Tunisia?)
If we can find a region somewhere, that fit into that description, there might have been some pre-ice-age civilisation that died out. Not very highly advanced though, but above the level of hunter gathering.
Amundsen got to the South Pole in 190x with Inuit technology. Possibly with the slight edge of better rifles for seal shooting and better nav instruments than the 1700s. It was modern technology which actually scuppered British ant/arctic exploration in the 19th century, state of the art tinned meat with no vitamin c in it.
But that's a side issue. If you actually read Hancock the idea is the Antarctic was ice free when it was mapped.
Do you mean that Amundsen used mostly Inuit technology to get to the South Pole, or that he could have gotten to the South Pole with only Inuit technology? The first is true, as far as I can tell; the second is wildly implausible, starting with the fact that Inuits had no way of measuring where the south pole even was, let alone charting a path to the pole from another continent and back.
My case (from which I have now resiled) was 1700s technology of whatever kind. By that stage the developed West had pretty much solved navigation (geopositioning) on land and sea, and ocean voyages. My point was that post 1700 developments (tinned food, useless motor sleds, "advanced" new clothing) were a net disbenefit to Scott (RF Scott, not our host) vs Amundsen with his seal meat and furs and dog sleds only.
I still think that is true, but amundsen did take tinned food and "gabardine" clothes, and probably benefitted from C19th ski developments. The killer, however, is kerosene (mid 19th C) and primus stoves (1890). I don't think any expedition would work if you were limited to burning blubber or bringing your own solid fuel.
BP - Before Present
BC - Before Christ
When that came in, I got huffy for about five seconds before I started laughing.
We can't use BC and AD anymore, because that is prioritising one particular religion and Western colonialist (they'd probably say 'white supremacist' today, that seems to be the term slipping into favour) and it ignores non-Western cultures and that there are other faith systems out there.
Fine, so we'll change it in order to keep old-fashioned dating intelligible but not be offensive. What do we change it to? "BC will now be BCE, which is 'Before Christian Era' and AD will now be CE which is 'Christian Era'" - oh wait, that's bad too, now it's "Before Current Era" and "Current Era".
So, uh, what current era we talkin' about, Willis? This one. Dated how? On the Western calendar. Which is calculated how, like from the foundation of the Roman republic or what? No, from the religious calendar dated - before Christ and then after Christ. So in effect we're still using BC and AD? .... Yes.
Reminds me of the humorous Isaac Asimov short story about the Devil getting ready for the end of the world, which has to happen in accordance with Biblical dating in the second millennium (can't remember exact date, it's been so long since I read it). But wait! second millennium since when? The world doesn't all use the same dating, every nation will be on a different date!
So the Devil has to get the entire world to accept a new dating system from the beginning of the Atomic Age, and once that is in place, then the countdown to the End of the World can begin 😁
As an atheist, I don't have a problem with using a dating system that begins with the birth of Jesus. Jesus is a real historical figure who was probably born within a few years of 1 AD, and even if he wasn't, fictional characters in fictional works can have birthdates too. I do have a problem with acknowledging Jesus as either the Messiah ("Before Christ") or as the Lord ("Anno Domini"). Not enough of a problem that I'd stop using AD/BC, but still, objecting to calling Jesus Messiah or Lord is more reasonable than objecting to the date of the calendar's zero point.
For starters, the Arctic is not a sort of entry-level version of the Antarctic. For second, why do you think a mission failure is always evidence of insufficient technology, which is what we are talking about? Do you think NASA tech took a sharp step backwards after Apollo 12? For thirds, that is not the claim we are discussing.
These arguments aren't very convincing.
> Argument 1: Where Are The Sites?
They don't need to be high up, just made of wood and steel - Disintegrated.
> Argument 2: Where Are The Crops And Livestock?
Part of a fragile circular ecosystem which wasn't robust to the collapse of civilization - or else, evolved into something else over the intervening millennia.
> Argument 3: Lead Levels. Many ancient civilizations mined lead
Maybe they weren't even interested in lead.
I do agree with your predictions; "0.5% chance we ever find something demonstrating equal or greater architectural advancement to the Great Pyramid, dating from before 11,000 BC" seems basically OK, because even if there was anything, the fact that we haven't found signs of it suggests all traces would simply be gone - or else, we wouldn't know what to look for, and thus can't be expected to find signs even if they do exist. Try looking, for example, at the global temperature fluctuations over the last million years; we aren't sure why they're doing that, and we assume natural causes. If a civilization in the future was looking back for evidence of us, would they even realize lead was the smoking gun?
To be a bit pedantic I think it would help alot to define "about as advanced" especially for case 1. I mean, suppose that they generally have all the other tech and social organization that the stonehenge people did except it just takes a long ass time/different conditions to manage agriculture and without that the incentives don't favor the creation of large monuments?
In other words is "about as advanced" about their level of monument building, their mastery of basic crafts or their social organization? It seems plausible these diverge.
It'd be buried pretty deep, all surface markers probably buried under rubble thousand of feet deep or glaciers?
The Sphinx and Pyramid of Giza are scientifically (politically) claimed to be built in 2500 BC with zero recorded accreditation from that era (makes perfect sense).
Both found with damage from flooding. Both "abandoned" and "re-discovered" in an excavation in 1400 BC by a later pharoah. The Sphinx was completely buried in sand, forgotten.
The "ancient" Egyptians have zero ancestral memories or recorded knowledge of building them. They didn't know what a Sphinx was or the purpose of the Pyramid. And they never rediscovered the "lost" technology to make them again.
Isn't Science awesome, the best (Omniscient); can fill in for every gaping hole in history.
What makes you think the pyramid was "rediscovered" ever? Was it buried in sand all the way to the top?
You are half a century out of date. Mid to late 20th C excavations have uncovered the tombs of dozens of friends and relations and high officials of khufu around the pyramid, not to mention multiple futher examples of his cartouche inside and outside the pyramid. Your "zero recorded accreditation" is simply wrong. In fact documentation relating to anything 4.5k years old is usually impossible to come by, and the pyramid is strikingly well documented for its age.
I am guessing your source is Hancock circa 1990? A lot has happened since then, like the discovery in 2013 of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary_of_Merer
Awkward for him and you
I'm not dodging the sphinx rediscovery. It got buried in sand. So what?
If the only inscriptions on Windsor were by people expressly identifying as her work teams, and if there were separate testimony as old as Herodotus that it was believed at that time that she built it, and carbon dating as a third quite separate line of evidence put the building in the right ballpark, I would be starting to wonder whether perhaps she had something to do with it. Meser was sure as hell doing something with all that stone.
How does an entire nation, the most advanced civilization known for the world's leading scientific, mathematical, cultural knowledge and wealth, completely forget its greatest monument in a short thousand years? It wasn't just some forgotten pottery in the sand.
There is zero inscription accrediting the Sphinx or the Pyramid's builders. The diary mentions nothing, zero hard evidence. Just assumptions by modern Science.
Well, your own claim is that they had forgotten is it not? What did they think it was?
You do accept Khufu's cartouche was found inside the pyramid in 1837? We have that plus Herodotus plus carbon dating all as independent of each other as possible and all converging
"So a 120m sea level rise wouldn’t be enough to wipe out evidence of our crop of ancient civilizations, and shouldn’t be enough to wipe out evidence of a previous crop, unless they had a very different geographic distribution than ours."
If there were ice age civilizations, they had a very different geographic distribution than ours.
Coastlines weren't the only thing that changed. Climate zones, wet and dry spots, biomes moved all over the place. Amazonia was a steppe, Sahara was green, Anatolia was forested. There is very limited overlap between "places optimal for habitation in 15 000 BC" and "places optimal for habitation today", and they just happen to be the places with the oldest known civilizations (Levant and Anatolia). They're also the most heavily archaeologically surveyed. We barely touched the ground in e.g. Central Asia and North Africa.
ACX archeological expedition to the Sahara when?
The spike in lead levels in 1000BC is due to Phoenicians opening silver mines in Spain. Did this produce a dramatic increase in the availability of silver? Or was it just that the mine was much dirtier than older mines? (Yet another possibility is that it is closer to Greenland, as the wind blows.)
I really like your willingness to assign probabilities, including your efforts to assess the outcome of your predictions. Personally I would assign different probabilities to the three discoveries:
Gobekli Tepe: You put 20%. I think that's too low. The place wasn't even discovered until 1963, suggesting that there very likely are other undiscovered sites (my impression is that that region of Anatolia has had a grossly disproportionate amount of archeological study). Your probability was based on finding a site 2,000 years older, but still. I'd bump it up to 40%.
The other two sound extremely unlikely to me. This raises the problem of how to estimate rare outcomes, because if an outcome is rare, the estimate generally is made without empirical data. That said, I'd put "pyramids" at 0.01%, and Buckingham Palace at <0.0001%. Though you had a "less than" estimate for the latter.
Hi Scott, wouldn’t the fact that all those agricultural crops start at exactly the same time across the globe support pre 10k bc agriculture and the younger dryas?
Sparta: I'm late to the party, but: there's (almost) nothing left there (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparta#Archaeology_of_the_classical_period). There are other much better examples; Athens, as you say or Mycenae.
The Jared Diamond article reads like something I might have written after watching a Disney movie. The logic is riddled with holes. Agriculture led to malnutrition. I got that. Settlements led to intellectual pursuits and the systematic acquisition of knowledge-- nowhere mentioned.