Complex Human Cultures Are Older Than Scientists Thought
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Universe Older Than Thought... The moon is older than scientists thought.. Land plants are older than scientists thought... Written zero 500 years older than scientists thought -... Your dog is 10,000 years older than scientists thought... Human Species May Be Much Older Than Previously Thought ...
Some [adjective] [commonly known subject matter/celebrities]'s [attribute] is/are [older/newer/bigger/smaller/...] than scientists/we thought.
One good reason to await solid evidence (if such a reason might at all be needed) is that the idea of an ancient, superior culture has been used in ideology before: the Atlantis story was one of the cornerstones of the Nazi mythology [0], but of course without the archaeological evidence to back it up. No need to repeat past mistakes.
No, science is about what we can formulate testable predictions. It can be completely unreasonable, yet still be science. Many major breakthroughs have been from unreasonable ideas.
Prediction: There's a buried city in Asia Minor
Test: Go there and dig it up
It excites me to consider that there were once entire axioms of culture, intellect, technology, spirit, and society as a whole that we have forgotten. Who knows what sort of mysteries we unlocked through entheogen-enabled consciousness exploration. Who would we be if we could find reconciliation?
What is probably more accurate is to say most human traits have very long genetic histories. Much the same way as human-like traits can be found in our great ape relatives, traits quite close to modern traits can be found in our ancestors.
Also what makes this a difficult question to answer is we don’t have a good idea what genes contribute to what human traits. We know that individual humans differ, and we know that a large amount of reason for this difference is genetic, what we don’t know is what genes are responsible for this difference.
This is a long way of saying we know that the people living 100,000 years ago were genetically different to modern humans, but we don’t know how different and in which particular ways. Evidence points towards us being calmer in large groups (domestication), better able to digest agricultural foods, and better at abstract thinking.
Dozens of miles is something a person could walk in a few days, so I don't see how that signifies a trade network, let alone a long-distance one.
Not that I'm doubting other things from the article, but this sentence seems a bit far fetched to me. I'm not an expert though - am I missing something?
> Many of the tools were made from a black volcanic rock called obsidian, which was brought to the site and processed there. But from where? There aren’t any obsidian outcrops near Olorgesailie. The chemistry of the tools suggests that they came from sources up to 100 kilometers away. But “these are straight-line distances that, in some cases, go over the top of a mountain,” says Alison Brooks from George Washington University.
> “There’s an occasional piece in the Acheulean that gets transported these distances,” says Brooks. “But we have thousands of pieces in this one site that’s smaller than most people’s kitchens. There has been a really major import of raw materials.”