Hacker News Reader

Comment by fit2rule | Hacker News Reader

.. and then there are the anatomically interesting cave paintings of Gabarnmung:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabarnmung

There is a .. crackpot theory .. around the notion of ancient intelligence, which I entertain as it is interesting to me as a fan of Szukalski as well as various neolithic cultural introspections: Australian aborigines are the original 'wise men', who travelled across the globe and taught other tribes how to harvest the land and cultivate animals. Gabarnmung was one of their original 'universities', and Gobekli Tepi, is another.

Anyway, its a wild and not yet substantiated theory, but .. what if indeed ancient society really was a lot more advanced than we gave it credit? Certainly, many cultures overlooked in the rush to the moon, have their own deeply advanced aspects.

View on HN

Thank you for the link!

Not sure I would subscribe to the advanced society, so far all the artifacts we have can be explained by above-the -average achievements of an individual (rather than a group or a society, like, for example, a microprocessor). And the fact that the mankind has a pronounced tendency to punish extraordinary achievement.

Australian aborigines had:

* A form of cryptographic key exchange which maintained peace among the tribes for 10's of thousands of years

* A formulated "do no harm" policy for its healing practitioners that was an analog of the Hyppocratic oath, long before Europeans had the concept. They also understood the healing nature of antiseptics, and had a knowledge of infection more advanced than European medicine at the time (1700's) of first contact. (We had miasma theory: the aborigines understood that there was a smaller world that would infect a person if they didn't bathe/take care of the wounds..)

* They have the oldest surviving oral traditions in the world. We in the west cannot keep our memes alive for longer than a few months - the Australians managed to tell the same stories among themselves for 40,000+ years.

* The Australian biosphere as it stood on first contact was a result of centuries of management by the aborigines. They were maintaining the land peacefully, and harmonically, for millennia.

* The oldest mason (Stoneworking) projects in the world are found in Gabarnmung. There is evidence that this technology was exported from there to other parts of the neolithic world.

I think they were actually a lot more advanced than we give them credit. Its easy for notions of European supremacy to blind one to this, however ..

Do you have a reference for that first point? I couldn't find it on Google, but would be interested to learn about it.

I think it might be this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_stick

https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-australia-oce...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com