Evidence of Cosmic Impact at Abu Hureyra, Syria, 12500 Years Ago
nature.com
nature.com
Perhaps there's a connection?
Basically a bunch of crap without any evidence. If it was an advanced civilization, they would have left plenty of tools and artifacts behind, but they didn't. The only evidence he mentions how Goebli Teppe or the Sphynx, were so extraordinary, that they could only be build by some advanced civilization. Yet, we have no proof of what he says whatsover.
Stonehedge, Mayan pyramids, Atlantis, etc.. are all been mixed in these types of imaginations.
The fact is that early humans were not stupid savages/cavemen, and civilizations have gone though booms and busts cycles even in this era. But that doesn't mean that there was some kind of fantastic civilization that we don't know about. Fact is that when in good times, where food is plentiful, people like to build stuff, for fun, religion, etc...
In bad times we did build either walls for defense, or just raided other people for resources.
Today's crazy buildings are stadiums, large concert/opera halls, etc... which are not needed at all for basic survival yet we crave them and are willing to spend lots of resources for them. so, building stuff, is ingrained in us, and the neolithic people were just like us in this desire.
Also, here is a clear evidence of how could people move large amount of rock, with just ropes and primitive materials. (the wheel was not invented yet at the time).
Scientists Make Easter Island Statue Walk | National Ge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpNuh-J5IgE
A simple imagination, the island had a festival type of routine, where every 4 years they would build one these and celebrate.... which is easy to do, even for a small population.
Over 40 years you'd have 10 of them in the Island. Over 400 years, you could have 100s..... A simple ritual for fun, for religion, for superstition, to bring the community together, it builds large things bit by bit over time.
As they say, Rome was not build in one day. Many of these monuments or buildings took decades to build. But when we find them, it is always amazing to us as we see the finished product of centuries of work.
There is no hole in his theories he can’t make up a nice story to cover it with.
How did you verify that none did survive? Lots of strange things have been found, too... some of which are potentially in front of our eyes as well.
According to the current orthodoxy, we lived hundreds of thousands of years basically like chimpanzees and then in the biological equivalent of a blink of an eye we become gods of earth (Anthropocene).
It would make a lot more sense, if civilizations were more cyclical and we are at some sort of peak where most of the predecessors that came before us devolved from.
When you think about the butterfly effect, its also entirely plausible those predecessors didn't discover or take advantage of fossil fuels making it very easy to not leave any traces of there existence, especially when you take cataclysms in to account.
all these ideas including many of the theories proposed by Graham Hancock could be false but they are pointing in the right direction. The current model doesn't make any sense.
What doesn't make sense is that all the examples you gave happened in just over a century. If you go back a bit further there is pretty much nothing.
Biologically, there should be very little difference between us now vs 5, 10 or 20 thousand years ago.
If we made an index fund that tracks human progress, For decades (millenniums) its normal linear growth like the S&P 500, something you put in your retirement fund. Then suddenly you have a massive green dildo that went up more in 2 seconds than decades worth of gains. Now the fund looks like a shitcoin.
But even apparently very simple processes like photosynthesis are terribly complicated. (BTW I very much hope the research in this area progresses and we could have artificial photosynthesis ready for mass-scale deployment before CO2 rises to the point of no-return.)
Maybe there is something very important right in front of us that we don't see. The current approach to consider life, thoughts, consciousness and so on as purely material phenomena have its place, but they monopolized research for historical reasons. Unless your career is rock-solid like Penrose, you won't even consider getting near challenging the current status quo regarding, say, the relationship between matter and consciousness for fear of ridicule.
Another obstacle is the limitations of human brain, including short- and long-term memory, the amount of information we can process, retain, meaningfully map and so on during the period of human life. Then there are several unknowns, for example the depth of the universe(s) in macro- and micro-scale. I somehow accepted that I'll never know these things, but it's worth trying anyway, I mean what more important could there be?
It could be the case the cyclical pattern is 1000k years of pre-history - then 1k years of advanced civilization - followed by 1000k years reversion to a pre-historical state. We could be the outliers in a cycle that is far more ancient and far more vast than Graham Hancock imagines.
And the criticisms of Hancock are well founded. He looks at a site like Gobekli Tepe. He ignores the most parsimonious explanation - that this is a temple site for observing obscure and long forgotten religious rituals. Instead Hancock engages in flights of fancy, asserting that GT is akin to a university, a place used to teach the long-forgotten secrets of a lost civilization. The criticism is not that he's positing a cyclical a view - but that he's making fantastical assertions without the evidence to back them up.
> ...its also entirely plausible those predecessors didn't discover or take advantage of fossil fuels making it very easy to not leave any traces of there existence
Or it could be the case we don't see any evidence because these ancient advanced civilizations didn't exist. We can infer non-existence from the lack of evidence. What we can't do is make an unfalsifiable claim without evidence and assert that ancient advanced civilizations existed. It's entertaining to speculate, or to listen to GH read the tea leaves. But it doesn't prove anything.
We have evidence of populous and vibrant civilizations existing in Africa, the Americas, the Mediterranean, and many other places in the past 20,000 years. We have essentially zero evidence for advanced civilizations during the period before the Neolithic, the long era of pre-history of our species.
> Another possibility is that chances of advanced civilizations developing are extraordinarily rare.
My issue with this theory is it makes us special (chronological snobbery). It makes a lot more sense for us to be standing on the ruins of many great civilizations that were roughly around ballpark or even more advanced than us. This would be more in line with our understanding of nature which is very conservative and cyclical.
> We have evidence of populous and vibrant civilizations existing
My understanding of this is, nature is a very powerful destruction agent and most archeological finds are rare exceptional cases where multiple unlikely things happened to get the area preserved.
Someone wanting to build would have basically the same intelligence as a civil engineer today, they would just have a smaller set of materials and techniques.
Not just a smaller set of materials and techniques, but also a smaller amount of time around the requirements needed to just survive - getting food/shelter, etc. Advancements in civilisation makes the overheads to staying alive smaller, so more time and effort can be spent on advancing technologies.
That's not how history works, most things get recycled or burned. Tools are taken with the craftsman, and usually end up rusting in a basement or garage, these days. Who made the Antikythera mechanism? Where are their tools? Who made the Hoover dam? Why aren't there tools littered all over the site?
Is it really a stretch to think that a large systemic crash could set civilization back a bit, like the dark ages? Or the supply chains after a virus spread across the world?
That reminds me of Tomb Raider 3
It's my personal belief that this happened, and the story of Noah in the bible is oral history that got written down.