Comment by ardit33 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ardit33 | Hacker News Reader

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His theories are about 'advanced civilizations' that build everything, and somehow disappeared, and the humans that came later just found the knowledge ready... etc. etc.

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.

This is entirely possible.. Modern civilization doesn't make sense.

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.

Why doesn’t the orthodoxy make sense? You could say the same thing about progress in the blink of an eye for, say, airplanes, or automobiles, or computers, the history of which is presumably not controversial. What doesn’t make sense about it?

Progress in those cases makes sense, it follows an exponential curve of technological progress that fits perfectly with our understanding of how things work.

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.

Or there could be some other beings that in some way control or influence humans. This seems to be very common in nature, see e.g. the relationship between humans and bacteria on a Petri dish.

maybe.. but thats not good enough. We have a mandate to discover the inner workings of gods creation. Just to say its god/aliens is not enough.

You are right. Personally I think one of the keys is life itself. We still haven't figured it out. It seems all forms of life stem from other forms of life, we haven't observed spontaneous manifestations of life from matter - apart from a few components that might be a (dead) protein.

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?

Another possibility is that chances of advanced civilizations developing are extraordinarily rare. It could be so rare that even if anatomically modern humans exist for one to two million years, the species only establishes advanced civilizations once or twice.

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.

I agree Hancock's theories often has a lot of wishful thinking but they seem more plausible to me than the current orthodoxy which imo is definitely wrong.

> 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.

I was under the impression that, if a modern-ish civilization existed in the near-geological-past, we'd be able to tell by a complete lack low-energy easy-to-acquire resources. Like, anything easy to dig up, would have been, dug up, made into machines, and then dispersed as low density material ( where-ever it ended up as the society decayed )

He’s got the lack of evidence covered. He thinks they are advanced in psychological and mental disciplines unleashing the ‘full potential’ of the brain. They thought that tools, physical technology, etc is a wrong turn in human development.

There is no hole in his theories he can’t make up a nice story to cover it with.

I’ve read a few Hancock books in my youth for fun and from what I recall, his advanced civilizations weren’t alien, they were just human civilizations more advanced than other human civilizations.

>If it was an advanced civilization, they would have left plenty of tools and artifacts behind, but they didn't.

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?

How did you verify their tools would have survived?

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.

Sometimes it’s hard to appreciate but humans living 10’s of thousands of years ago were as intelligent as today. They could have figured out a way to do pretty much anything that could be done with the materials of their day.

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.

> 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.

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