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Comment by User23 | Hacker News Reader

It raises questions that anatomically modern homo sapiens existed for at least 200,000 years, but supposedly only developed civilization in the past five thousand years or so. Perhaps human civilization is considerably older than the mainstream view, but 5,000 years is about how long it takes for all traces to disappear? It does appear the great pyramid will probably be extant for longer than 5,000 years, but such artifacts appear to be rare.

My very limited understanding is that traditional Hindu teaching is that human civilization is orders of magnitude older than 5,000 years. If anyone who knows more about that wants to reply I’d be interested.

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We do find traces of human habitation from much older, though, including dwellings and cultural artifacts. So traces didn't disappear - they're there, and the picture that they paint is of a very primitive society.

It would be very strange indeed if the only things that disappeared were the ones necessarily to demonstrate that society was actually highly developed, no?

> It would be very strange indeed if the only things that disappeared were the ones necessarily to demonstrate that society was actually highly developed, no?

I’m no expert, but highly developed artifacts strike me as the ones most likely to be fragile to entropy and erosion.

In any event I’m only curious. Questioning an absence of evidence implying evidence of absence is just basic reasoning.

I believe the number to look at would be 10,000 BC. That's around the time humans settled down, and there have been various human settlements and pottery found since then. I believe the number of ~5,000 years ago is just based on the records we have-- that's when the Sumerians come into the archeological record with complex artifacts. And of course that's when we have records of large civilizations like Akkad.

But humans were certainly sophisticated long before then, even if they didn't have complex writing and government. One of the strangest pieces of archeology to me is the Löwenmensch figurine or Lion-Man, an ivory figure dating to 40,000 bc. So humans definitely had some complex culture for a long time. One theory I heard about why civilization developed so recently, is that it's in the past 10,000 years that the planet warmed up enough that farming became practical. I don't know enough about geological history to confirm that, but it seems like an appealing theory

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-man

I don't think 'anatomically modern' necessarily implies that their brains were evolved to the same level of modern humans; I don't believe there is any hard evidence, genetic or otherwise. But even if so, that 200k years could have been the time it took to develop the software (i.e. knowledge and culture) necessary to fully apply the hardware (brain) toward building more modern civilizations.

Doesn't "anatomically modern" humans include neanderthals, denizovans and so on? Those people don't seem to have left any cities.

I keep coming across the claim that humans have been around for 300,000 years. Based on no knowledge or expertise at all, I'm sceptical. It seems fairly clear that there exist remains of cities 12,000 years old (e.g. Troy); the classical Greeks regarded the stories of the Trojan war as something close to mythology, but then Schliemann found the place. But there don't seem to be stories of ancient civilisations that go back much further than that.

I find it difficult to believe that people able to build a civilisation would have existed for tens of thousands of years, without actually building one. But evidence for ancient civilisations is hard to find, so perhaps we just haven't found it yet. So I'm open to the view that humans capable of civilisation-building have been around for (say) 50,000 years. But without evidence, I find it hard to credit the claim that humans from 300,000 years ago were at all like us.

I'm ignorant about these matters, and my sketchy opinions are based on stuff I read decades ago. Is there something written for the layman that I could read to inform myself?

David Graber’s new book leans onto this: the dawn of everything

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