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Comment by greatpostman | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s pretty clear that sophisticated societies existed long before recorded history. They may not have had the tools of working with metal, but they definitely had sophisticated philosophical views and moral frameworks. I would bet this goes back even 30-50 thousand years. This idea that humanity sprang up out of nothing in Sumerian/Babylon is very contrived. There was an ice age ten thousand years ago, the cessation of which caused the floods, which destroyed large swaths of human “civilization”

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Civilization means people living in cities. To do that, agriculture is probably needed. There's also probably some level of specialization and accompanying social stratification.

History is written records.

There were many prehistoric societies, but because civilization tended to have some form of written records, the prehistoric societies are not considered civilizations.

No scholars would clai that humanity sprang out of nothing in those places. I mostly hear that from bible literalists. But if some of their people weren't in cities, the society was not civilized. And if there was nobody to write about them they were prehistoric.

> There were many prehistoric societies, but because civilization tended to have some form of written records, the prehistoric societies are not considered civilizations.

What about cave paintings?

That's archeology or something, not real history :)

It's the threshold between "how much do we trust the author?" and the blanket claim of "used for ceremonial purpose" whenever something isn't entirely obvious. Yes, it's a real distinction. Archeologists and historians don't consider themselves one group at all.

I personally find cave paintings to be compelling evidence for a behaviourally modern mind. They demonstrate great skill. The artists did not live in cities or have agriculture or writing, but I have little doubt that they perceived the world as we do, and were capable of essentially the same speech and thought patterns as we are. It’s an awe-inspiring tragedy and mystery that those lives were lived in a manner so unknown to us, and yet potentially so relatable to us.

They absolutely would have had conversations around campfires. Talking about what, I wonder?

There are known city sites that predate agriculture in their regions.

Example, source, etc?

A comprehensive evidence around the world with sites and prehistoric periods are well outlined in the last David Grabaur's book "The Dawn of Everything".

I assume you're referring to Çatalhöyük (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%87atalh%C3%B6y%C3%BCk)?

Interesting the sand bags, I do see a concrete wall around the whole thing.

It's great people care enough to set that up/preserve/study it.

> if there was nobody to write about them they were prehistoric

A comment from a documentary about Rome stuck in my mind, it goes something like : "There is no history of Europe before Rome because for most of Europe, history starts with Rome conquering that region. They were the first to write anything down."

Similarly, we know how slavic peoples migrated into Europe because those regions stopped sending written updates back to Rome. Did they then revert back to pre-history? Or does a region continue to "have history" even if for a few centuries nobody in that area writes anything down?

How about ancient Greece? Also Europe as something that has a cultural identity is relatively new, difinitley postdates Rome.

or Egypt

Yes, except that is not Europe but the distinction is anachronistic hence my comment.

Genuine question, how much evidence of agriculture would survive an ice age, being crushed under the weight of 2 mile thick ice sheets and then washed away or engulfed by bodies of water once they've melted?

Major regions in which early humans evolved and migrated have not been subject to glaciation since those events. Africa, Mesopotamia, Egypt (part of Africa), the Mediterranian basin, the Indian subcontinent, most of China and Southeast Asia, central and Southern America, and much of North America, particularly south of, say, the modern Mason-Dixon line.

The regions heavily affected by glaciation are relatively few, relatively lately settled (for obvious reasons), and hence, less significant to overall availability of evidence of early agriculture.

Other disturbances resulting from glaciation, notably sea level rise and the innundation of previous coastal and low-lying regions may contribute somewhat more to obscured evidence.

Under these terms, all 400+ tribes north of the deserts of North America were prehistoric until the arrival of the European and some paper.

There were plenty of urban centers in the Americas prior to European arrival, e.g. Cahokia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia

That addresses civilization but not prehistory as there is no known record of written language north of the desert barrier.

Are we still not counting wampum belts or khipu as a written language? I know that those are both very different from how we comprehend written languages but there is significant evidence to support that they were used in the process of imparting information (whether that be treaties, legends, or statistics)

A language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary.[0] I don't think NA wampum or totem poles would be considered written language by that definition. Khipu aren't found in NA, AFAIK.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language

Yes. This is absolutely correct. The generally accepted view is that prehistory ended and history started on the North American continent roughly mid 1490's.

This only sounds prepostrous if you don't understand what the terms mean.

This is also roughly the timeframe when the last stone-age society near Europe finally got subjugated by Europeans and stone age finally ended in the old world, when the Spanish crushed the Guanches in the Canaries.

This is fine if everyone in the conversation has that same academic definition of pre-history - the problem is that bad actors will often latch onto that statement, ignore the definitions, and use that as a basis to argue that so-and-so people were sub-human.

It'd be really nice if all parts of the internet engaged in good faith debates on topics they were knowledgeable but finding that phrasing preposterous isn't unreasonable if you've spent a decent chunk of time exposed to reddit and twitter.

I agree that you're correct and reasonable, but I also agree that the person you're replying to was correct and reasonable when expressing caution over how things are worded.

You might be interested to read "The Dawn of Everything" which discusses all of this. Cities and agriculture are far from requirements to have civilization.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/314/314162/the-dawn-of-every...

You can have oral histories.

They don't tend to last very long without varying dramatically from the original version.

Sorry to do an "actually" here but funnily enough history is not historically written records. History as a branch of knowledge was specifically operated upon the context that the likelihood of something happening historically is based on the individual's effort to ascertain the word of mouth of the people to find certainty and consistency. That is because what is written can easily be done by anyone but convincing many people over generations would be much harder. So the fact that history has shifted to what is written as the authority is actually a successful implementation of an attack vector to manipulate truth.

tl;dr Historically oral history was the only form of discovering what is true and specifically regarded as more rigorous than written accounts.

At least, when taking history into account.

Etymology is also interesting:

> From Middle English historie, from Old French estoire, estorie (“chronicle, history, story”) (French histoire), from Latin historia, from Ancient Greek ἱστορίᾱ (historíā, “learning through research”), from ἱστορέω (historéō, “to research, inquire (and) record”), from ἵστωρ (hístōr, “the knowing, wise one”), from Proto-Indo-European *weyd- (“see, know”). Doublet of story and storey.

Fascinating that history is based on "seeing and knowing."

Then the Incans, mayas, and other civilizations which didn't have a writing systems are considered primitive??

On the flip side, let's also not forget that the earliest civilizations (so to speak) were also rather different from later ones in some striking ways. Put simply, they were a lot more literal-minded, and didn't engage in as much abstraction as did their descendents. Ancient fertility statues (even as late as classical Greece and Rome) are grotesquely over-endowed; ritual sacrifices of food and symbolic objects have in many places taken the place of sacrificed slaves or wives. Mesopotamian city states would fight wars because, like a frat prank, one would steal a statue of a god like Marduk from the other's temple -- only, there was no notion that it was a statue, rather it was the god. Early Egyptian murals speak to the power of kings by showing piles of dicks their soldiers had cut off of defeated enemies (unlike Egyptians they were uncircumcised). And there's the whole mummification thing, which betrays a certain literal-mindedness about immortality. So yeah, it's a spectrum - but both before and after the "rise of civilization"

This seems like unjustified speculation; people could look at e.g. people leaving cookies and milk out on Christmas Eve as an example of how modern Americans are poor at abstraction and have to give literal offerings to their god Santa Claus.

AFAWK there has been no significant change in the anatomy of humans in the past 200k years, and similarly nothing to indicate that we’ve had major changes in things like our ability to abstract. The bicameral theory of mind has been thoroughly discredited.

You can always find examples of irrational behavior, but the difference is scale. Today a major state isn't spending inordinate resources to ensure that the cookies left for Santa are prepared using the finest ingredients (say, a few million dollars' worth of gold) by the most accomplished bakers, and then placed on a dish so large that it can be seen from space (and hundreds or thousands of people died making it).

If you can show me the tomb of a prominent world leader from the last, let's say, 500 years that's decorated with images of his/her enemies' severed genitalia, I'll concede the point.

I feel that the problem with your claim is that within 500 years all humans everywhere have suddenly become abstracters extraordinaire, which just seems terribly unrealistic.

Generally every theory which talks about these great leaps in human cognition, and ties these to human "development" while ascribing diminished intellectual capabilities to our ancestors, seems to fall apart after scrutiny (e.g., Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, bicameral theory of mind).

Also, we've seen plenty of "undoing" of abstraction in long-continuing cultures. E.g., in Hinduism, idol worship wasn't really a thing in Vedic times, and only became popular in Puranic times (over a 1000 years later). Many Hindus do believe that some idols contain portions of gods, especially those idols that reside ones in "big" temples. I would not say that these folks have lost their ability to abstract. As another example, post-Vedic religion underwent a large amount of abstraction in the Upanishads, but then reverted to personification of deities via the bhakti movement and in Puranic religion. Again, I wouldn't say that Hindus lost their ability to think abstractly.

> I feel that the problem with your claim is that within 500 years all humans everywhere have suddenly become abstracters extraordinaire, which just seems terribly unrealistic.

Isn’t something like this the general explanation for the Flynn effect? (that newer generations in modern societies are better at IQ tests because they’re better at IQ test-style abstractions)

> Today a major state isn't spending inordinate resources to ensure that the cookies left for Santa

I get the impression that the degree to which people took religion literally varied a lot from person to person, and even priest to priest throughout history.

It’s not clear whether more people took religious belief literally, or if they just said they did for political and social reasons.

Christmas is a major part of economics.

> The bicameral theory of mind has been thoroughly discredited.

Sure it claims way too much, but I don’t think every nearby direction is discredited. That would mean everyone in history had the exact same theory of unitary consciousness we do (that we have free will, our actions come after conscious thought, there’s a conscious/subconscious/unconscious or id/ego/superego, dreams come from our own memories, etc.)

There’s a lot of Buddhists out there to this day, and they do officially belong to a religion with a you-don’t-exist policy. How this is integrated with resurrection depends on the lineage of course.

Myself I just want to know if the Babylonians were taught math by a fish alien named Oannes. Maybe he can tell us if P=NP.

I'm not sure I've ever seen "literal mindedness" argued like this in recent works? Do you have any papers or books you could point to where an archeologist or historian argues this?

Most of the recent academic work I'm familiar with tends to emphasize the opposite case, tempered by the fact that ancient religion and culture tend to be very alien. Take, for instance, popular reviews by Irving Finkel in his "Noah" book, or Ed Barnhart's work on the Moche, etc.

Well, I am a working professional historian of the premodern world, and this is certainly my impression from years of reading Chinese-language primary sources about China during the Shang, Zhou, Qin, and Han dynasties. Spend some time with the literature, and you'll read how Mohists coupled careful logic and quasi-scientistic reasoning with "ghosts who will punish you if you're bad," about how Han dynasty tomb exterior-door inscriptions talk extensively about how the decedent's family loves them but earnestly hopes to never, ever see them again, because if they did it would mean the decedent left their tomb to punish them for their unfilial conduct. (And you'll read how gingerly the subject of human sacrifice in the distant past, or emperors indulging itinerant "Daoist" rainmakers, to the considerable chagrin of more secular-minded officials, is handled.) I can't point to anything synoptic on the Chinese case -- early China scholars tend to make a lot (frankly too much) out of a little (we don't have that many texts -- but Herbert Fingarette's "Confucius: The Secular as Sacred" was formative for all the early China people I studied with on a more intellectual register. One controversy that gets lots of play: whether Confucius urged performing the rituals "as if" the dead were present, or if they were actually present. Linguistically, the phrasing is entirely open to the latter, even if people like to make the thinking presented in the "Analects" out to be more modern-seeming. At the risk of giving too much of a peek behind the curtain, so to speak, broadly speaking -- this being several decades since Foucault made his mark -- careers get made by either emphasizing the past's surprising lack of alterity or by finding some spectacular, flamboyantly surprising new form of alterity. And the former is rather easier to pull off than the latter.

But, I read about the piles of genitalia in Toby Wilkinson's "The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt" and about the god-statues in Trevor Bryce's "Babylonia: A Very Short Introduction."

Sounds like I have reading to do! I guess I really just take exception with the claim that the currently living are any more (or less) literal than our (distant) ancestors. For instance: my wife wants to get two, adjacent, cemetary plots so that we can "be together after we die, and our kids can visit us easily." I want to be mulched. Where I'm living, now, the number of Biblical literalists isn't a "quirky few" its the bulk of the people; these aren't hicks, either: this is one if the wealthier exurbs in the country.

> grotesquely over-endowed

Download almost any anime-style game off the Google Play store and you'll see the exact same thing

Yeah, that's why I hesitated to include it on the list, but I don't think such representations are very common in religious contexts today (and these statues do seem to have been religiously significant, e.g. all the Venus statues from prehistoric Europe and the Middle East)

Reading about Çatalhüyük (thanks autocorrect for making it properly squiggly) I was struck by how actually different it seems to have been despite being city-shaped.

There aren’t streets, rather everyone supposedly traveled on top of everyone else’s roofs. There were family homes but not public buildings. And they buried their dead family members right inside their own houses and sometimes kept their skulls out for decoration.

I warmly recommend to anyone interested in this line of thought James Scott's "Against the grain" for oldest evidence of the first agrarian states in the middle east.

"Against the grain" points out that it's not obvious as number of people increases everyone wants to live in cities ruled over and taxed by someone else.

"I think it’s pretty clear that sophisticated societies existed long before recorded history."

If you mean beyond 12k years or so I would not say it's "pretty clear". I would go as far and say it's psychologically and biologically feasible, but we have no evidence to back this up.

What archaeological evidence does prove, is that arrival of anything resembling civilization was a shambolic affair lasting thousands of years, composed of waxing and waning city-sized polities that could at maximum control only few tens of square kilometers of area.

What we do have are sites like Göbekli Tepe at max 12 000 years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

The arrival of agricultural plants is around the same time during Neolithic Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution

I think you would need to expand on the meaning of "sophisticated". I don't want to presume your intent with the use of this word.

But, a hunter gatherer society looks quite a lot different from an agricultural society.

Of course the people living in a hunter gatherer society could very well be artistically and philosophically very developed. But the likelihood of an "Atlantean supercivilization" would be very small.

I think both options are pretty cool. As a species we have a history of 200 000 years. Either our past is riddled with complex emergent societies that have been ground to dust, forgotten, only for the cycle to start again a new over and over again over thousands of years. And only on our current cycle we've managed to start to reach the full potential of our species.

Or, there have not been "civilizational cycles" which would make our anthropocene epoch with it's industrialization and science something even more mind blowingly astonishing.

Both options are humbling.

Isn't the theory that agriculture meant some book-keeping was needed, to keep track of the seasons and when to plant. This book-keeping then caused the development of writing in general. And writing caused the birth of inter-generational memory and the ability to accumulate knowledge. Of course oral histories can be cross-generational as well, but writing is much more efficient storage medium than human brain alone. Writing allows human brains to co-operate over vast geographical distances and time-scales.

Oral history seems to be surprisingly robust. As an anecdote Socrates was critical of how writing makes you forget things.

https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-...

I think bookkeeping may be a related catalyst. But it's primary use seems more for inter-societal trade (settling accounts), than intra-societal education.

Bookkeeping is not the only prerequisite for written language, e.g. in the new world, sophisticated bookkeeping mechanisms existed for centuries without written language.

We can only go by what we know and what we have evidence for. Sure, other small civs likely existed, but we don't have known evidence of them and their history, etc. At most we have tombs and archeological ruins to go by. So we go with the earliest civs for whom we have written evidence as well as lots of physical evidence for in addition to present-day influence. Otherwise things start to get very speculative.

Yeah we shouldn't say we "know" that advanced civilizations existed, but there's nothing wrong with hypothesizing that they did. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

But we must also be careful not to get into Russel's teapot territory in the course of our hypothesizing.

Plato wrote about it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timaeus_(dialogue)

“Let me begin by observing, first of all, that nine thousand was the sum of years which had elapsed since the war which was said to have taken place between all those who dwelt outside the Pillars of Heracles and those who dwelt within them: this war I am now to describe.

Of the combatants on the one side the city of Athens was reported to have been the ruler, and to have directed the contest; the combatants on the other side were led by the kings of the islands of Atlantis,”

> We can only go by what we know and what we have evidence for

There is nuance here, in the degree to which uncertainty due to lack of evidence is surfaced in scientific communications for the public.

Take for instance, the behavior of dogs. Science cannot [yet] objectively answer the question of how much the subjective qualia of a dog is comparable to the qualia of humans. What then can we say about whether dogs feel 'love'? Some might say that science has not yet answered this question; that is fine.

But others get overeager and assert that because science hasn't demonstrated that dogs feel love, the scientific position is to assume all apparent demonstrations of love from dogs are little more than elaborate food seeking behavior. This goes too far, it assumes a lack of evidence is evidence to the contrary, implicitly treating science as complete until proven otherwise. I think this overzealous sort of 'scientific' thinking reflects a dogmatic attitude which is actually antithetical to the real scientific method.

It’s a great point.

When you get to the edge of knowledge, ignoring obvious things and glossing over tends to rule the day.

Knowing what we know about people, it seems absurd to think that people just went poof, “civilization” has arrived! There were a lot fewer humans in the past, and hundreds of generations are lost to time. But the narrative of the pageant of history, often leading to the <insert nation here> greatness of today doesn’t work with “I don’t know”

Well, it would seem like the middle way would be to postulate things such as these but not assert them as 'received knowledge'. And just as we might postulate that dogs can experience love, we can also postulate the opposite and discuss both without giving one a preponderance of support till we can develop such support.

There's strong evidence that some animals, at least, process visual stimuli similarly to humans, as illustrated by cats responding to the "rotating snakes" illusion:

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=CcXXQ6GCUb8

And if you pause to consider that emotions, particularly such core and foundational ones as love (maternal, partner, tribal) are all but certainly evolved, then existence of them or precursors in other species seems all but certain. That thought had occurred to Charles Darwin, who wrote a book on the question, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.175687

The ice age itself would have had glaciers grinding down all evidence to nothing. Even our metal based structures would not withstand it very well over a few thousand years.

I agree that it doesn't make sense for there to be a single 6,000 year time period of human prosperity and collaboration, its much more likely that there have been multiple periods over a 200,000 time span. Perhaps some traits in humans continually set us back to a rudimentary lifestyle with thinned populations.

A good chance that the glaciers might have also grounded whole societies as well

Oh yes, any number of things could be less conducive to human life or a large population.

I’m just thinking war tactics and war machines keep it in check too.

Eh, that doesn't get you much. Glaciers weigh heavy on the minds of North Americans and Northern Europeans, but they didn't reach much further -- no civilization south of, say, 40N would be obliterated by the glaciers themselves such that we would expect no trace to remain today.

Sea level change would be a bigger global risk, but aside from sudden flooding, you would expect that to just push back an established civilization to the uplands of their territories rather than wiping them out root and branch.

The fact that civilisations tend to cluster near shorelines and waterways means that the impacts of sea level rise would likely be quite significant. Particularly at eliminating incidental traces of, say, groups or cultures migrating along such coastlines. I suspect virtually all of the early migrations of native Americans would be so affected, especially along the west coast of the Americas.

> Even our metal based structures would not withstand it very well over a few thousand years.

Well, not steel framed buildings or anything like that. But our modern civilization has certainly done things that I think stand a good chance of lasting hundreds of millions of years. Take for instance glass bottles. Those tossed into the ocean won't last more than a few decades before they're eroded to nothing (see: sea glass), but we've created so many glass bottles and distributed them so far and wide, it is virtually certain that many of them will survive in the soil for a very very long time. There is no doubt that glass can last for millions of years under the right conditions; there is a lot of volcanic glass around that attests to this. There are so many glass bottles in landfills or littered around the world, at least some of them are certain to be in geologically stable conditions.

Then there are things like mountaintop removal mining. Maybe normal quarries get filled in and hidden over time, but there's no hiding the top of a mountain being sliced right off.

Humans were not mass manufacturing things back then, and there were orders of magnitude less people.

On top of that, we don't even have exact knowledge of where to look. Most places we do discover have plenty of signs and evidence, they are just buried under 10ft of dirt and thus essentially undiscoverable.

> Humans were not mass manufacturing things back then

Ah, but how do you know that? You weren't there. ;)

Sometimes the absence of evidence really is evidence to the contrary, but other times it isn't. It all depends on whether or not it's reasonable to expect evidence to be found given the amount of looking we've done and the nature of the evidence we're looking for. If we don't find a ton of glass coke bottles in the soil around the world, after digging around in innumerable construction sites on almost every corner of the globe, that's strong evidence that nobody was mass manufacturing coke bottles 50k years ago.

Contrast that with the lack of evidence for ancient wooden sailing vessels. We don't have any evidence of wooden ships 50k years ago. But supposing there were a shipbuilding culture back then, would we really expect to find evidence for it? All those wood artifacts would be LONG gone, even the oldest bog wood ever found is less than 10k years old. In this case, the absence of evidence is weak evidence to the contrary at best.

Old things aren't necessarily that far under our feet. I've excavated 4,000 year old sites under a couple inches of dirt, and found 10,000+ year old artifacts on the surface.

Early civilizations did not appear out of nothing 6000 years ago. The earliest evidence of cereal harvesting in the Middle East is from 23000 years ago. The transition from hunting and gathering to sedentary farming communities took over 10000 years, and those communities needed thousands of years to grow into large sophisticated cities.

It's also good to remember that there has been an ice age for the last 2.5 million years. The climate is generally too cold and dry for agriculture, except during relatively short interglacial periods. Maybe there was an opportunity for a civilization to develop in the Eemian period 130k to 115k years ago, but that was likely the only window of opportunity.

Were that the case we'd have evidence of the "Material culture" of these cultures, yet we do not. Conversely, we have literally TONS of archaeological evidence of Neolithic hunter-gatherer people spread across the entire world during these so called "Lost ages" so personally I think it's preposterous to assume that somehow some advanced civilization that left absolutely ZERO trace of it's supposed grandeur existed beside a hunter-gatherer civilization for which we have plenty of archaeological evidence.

It's a certainly fun through experiment to think of some lost ancient civilization with glittering cities and high technology that was ground down to dust by the last ice-age, but there's literally no factual evidence to support such a notion and plenty of factual evidence to disprove it, so it's best not to get sucked too far down that particular irrational rabbit-hole.

This fits a pattern in science: the further we look, the more we find.

First we thought the Earth was the center of the universe. Then we thought it was just our solar system. Then we thought the Milky Way Galaxy was the whole of the universe. Some astronomers persisted in this belief all the way up to the 1920s. Now...

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field#Hubble...

... and we've just launched the JWST which will be able to see a lot further than Hubble.

Gobekli Tepe pushed the date for civilization back a few thousand years:

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

It'll probably get pushed back some more. Also I've always thought there are too many flood myths around the world for it to be chance. No I don't think there was a true global flood since it makes no sense, but the end of the ice age would have brought sea level rise and enormous regional floods due to things like the bursting of glacial dams. This would have occurred over the same period of time across the world, leaving behind traces in myth and legend but also physically destroying a lot of evidence of civilizations in the path of these disasters.

Your suppositions are interesting, but there's simply no proof of them.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Unfortunately most of the (probable) evidence is under meters of water and mud.

But also untouched. Maybe we'll find a way to dig up evidence in the future...

Is there such a thing as "evidence of absence"?

I'm thinking that would be demonstrating that there cannot be evidence.

It's called a contradiction and it can only exist in the realms of logic.

As long as it has been investigated scientifically, then "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is actually not correct. To my understanding that is exactly how particle physics research is conducted.

My understanding is that there is no evidence for pre-historic human societies that had advanced technologies. We have hard data in our genetics for the timeframes of human existence (statistical rate of random genetic drift vs nearest ancestors) in addition to the fossil record, we have good information from ice cores about when/what of particulates were in the atmosphere, we know general rates of tectonic movements , and it's easy to observe what's under kilometers of strata with drilling cores if anyone has a good hypothesis as to where to drill.

Why is the default assumption that since we can't prove humans had sophisticated and complex lives comparable to our own, that we must assume they are simpletons. Their minds were no less capable of our own, why shouldn't we assume they had complex morals and social structures?

Because that's how we differentiate science from theology.

Hard disagree here. There's a lot of differences between science and theology. There is nothing divine or holy about potential past civilizations.

Divine/Holy are how powerful people prevent others from questioning things. I didn't mention Divine or Holy, just theology.

The core difference between Science and Theology is how they deal with statements of "truth" without evidence.

Theology starts with "it's true because I said so"

Science starts with "it's true because I can demonstrate it"

That humans were complex in the past is a good hypothesis. It needs evidence before it can be accepted as fact, or even necessarily expect respect from others. The lack of recent skull changes would seem to be a good start.

If someone believes the hypothesis to be true, they will go explore and find evidence to back their claims. If there was a complex society in the English Channel, it's likely well preserved, just waiting to be found!

>Theology starts with "it's true because I said so"

To believe this is to cut yourself off from an unfathomably rich collection of human knowledge, and it is sad to see someone committed to it.

Except, that's what it literally is.

God speaks to someone. That someone says "It's true because God told me so."

I have read religious works, I'm not cut off from them. It's impossible to be cut off from theology in the USA. However, they all start with "it is true because I (the author) say so".

Because complex social structures tend to be innovations and inventions similar to those in the physical realm. It thus stands to reason that a 'social evolution' has taken place over the millennia, and there's ample evidence of that progress in the world around you. No one says prehistoric humans were individually simpletons, just that societally they were far simpler (as in strictly less advanced).

Please specify, what do you mean by "less advanced"? I doubt a randomly picked person has a more complex net of social interactions today than 50,000 years ago - probably the personal level is a lot simpler today, since we can outsource many needs to corporate and national structures, with whom you also have pretty straightforward relations.

"I doubt a randomly picked person has a more complex net of social interactions today than 50,000 years ago..." Why? 50k years ago the average person lived with a small group of people and barely ever interacted with anyone else in the world. Whereas the common person, today, interacts with a large number of people socially; if you include virtual and physical interactions.

> Why? 50k years ago the average person lived with a small group of people and barely ever interacted with anyone else in the world.

I think at least some of the people in this thread would argue against that, seeing as how it is about the idea of advanced or at least extant cities in the distant past. That would be exactly one of the points being argued on.

Yes, by simple count the social net may have been smaller in the past, but I was talking about complexity. Just imagine living with one tribe for the rest of your life, having to partake in everyone managing each other's friendships and relationships with each other.

What you mean isn't something many of the relevant experts would agree with, but the words in the second sentence aren't bad.

Similarly to biological evolution, on any sufficiently long time scale the descendents aren't more advanced, simply better adapted to different conditions. Our ancestors' societies reflected wildly different contraints and path dependence, not primitiveness.

>Similarly to biological evolution, on any sufficiently long time scale the descendents aren't more advanced, simply better adapted to different conditions. Our ancestors' societies reflected wildly different contraints and path dependence, not primitiveness.

I understand what you mean, yet I refuse to call concepts like universal human rights, rule of law and the unacceptability of war crimes as simply different adaptations, as opposed to being strictly more advanced than the predecessor ideas.

That's fine, you can take whatever moral stance you want. It just doesn't have any place in scientific discussion.

And in the absence of proof, the simplest assumption would be that humans then were just as human, and so had sophisticated societies etc.

A simpler alternative assumption could be this:

1. sophistication is driven by specialization

2. the ability to specialize is driven by access to surplus energy

3. before the advent of agriculture bands of humans simply did not have the excess calories available to them to support a priesthood and philosophers and bureaucrats, etc.

> sophistication is driven by specialization

Sophisticated technology is driven that way for sure, Sophisticated culture, I would argue, does not have those preconditions.

That is definitively not a simpler assumption. Each of those bullet points is itself a new assumption.

Or maybe they simply choose to not spend those excess calories on philosophers and bureaucrats because doing so provided no immediate benefit? We have evidence showing that the rise of civilization and agriculture were a net negative for an average individual. It seems that at least in Egypt and Mesopotamia climate change, specifically an end of warmer and wetter climatic cycle, is what pushed people into fertile river valley. Most people would had probably preferred to remain hunter gatherers had that been possible or even independent farmers (which is what happened in the rest of the world.

The people in Mesopotamia (and in other similar areas which were slowly turning into a desert) didn't really have a choice. Building and maintaining irrigation systems takes a lot of people and coordination. Since most would probably prefer to be the ones handling 'coordination' aspect rather than digging trenches in the mud priests and philosopher classes had to appear to maintain social cohesion. It's much easier to convince peasants to give X% their harvest to the local strongman when they know that he's an divinely appointed king or maybe even a living god himself.

Actually I think platos account of Atlantis and how it coincides with the dates of the flood is evidence. How could he have known the exact years back of the flood? Sure it’s shaky, but the geology checks out.

There's actually pretty solid archaeological evidence of at least the cognitive capacities which would prefigure in civilisation through toolmaking and their complexity.

This is a long but highly informative presentation by Sander van der Leeuw from 2012:

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=pOyQqPi28ug

Relevant segment begins at about 8m30s.

> This idea that humanity sprang up out of nothing in Sumerian/Babylon is very contrived.

I don't think anyone believe that's the case? It's just what we have records for. You need a lot of prior development to arrive to the point where you have recorded history.

Eh, maybe no one who's thought critically about it, but past the "earth is 6,000 years old" crowd I think you'll find a "cilization is 10,000 years old, before which we were hunter gatherers" crowd

I think most people are just repeating what they learned as children and haven't given it much more thought. So the answer is usually some combination of religious influences, when you were schooled, and what textbook your teacher was using.

In 2008, this is what a certain group in Hollywood thought 10,000 B.C. was like... anachronisms and all.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10,000_BC_(film)

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