This is a continuation of many findings in this direction. It's wonderful to imagine the many societies humans have created, and sad that we'll be able to learn so little about them.
Its believed that homo sapiens have been around for at least 300,000 years and yet we think almost all of that was entirely without civilization.
We find fossil records of dinosaurs but we have little to no evidence of what would have been before them, presumably there was an extinction event prior to them as well.
It seems foolish to think we are the latest incarnation of the only chain of civilization that had ever happened on Earth.
Depends what you call civilization. If there was a civilization what happened to it and why did it leave no trace.
> We find fossil records of dinosaurs but we have little to no evidence of what would have been before them, presumably there was an extinction event prior to them as well.
Actually we do have evidence of what came before them, and there were extinction events.
> It seems foolish to think we are the latest incarnation of the only chain of civilization that had ever happened on Earth.
We might not know about previous civilizations (that is the point of the Silurian Hypothesis - a lot of traces will disappear over time) but we have no evidence that there was any previous civilization, or of any sufficiently intelligent animal to build one. The oldest stone tools we have found are only about 3m years old.
It does a lot to talk about modern anthropological studies that corrected a lot of misconceptions about early humans. Really fascinating book, basically postulates that humans have always been imaginative social creatures that were routinely well travelled; and the idea that early humans weren't also politically or culturally advance is wrong. In fact some societies were purposely designed to ensure things like hierarchy wouldn't exist for example; these societies persisted for thousands of years.
Really interesting book.
> At its apex around 1100 AD, the city [Cahokia] covered about 6 square miles (16 km2), included about 120 earthworks in a wide range of sizes, shapes, and functions, and had a population of between 15,000 and 20,000 people.[5][a]
> During the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, the population of the city of Rome is conventionally estimated at one million inhabitants.
And there are much better examples according to some sources of large cities in the Americas than Cahokia.
> Hernan Cortés arrived in Tenochtitlan on 8 November 1519. Although there are no precise numbers, the city's population has been estimated at between 200,000 and 400,000 inhabitants,[27] placing Tenochtitlan among the largest cities in the world at that time.[28] Compared to the cities of Europe, only Paris, Venice and Constantinople might have rivaled it.
> In the 9th and 10th centuries, Constantinople had a population of between 500,000 and 800,000.[60]
> With the restoration of firm central government, the empire became fabulously wealthy. The population was rising (estimates for Constantinople in the 12th century vary from some 100,000 to 500,000), and towns and cities across the realm flourished.
> Kaifeng-Dongjing became largest and most prosperous city in China, with a population of over 400,000 living both inside and outside the city wall. The historian Jacques Gernet provides a lively picture of life in this period in his Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250-1276, which often draws on Dongjing Meng Hua Lu, a nostalgic memoir of the city.[14]
> Around 750 AD, Chang'an was called a "million-man city" in Chinese records; most modern estimates put the population within the walls of the Tang city at around 800,000–1,000,000.[1]
https://www.jstor.org/stable/482790?seq=1 Read this paper and the contemporary accounts and tell me that's not slavery.
>To modern Westerners, the use of such a kinship metaphor suggests and is believed to reflect genuine nurturing and closeness; however, in Africa and elsewhere it conveys an entirely different meaning: authority and subordination.
>Villagers, forming a gauntlet and armed with clubs, fire-brands, sticks, and other weapons, greeted the prisoners and rained down on these hapless individuals blows designed to inflict pain but not to kill This was often followed by torture and public humiliation and then deliverance to the grieving families, whose "matrons then chose either to adopt or to execute them," or both
If you look at pages 11-13, there's a discussion of ritual torture to prevent captives from escaping. 13-14 deal with the torture and execution of unruly captives. 15-16 deal with the etymological relationship between "slave" and "pet/livestock" in Iroquonian languages like Mohawk. Pages 17 and 18 discuss people preferring suicide to capture and the sexual exploitation of female captives.
>The ways in which captives were treated differed widely among Native American groups. Captives could be enslaved for life, killed, or adopted. In some cases, captives were only adopted after a period of slavery. For example, the Iroquoian peoples (not just the Iroquois tribes) often adopted captives, but for religious reasons there was a process, procedures, and many seasons when such adoptions were delayed until the proper spiritual times.
>In the cultural practices of the Iroquoian peoples, also rooted in a matrilineal system with men and women having equal value, any child would have the status determined by the woman's clan. More typically, tribes took women and children captives for adoption, as they tended to adapt more easily into new ways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_among_Native_Americans...
I suggest you try to read it at least once. It's almost incomprehensible.
Rigveda would be around 1500Bce. Even Sumerian cuneiform would be far older at 3000 bce. If you want oldest oral records, some Australian aboriginal stories would be the ones at 8000 bce
The Sumerian tablets are likely older, but they were forgotten and then re-deciphered. The transliterations still carry educated choices made by a scholar (there's only so much you can do when the record breaks for a long time).
Meanwhile, we know exactly how people spoke those early vedas because there is a tradition that keeps chanting it, without stopping, since before it was written down. That chanting has error correction mechanisms, redundancy and other impressive features that further place the Rigveda in a unique place among earlier works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padapatha
> The oral tradition of the Vedas (Śruti) consists of several pathas, "recitations" or ways of chanting the Vedic mantras. Such traditions of Vedic chant are often considered the oldest unbroken oral tradition in existence, the fixation of the Vedic texts (samhitas) as preserved dating to roughly the time of Homer (early Iron Age or 800 BC).
https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/tradition-of-vedic-chanting-000...
> The value of this tradition lies not only in the rich content of its oral literature but also in the ingenious techniques employed by the Brahmin priests in preserving the texts intact over thousands of years. To ensure that the sound of each word remains unaltered, practitioners are taught from childhood complex recitation techniques that are based on tonal accents, a unique manner of pronouncing each letter and specific speech combinations.
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It's not some obscure thing, a web search will yield tons of quality information about it.
This is a fascinating idea.
> and even archeological evidence is lacking.
A couple million years and your surface will be forever lost under a subduction zone. There is little sign of a global civilisation predating humans, but there is plenty spacetime for smaller societies that would have completely disappeared without a trace.
That there were non-human civilizations before the dinosaurs?
Do you consider ants/bees to have civilizations or is it just humans currently?
Or do you mean that there were human civilizations in the prehistory? And what do you mean by that – is it foolish to think that they were hunter gatherers for hundreds of years?
I don't mean to make strawmans, that's why I'm asking.
I don't consider animals to have civilizations simply for having complex groups (ants or bees, for example). Though separately they do absolutely have emotions, family bonds, and long memories. My cows have proven that, each one is a different personality with their own clicks among the herd, and each cow treats the me and my wife differently so its not like "this one's always mean, this one wants to be petted" etc.