This 12-year-old article (https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/digging-up-a-new-past/) by Carnes Lord (straying a bit from his usual beat of political philosophy and strategic studies) speculates about the emergence of advanced science and technology much earlier than the conventional wisdom would hold possible. When I read the article, it stuck me as crankery in the Chariots of the Gods mold, but I had to admit that I was just following the conventional wisdom, and if recent years have taught us anything, it's not to blindly trust the conventional wisdom. Unfortunately, I'm not competent to evaluate the arguments for and against Lord's thesis, so I'll just have to remain agnostic on the subject.
Gobeleki Tepi, the Sphinx and the pyramids suggest that there was some sort of a civilation that was destroyed prior to the Younger Dryas. It may have been largely maritime in nature leaving all traces of it submerged by the rising ocean. Underwater archeology is notoriously difficult. What we know will always be just a fraction of what we don't.
People might have lived in the Black Sea that is now underwater. There's a decent chance it got inundated by the Mediterranean breakthrough at Constantinople over the last 10,000 years. Noah's Ark? Atlantis?
Not quite as old but, apparently, the shoreline of the Persian gulf was much further south and moved rapidly in the 5th millennium bc. The Sumerians are described in myth as bringing civilization out of the sea (and new dna confirms what we already expected about Mesopotamian influence in predynastic Egypt). Maybe there are older cities in the bottom of the gulf?
Graham Hancock and his amazingly entertaining Netflix show have pissed a lot of archaeologists. Imagine slowly sweeping to reveal ancient artifacts in sweltering heat only to be outshined by Joe Rogans buddy .
I find them credible. But it's way outside my expertise (Renaissance and Modern American poetry, crime law, and recidivism statistics). On the other hand, I know extremely smart STEM people who quit when they were comfortable and started an excellent and fair nonprofit using satellites to record important, threatened sites from space (such as Buddhist temples before they were destroyed by the Taliban and other commie terrorists). They used computer technology to show far earlier settlements beneath known settlements of relatively 2-4 thousand years. So convince me briefly, in simple terms. I will pass your critique to them, anonymously if you wish, and report back. They are trustworthy. Or I can put you in touch with them. I find Hancock's theories to be correct and the rejectism merely example 10,000 of academic maoism and groupthink. "Peer review." Tenure-defence?
The more Neanderthals et al are shown to have acted like homo sapiens and interbred with homo sapiens the less and less support there is for the theory that homo sapiens 'evolved' as opposed to simply being the earliest record of a genocide.
Killing off males of the conquered tribe, or killing the whole vanquished tribe was extremely common in ancient times. One just has to accept it that then it was a fact of life. Beyond that, I don't think cromagnon and neanderthal interbred well. Otherwise, we would see more than 2% neanderthal genome preserved in modern humans.
The fact of 2% suggest that we see the effects of "lucky mischlings surviving" despite partially incompatible genomes. Like an occasionally luckily fertile mule as a result of a horse x donkey crossing. Same for denisovans. But maybe neandertal x denisovan crossing was more compatible.
Interesting comment. I would guess that weaker tribes moved to the worst, inaccessible areas due to fear of being destroyed. Although we acknowledge that the Apaches were a fierce people, they were usually restricted to the inhospitable desert. The Indians that crossed from Siberia to Alaska were probably defeated tribes on the run.
As for killing off the males, when the agricultural revolution began, it probably made more sense to make slaves out of defeated tribes than kill them off. Were young women made into concubines for the winning tribe?
The Yamnaya (Indo-European steppe conquerors) may have started off in, say, Ukraine, as river valley dwellers, but then they either saw the future was on the uplands or, more likely, were forced out of the river valleys and had to invent a way of living on the steppe, which led to them conquering much of the world.
Fertile conquered women usually became lower status wives. Their offspring had little claim to inheritance - this was for example the story of Judge Yephtah in the Book of Judges.
Male slaves - that depended on how much additional manpower was needed.
No because Upper Palaeolithic Eurasian modern humans carry more Neanderthal DNA (about 4–5%) than present-day Eurasian modern humans (about 1–2%). This suggests that Neanderthal genes were selected against at a later period.
Hesitant on the factuality of boiling. Where is the evidence for pottery or metal containers? Maybe they just heated things by burying something in sand and made a longer going fire over it?
You can boil water in bark or skin containers or hollowed out logs by dropping heated stones in the water. You can actually boil water in a paper cup over an open flame. ( Not claiming prehistoric paper cups were a thing.)
The key question is not so much if it boils 2-3 seconds but 1h or more. The problem with boiling is that evaporation of water is an extremely energy consuming process, compared to the heat capacity of stones. You drop a really hot stone into water and couple of minutes later boiling stops.
Funny, I was just thinking about the Doggerland as Atlantis theory today. If there's anywhere that underwater archeology might be fruitful, the Dogger Bank and the Black Sea might be worth the effort.
Comment on X: "guy 10,000 years from now putting lead and plastic in his food for the "Anthropocene Diet", eaten by his ancestors who built the Bass Pro Shops Pyramids and the Great Underwater City of Miami".
The History Channel had that "Life After People" series in 2008 that ludicrously imagined concrete and steel would start disappearing after 50-100 years. Wikipedia said a new installment came out this month.
For a long time almost all Mesoamericanists, Andeanists, and New World archeological anthropologists have been concerned to present Pre-Columbian civilizations as entirely indigenous achievements, created from scratch with zero contact with the Eastern Hemisphere other than a few smidgens of “mental software” (in Linda Schiele’s phrase) brought across the Bering Strait thousands of years ago. But lately there are stirrings of careful studies that, in my amateur’s assessment, show close to conclusively that early on and well into what in Mesoamerican studies is called the Post-Classic era (900–1521). North and South American Indians at least communicated with Asians and -- especially on the basis of botanical affinities -- probably traded with them. Exchanges of stuff and ideas may have been restricted to castal merchantmen, with more than a couple “degrees of separation” as goods moved into Indian hands.
To generalize, scholars adopted the no-contact premise not just because amateur fantasy promoters concocted hundreds of popular contact theories even before Joseph Smith adapted them into a winning franchise, but because it seemed to put the Indians down. What if the reading public concluded, falsely, that the red man never invented anything? My rejoinder to this – and so far I haven’t found anyone else saying the same -- is that proclaiming that early seafarers were too dim or timid to navigate their (in fact quite large) vessels a few hundred miles along the often calm and resource-rich Pacific Coasts is putting THEM down.
Of course, the smartest of all post-war anthropologists was onto this seventy years ago:
"It is difficult to understand the origins of the American civilizations, unless we accept the hypothesis that all along the Pacific seaboard – both in Asia and America – intense activity was in progress for several thousands of years, and was spread from one area to another by boats moving along the coasts. Once, we refused to allow pre-Columbian America an historical dimension, simply because post-Columbian America had none. We now perhaps have to correct a second mistake, which consists in assuming that America remained cut off from the world as a whole for twenty thousand years, because it was separated from Western Europe. Everything would seem to suggest rather that the deep silence on the Atlantic side was offset by a buzz of activity all along the Pacific coasts."
Thor Hyerdall proved that maritime travel from south America to Oceania was possible but I think any sort of trade between the Americas and Asia before the age of sail is a stretch.
Yes, most of Hyerdall's notions have been debunked, although there's some botanical evidence, especially regarding sweet potatoes, that there may have been some contact, maybe even accidental.
As a lad, though, I loved "Kon-Tiki" and also the small chain of preposterously gaudy South-Seas fantasy restaurants named after it, Kon-Tiki Ports. Just bring me a giant tropical coconutty punch alcohol-free cocktail in a hollowed-out pineapple sitting in a smoking dish of dry ice and bristling with giant-size straws, plastic swords, tiny working paper parasols, and a backscratcher with a handle in the shape of some malevolent volcano demon. Gosh-wow breathstopping psychodellicious hallucinatorientalist FUN!
Yes, absolutely, and archaeological and linguistic anthropologists have shown unequivocally that this is what happened. It seems likely that if there were a few voyages in the other direction, they were either one-offs by daredevils or fugitives or simply mistakes. Boats can get blown bizarrely off course in the Pacific typhoons -- for instance, into the 19th century, every decade a Japanese junk or two would turn up on the California or Oregon coast.
And, just to represent the pop or pulp side of the issue --
“KNOW, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars — Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs..."
-- Robert E. Howard, "The Phoenix and the Sword", 'Weird Tales' Magazine, December, 1922: Delphi, Collected Works of Robert E. Howard, Kindle Edition
NB. This story introduces an immortal character loved around the world by young and old: CONAN THE BARBARIAN!
I like the casual assumption that ten thousand years from now, "Phoenix, Las Vegas, Riyadh, Johannesburg, and hundreds of smaller cities" will all be moldering ruins. Climate change, I suppose.
Ahead-of-their-time inventions are both fascinating and worrisome. What have WE not invented that we need need need now now now? Car, truck, &c. wheels that turn 45 degrees so you can just slide sideways into parking spaces? Adequately-functional combination washer/dryers? A truly universal cable connector? But let’s look back --
First place: ; Hero of Alexandria's working steam engine, the aeolipile, which never got beyond the executive desk toy phase.
Maybe the problem was the name.
If Hero had been as bold as HIS name and gotten free samples to some of the early-adopting military/industrial proto-technocrats in the officer corps, the ugly pudgy cutetsy whistling Pokemonish inky-dink little gizmo might have kickstarted the Industrial Revolution in the first century CE, when it might have done some good.
There’s been a lot of loose talk lately about how after fifteen hundred years of putting up with crumbly flaky rotten grainy crackly crusty and ugly-as-deformity-itself cement, engineers are investigating Classical Roman concrete, which like Bounty Paper Towels really is superior in durability to the other leading brands. It also resists stress better and, mysteriously-until-recently, the glop actually gets STRONGER the longer it sits around -- like the Pantheon dome, going on 2000 and still a destination feature without visible wear. Evidently the secret ingredient was volcanic ash (which in convergent-tectonic-activity hotspot Italy they must have had more than enough to get the hell rid of anywy) plus some sort of superastable calcium-aluminium-silicate-hydrate compound that binds the stuff to itself for apparently ever. We were planning to build my tomb out of Travertine marble, but I’m switching to this more economical matter.
Finally we should give a nod to the infamous vunderveapon called Greek Fire,a napalm-like concoction that kept Constantinople unconquered for centuries. The secret and now-lost recipe may have included naphtha, quicklime, sulfur, nitrate, a pinch of rudimentary gunpowder, and of course the golden fresh-scented pine resin that made it stick unremovably to wood, armor, and especially skin. Naval and anti-siege units of the Eastern Roman Empire, spewing it out of an array of sort of giant bellows-and-and-bladder contraptions with siphons and pumps and like spirit lamps on the brass nozzels, could convert a 150-foot five-deck 400-man quinquereme into charcoal briquettes in ten minutes. The weapon may also have had some psychological effect: it was said that soldiers facing an onrushing fifty-foot cone of thousand-plus-degrees blinding solid flame could sometimes became discouraged and less responsive to “stand your ground”-type commands.
And there are more great ideas that didn’t take off -- and more, and more…
Older versions of concrete, now encased by in mesh by thickness, are regularly used in large drainage, road, and factory wall building. I can't wait until it hits the general housing and farming market.
This 12-year-old article (https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/digging-up-a-new-past/) by Carnes Lord (straying a bit from his usual beat of political philosophy and strategic studies) speculates about the emergence of advanced science and technology much earlier than the conventional wisdom would hold possible. When I read the article, it stuck me as crankery in the Chariots of the Gods mold, but I had to admit that I was just following the conventional wisdom, and if recent years have taught us anything, it's not to blindly trust the conventional wisdom. Unfortunately, I'm not competent to evaluate the arguments for and against Lord's thesis, so I'll just have to remain agnostic on the subject.
Trust in Lord
Gobeleki Tepi, the Sphinx and the pyramids suggest that there was some sort of a civilation that was destroyed prior to the Younger Dryas. It may have been largely maritime in nature leaving all traces of it submerged by the rising ocean. Underwater archeology is notoriously difficult. What we know will always be just a fraction of what we don't.
People might have lived in the Black Sea that is now underwater. There's a decent chance it got inundated by the Mediterranean breakthrough at Constantinople over the last 10,000 years. Noah's Ark? Atlantis?
Not quite as old but, apparently, the shoreline of the Persian gulf was much further south and moved rapidly in the 5th millennium bc. The Sumerians are described in myth as bringing civilization out of the sea (and new dna confirms what we already expected about Mesopotamian influence in predynastic Egypt). Maybe there are older cities in the bottom of the gulf?
Graham Hancock and his amazingly entertaining Netflix show have pissed a lot of archaeologists. Imagine slowly sweeping to reveal ancient artifacts in sweltering heat only to be outshined by Joe Rogans buddy .
Good thing he's filled with the true intellect's joy of knowing. Considering how he was treated, a lesser person would be mired in Schadenfreude.
Hancock believe in DMT aliens and Martians.
Hancock has always been unable to define his civilization. All his evidence are shady at best.
I find them credible. But it's way outside my expertise (Renaissance and Modern American poetry, crime law, and recidivism statistics). On the other hand, I know extremely smart STEM people who quit when they were comfortable and started an excellent and fair nonprofit using satellites to record important, threatened sites from space (such as Buddhist temples before they were destroyed by the Taliban and other commie terrorists). They used computer technology to show far earlier settlements beneath known settlements of relatively 2-4 thousand years. So convince me briefly, in simple terms. I will pass your critique to them, anonymously if you wish, and report back. They are trustworthy. Or I can put you in touch with them. I find Hancock's theories to be correct and the rejectism merely example 10,000 of academic maoism and groupthink. "Peer review." Tenure-defence?
Reminds me of one of my father's barbed compliments: "You're not as dumb as you look."
Followed by, “You almost couldn’t be.”
RIP Ozymandias
Easy to believe that something like pemmican going far back in time.
The more Neanderthals et al are shown to have acted like homo sapiens and interbred with homo sapiens the less and less support there is for the theory that homo sapiens 'evolved' as opposed to simply being the earliest record of a genocide.
I don't understand this. Can you expand on it?
Killing off males of the conquered tribe, or killing the whole vanquished tribe was extremely common in ancient times. One just has to accept it that then it was a fact of life. Beyond that, I don't think cromagnon and neanderthal interbred well. Otherwise, we would see more than 2% neanderthal genome preserved in modern humans.
The fact of 2% suggest that we see the effects of "lucky mischlings surviving" despite partially incompatible genomes. Like an occasionally luckily fertile mule as a result of a horse x donkey crossing. Same for denisovans. But maybe neandertal x denisovan crossing was more compatible.
Interesting comment. I would guess that weaker tribes moved to the worst, inaccessible areas due to fear of being destroyed. Although we acknowledge that the Apaches were a fierce people, they were usually restricted to the inhospitable desert. The Indians that crossed from Siberia to Alaska were probably defeated tribes on the run.
As for killing off the males, when the agricultural revolution began, it probably made more sense to make slaves out of defeated tribes than kill them off. Were young women made into concubines for the winning tribe?
Defeated tribe on the run. Interesting idea. You’d need some strong motivation to attempt that. Did it happen more than once?
The Yamnaya (Indo-European steppe conquerors) may have started off in, say, Ukraine, as river valley dwellers, but then they either saw the future was on the uplands or, more likely, were forced out of the river valleys and had to invent a way of living on the steppe, which led to them conquering much of the world.
Fertile conquered women usually became lower status wives. Their offspring had little claim to inheritance - this was for example the story of Judge Yephtah in the Book of Judges.
Male slaves - that depended on how much additional manpower was needed.
No because Upper Palaeolithic Eurasian modern humans carry more Neanderthal DNA (about 4–5%) than present-day Eurasian modern humans (about 1–2%). This suggests that Neanderthal genes were selected against at a later period.
Typically the conquering tribe killed the men. The women and children were often enslaved.
So the Neanderthals made Osso Buco. Awesome.
More in the line of bone broth, I’d say.
APPETIZER: "...a lobster bisque and a bracingly carnivorous “Boneshot”: hot, deliquescent marrow with salt, lemon and a side of vodka..." Lisa Hilton hunts up some real good eats: https://thecritic.co.uk/an-admirably-efficient-steakhouse-in-the-swiss-capital/
Perhaps true since polenta came later.
Hesitant on the factuality of boiling. Where is the evidence for pottery or metal containers? Maybe they just heated things by burying something in sand and made a longer going fire over it?
You can boil water in bark or skin containers or hollowed out logs by dropping heated stones in the water. You can actually boil water in a paper cup over an open flame. ( Not claiming prehistoric paper cups were a thing.)
The key question is not so much if it boils 2-3 seconds but 1h or more. The problem with boiling is that evaporation of water is an extremely energy consuming process, compared to the heat capacity of stones. You drop a really hot stone into water and couple of minutes later boiling stops.
Even The Planet of the Apes had its Statue of Liberty.
Funny, I was just thinking about the Doggerland as Atlantis theory today. If there's anywhere that underwater archeology might be fruitful, the Dogger Bank and the Black Sea might be worth the effort.
Comment on X: "guy 10,000 years from now putting lead and plastic in his food for the "Anthropocene Diet", eaten by his ancestors who built the Bass Pro Shops Pyramids and the Great Underwater City of Miami".
The History Channel had that "Life After People" series in 2008 that ludicrously imagined concrete and steel would start disappearing after 50-100 years. Wikipedia said a new installment came out this month.
Agreed, but I’ve been astounded at the speed with which abandoned asphalt roads disappear, at least here in the lush northeast.
For a long time almost all Mesoamericanists, Andeanists, and New World archeological anthropologists have been concerned to present Pre-Columbian civilizations as entirely indigenous achievements, created from scratch with zero contact with the Eastern Hemisphere other than a few smidgens of “mental software” (in Linda Schiele’s phrase) brought across the Bering Strait thousands of years ago. But lately there are stirrings of careful studies that, in my amateur’s assessment, show close to conclusively that early on and well into what in Mesoamerican studies is called the Post-Classic era (900–1521). North and South American Indians at least communicated with Asians and -- especially on the basis of botanical affinities -- probably traded with them. Exchanges of stuff and ideas may have been restricted to castal merchantmen, with more than a couple “degrees of separation” as goods moved into Indian hands.
To generalize, scholars adopted the no-contact premise not just because amateur fantasy promoters concocted hundreds of popular contact theories even before Joseph Smith adapted them into a winning franchise, but because it seemed to put the Indians down. What if the reading public concluded, falsely, that the red man never invented anything? My rejoinder to this – and so far I haven’t found anyone else saying the same -- is that proclaiming that early seafarers were too dim or timid to navigate their (in fact quite large) vessels a few hundred miles along the often calm and resource-rich Pacific Coasts is putting THEM down.
Of course, the smartest of all post-war anthropologists was onto this seventy years ago:
"It is difficult to understand the origins of the American civilizations, unless we accept the hypothesis that all along the Pacific seaboard – both in Asia and America – intense activity was in progress for several thousands of years, and was spread from one area to another by boats moving along the coasts. Once, we refused to allow pre-Columbian America an historical dimension, simply because post-Columbian America had none. We now perhaps have to correct a second mistake, which consists in assuming that America remained cut off from the world as a whole for twenty thousand years, because it was separated from Western Europe. Everything would seem to suggest rather that the deep silence on the Atlantic side was offset by a buzz of activity all along the Pacific coasts."
-- Levi-Strauss, Claude, 'Tristes Tropiques', © Librarie Plon, 1955; English translation copyright © Jonathan Cape Limited, 1973; Penguin Publishing Group, Kindle Edition, 2012, p. 257
Thor Hyerdall proved that maritime travel from south America to Oceania was possible but I think any sort of trade between the Americas and Asia before the age of sail is a stretch.
Yes, most of Hyerdall's notions have been debunked, although there's some botanical evidence, especially regarding sweet potatoes, that there may have been some contact, maybe even accidental.
As a lad, though, I loved "Kon-Tiki" and also the small chain of preposterously gaudy South-Seas fantasy restaurants named after it, Kon-Tiki Ports. Just bring me a giant tropical coconutty punch alcohol-free cocktail in a hollowed-out pineapple sitting in a smoking dish of dry ice and bristling with giant-size straws, plastic swords, tiny working paper parasols, and a backscratcher with a handle in the shape of some malevolent volcano demon. Gosh-wow breathstopping psychodellicious hallucinatorientalist FUN!
Wouldn't the Polynesians sailing to South America make more sense than the other way around ?
-it is a lot more difficult to miss South America than to miss the islands in the Pacific.
-the Polynesians have a strong tradition of long ocean voyages.
Yes, absolutely, and archaeological and linguistic anthropologists have shown unequivocally that this is what happened. It seems likely that if there were a few voyages in the other direction, they were either one-offs by daredevils or fugitives or simply mistakes. Boats can get blown bizarrely off course in the Pacific typhoons -- for instance, into the 19th century, every decade a Japanese junk or two would turn up on the California or Oregon coast.
Wacky things do happen.
And, just to represent the pop or pulp side of the issue --
“KNOW, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars — Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs..."
-- Robert E. Howard, "The Phoenix and the Sword", 'Weird Tales' Magazine, December, 1922: Delphi, Collected Works of Robert E. Howard, Kindle Edition
NB. This story introduces an immortal character loved around the world by young and old: CONAN THE BARBARIAN!
I like the casual assumption that ten thousand years from now, "Phoenix, Las Vegas, Riyadh, Johannesburg, and hundreds of smaller cities" will all be moldering ruins. Climate change, I suppose.
Ahead-of-their-time inventions are both fascinating and worrisome. What have WE not invented that we need need need now now now? Car, truck, &c. wheels that turn 45 degrees so you can just slide sideways into parking spaces? Adequately-functional combination washer/dryers? A truly universal cable connector? But let’s look back --
First place: ; Hero of Alexandria's working steam engine, the aeolipile, which never got beyond the executive desk toy phase.
Maybe the problem was the name.
If Hero had been as bold as HIS name and gotten free samples to some of the early-adopting military/industrial proto-technocrats in the officer corps, the ugly pudgy cutetsy whistling Pokemonish inky-dink little gizmo might have kickstarted the Industrial Revolution in the first century CE, when it might have done some good.
There’s been a lot of loose talk lately about how after fifteen hundred years of putting up with crumbly flaky rotten grainy crackly crusty and ugly-as-deformity-itself cement, engineers are investigating Classical Roman concrete, which like Bounty Paper Towels really is superior in durability to the other leading brands. It also resists stress better and, mysteriously-until-recently, the glop actually gets STRONGER the longer it sits around -- like the Pantheon dome, going on 2000 and still a destination feature without visible wear. Evidently the secret ingredient was volcanic ash (which in convergent-tectonic-activity hotspot Italy they must have had more than enough to get the hell rid of anywy) plus some sort of superastable calcium-aluminium-silicate-hydrate compound that binds the stuff to itself for apparently ever. We were planning to build my tomb out of Travertine marble, but I’m switching to this more economical matter.
Finally we should give a nod to the infamous vunderveapon called Greek Fire,a napalm-like concoction that kept Constantinople unconquered for centuries. The secret and now-lost recipe may have included naphtha, quicklime, sulfur, nitrate, a pinch of rudimentary gunpowder, and of course the golden fresh-scented pine resin that made it stick unremovably to wood, armor, and especially skin. Naval and anti-siege units of the Eastern Roman Empire, spewing it out of an array of sort of giant bellows-and-and-bladder contraptions with siphons and pumps and like spirit lamps on the brass nozzels, could convert a 150-foot five-deck 400-man quinquereme into charcoal briquettes in ten minutes. The weapon may also have had some psychological effect: it was said that soldiers facing an onrushing fifty-foot cone of thousand-plus-degrees blinding solid flame could sometimes became discouraged and less responsive to “stand your ground”-type commands.
And there are more great ideas that didn’t take off -- and more, and more…
Older versions of concrete, now encased by in mesh by thickness, are regularly used in large drainage, road, and factory wall building. I can't wait until it hits the general housing and farming market.