These causeway and mound settlement structures have been known for quite awhile, the new thing here seems to be the discovery of a more complex city like settlement. It's seems like cities and complex states probably weren't necessary to build the causeways as evidenced by Poverty Point and the mound building peoples of Ohio and the later Mississippian/Cahokia. However, given the geography in that part of the Amazon basin, these mounds and causeways were probably necessary FOR cities to develop.
The other piece is this quote:
> By the 20th century, archaeologists had yet to confirm the rumours, and argued that the Amazon’s nutrient-poor soil was inadequate for supporting large-scale agriculture, and that it would have prevented tropical civilizations
I think it's worth noting that a number of large settlements north of the Rio Grande managed to grow quite large with limited or no agriculture. Particularly where fish were plentiful, farming wasn't taken up even when contemporaneous neighboring groups farmed. Similar to Kosher or Halal, not farming seemed to be a matter of cultural or religious preference/edict among some pre-Columbian indigenous peoples.
ellopoppit 671 days ago [-]
>> By the 20th century, archaeologists had yet to confirm the rumours, and argued that the Amazon’s nutrient-poor soil was inadequate for supporting large-scale agriculture
Those archaelogists were also ignorant of Terra Preta
Yeah, the next half of the paragraph I quoted mentions that. I'm not sure if the range of Terra Preta extends all the way to the site in question, but it may. Either way it seems like some amount of soil improvement was happening on all of the mounds I've read about in the region.
seibelj 671 days ago [-]
Ancient peoples and societies were very advanced. We constantly find earlier and earlier evidence of advanced behavior and technology because they were using it. People 10k years ago are physiologically the same as us, and human nature does not change, so it isn't surprising that many wanted to live in dense communities, just as we do.
The major difference is imagining that you have no knowledge of science. As humans desire control, your brain immediately assumes that gods cause everything, and then to get more control society starts believing they can influence and appease the gods through various rituals, which then develop into organized religion. The total integration of religion with every facet of life is alien to most of us, and certainly to nearly everyone on Hacker News, which is the biggest barrier to imagining yourself living back then.
Otherwise, people fell in love, had children, desired to achieve, were constantly striving and innovating, and all of the same types of people and desires that we have today, leading to kings, wars, commerce, and so on.
seer 670 days ago [-]
Visiting Herculan in Italy (the _much_ better preserved sister city to Pompeii) really put those kind of things for me into perspective.
There are street numbers, pubs, fast food joints, various multi story buildings with some of the murals intact, especially the gymnasium/public baths really showed to me - “I could totally see myself living in this kind of environment” it was … weird and uncanny, but very educational experience.
anthk 670 days ago [-]
On Pompei and graphitti, dick jokes and so on, some things never change.
Also, I saw 3D Roman recontructions on house blocks. They looked pretty the much same as any house block in Spain on any town/village in the 21th century. Crazy.
I think there is a systematic bias in our perception of ancient peoples that is influenced by the scarcity of archeological evidence, combined with a common logical fallacy. Until we have evidence that people did X before year Y, we are biased towards assuming they did not.
We continuously hear headlines of the form “discovery people did X before previously thought.” But why did we think they did not do those things earlier?
The fallacy is to be over conservative and assume that if we have no evidence that something happened, it probably didn’t.
But our prior assumption should be that the earliest evidence for X is much later than the first X.
AlotOfReading 670 days ago [-]
That is the prior assumption for archaeologists. For a long time, it was simply treated as "obvious" and there wasn't a well-established way to estimate temporal ranges from dated finds. Now people use a technique called Optimal Linear Estimation that was originally invented by paleontologists to estimate extinction dates.
aksss 670 days ago [-]
I think in my lifetime I’ve started to see the articles morphing a bit more towards “pushes back the date for the first evidence of people doing X”, which is a better spirit of discovery to express. This may be the result of choosing better magazines to read though, too. :)
aksss 670 days ago [-]
> total integration of religion with every facet of life is alien to most of us
I suspect there’s still a lot of bias in this view. A fish likely doesn’t realize it lives in water. Similarly, we likely don’t appreciate the role of our modern “religious beliefs” and how saturated our lives are with them and how they have permeated our methods of interpreting experience (physical or cultural). It’s alien to us only in hindsight and removed from the cultural context, but in a thousand years I suspect we’ll be no more immune from criticism.
Agreeing entirely with your other points, we are after all only human. There’s great conceit in our perception of past generations, and this gets more shameless the further back we look and especially across cultural divides.
Inevitably, we must state that they incorporated more supernatural explanations for physical phenomenon than we do today. It’s probably specifically this narrower point that would be alien to most of us.
mark336 670 days ago [-]
You got it right. But I want to add that civilizations began when man moved to farming and didn't have to hunt for food.
humbleMouse 671 days ago [-]
How can you state they had no knowledge of science? How do you think they built things like pyramids and countless other mega structures that are exactly aligned with the solar system?
neaden 670 days ago [-]
I think this goes to a question of what we mean when we say science. If someone has knowledge of where all the stars are and their movements, but thinks of those stars as gods and believes that their movements affect sickness on Earth, is that science, religion, or some combination?
rurp 670 days ago [-]
I don't think it's possible to develop the ability to predict astronomical events without a lot of work analogous to modern science. Sure it was probably couched in some spiritual terms that we wouldn't recognize, but it's probably not all that different to how people will view our modern science in thousands of years.
mark336 670 days ago [-]
As an Andean Native-American I think that there were some things that were science, like being able to tell time and the seasons by their star observatories. And then there was religion around a planet or the moon.
motohagiography 670 days ago [-]
Raises the question of what about our present beliefs and thinking should change as a consequence of discovering advanced civilizations that have risen and fallen not only independent of "us," but of our ability to have ever precived the possibility of their existence.
Makes me want to write a sci-fi story about predicting the reflection of coherent radio signals from distant planets that originated on earth hundreds or thousands of years ago, and the ML model that filters for candidate signals, as though it were more plausible that old civilizations discovered radio before they were wiped out than another advanced civilization inhabit nearby solar systems. Starts with capturing reflections of 1930s broadcasts, but then the method scales by applying it to further objects that reflect ones from further back in time.
edgyquant 670 days ago [-]
This is a hard subject to discuss because there’s a ton of fud and unintellectual nonsense (e.g. people who want hyperborea or Atlantis to have been real industrial civilizations.)
There probably wasn’t some industrial level civilization as we know it. But there’s 200,000 years of human history and the there was another ~20ky period like ours 120,000 years ago in between ice ages. Humans migrated across the old world at this time and they likely had societies we’ll never know about.
I try to envision ways they could have achieved cool tech but primitive. So maybe there was no industrial civilization but maybe some mystic religious society devised some way to do computation (if we really wanted to we can build do computation with water and irrigation) and learned a ton about the universe.
My hot take is we do man a disservice by saying civilization began with writing. There were certainly societies that learned lots of truths about the universe and passed them on via memes and superstitions.
acegopher 670 days ago [-]
I've often wondered... what is the most advanced civilization (human or not) that could have existed some number of years back and not left evidence, or the evidence was destroyed through natural processes, or the evidence would remain in places we can't/haven't discovered?
Conversely, at each known stage of human civilization, how long will it be before evidence of that civilization becomes unknowable through future archaeology?
BurningFrog 670 days ago [-]
There was clearly no civilization that routinely travelled between continents.
Because animal and plant species were very separated, until the "invasive species" phenomenon the last few centuries.
IMHO, any civilization that advances to the industrial era would be leaving artifacts all over the world. It wouldn't be confined to an island or a region in a continent.
corrral 670 days ago [-]
We've recovered air trapped in ice cores up to 2 million years old.
Odds are if there had been an advanced ancient civilization of any size (and an advanced one is going to tend to be large) and for any length of time, they'd have done quite a bit of lead smelting (lead's really useful and super-easy to smelt... shame it's poisonous), and we'd see it in the ice core record.
Let alone something like fossil fuel use. Plus probably dozens of other markers of iron-age industry or later, that I don't know about.
I very much doubt any very-ancient humans/hominids got past Bronze Age tech, at best. If I had to place a bet on it, I'd bet against them having gotten past stone-age tech at all. I think we'd see evidence of it.
cogman10 670 days ago [-]
Any civ that discovers iron smelting leaves land scars that are easy to recognize.
Charcoal and iron mining is simply highly visible.
krisoft 670 days ago [-]
> what is the most advanced civilization
What is "advanced"? Is it a property everyone would agree on? Is it a single scale or some multi-dimensional ordering?
If a civilisation has beautiful spoken-word poetry, while the other has a tradition to play a complex game with baskets and grass knots which one is more advanced?
edgyquant 669 days ago [-]
To me advanced means has an caloric surplus through which they get separation of skillsets. Civilization arose from this.
aaaaaaaaata 670 days ago [-]
These "jungle people" don't need to clock in to a single desk to get their food/do day to day, or have their leisure conversations captured by a friend-wielded listening device.
They seem like the natural frontrunner, in my eyes.
JoeyJoJoJr 670 days ago [-]
I wonder what they would think about my eyes becoming short sighted because I stare at a computer screen all day, or my neck aches because I sit in a chair in a room all day.
Imnimo 670 days ago [-]
An interesting story of a surprisingly ancient technology is this:
The exact thing I was speculating about but with tons of prior art, thank you!
icare_1er 670 days ago [-]
Most of the archeological and historical evidence on civilizations are quite frail, and the cards are regularly re-shuffled every now and then when a toe or a necklace or some ancient tools, are discovered (which is roughly every 10 years).
Gobekli Teppe recently also demonstrated that we really don't know much, and that the "official" theories are mere speculations which are very likely to be replaced by another theory in the future.
hinkley 670 days ago [-]
Maybe there’s a trick with Euclidean geometry and gravitational lensing where you fly one direction, turn ninety degrees and scan a supermassive black hole for signals.
roughly 671 days ago [-]
1491 by Michael Mann is a must read for anyone even vaguely interested in the Americas before European arrival. It’s a fantastic book that will change how you think about indigenous cultures in the Americas and make this kind of thing seem a lot less surprising.
aerovistae 671 days ago [-]
I think you mean Charles Mann :) Michael Mann is a director of heist movies.
roughly 670 days ago [-]
Whoops, yes, Charles Mann. Too late for an edit or delete; guess that typo's just gonna live there now.
Although Michael Mann's filmography is pretty good, too.
h2odragon 670 days ago [-]
hey you were in the right general neighborhood.
"that dude that wrote the book about the thing" is as far as I usually get. "you know, the cover was blue"
Anyone who has encountered a potato or corn (maize) should know that the Americas had superior agricultural technology to Europe. Metallurgy and mechanics just leave more obvious artifacts.
ghotli 670 days ago [-]
I read this in my late teenage years. I can safely say it had a great impact on me and how I view the world. It was especially jarring as I was still in high school and the narrative I was being taught / had been taught was quite... well it left out a lot of things.
bleachedsleet 671 days ago [-]
Would also recommend the follow up, 1493 for a comparison of how Columbus altered these cultures. Excellent books.
sudden_dystopia 671 days ago [-]
Interesting. I have a question though. It notes in the article that “ Amazon’s nutrient-poor soil was inadequate”. How can the soil be so deficient in a forest where there is constant death and decay? Or is it because the trees don’t shed their leaves seasonally? I would have imagined that a place so rich in biodiversity had rich soil.
detaro 671 days ago [-]
Dead matter decays quickly (due to hot&wet climate) on the surface instead of settling into the ground and decaying there. And rich ecosystem also grows fast, picking up any nutrients immediately. And high rainfall etc means nutrients would be washed out quickly. These three things mean that soil in tropical rainforests isn't nutrient-rich, because the nutrients are constantly reused everywhere else.
Razengan 670 days ago [-]
That logic doesn’t make sense: “This person isn’t rich because he keeps spending millions.”
If the soil wasn’t “rich” how did it become such a forest in the first place? Maybe reword it as “forests are not suitable for farmland”.
axus 670 days ago [-]
If you're always spending money (soil), there's nothing left for someone else (the farmer) to steal.
codefreeordie 670 days ago [-]
At one time in the past, it was richer. But the forest ecosystem was too stable, causing it to continue to grow until it had consumed all of the resources, leaving the soil poor.
But the forest remains, and remains almost maximally stable, so any time that anything dies, freeing up resources, they're almost immediately taken back up by the system and converted into more forest.
minsc_and_boo 670 days ago [-]
It's rich because of the insane cash flows going through the soil.
Clear out the rainforest for traditional agri and you've lost your insane income.
I would be curious to hear author and researcher Graham Hancock’s take on this. His theories on human history based upon archeological evidence are very interesting. He predicted old new kingdoms were yet to be discovered in Amazon basin. Fingerprints of the Gods was one of his good reads
silicon2401 670 days ago [-]
I came here exactly to share a related tidbit I learned through Graham Hancock: "terra preta". It's absolutely mindblowing to me and something I think any reader of HN would appreciate, too:
> Terra preta [...] is a type of very dark, fertile artificial (anthropogenic) soil found in the Amazon Basin. [...] Terra preta owes its characteristic black color to its weathered charcoal content,[2] and was made by adding a mixture of charcoal, bone, broken pottery, compost and manure to the low fertility Amazonian soil. A product of indigenous soil management and slash-and-char agriculture,[3] the charcoal is stable and remains in the soil for thousands of years, binding and retaining minerals and nutrients.[4][5] [...] Terra preta soils were created by farming communities between 450 BCE and 950 CE.[10][11][12] Soil depths can reach 2 meters (6.6 ft). It is reported to regenerate itself at the rate of 1 centimeter (0.4 in) per year.[13]
Hancock has a gift for pointing out deeply fascinating aspects of human history. His personal conclusions based on things he brings up include things like advanced, pre-historic civilizations. Regardless of whether you care for those kinds of claims, I think it's almost undeniable that the tidbits he brings up in his discussions, like terra preta, are a real treat to read about. For any fan of history or intellectually curious person, I'd recommend at least watching a video or two of his on youtube, just as a starting point if nothing else, and going from there to read about the various things he brings up.
greenonions 670 days ago [-]
I don't really think of Graham Hancock as being a very good scientific source, but I think his ideas are a fantastic source of wonder about human history. It's simply fun to imagine advanced ancient civilizations.
silicon2401 666 days ago [-]
Exactly. For me it's kind of like using wikipedia for grade school homework: the point isn't to use the article as your source, the point is to reference the wikipedia article's references. And I agree with your latter point as well: I don't really care whether his ideas about ancient pre-history are true or not, I just think they're really fun to think about. I love reading mythology even if I don't believe it, and Hancock's mythology is no different.
colordrops 670 days ago [-]
He was also talking about Gobekli tepe years ago and now you see announcements about it like it's news.
He is derided as he's a journalist rather than an academic but I don't think he ever pushed that his ideas are absolute truth. Also he's an Ayahuasca advocate, which unfairly brings further derision. He'll talk about more far out theories too if with the right audience.
circlefavshape 670 days ago [-]
Fingerprints of the Gods? The one where he wrote the whole thing stoned? And then remained stoned for 20+ years until a hallucinatory snake on an ayahuasca trip told him to quit smoking weed.
rustybelt 670 days ago [-]
Some of the best programmers I know are always stoned. Funny to see this take on HN of all places.
tomcam 670 days ago [-]
How is this helping the discourse? Do you have anything of substance to add?
bee_rider 670 days ago [-]
Is he a well regarded expert on this kind of stuff? I've never heard of him, just -- title in the format "<Noun> of the <Dramatic Noun>" tend to set off little alarm bells in my head.
AlotOfReading 670 days ago [-]
No. He's widely regarded as a crank. However, he is quite popular.
There's a bit of a split between archaeologists that merely think Hancock is an indication that Archaeology's public outreach is insufficient and those that think he's actively harming public perceptions of the field with misinformation. For the record, I'm more in the former camp.
Anyway, the SAA (an archaeology trade group) devoted 27 pages of a magazine issue to discussing that split and picking apart the arguments in one of Hancocks's recent books. You can find the magazine here to decide for yourself: http://onlinedigeditions.com/publication/?m=16146&i=634462&p...
> [Graham's blog post] Before closing, however, I’m understandably very happy to quote here the useful concise summary of America Before given by anthropologist Jeb J. Card in his contribution to the issue (pp 26-30):
>> [Card's review] Attempting to critique America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization by Graham Hancock (2019) using the criteria of professional archaeology is doomed to failure, as his goals are outside of the materialist practice of scientific archaeology. In a nutshell, Hancock argues that an ancient civilization of the Pleistocene emerged in North America that was based not on material technology but on psychic/spiritual knowledge. It became a global sea-based society comparable with the late pre-Industrial British Empire. These Ice Age Americans (spoiler: Atlanteans) foresaw a cosmic disaster and spread memetic seeds of sacred knowledge of geometry, astronomy, and the Otherworld and how souls may navigate it around the world. After this civilization was destroyed by impact events from a comet during the Younger Dryas, these advanced people came to be remembered as magicians and gods. Seeking this knowledge today is a path to truly understanding reality and the spiritual elements denied by materialist science.”
> [Graham's blog post] Card’s precis of my arguments is fair, and in general I’d say that his analysis of my work and its function is much more carefully thought through than that of any of the other contributors.
If the author thinks the reviewer pointing to psychic Atlanteans in his work is treating him more fairly than the rest, that doesn't bode well for the overall work.
tomcam 670 days ago [-]
Thanks for both of these links.
rfwhyte 670 days ago [-]
No, Graham Hancock is an anti-science charlatan. No actual archaeologists take him remotely seriously.
aksss 670 days ago [-]
Calling people “anti-science” now also sets off alarm bells for me. “Anti-science” is analogous to calling someone a “heretic” in the 1400’s, but with our benefit of hindsight into the fallacy of groupthink and servility to orthodoxy.
edmundsauto 670 days ago [-]
Especially when the field is archaeology, which is a study and not a science. It has its rigor, but it is more of an interpretation of understanding rather than experimentation.
Still valuable, still rigorous… but no ground truth is possible.
tonyg 670 days ago [-]
> no ground truth is possible.
Oof. I have bad news for you about science in general.
edmundsauto 670 days ago [-]
Eh, I'm not overly proscriptive that science answers all the questions, or that it has the precision people think that it does. OTOH, it has been important for civilizational science, so I'm pretty comfortable saying that it's a good option.
More germane to the point, it's probably better to think about "ground truth" as "sufficiently reasonable approximation for the grain that I need to operate at".
anthk 670 days ago [-]
>but no ground truth is possible.
Carbon 14.
edmundsauto 670 days ago [-]
This is actually a really interesting situation. Carbon-14 resides only in organic matter, and so a lot of stone age artifacts found can only be dated based on what surrounds it. Humans have a tendency to dig down to bury organic matter, which makes it very difficult to understand if the C14 readings are associated with what artifacts.
So while we can reasonably ascertain the age of (organic) artifacts, it does not answer the questions being asked.
icare_1er 670 days ago [-]
Carbon14 is hard-science. Archeology is not. It is mostly speculations, where you allow yourself to imagine a scenario that would explain what happened over 1 million years, on the basis of a bone that you found.
bee_rider 670 days ago [-]
Of course, alarm bells just mean we should look into things.
In this case, the author being discussed seems to literally looking for non-material/"Otherworld" based explanations for history. I think he would not be insulted, to be called anti-science. There might be something unfortunate going on in broader discussion around the phrase "anti-science" (I'm not ready to defend that too strongly either way), but in this case it seems pretty apt.
aksss 668 days ago [-]
Some heretics were/are complete loons. But there’s an insanity in the religious devotion to “Science” in popular culture driving the word to take on a synonymity to “orthodoxy” or “establishment”. “Trust the orthodoxy” wouldn’t have nearly the same ring to it, but that’s what I think I most often hear from people wearing cheesy Bill Nye and NDT t-shirts. Calling someone “anti-science” then also sounding like “anti-establishment”. Sure they may be, but insofar as the scientific method is concerned, we need antithesis ideas, loon hypotheses, and room for those to be tested and discussed.
mistrial9 670 days ago [-]
describing people who publish original thought as "anti-something-important derogatory-name" sets off alarm bells for me. Is conformity really that precious? are public writings so black-and-white ?
nobody9999 670 days ago [-]
> describing people who publish original thought as "anti-something-important derogatory-name" sets off alarm bells for me. Is conformity really that precious? are public writings so black-and-white ?
In that case, I recommend you check out Erich von Danniken[0], Giorgio Tsoukalos[1] and Charles Dawson[2].
They have some original thoughts that have been wildly popular. Or are you saying that if something is "popular" that it's "conformity" and should be rejected for being conformist?
If it's generally accepted (as bible dogma in the middle ages was), then it must be a false flag designed to hoodwink the masses into accepting false information, because no amount of consensus is enough. amirite?
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
-- Ozymandius by P.B. Shelley
icare_1er 670 days ago [-]
There has been a lot of precedents of "actual scientists" not taking anti-science charlatans seriously: before the discovery of genes; before the discovery of DNA; before the discovery of tectonicsl before the discovery of the ultraviolet catastrophe. Etc, etc, etc....
670 days ago [-]
iostream24 670 days ago [-]
We speak of evidence for having had writing systems, but it’s worth noting that we preselect for mineral-based writing systems.
Paper/papyrus/neet-weavings tend to rot if made from organic matter.
We certainly find marked sticks where preservation of organic matter is possible, I.e. frozen crag falling victims.
The article references these jungle cities to have disappeared around 1400ce, and I wonder what this estimate is based upon and if it’s not 1500ce instead, as disease could be the culprit…
stakkur 670 days ago [-]
Great, but they’re not ‘ancient’, at least by common definitions of what ancient means. They’re relatively recent, historically speaking.
yesenadam 670 days ago [-]
The article says "starting about 1,500 years ago, ancient Amazonians built and lived in densely populated centres". From a quick google, ancient most commonly is defined to mean, until about 500AD or before the fall of Rome (476).
But that's in a European history context. It seems that ancient in the context of the Americas is usually applied to anything pre-1492.
stakkur 670 days ago [-]
Underneath all this is a recent phenomenon to recast Central/South American civilizations as 'ancient' and 'comparable' to other non-American civilizations. A lot of this is normal, on the level kind of research, but there's a significant amount of breathless hyperbole about it too. You can usually identify the latter by the language it uses.
This article does a lot of that ("Mind blowing!" "Challenges archeaological dogma!" "Mysterious"!), and it repeats something that's very suspect, even amongst conservative historians--it dates civilization in the area to "10,000 years old". Also, much of what's in these kinds of articles is not new, but simply repackaged content.
yesenadam 670 days ago [-]
Maybe I was too obscure or something - there's no sign in your reply that you heard my point: that, contrary to what you said, it seems 500AD is "‘ancient’, at least by common definitions of what ancient means."
stakkur 669 days ago [-]
Maybe you thought I was trying to respond to your point, instead of adding more information of my own.
JoeAltmaier 670 days ago [-]
Each time remains of an ancient city are uncovered, I wonder the same thing: is the estimation of size of the city correct? They include all the settlement remains. But perhaps it was serial - that is, new places were built as old ones decayed? They were often mud brick. Perhaps it wasn't 1000 people, but 100 moving 10 times etc.
ozten 670 days ago [-]
The Dawn of Everything - A new history of humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow is a fascinating book that challenges the dominant western narrative and re-examines the archeological record giving credit to the contributions and achievements of ingenious peoples.
The other piece is this quote:
> By the 20th century, archaeologists had yet to confirm the rumours, and argued that the Amazon’s nutrient-poor soil was inadequate for supporting large-scale agriculture, and that it would have prevented tropical civilizations
I think it's worth noting that a number of large settlements north of the Rio Grande managed to grow quite large with limited or no agriculture. Particularly where fish were plentiful, farming wasn't taken up even when contemporaneous neighboring groups farmed. Similar to Kosher or Halal, not farming seemed to be a matter of cultural or religious preference/edict among some pre-Columbian indigenous peoples.
Those archaelogists were also ignorant of Terra Preta
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
The major difference is imagining that you have no knowledge of science. As humans desire control, your brain immediately assumes that gods cause everything, and then to get more control society starts believing they can influence and appease the gods through various rituals, which then develop into organized religion. The total integration of religion with every facet of life is alien to most of us, and certainly to nearly everyone on Hacker News, which is the biggest barrier to imagining yourself living back then.
Otherwise, people fell in love, had children, desired to achieve, were constantly striving and innovating, and all of the same types of people and desires that we have today, leading to kings, wars, commerce, and so on.
There are street numbers, pubs, fast food joints, various multi story buildings with some of the murals intact, especially the gymnasium/public baths really showed to me - “I could totally see myself living in this kind of environment” it was … weird and uncanny, but very educational experience.
Also, I saw 3D Roman recontructions on house blocks. They looked pretty the much same as any house block in Spain on any town/village in the 21th century. Crazy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulae
We continuously hear headlines of the form “discovery people did X before previously thought.” But why did we think they did not do those things earlier?
The fallacy is to be over conservative and assume that if we have no evidence that something happened, it probably didn’t.
But our prior assumption should be that the earliest evidence for X is much later than the first X.
I suspect there’s still a lot of bias in this view. A fish likely doesn’t realize it lives in water. Similarly, we likely don’t appreciate the role of our modern “religious beliefs” and how saturated our lives are with them and how they have permeated our methods of interpreting experience (physical or cultural). It’s alien to us only in hindsight and removed from the cultural context, but in a thousand years I suspect we’ll be no more immune from criticism.
Agreeing entirely with your other points, we are after all only human. There’s great conceit in our perception of past generations, and this gets more shameless the further back we look and especially across cultural divides.
Inevitably, we must state that they incorporated more supernatural explanations for physical phenomenon than we do today. It’s probably specifically this narrower point that would be alien to most of us.
Makes me want to write a sci-fi story about predicting the reflection of coherent radio signals from distant planets that originated on earth hundreds or thousands of years ago, and the ML model that filters for candidate signals, as though it were more plausible that old civilizations discovered radio before they were wiped out than another advanced civilization inhabit nearby solar systems. Starts with capturing reflections of 1930s broadcasts, but then the method scales by applying it to further objects that reflect ones from further back in time.
There probably wasn’t some industrial level civilization as we know it. But there’s 200,000 years of human history and the there was another ~20ky period like ours 120,000 years ago in between ice ages. Humans migrated across the old world at this time and they likely had societies we’ll never know about.
I try to envision ways they could have achieved cool tech but primitive. So maybe there was no industrial civilization but maybe some mystic religious society devised some way to do computation (if we really wanted to we can build do computation with water and irrigation) and learned a ton about the universe.
My hot take is we do man a disservice by saying civilization began with writing. There were certainly societies that learned lots of truths about the universe and passed them on via memes and superstitions.
Conversely, at each known stage of human civilization, how long will it be before evidence of that civilization becomes unknowable through future archaeology?
Because animal and plant species were very separated, until the "invasive species" phenomenon the last few centuries.
Odds are if there had been an advanced ancient civilization of any size (and an advanced one is going to tend to be large) and for any length of time, they'd have done quite a bit of lead smelting (lead's really useful and super-easy to smelt... shame it's poisonous), and we'd see it in the ice core record.
Let alone something like fossil fuel use. Plus probably dozens of other markers of iron-age industry or later, that I don't know about.
I very much doubt any very-ancient humans/hominids got past Bronze Age tech, at best. If I had to place a bet on it, I'd bet against them having gotten past stone-age tech at all. I think we'd see evidence of it.
Charcoal and iron mining is simply highly visible.
What is "advanced"? Is it a property everyone would agree on? Is it a single scale or some multi-dimensional ordering?
If a civilisation has beautiful spoken-word poetry, while the other has a tradition to play a complex game with baskets and grass knots which one is more advanced?
They seem like the natural frontrunner, in my eyes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haya_people#Archaeological_dis...
It's not as fantastical as radio signals, and not as truly 'lost' - it persisted in oral history, but it's still thought provoking.
Gobekli Teppe recently also demonstrated that we really don't know much, and that the "official" theories are mere speculations which are very likely to be replaced by another theory in the future.
Although Michael Mann's filmography is pretty good, too.
"that dude that wrote the book about the thing" is as far as I usually get. "you know, the cover was blue"
If the soil wasn’t “rich” how did it become such a forest in the first place? Maybe reword it as “forests are not suitable for farmland”.
But the forest remains, and remains almost maximally stable, so any time that anything dies, freeing up resources, they're almost immediately taken back up by the system and converted into more forest.
Clear out the rainforest for traditional agri and you've lost your insane income.
https://www.dw.com/en/the-amazon-nutrient-rich-rainforests-o...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
> Terra preta [...] is a type of very dark, fertile artificial (anthropogenic) soil found in the Amazon Basin. [...] Terra preta owes its characteristic black color to its weathered charcoal content,[2] and was made by adding a mixture of charcoal, bone, broken pottery, compost and manure to the low fertility Amazonian soil. A product of indigenous soil management and slash-and-char agriculture,[3] the charcoal is stable and remains in the soil for thousands of years, binding and retaining minerals and nutrients.[4][5] [...] Terra preta soils were created by farming communities between 450 BCE and 950 CE.[10][11][12] Soil depths can reach 2 meters (6.6 ft). It is reported to regenerate itself at the rate of 1 centimeter (0.4 in) per year.[13]
First paragraphs on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
Hancock has a gift for pointing out deeply fascinating aspects of human history. His personal conclusions based on things he brings up include things like advanced, pre-historic civilizations. Regardless of whether you care for those kinds of claims, I think it's almost undeniable that the tidbits he brings up in his discussions, like terra preta, are a real treat to read about. For any fan of history or intellectually curious person, I'd recommend at least watching a video or two of his on youtube, just as a starting point if nothing else, and going from there to read about the various things he brings up.
He is derided as he's a journalist rather than an academic but I don't think he ever pushed that his ideas are absolute truth. Also he's an Ayahuasca advocate, which unfairly brings further derision. He'll talk about more far out theories too if with the right audience.
There's a bit of a split between archaeologists that merely think Hancock is an indication that Archaeology's public outreach is insufficient and those that think he's actively harming public perceptions of the field with misinformation. For the record, I'm more in the former camp.
Anyway, the SAA (an archaeology trade group) devoted 27 pages of a magazine issue to discussing that split and picking apart the arguments in one of Hancocks's recent books. You can find the magazine here to decide for yourself: http://onlinedigeditions.com/publication/?m=16146&i=634462&p...
For fairness, here's Hancock's response: https://grahamhancock.com/saa-archaeological-record-response...
> [Graham's blog post] Before closing, however, I’m understandably very happy to quote here the useful concise summary of America Before given by anthropologist Jeb J. Card in his contribution to the issue (pp 26-30):
>> [Card's review] Attempting to critique America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization by Graham Hancock (2019) using the criteria of professional archaeology is doomed to failure, as his goals are outside of the materialist practice of scientific archaeology. In a nutshell, Hancock argues that an ancient civilization of the Pleistocene emerged in North America that was based not on material technology but on psychic/spiritual knowledge. It became a global sea-based society comparable with the late pre-Industrial British Empire. These Ice Age Americans (spoiler: Atlanteans) foresaw a cosmic disaster and spread memetic seeds of sacred knowledge of geometry, astronomy, and the Otherworld and how souls may navigate it around the world. After this civilization was destroyed by impact events from a comet during the Younger Dryas, these advanced people came to be remembered as magicians and gods. Seeking this knowledge today is a path to truly understanding reality and the spiritual elements denied by materialist science.”
> [Graham's blog post] Card’s precis of my arguments is fair, and in general I’d say that his analysis of my work and its function is much more carefully thought through than that of any of the other contributors.
If the author thinks the reviewer pointing to psychic Atlanteans in his work is treating him more fairly than the rest, that doesn't bode well for the overall work.
Still valuable, still rigorous… but no ground truth is possible.
Oof. I have bad news for you about science in general.
More germane to the point, it's probably better to think about "ground truth" as "sufficiently reasonable approximation for the grain that I need to operate at".
Carbon 14.
So while we can reasonably ascertain the age of (organic) artifacts, it does not answer the questions being asked.
In this case, the author being discussed seems to literally looking for non-material/"Otherworld" based explanations for history. I think he would not be insulted, to be called anti-science. There might be something unfortunate going on in broader discussion around the phrase "anti-science" (I'm not ready to defend that too strongly either way), but in this case it seems pretty apt.
In that case, I recommend you check out Erich von Danniken[0], Giorgio Tsoukalos[1] and Charles Dawson[2].
They have some original thoughts that have been wildly popular. Or are you saying that if something is "popular" that it's "conformity" and should be rejected for being conformist?
If it's generally accepted (as bible dogma in the middle ages was), then it must be a false flag designed to hoodwink the masses into accepting false information, because no amount of consensus is enough. amirite?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_von_D%C3%A4niken
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_A._Tsoukalos
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dawson
The article references these jungle cities to have disappeared around 1400ce, and I wonder what this estimate is based upon and if it’s not 1500ce instead, as disease could be the culprit…
But that's in a European history context. It seems that ancient in the context of the Americas is usually applied to anything pre-1492.
This article does a lot of that ("Mind blowing!" "Challenges archeaological dogma!" "Mysterious"!), and it repeats something that's very suspect, even amongst conservative historians--it dates civilization in the area to "10,000 years old". Also, much of what's in these kinds of articles is not new, but simply repackaged content.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31511047