posted on Oct, 13 2004 @ 03:39 PM
�Paleo-tech�: why I don�t think there was any.
One of the defenses I hear when I ask for evidence of long-lost advanced technological civilizations � which I call �paleo-tech� --is that all traces
of them have been obliterated by either (relatively recent) Pleistocene ice sheets or (further back) by tectonic subduction.
This approach, from the viewpoint of a defender of "paleo-tech", is comforting, but wrong.
There are a lot of places in all the continents that were not covered by any Pleistocene ice sheets, including the bulk of the Indian Subcontinent,
Southeast Asia, all of Africa, the Lower Mississippi Valley, the Gran Chaco, and most of what is now the area surrounding the Mediterranean Sea.
Yet there is no real evidence whatsoever of "paleo-tech".
By �real evidence�, of course, I mean artifacts. The Nacza lines are better explained as irrigation than they are as landing patterns for
Neolithic spaceships; drawings of Gods and legends of ancient heroes can best be explained by people looking to mythology to explain things they don�t
understand, �researchers� like Erich von D�niken and Zecheria Sitchen to the contrary.
Where is the single piece of alloy beyond bronze or steel? Where are the thermoplastics? Where are the huge limestone, marble, or granite quarries
of ten to twelve thousand years ago? Where are the broken shards of machine-produced glass?
Not even a single one of these has been found.
Ancient batteries? Quite possibly. The Mesopotamian batteries, which may have been used a millennium ago to aid in electroplating, are signs of a
possibility at the very least. But vinegar and a rough rod in a clay pot sealed with pitch, brilliant as the concept is, is hardly "paleo-tech".
And I find it surprising indeed that defenders of "paleo-tech" blow off my questions with the comment that all the real artifacts went down with
Atlantis or whatever, because that simply isn�t so. The entire United States could sink beneath the waves tomorrow, and there would be shards of
Coca-Cola bottles rattling around the rest of the Earth for millennia to come.
Any civilization worthy of the "paleo-tech" description would have to be one that explored and traded (at one level or another) world wide. Who
cares if the Atlanteans never built a satellite city in what�s now Biloxi, Mississippi or Asuncion, Paraguay? God knows there should be some ancient
trade goods from somewhere!
I�m sorry. As romantic and exciting as the concept of Atlantis or Mu sounds, there is simply no real evidence for them. Worse still, for the
"paleo-tech" believers, is that the very absence of evidence argues for its non-existence.
[edit on 13-10-2004 by Off_The_Street]