Extinction event! what like last time?

Originally posted by anonentity

Originally posted by Harte
No bottleneck 12kya.
The great pyramid was never underwater.
There is no seaport at Titicaca.
"All" of humankind does not have a flood myth, though it's true that floods happen everywhere.
There is no such thing as the Gulf of Cathay. Cathay is an old name for China. You mean the "Gulf of Cambay," actually the Gulf of Khambat, and there's no city there and the only thing dated was a dredged up piece of driftwood.
Antarctic ice hasn't melted in a at least half a million years.
There exist no ancient maps of an "ice free" Antarctica. Greenland was basically ice free when the Vikings got there (during the Medieval Warm Period.) The little ice age, which only ended during the American Civil War, put an end to the ice free status.

Perhaps you could come up with something that actually happened?

Harte

Yeh it was the Gulf of Khambat I missed the edit time. Greenland ice free? No sunken city under Khambat? If I said Aluminium occurred naturally , you would say it dosn't.

Actually, no.
I spent 25 years in the aluminum manufacturing industry. I know for a fact that aluminum occurs naturally, though extremely rarely.

I also know that aluminum doesn't oxidize away in the way iron does.

Aluminum oxide is a crystalline molecule that, when forming on the surface of a piece of aluminum, eventually locks in with the other oxide crystals to form an airtight coating. At that point, oxidation ends because the oxide is very tough (unlike iron oxide, or rust.)

In fact, oxidation of aluminum was one of my specialties in the field. It's called "anodizing." Have you heard of it?

Harte

reply to post by anonentity


The main points, like the meteor event from 12,000 yrs ago that wiped out the American mega fauna, are valid, especially in light of the recent finds of meteoric debris in the "Black Matte" layer. The fact is, a continent teaming with huge mammals was cleared of them geologically overnight.

Picking at the mis-info, (which exists in reams in relation to this topic, to be fair) is good in that it teaches, but that people achieved some form of higher civilization (and this doesn't mean steel skyscrapers) in the past is pointed to in "myth/legend," occasional OOPs, dna migration studies and most of all in the fact that we have been in our present forms for at least half a million years.

My dna likes a civilized existence. Extrapolating from that, I'd think my ancestors would've liked living in communities where life was easier... could be wrong, but the evidence of our past is darn scant (beyond 5,000 bce), on both sides of the past civilization argument. So what I'm saying, if it matters, is it's certainly possible whether naturally occurring aluminum was used in a belt buckle or not.

Just because some of the evidence is anything but, doesn't mean the notion lacks any merit... baby... bathwater, blah blah...

Originally posted by Baddogma
reply to post by anonentity

 

The main points, like the meteor event from 12,000 yrs ago that wiped out the American mega fauna, are valid, especially in light of the recent finds of meteoric debris in the "Black Matte" layer. The fact is, a continent teaming with huge mammals was cleared of them geologically overnight.

Picking at the mis-info, (which exists in reams in relation to this topic, to be fair) is good in that it teaches, but that people achieved some form of higher civilization (and this doesn't mean steel skyscrapers) in the past is pointed to in "myth/legend," occasional OOPs, dna migration studies and most of all in the fact that we have been in our present forms for at least half a million years.

My dna likes a civilized existence. Extrapolating from that, I'd think my ancestors would've liked living in communities where life was easier... could be wrong, but the evidence of our past is darn scant (beyond 5,000 bce), on both sides of the past civilization argument. So what I'm saying, if it matters, is it's certainly possible whether naturally occurring aluminum was used in a belt buckle or not.

Just because some of the evidence is anything but, doesn't mean the notion lacks any merit... baby... bathwater, blah blah...

edit on 8/4/2013 by Baddogma because: scant beyond recent history

Yes I agree that there is a fog of pseudo science, fakes and all the rest to see through. But some hard facts persist. Trying to find archaeology that could back the theory up is pretty difficult. The Antikithera mechanism suggests skilful engineering expertise. The ancient understanding of geometry, is another. The knowledge that the Earth was a sphere another. Lenses unearthed at various places another.
I think that slavery equals the status quo, and no slaves equals not enough manpower, which equals mechanisation. So societies in the past which didn't have slaves made advances..."necessity being the mother of invention etc." Machines elevate human effort. etc. Was it just coincidence that when slavery was banned in Britain the Industrial revolution took off?....Which made slavery uneconomic. If the political system was right. That would have been a significant cause of ancient societies advancing. ie a few brief years in Greece before the pseudo democracies, when all the great art and philosophers seemed to flower. But it could also be the cause of their demise, We can see that now as we have entered the post industrial age the problem of redundant people who are not required, is growing, welfare is increasing, and not likely to stop. So political revolution and ensuing chaos could be another cause of collapse,
Just as deadly as Thera blowing its top, and causing a tsunami that made everyone start the game over again. Which supports the linear A and B or as told to Plato by Solon that the Greeks were as children and had to start again. Which kind supports Plato with regards to the rest.

reply to post by Harte


Good to know - I stand corrected!

reply to post by Baddogma


Nice theory but what we know argues against it. Your ideas comes up short when compared to what we actually know about the archaeological footprints real civilizations leave.

reply to post by Hanslune


To be fair, it's not actually a theory... it's speculation that's just shy of "wild."

There have been some weird things found around the world, and it is true that if something too advanced is found in a context that's too old, it is relegated to the fraud or mis-ID'd pile without too much fuss.

The fact that cultures have stories about past higher civilizations is odd, too, if there's nothing to it... and it isn't just Plato.

But you are right in that there isn't a smoking gun... but I won't be flabbergasted if one turns up someday. And by smoking gun, I don't mean Atlantis necessarily, just signs of ever older civilization.

But then, that's probably just my lack of education showing...

Originally posted by Baddogma
reply to post by Hanslune

 

To be fair, it's not actually a theory... it's speculation that's just shy of "wild."

There have been some weird things found around the world, and it is true that if something too advanced is found in a context that's too old, it is relegated to the fraud or mis-ID'd pile without too much fuss.

The fact that cultures have stories about past higher civilizations is odd, too, if there's nothing to it... and it isn't just Plato.

But you are right in that there isn't a smoking gun... but I won't be flabbergasted if one turns up someday. And by smoking gun, I don't mean Atlantis necessarily, just signs of ever older civilization.

But then, that's probably just my lack of education showing...

I suspect we will find more cultures maybe even villages or towns in the area called the fertile crescent plus. We might also find them in China or elsewhere.

A world wide civilization like our own, recently? I don't want to say impossible but given the evidence we have it would be very unlikely that we wouldn't detect it.

What we might not detect is a small city state or something that was completely destroyed long long ago, if some genius or group of them had advanced. Or something hundreds of thousands of years ago or by a non-human intelligence, or a group of humans who specifically did those things that would avoid detecteion later on - but it is hard to imagine how they could survive doing so or why they would do so.

Yes lots of weird things are found, they tend to be either hoaxes, mis-identifications or deliberate fringe assignments to them of 'high technology'. I have been looking for such signs for 40+ years and I haven't found anything remotely plausible - but I keep looking.

If you are interested get the Corliss series of books they have a lot of information on these types of things.

Yes there are stories and there are tales, some true, some made up and some mere distortions, they need a second source (or more) of identification to be made 'real'.

What needs to be found is something like Gobelki Tepe or Catalhoyuk, ie habitation/used sites, they are impossible to 'fake' and they provide enormous amount of information and they are very common (archaeologically speaking)

reply to post by Hanslune


Agreed... on all you wrote above.

Corliss was exactly what/who I was thinking of in regards to OOPs and things of that nature. He was a wonderful collater and collector of the odd with a solid science background and the sense to present facts without fanciful speculation.

Some of his published materials were enough to raise one's eyebrows completely off one's head. I was sorry to learn he died recently.

And yes, there isn't anything really to support the notion of a long standing world wide civilization akin to our own and it's much more likely smaller groups with good navigation skills and tenuous networks are responsible for some of the more strange leavings.

Our past is fascinating enough in the mainstream narrative... but the what ifs are intriguing, too!

I was corrupted at a tender age by renegade, drug gobbling anthropologists who firmly thought the evidence for divergent hominids, like Sasquatches, was decent and wondered if we had been gene spliced and left by dead-beat aliens... years before Sitchen wrote his gobbly-gook... so I plead baby-boomers and Timothy Leary for my fringe plight. Skoal.

reply to post by Baddogma


Yes but those navigators left us few clues so their existence is unknown. Diffusion vs independent creation is always a problem and should continue to be one for the next few centuries.


I do predict however that we'll find an organized pre-pottery, pre-agricultural people who lived in clans and inhabited a piece of territory in a semi-sedentary way some 15,000-20,000 years ago.....

We shall see