Did prehistory look like middle earth?

IIRC at least 4 species of homo interbred over the last several hundred thousands of years [since the first sapiens], so you're right about the multiple "races" of humans. We know that humans used mammoth bones and tusks, and giant armadillo shells to make shelters. I reckon that certain places at certain times would seem a lot like something out of a fantasy book.

strongfp
reply to post by Rapha

 

You can fit almost any plot or scenario from LOTR into your own. But Tolkien being a former soldier, and growing up during WW2 and how closely the events were to his books, it was most likely WW2. The tree ents really give it away.

He was WW1

Tolkien was a soldier in WW1 and some of the dialogue comes straight off the battlefield. The dragons were like the slow-moving aircraft of the day and the oliphaunts were the tanks. The "eye" of Sauron was like a searchlight- always watching- and yes the Ents were the Americans who did not want to get involved. I bet Gollum was based on some poor crazy guy who had been gassed that they could hear coughing at night creeping about in no man's land.

Tolkien loved European mythology and he used to complain that England lacked this (I would argue that by mentioning Arthur and Avalon, but that's what he believed). Apparently he created Middle Earth in the hope it would become real in our hearts, and that it would stay with us as real mythology.....hence by the end of the Fourth age men became increasingly dominant and the 'magic' of the elves and dwarfs started to disappear...and here we are, in the future, a world dominated by men where magic has gone.

I wish one day I'll open an old wardrobe and I'll find myself in Middle Earth (although Narnia looks good too).

reply to post by ArtemisE


Yes I think the deluge was very real and that in those earlier times the Earth was in an unrecognizable state which to us would seem magical. Kind of like middle-earth ish but with geography that was even more neat. Neat as in neat like a neat room. And as neat as in neat how it's used as slang. Lower sea level more land more rivers more defined features. Far richer histories and cultures that would make ours look disorganized and quaint. And a population impressive even to our modern day standards. With building feats equally impressive to our most beautiful structures in record. With people having access to clues that Earth back then gave them which led them to surpassing us in astronomy, astrology and history deduction. The stars may have looked very different back then even with the lens of a slightly different atmosphere and not so much electrical light.

Speaking of I wonder how many new galaxies and stars are revealed each century? That would expand our field of vision by 100 light years right? I wonder if this is applicable to reality or the rate of universal expansion is equal to that. If so that would be an interesting coincidence. It's seeming like illusions apply to space relative to our detectors in this system as well. For all we know some stars that appear large by scientific standards could actually be small and magnified for God knows what reason. Maybe some of the big blue stars 100x the suns size are actually small blue stars smaller than the sun and closer or farther than we originally thought by quite a distance. Or maybe they're solar systems that are universally giant or galaxies with universally small or large systems. Where everything is bigger even atoms. Or maybe it's an illusion because when we went to that planet our atoms would grow uniform with that galaxy. This would account for the illusion. Thanks for the inspiration, good thread.

strongfp
reply to post by Rapha

 

You can fit almost any plot or scenario from LOTR into your own. But Tolkien being a former soldier, and growing up during WW2 and how closely the events were to his books, it was most likely WW2. The tree ents really give it away.

Not according to Tolkien:

"An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience," Tolkien acknowledged, but he strongly denied that his story was an allegory for World War I or II.* Although The Lord of the Rings was written during World War II and follows the rise of a great evil threatening to envelop the world, the ring was not meant to symbolize the atomic bomb. Likewise, the characters Sauron and Saruman, although both tyrants, are imaginary characters and are not meant to represent Hitler or Stalin.

NatGeo

Harte

I agree with what another poster said. There is a grain of truth at the bottom of every story--an original muse.
It is interesting that some fantasy authors are going with this idea and imbedding it into their novels. Robert Jordan, in his Wheel of Time series, cast back to ancient pasts where the world is extremely different. Terry Brooks novels cover thousands of years--and the timeline starts in relatively modern times, but the entire world, it's people and technology are completely transformed.

So, when it comes to anything left over from prehistory...how long does it take for the Earth's crust to recycle itself through the core? Couldn't everything after a certain amount of time be gone? Or am I not understanding how all of that works?

reply to post by awakendhybrid


We have rocks from the really early earth. It takes billions of years to recycle every thing thru tectonics... That said most stuff deteriorates without plat tech.

I personally doubt we made it past Greek civilization in tech in the forgotten past. We would be finding more stuff we couldn't explain.

Also with the evolutionary record being pretty solid. It all had to go down in the last 2 or 3 hundred thousand years. A blink in tectonic terms.

DogMeat
We can date back what.. 500,00 years of man(or so we think)
Dinos went out some 50 million years ago. Mamoths 10,000 years....

Earth is 5 Billion years old... give or take.
What happen with the other 4.9 Billion years??

Earth could just be doing a rinse and repeat of all life as it were.

Who says that hundreds or even thousands of civilizations did not come before us?
What makes us think we are the best that time and earth has produced?
As far back as we think we can see/test/know is little more than a blink in time.

We could be repeating this whole game over and over.
With all the earth quakes we are having and such. Earth may be tired of our crap and ready to rinse and repeat yet once again.

edit on 11-4-2014 by DogMeat because: (no reason given)

The continental tectonic plates have remained as they are for the past 450 million years. Given that they drift by 5cm/year, that means they could have moved 4000km along all those years. In that time, seas like the North Sea have appeared, coastlines have disappeared, rivers have changed paths. Whole cities have been submerged.

Then you have the mystic tribes like the druids who were feared by the Romans. But mostly that was because the Romans didn't really understand medicine and only made offerings to the Gods when someone was ill. Yet, the Egyptians had doctors and dentists.
Then the Aztecs had all that stone building.

I think it would have been awesome to see if there really was a Middle-Earth period. I just finished reading a book called Bright Sword of Ireland and now I have the urge to jump into the nearest time machine to go back to the time of the Celts and the Tain

reply to post by ArtemisE


I'm with you on this, I'm sure it did resemble Middle Earth in many ways. I believe there was at least one advanced civilization we either don't know about or are not being told about. How else would you explain a complete loss of know-how on how to build proper pyramids?

I also believe this past civilization was more "in tune" with nature, again making it resemble Middle Earth. Just a guess. I wish I had grown up in that era haha.

In regards to the earth going through cycles, and stuff being lost to time, look into super continents.

"The forming of supercontinents and their breaking up appears to have been cyclical through Earth's history. There may have been many others before Pangaea. The fourth-last supercontinent, called Columbia or Nuna, appears to have assembled in the period 2.0–1.8 Ga.[8][9] Columbia/Nuna broke up and the next supercontinent, Rodinia, formed from the accretion and assembly of its fragments. Rodinia lasted from about 1.1 billion years ago (Ga) until about 750 million years ago, but its exact configuration and geodynamic history are not nearly as well understood as those of the later supercontinents, Pannotia and Pangaea."

"Pangaea (/pænˈdʒiːə/ pan-jee-ə;[1]) was a supercontinent that existed during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras, forming approximately 300 million years ago.[2] It began to break apart around 100 million years after it formed."

-en.wikipedia.org...

"The supercontinent cycle describes the quasi-periodic aggregation and dispersal of Earth's continental crust. There are varying opinions as to whether the amount of continental crust is increasing, decreasing, or staying about the same, but it is agreed that the Earth's crust is constantly being reconfigured. One complete supercontinent cycle is said to take 300 to 500 million years. Continental collision makes fewer and larger continents while rifting makes more and smaller continents."

-en.wikipedia.org...

So, as you can imagine, the world would be unrecognisable as our own if we travelled just a couple hundred millions years back. 540 million years ago [pre-pangaea] North America was on the equator. The earth was relatively cold, and Gondwanaland [the super-continent that Australia, South America, Antarctica, Africa and India formed from] was at the south pole.

reply to post by ArtemisE

For the different Homo species to interact, they'd have to exist at the same time and in the same place. We know sapiens interacted with both neanderthalensis (in Europe) and Denisovans (in Asia). Homo floresiensis existed during the same time as modern humans, and while they seem fairly isolated, there might have been some interaction. But if this graphic on Wikipedia is right, it is unlikely we met any of the others. And by the time Middle-earth scale civilization was going on, writing and city-states and whatnot, only Homo sapiens remained.

rickymouse
Well, six hundred years ago you could live in the forest here in parts of North America and never venture out into the sun during the summer. There was a high canopy above the land, the Indians created this place. White man came and cut it all down and sent the wood to Europe. Yeah, it may have looked like middle earth.

how about NO. The indians moved in and slaughtered off a previous people. They have found evidence of a people here before the Indians came and evidence to support them fighting each other.

As for the middle earth theory. Some of it might had been possible. Dragons? pssh yeah right. Elves could be what we call NORDICS. Dwarves died off. Hobbits crossbred with humans and eventually stopped being hobbits whose decendants became the irish. Wizards went away until needed. Like merlin who showed up to counsel king arthur. Its a fun exercise to speculate.

reply to post by yuppa


If you read some Indian history, you will see that the Indians lived with these other ancient inhabitants fairly peacefully for a long time. The other beings didn't like interacting with the Indians much and would not tolerate the Indians messing or interfering with them. The Indians actually caused conflicts but not as a society as a whole, some of their people would purposely rile these Ancient ones up. The Indians decided to kill off these old ones. It wasn't right on the part of the Indians, they knew a small percentage of their people caused all the problems. The Ancient inhabitants did not have to attack the tribes either, but their language was way different and they didn't seem to be very patient.

I have read many articles about ancient Indian folklore. Much of it is possibly true, what was orally passed on from generation to generation of the Shaman was tightly regulated by their rules. Some tribes didn't interpret the Shaman's information right, and unless they had agreements, these differences caused wars amongst the tribes. I guess this was sort of like religious wars in the history of the people in Europe and Asia.

These ancient people were supposedly big people.

reply to post by yuppa


What previous people? NA and SA were the last continents to be inhabited by Humans. Only in the last 10'000-40'000 years did people come here. And there was an ice sheet over northern NA, so everyone was stuck in the North [Alaska, mostly] until the last melt.

It is true that some of the First Nations displaced other people, but it was hardly a slaughter. My guess is that you are referring to the Thule and their displacing of the Dorset people. The Dorset people were in the North thousands of years before the Thule, and were "driven away" by the Thule who are the ancestors of today's Inuit people. There isn't evidence of any "war". The Dorset people were already in decline being unable to cope with the Medieval Warming period... the "displacement" was just the nail in the coffin. There is actually evidence that the Thule and Dorset [and/or other earlier peoples] cooperated. The Thule and their descendants crossed the whole of the Northern Stretch of NA in an extremely short span of time reaching Greenland. The only way that the Thule could have made that journey would be with help from an earlier peoples.

Did the First Nations fight amongst themselves? Obviously. They're human. But nothing on the scale of the slaughter seen with the European invasion. Oral history describes some conflicts between nations, but for the most part they were cooperative and tolerant of each other.

Edit: The Dorset people [and Thule people] were both occasionally described as giants and as dwarfs... yet we have remains and shelters and tools and they are all normal sized. You can't take folk tales to heart. Most pre-european cultures that exist today can be traced back to their origin. As science marches on, mysteries have to be put aside. The Thule/Inuit described the Dorset people as cowardly giants. But we now know that the Dorset were normal sized. Vikings described the people they encountered in NA as both giants and dwarves, but now we know exactly what culture they interacted with... and the people were normal sized. Look at evidence before looking at anecdotes.

rickymouse
Well, six hundred years ago you could live in the forest here in parts of North America and never venture out into the sun during the summer. There was a high canopy above the land, the Indians created this place. White man came and cut it all down and sent the wood to Europe. Yeah, it may have looked like middle earth.

They did the same in Europe. Insane acres of forest were cut down for firewood to heat castles and homes using huge fireplaces that just let all the heat shoot up through the chimneys. Not even a firebox to trap the heat.

Then there were so few people in Europe, that there was more risk of bear and wolf attacks in the forests than there was of meeting someone else. Imagine just being able to have the knowledge of making your own boat, load it up and sail to some nearby fjord or beach and have the freedom to just cut down trees and build a home right there and then, no need for planning permission, environmental impact surveys or solicitors fees.

reply to post by LeviWardrobe


Agree with all of this.
Anecdotal tales of giants are unsubstantiated.

This thing about ginger hair is always mentioned but this has been investigated and it turns out that all human hair contains certain redish pigments which are more prevalent after death (due to their chemical stability in comparison to other pigments) en.wikipedia.org...

Ginger hair doesnt mean conventional "Ginger".

reply to post by stormcell


I was going to build a sauna ten years ago and the cost of the permits would have been nearly as much as the cost of the sauna. Eight hundred bucks in permits and another fifty bucks a year for taxes on the property. I can go to the VFW and take a sauna for two bucks.

OP is 100% correct and you wouldn't have to go back further than maybe 30,000 years to 100,000

Let's bear in mind before I bring to bear what we "know" that most creatures never leave fossils it takes extreme cicumstance and then let's present what we "do know"

1: Hobbit Man en.wikipedia.org... Homo Florensis lived from at least 90,000 years ago until (at least) 13,000 years ago... 3 feet tall there are your dwarves

2: Neanderthal man www.sciencedaily.com... Neandethal man remains found near the arctic date to 28,000 years ago, there are stories from Russia of the last ones having died only this century... They apparently had a different set of vocal patterns, larger brain, stronger... (and remember) fossils are rare...

3: Gigantopithicus dates of finds date to 100,000 years ago but might have been around a lot longer, many people think the modern Bigfoot is the ancestor of Gigantopithicus, the big 12 foot ape was definitely quite a Troll of sorts.. en.wikipedia.org...

4: Homo erectus discovermagazine.com... last surviving Erectus? 50,000 years ago... again, that we know of...


Now this is all just nearly human, bigtroll, dwarf, human, wild man, half ape (orc) all kind of running around at the same time around 90,000 years ago, it's easy to imagine Homo sapiens pushing into Asia in that time fram, running into Many neanderthals, a rare gigantopitihicus, tribes of occasional erectus and florensis... our last dates again are only fossil records which again are rare and don't happen via murder... as it seems the larger weirder man forms sort of did vanish... as we arrived. (very Tolkein like if you ask me)

Denisova en.wikipedia.org...

Now lets add what else was out there...

Giant Sloth. Saber Tooth, Mammoth, Giant armadillo, the Moa and well... like 140,000 other species that vanished

Now... Dragons? www.youtube.com... sure some tiny flying reptiles still survive, but there are images of things that look like a petrosaur as recently as this century, the mokolomembe, small brontosauri have been reported, there is actually NO real reason to assume all the dinosaurs perished... none.

So here is the way I see Earth 90,000 years ago to 13,000...

1: at least (minimum) 6-7 species of Hominids still surviving, some in much smaller numbers than others... but out there

2: world populated by large Mammals, Giant by our standards including many varieties of ape some we don't even know of...

3: some dinosaurs surviving still in small numbers, reptiles growing much larger and more common than today, crocs, alligators, snakes growing far larger than today, but also, Petrosaurs, Brontosauri and maybe even a few larger carnivores still wandering around, given the large size of Mammals until recently a rare loc of a trex like predator is far from unthinkable... Bas that grew to 60-80 feet...

4: Giant sea creatures, www.discovery.com... ce-of-a-50-ton-megalodon.htm discovery channel evidence for a living Megalodon... 50 Ton shark, that's just a start...

I'm sure it looked A LOT like Tolkien... heck the herds when European settlers arrived in the new world number 100's of thousands crossing the plains... that's a lot of food, it would have been something to behold the world of 90,000 years ago... you'd want a party of adventurers to go see it...