Dang, I just came here to post:
And now I’m too late.
I retract what I said. If you define civilization as having cities, then what I said makes no sense, neither do I have any desire to live in a civilized society.
But it’s not just the plants that are the sign of agriculture. The disturbance to the soil can last for a long time. I’ve not got a cite, but I remember reading about how planes with ground-reading radar can find the signs of agriculture, roads, etc., for a long time after the human activity in an area has ended. Am I misrembering, or can anyone else give us information on this?
How what are the odds of their being a ‘lost’ civilization that significantly predated the known rise of civilization elsewhere? Not a technological one, but say an advanced one with advanced thinking, maybe some astronomical knowledge, a philosophy. Say like a Greek city-state 80,000 years ago, formed due to a lucky confluence of abundant game, perhaps easily harvested local vegetation, and a rich fish supply? Homo Sapiens had already been around almost 50,000 years by then. Could a civilization have risen, survived a few thousand years, and vanished?
Or maybe a better question is, “What kind of civilization was possible, and how complex could it have gotten while still not leaving a trace of itself today?”
Wouldn’t anything on the surface of the island of Britain before 20,000 years ago have been completely scoured away by the last glaciation? Ditto for much of the northern hemisphere.
Also, I’ve heard it claimed that there might have been a time when hunting megafauna could have supported prehistoric quasi-civilizations. The idea is that advances in hunting technology made it possible to take down mammoths and other game too big to attack previously, and that for a time these provided a hyper-abundant food source until they were finally hunted to extinction. When you could feed 100 people for a month on the take from a single hunt, it would have left a lot of free time.
Define “civilization”. I would call a Greek city-state a technological civilization. How could you not? A Greek city-state simply couldn’t be supported by hunting and gathering. It would need agriculture.
Actually I believe you’ll find that civilization is defined by having cites.
It’s extremely hard to obliterate traces of even small civilizations from the earth. Heck, we can still identify post holes and garbage dump holes from tiny settlements. It someone were building large. extensive structures, they would certainly leave traces in the earth.
Even if their Soaring Cities of Adamantine Steel crumbled into dust and nothing, nothing remained above the surface, we’d still have tunnels with characteristic arches and their 20-mile-on-a-side cubes of Thought Projectors powered by klystron relays and thermonuclear reactors sunk in the planet’s core.
Or something.
The big problem that I see occuring here is folks have wildly varying ideas as to what constitutes “civilization”.
So, before we continue exploring the idea, we should define what makes a “Civilization”.
Cities?
Public works (bathhouses, roads)?
Multiple layers of society?
Military Power?
Writing?
Digital watches?
Bobble-head dolls of your favorite porn queens.
You know a bunch of us have been gone for about 30 minutes because of this.
(I love PBF!)
Are there?
There is a bobble head doll modeled on Jenna Jameson.
People forget what other’s have accomplished a hundred years ago. I don’t rule out that we haven’t recognized or found the remnants of societies more advanced than history credits existing in the past. They may have used stuff we don’t recognize as a tool. Some technologies could be lost forever, once the people using it are gone. There is a layer of debris across the central USA that occurred by a giant wave. Possibly the Chesapeake meteor that hit on the east coast. There are bronze items brought up by drilled wells that indicate there was a a civilization buried under this debris. There are all sorts of tales, but they all need to be considered tales, because no indisputable proof has been produced.
They are a pretty neat idea.
Stranger
Yeah, but we have knowledge of a pretty catastrophic sea rise around the fertile crescent area connected with the end of the last ice age which isn’t that far removed from the emergence of the first civilzations in that area. We still are finding new remains from Alexandria, and we’re talking about big palaces and we know pretty precisely wher to look. Could we easily locate a pre or early dynastic Egyptian style civilzation in the Mediterranean? Egypt itself have only left their stone temples, the mud-brick cites having long since faded away. Even if we knew where to look for one of these civs, how much would they leave in the way of remains, and what would the ocean floor have done to them over the last 5,000+ years?
I recall reading something in Guns, Germs and Steel about some Egyptian coins (or something) being found on the american continent. Which could imply a much more advanced native american civilization than we assume. But I can’t bloody find it.
Sounds more like Graham Hancock’s nonsense.