How much of pre-history is there to be lost?

Great Debates
1

From a Western historical point of view, it would seem as if society sprung into existence rather suddenly.

Defined as the era before written records are available, pre-history spans hundreds of thousands of years beyond what we know. We have but traces of cultures that would be ancient to the ancients - and ancient to them - it gives me a spine-tingling sense to imagine back that far, to humans not removed from ourselves building the foundations of culture.

Agriculture was known in parts of the world by 6000 BC. The Bronze Age began c. 3100 BC. Almost totally unrecorded history spaned the world in most of that time. There is no need to think of these early pre-civilized peoples as primitives little removed from animals. They knew how to make complex instruments, they cultivated animals and some had agriculture. They had culture, religion, heirarchy. They had kings. They had monuments. Largely forgotten to modern, Western history are the cultures that thrived throughout Central Asia, in Africa, Asia proper. These people lived for thousands of years - not with the tools that would revolutionize society and introduce urbanization and civilization, but they lived.

Maybe not enough to create great cities that stand the test of time… but envision a series of nomadic, tribal cultures, such as that of the later Scythians, hunting and living for thousands of years. The stories, the lore, the legend they must have told… we know that very early humans held religious beliefs, and we know that many of the familiar Egyptian, Sumerian, Greek, and other gods were imported from the depths of Africa and Central Asia. How far back can this lore stretch?

Realistically, how much of this lost history is possible? Given the sheer odds of archeology, finding anything is so chancy, and there are tremendous gaps in our knowledge. There may be, and in my estimation, likely are, entire missing civilizations, hinted at by the ancients in their lore of their ancients.

What evidence is there? Traces of large groups of people following rulers, maybe an ancient tattooed culture on the Asian steppe, with no writing, no building, but culture, and history. How far back can we reach? How far can we expect it to reach? Are the primitive gods of the earliest humans ancestors passed down, pantheon to pantheon, culture to culture, ever changing, until they reach us?

I think this is the greatest mystery… what once was, what we have lost. What these humans laughed and joked about, fought over, loved over. What their art was.

Then, the ultimate question… could civilization have existed, and been lost? If not civilization, kingdoms? Could there have been scientific advances - bronze - that by chance failed their founders? Could there have been super-ancient cities lost to the forces of nature? I’m not speaking of the fantasy tales of advanced technology and civilizations spun by Atlantis theorists, but very simple civilization.

I’m sorry, I find this topic fascinating. Evidence exists that mankind became food producers in glacier-torn Europe between 6000 and 5000 BC. What of the rest of the planet? The landscape and climate, rivers and seas and oceans would be positioned differently. Weather patterns could be unrecognizable. The cradle of civilization may have been somewhere before Sumeria. To me, it is a haunting prospect. To gaze back 6000 years to a settlement of fur covered structures… and hear what they said.

What knowledge do you have, Dopers?

2

Not sure if there’s a debate here.

Archaeology is largely a crapshoot. Luck plays a tremendous role.

If for any reason, no one thought to have created the Rosetta stone, many aspects Ancient Egyptian culture might still be a complete mystery to us.

We are always one shovelful away from finding a previously unknown civilization.

And no, they were not primitive. Homo Sapiens has changed little, if at all, in tens of thousands of years.

The aspect of this that I find humbling is the idea that no matter how backwater an ancient technology might seem to us, the people using it probably felt the same way we do: that they lived at the highest possible pinnacle of civlization.

3

As far as I know the Chinese culture - from which the earliest dated findings (gravegifts) are 9000 years old - is today considered as not only the longest existing but also the oldest culture of human history (that is known of).

A few months ago I went to Bonn to visit an exhibition of the Chinese Emperors Art Collection. What was brought to Germany was only a little part of this collection which is now in the especially constructed National Palace Museum in Taipeh. Yet I couldn’t resist of taking this occasion to refresh my memory of a few of these amazing works of art the Emperors of different dynasties collected. Including some of the objects they used personally and some they made themselves (mostly poetry or painting).

Whatever is considered now as modern “culture” can’t stand even in the shadow of what was made thousands of years ago in China. The catalogues alone of this collection, which emperors ordered to be made and adjusted are an artwork.

I think people who adhere so much to “the miracles of technology” that they think that whomever who lived in a “non technological” age (and extend that to the people who do not have acces to that miraculous technology age today) had and have no “culture” and are “backwards” should go to exhibitions like this to wake up.
I even read on this board once a poster who claimed that no art (it was about paintings) had any value because (as he put it) all you need is a PC and a scanner to get it all printed out exactly the same as if you had the original painting.
In my opinion if you get people who reason like that then there is something weird about the education system they have in their nation/region/school… Whatever.
Salaam. A

4

I’ve wondered about this. Apart from smaller artifacts like the ones Aldeberan mentioned, there seem to be no major sites or ruined cities beyond a barrier at about 3500 BCE. Since we’ve been anatomically modern for upwards of 100,000 years, according to currently accepted theories, why did we spend 90000 of those years in Old Stone Age conditions?

5

The better question would be “why didn’t we?”. Even with the intelligence to make complex connections between cause and effect or process and result, there’s still a large element of luck in what moves us technologically forward. It’s not obvious, for example, that mixing copper and tin together is a good idea worth pursuing because it makes this really cool bronze stuff. It takes, I dunno, maybe Zog accidentally dropping some tin in a vat of hot copper he was using to make something else and then realizing the worth of the alloy formed afterwards instead of just pitching it out and cussing a bit about the waste.

6

This was exactly the point James Burke made with his television series “Connections” in the 1970s. Most of the technological advances that he felt were really paving the way toward the future as of 1978 (and he was a marvelous predicter) had their origins in discoveries that, at the time, seemed completely useless. It was only luck that brought them about at all, and accident of circumstance that anyone found a function for them.

7

But are they not a few key “enabling” technological inventions that are needed to allow an explosion of other advances to be permanently retained and used as the basis for further dependent developments?

I am thinking about writing systems here - enabling the passing on of knowledge, like the recipe for bronze for instance.

I am not an archeologist but I would imagine without some way of passing knowledge on other than word of mouth then many things would have to be reinvented repeatedly. If everything you invent that is useful can be recorded and shared then surely you get an explosion of technological advances?

Or maybe not. After all from the little I know early writing systems were used to make lists of contents of treasuries, slaves, store houses etc… Hmmm.

8

Could be just a matter of numbers. Current anthropological thinking has us going thru an evolutionary bottleneck about 75k yrs ago during which time there may have been only 1,000 - 10,000 H. sapiens total. We may have simply grown into a situation where settled communities made sense from a survival standpoint. Put that together with the right climatic conditions (ie, end of an ice age) and that it might just be the lucky conditions that produced civilization.

9

Interesting. I hadn’t heard about that theory. You wouldn’t happen to have a cite would you?

10

The process of evolutionary genetic selection in homo sapiens was indeed slowing down to a halt 100,000 years ago. You should be able to drop an infant human being from 75k years ago into a family unit in modern New York City, and they would get along in life just fine.

Natural evolution stopped happening when human beings went from strictly gathering tribes to hunting tribes. With this innovation, the home-base was created. Women and children at home, men hunt. With gathering, you rely on luck, and an effect of this is harsh natural selection. With hunting, humans have taken the first steps towards controlling and manipulating the environment around them. In a huge sense, men have taken evolution into their own hands, since now a tribes’ standard of living relies on innovation and technology instead of the pure power of the natural forces surrounding them.
For civilization however, a primary ingredient is a surplus of food. This didn’t really happen for human beings until about 6,000 B.C. when agriculture first appears.

So my wager is that between 100,000 B.C. and 4,000 B.C. when the first civilizations take shape, human beings were primarily occupied with survival itself. That is why we spent 90,000 years in stone-age conditions.

When agriculture comes, you get a surplus of food, and for the first time there can be true specialization. A man can spend his whole life carving tools, mixing metals, mapping the night sky, plotting a written language etc… The surplus of food means that survival doesn’t occupy all men’s time.

To contemplate how many human lives have come and gone on this planet, and with them countless hopes and dreams is truely awe-inspiring. To think that ancient Egyptian civilization spanned an era from 3200 B.C. to 1075 B.C. - a period one and a half times longer than Christianity. Think of how truely small of a blip the United States is.

11

(Emphasis added.) While I agree with the rest of your post, this statement just isn’t true. So long as some humans have more children than others, and some portion of this variation is hereditary, natural selection will continue to affect human populations. It may be that selective pressure on modern humans is low, but it is not zero.

Note that lack of anatomical changes does not imply that our species is not evolving. At the very least, humans have co-evolved in an ongoing process with several disease organisms. Also note the fact that the sick and less than physically perfect survive to reproduce increases the evolution of our species, by increasing genetic diversity.

12

Even being preoccupied with survival and without agriculture, isn’t it still possible for, if not civilization, cultures and larger collective groups to have organized? Even if it was very primitive - nomadic tribes similiar to those that existed in the Americas and Central Asia for well into recorded history…

What would their society have been like? We know from the early cave paintings and artifacts that religion developed very early in primitive mankind, as did a social structure. By, say, 8000 BC, what would they be wearing? What are the steps between the primitive Stone Age and the Bronze Age? We know that there have been later empires and civilizations we had never known about until a chance discovery. Wiped out by disease or famine, leaving almost no trace, and this would be (relatively) recently. I’m thinking of one recently unearthed in, I believe, Kazakhstan. I can’t seem to find the resources. I’ll keep looking.

13

No web cite, but you’ll find this discussed in almost any book about human evolution written in the last decade or so. But I believe it is more in the realm of hypothesis than theory at this point, and is based mainly on the remarkable similarity in modern human DNA, pointing to a small founding population.

Highly unlikely. Humans species “went from strictly gather to hunting” long before Sapiens evolved. Once Sapiens did evolve, there was still genetic variations that produced the regional physical differences one sees in poplations of humans today.

14

Well, that’s just it.

Until you get into serious metal working, you don’t have a lot of stuff that’s going to stand the test of time. There could be some ancient civilization based entirely on wood products, but we’d have to count ourselves fortunate to find any trace of it.

15

Realistically, not much. After all, history, as distinct from archaeology, is meant to not only collect but also to explain. Even with primary and contemporary secondary written sources it’s hard enough to establish a “story” behind your physical findings.

For instance, is a carved female figure a goddess, art, or pornography (or all 3?) Not only should we not look down upon the ancient’s technological feats, we should not look down upon their cultural advancement as well (even they had to have fun, sometimes.)

16

That hypothesis re: the Toba eruption circa 75 ka and a human genetic bottleneck is incorrect. We were just talking about this the other day in GQ. The current thought is that a bottleneck is possible, but there really is no way of reliably knowing when it happened from mDNA mutations alone, because we have no constraint on the mutation rate. It could have happened as early as 2 million years ago, or as recently as 40,000 years ago.

My own arm-wavy opinion on the topic of why certain technological advances didn’t happen sooner: 1) the tool kit that people had in hand was adequate to their circumstances, so there was little pressure to develop something new; and 2) the population density needed to develop and sustain the use of technological improvements hadn’t been reached until relatively recently.

Hunter-gatherers leave very little behind in the archaeological record; finding their traces is like finding needles in a haystack. How many times was a better blade independently developed before its form was used by enough people to leave traces that could be tied to “cultures”? I don’t think we will ever truly know.

17

If there had been a civilization 75K years ago, how advanced could it be while still leaving no visible traces after 75,000 years? For instance, if there was a civilization before the last ice age, would the ice sheet obliterate it? For instance, I would expect a civilization roughly equivalent to the Stonehenge might vanish completely. What about a bronze age civilization?

Is there any reason to believe that Humans went through a successful phase and then shrank dramatically in population, perhaps by the ice age, and then sprung back again? Is that even possible?

18

Not 75k years ago, since modern humans had not left Africa yet. No ice age there to obliterate anything. Possibly 40k yrs ago, after we had made it to Europe, Asia and Australia.

19

That should have been “No ice sheets…” instead of “No ice age…”.

20

Still, that is a damn long time. We know civilizations - well, cultures - that survived until the modern era without advents like bronze. When I started this thread, I was thinking along the lines of less than 10k years ago, which is still a damn long time. It just seems like there would be spurts and failures before we “got it right”… and even if not, the people who lived for those 40k years had to have had some amount of culture, some way to live.

What about language? What do we know about the development of the earliest languages? I would imagine this would be nearly impossible to date, outside of evidence of higher organization…

This site (it seems kinda out there, so I make no claims as to its accuracy, but it gives a number) dates 10k years ago, and cave paintings to 30k years ago.

http://www.primitivism.com/language.htm

It seems to suggest that c. 10,000 BC, there would be social structures in place that could develop civilization.

Indo-Euro root is dated to c. 4000 BC, if I read correctly, while

(http://www.armenianhighland.com/homeland/chronicle120.html)

So the estimate of 10k years ago seems fairly on-target for known culture/civilization to develop, likely in Central/Western Asia for the “traditional” root - I haven’t been able to find much regarding African and American languages.

Frankly, this is getting frustrating. The Internet is a brilliant research database, but it isn’t exactly peer-reviewed. Every time I think I hit upon a site with decent information, it starts talking about the Early World Civilization or some wild theory that I won’t accept without a helluva lot of proof.

This is typical http://www.crystalinks.com/languages.html

All I can get for “early Africa” is post-historic… and this is what piques my interest. Clearly, civilization of a sort existed in the heart of Africa for quite some time - we simply don’t know, because some areas are unexplored, the jungle covers much of it, and frankly, no one has been interested. There has been no great Sumerian-type empire, but it appears, a lot of smaller tribal kingdoms with an occasional empire that interacted with the ME (the Salt Road comes to mind). I want to know… how far back does this go… can the “primitive” tribal African be a snapshot of what we were 10,000 years ago? Well, there is less need for agriculture, less need for mobilization and domestication of animals. Really, little of what kickstarts civilization. I feel like it is a false lead.

Quick, someone give me a research grant. :-p