One more thing to kill the diet debate, I was in Special Forces we operated with barely any food for long periods of time, we contrived some damn inventive ways to track and kill our enemies, Fact is a hungry man is gonna be your most alert and desperate, and finally deadly foe. If the food issue was the debate how is America mostly obese and our test scores academically are falling. Trust me in America we are mostly well fed with a highly selectable diet, and our youth are dropping out of school at alarming rates. All of a sudden tests like the SAT, and Act are too hard but our parents passed them so what gives? Very soon we will find our world ruled by the educated few like its been but on a larger scale.
Thanks Chief, lol I know you guys are well educated men, But when men and women come together with their individual educations, pretty soon we reach enlightenment, we cannot assume that everybody knows what we know but we can put it out there so they can. That’s to ensure we never leave a dummy behind, lol
Remember this, Necessity is the Mother of invention, humans don’t evolve we adapt and replicate. One can only look at our tech advances after major wars to know that this is true, there would be no internet if it wasn’t for the cold war. There would be no satellites if there were no need to spy on our enemies, There would be no law if there were no cities and property. There is also no scientific fact concerning there being a pre-human ancestor, none of the extractable DNA, from Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal etc… denote that they were our ancestors they just resembled us or we resembled them. Its now widely accepted that Neanderthal existed next to modern humans in Isralel, however it is also noted that it was unlikely that they could reproduce with modern humans. Just like apes cannot mate with us. They make tools and have societies, but they are not human. So hence we have the darwinists looking for “BIGFOOT” which is the last great hope of Darwinism, lol aint that something, lol good night friends…
Nazi archaeologists were obviously much more skilful than modern archaeologists, who haven’t found any evidence of this whatsoever; but thanks for sharing.
The general thought on nutrition=smart is that during brain development, having the correct nutrients is important. So during fetal development, and during early childhood up to adolescence, good nutrition can make a huge difference in the ultimate intelligence level of the person.
After that - starvation amy play a role. Some nutritional vitamin deficiencies can dull the body’s capabilities, shortage of food can induce lethargy, but in general, it’s not a big effect.
IIRC I think it was SuperFreakonomics where the authors discuss the effect of women fasting excessively in early pregnancy during Ramadan. It produces a noticeable deficit in development.
Agricultural development was not a boon, it was a trap, as the subsequent issues with agriculturalist development seem to show. I ssuggest anyone who can, read Farley Mowat’s “Sea of Slaughter” about the massive abundance of wildlife in North America (he concentrates on the area around the Gulf of St Lawrence, but it applies everywhere). Before dense heavily agricultural populations with advanced weapons deciated them, birds filled the skies, fish filled the oceans, and wildlife roamed the forests and plains in massive herds.
Presumably, as agriculturalists became more locally settled, they stripped the area of game, tying them even more completely to the agricultural way of life. The population explosion and greater population density possible with reliable food supplies created a population too numerous to go back to H&G if the crops failed.
So, “research” by way of Indiana Jones?
Don’t be too disappointed that my position from nearly a year ago has not changed from the underwhelming amount of evidence provided here.
The “lost human civilization” idea goes back a long time and is a staple of SF. Arguably the legend of Atlantis as described by Plato and the antediluvian civilization described in Genesis relate to this idea of a lost civilization, and plenty of modern stories include this as a major idea.
Obvious modern examples of this story include:
Battlestar Galactica remake
Mysterious Cities of Gold
Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker series
And here I was thinking as I clicked on this thread “Oh, someone is posting some new information and thought on human civilizations before the last ice-age.” :rolleyes:
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Revived zombie thread though this may be, I thought it was an interesting read, and I have to say that the ice core records are key here, particularly the ones from the Antarctic that go back more than 600,000 years. Those records show remarkably bounded CO2 cycles between periods of glaciation and the inter-glacials, and then a huge spike that occurred suddenly in the last few hundred years of post-industrial fossil fuel burning that is clear and spectacular evidence of industrialization. Even accounting for a much smaller population in ancient times, any significant industrialization would have left a signature in the CO2 record.
Yes, it assumes that, but it’s hard to see how technology could evolve without passing through the primitive stage of burning stuff for energy first, before being able to develop things like electric and nuclear power. So ancient civilizations may have been advanced in some philosophical or aesthetic sense, but it’s hard to see how they could have been technologically advanced without leaving traces in the ice core record. Tree-shaping is hardly the basis for a technological society.
The other important point - the development of decent technology implies the ability to travel and spread, and weapons to “take over” other groups. A lot of waves of conquest are often traced to technology - iron age tools defeating bronze age, the european expansion with the development of good sailing ships, gunpowder allowing a handful of Spaniards to destroy two large civilizations, etc.
Once a civilization reaches a certain level of technology, you sort of expect it to spread. China seems t have stopped at natural boundaries, but only because it encountered in places like India a matched or better opponent. Regardless, the technology (i.e. stone buildings) spread beyond its borders reating a wave of civilization. It’s unlikely you’ll find a highly advanced civilization with mechanical capability, that never spread beyond, say, an area the size of California, and never had the technology spread far and wide to neighbouring countries. Once they have the tech to compensate for lack or resouces (i.e. transport to import them) technology will flourish.
Then, it’s hard to hide that level of technological development even over a hundred thousand years - we find building post holes and hearths from 10,000 years ago, we’d find roads, tunnels, mines, and foundations for big buildings and such from 100,000 years ago.