I’ve never been a believer of the “chariots of the gods/lost city of Atlantis/lost super civilization/inexplicable stonework” theories. However, I often find myself wondering what life was like for homo sapiens before 10-20,000 BC. As far as I can tell, modern humans existed at least 100k years ago - with some sources claiming 300k. What did those early humans leave behind?
Many sources claim a “blossoming” of human culture approximately 10k yrs ago. If there were such a blossoming, when did it occur and why?
Gobekli Tepe was 8500-9500 yrs ago - but obviously did not spring into being out of nothing. And I periodically hear about older sites. What is the current thinking WRT “civilization” between 10,000 and 100,000 years ago? It seems I have regularly heard of discoveries pushing back any number of dates - such as the peopling of the Americas.
The last threads I saw were from 2002-03. I was wondering what folk consider reliable findings/writings/research since then.
I initially intended to place this in FG, but thought the topic might not lend to an unargued factual answer.
I’m not up on what newer archeological findings have been made but at one point paleontologists thought there was a distinct revolution in artifacts approximately 40,000 BCE. Here’s Wikipedia’s take on the subject.
Thank you for the correction. So, the question remains - what existed before 11k yrs ago? I understand the fragmented archeological record, but if something as monumental as GT existed 11k years ago, I’d expect SOMETHING more significant earlier. Humans just leapt from huts to GT?
A sizeable gap between GT and 500k yr-old Lincoln Logs.
Are there any websites/publications you find meaningful WRT this early history/prehistory? I wish to avoid the numerous “Archeology cannot explain…” sites. (Unless, of course, there ARE unexplained mysteries…)
True. Körtik Tepe is probably pre-10000 BCE. So is Mendik Tepe. Similar cultures but earlier so we know that the progression was gradual.
Indications of organized human activity are much older than that. Structures built from mammoth bones dot eastern Europe and date to around 25000 BCE.
Cave art has to be considered modern human behavior. It’s now known from 50000 BCE in Indonesia and from 40000 BCE is Europe. Some art is far older than that.
The first evidence for drawing were found on rocks in the Blombos Caves in southern Africa and dates back to between 75,000 to 100,000 years ago. These consist of geometric patterns.
Numerous remains of other sorts have been found all over the world from before 10000 BCE. Definitions of “modern” behavior are needed to know what you want to include.
Archaeology magazine’s website is a great readable conglomeration of news and findings.
Supposedly this was due to climate change (the good kind). An ice age ended about 11,000 years ago and climates became stable enough to support agriculture. So agriculture developed in close to a dozen different human settlements located all over the world around this time. Europeans, Asians, Americans, Middle easterners, Africans, etc all developed agriculture around this time and the neolithic revolution happens. Which makes me wonder if humans were experimenting with agriculture before 11,000 years ago, its just that the climate wasn’t stable enough for it to be sustainable.
There’s a skeleton from Israel about 38,000 years old with a healed foot fracture, and a 15,000 healed femur fracture, suggesting that people with serious injurious were cared for, to the point that they were able to recover.
That took either serious dedication of a partner, or, more likely, a community where there was some kind of organization for caring for people who couldn’t care for themselves, and aiding families with a such a member.
Do most people agree that agriculture was the cause of the “culture expansion” 10-15k years ago? How do you separate cause from effect? Wouldn’t the climate have permitted agriculture during the ice age, in areas south of the ice sheets? Such as in Africa and the middle east? Or was it that the ice sheets blocked migration.
I guess what underlies my question is that I periodically wonder what it would like to be a human - essentially like myself, some 50-100k years ago. What was life like? Perhaps the best insight may be to look to more recent “primitive” hunter-gatherer societies.
But most likely, my personal difficulty lies in not appreciating how much can be accomplished in 1000 - or 10k years. The cultural and technological differences from 1100-2100 AD is astoundingly vast. My perspective in the present causes me difficulty imagining similar changes between - say - 10,000-9000 BCE.
The rate of change has simply exploded in the last 1,000 and especially last 100, years. Which gives all of us modern folks a really inappropriate yardstick to measure eras prior to that when stasis was the norm.
No. Humans had been flirting with forms of agriculture for thousands of years before the “revolution” without significant settlement pattern changes, and they experimented with various settlement forms afterwards too. See “The Dawn of Everything” by Graeber and Wengrow, ch. 6.
Key takeaway from that whole book is that the idea of linear progress is not justified.
No. The best insight is to look at the material evidence.
Looking primarily at recent HGs is a big mistake. They are just as modern as the agrarian and pastoral societies surrounding them.
Argument from incredulity is a fallacy.
Any one set of technological innovations in that timeframe could be immensely impactful and yet untrained people wouldn’t give it any credit. So, for instance, pottery advances, or changes in microlith manufacture, or evidence of water transport. Add them all together and it’s hardly a static millennium, technologically.
Even more importantly, they’re atypical because in historical times they have only lived in marginal areas unsuitable for farming or herding: deep jungle, desert and arctic tundra. HGs would have faced very different circumstances before farming and herding took over the temperate zones.
As an aside, I’m not crazy about the term “cave art”, because it implies that there was ever something special about art in caves. The fact is, prehistoric humans probably drew on every surface they could find; caves just happen to be the only places we’ve found where their art was preserved.
Both sentences are true. One could talk about rock art, because very old Australian aborigine art has been found in the open. And earlier carved or drawn pieces on various materials also indicate modern human thought.
Cave art or cave paintings or similar terminology is what it has been called since Lascaux was found in 1940. A term with a century of usage is hard to displace.