Was just watching a show on History Channel talking about the supposed pyramids off the coast of Japan. They look like natural formations to me, though some of it…well, it’s hard to say. The idea they might have been a neolithic quarry is intriguing (to me anyway). But it got me thinking. Sea levels have risen quite dramatically in the last 10-12k years world wide. Also, it seems unlikely to me that we have found all of the ancient ruins even on land.
So…is it possible that there WERE proto-civilizations out there that left cities or other artifacts still to be discovered? Since there is no way to answer this save for opinion I figured I’d put it here. What do you think?
(My thought is that there WERE some fairly advanced cultures out there who’s permanent structures are still out there waiting to be discovered. I especially hope that one day we find something under the Black Sea or maybe even off the coast of Western Europe…or in the Pacific Rim somewhere, perhaps off the coast of China)
Cities that were drowned, like in the Black Sea, are a possibility, as are civilizations in areas where wood would be the default building material and the ruins rotted away. Had the Mississippian culture not erected mounds, like at Cahokia, I’m not sure we’d’ve ever guessed they had once existed and lived in large cities. It’s unlikely anyone would’ve noticed the different color of the soil where the logs that formed the palisade were planted when people were bulldozing another suburb of St Louis or the new grounds for the Collinsville Horseradish and Catsup Festival.
ETA: For the record, Brooks Catsup is the best, and they have (had?) one with Tabasco, making it Mother’s Milk for Adults.
Well, the Egyptian pyramids were anomalous, being Really Effin’ Big and in a climate that preserved them, but advanced cultures don’t always build big, permanent things. The cultures of Subsaharan Africa are nearly unknown because their physical culture (AKA: “stuff”) mostly reverted to its constituent atoms (AKA: “rotted” or, as the model airplane people say when a plane takes a one-and-a-half gainer into the ground, was “re-kitted”) centuries ago.
Yes. I’d say it’s almost a given. Hell, how many tribes were dominant and disappeared with nary a trace in Central and South America alone? We haven’t found the tomb of Genghis Khan, which could be the most important archaeological find ever.
As far as wooden structures goes…I know the conditions have to be ideal, but I’ve seen shows that feature wooden vessels that are in nearly pristine condition. A lot of the wrecks on the great lakes for instance are still down there with even the rigging (in some cases) still on them after hundreds of years. Same with some places off the coast of Europe (and I assume similar conditions are in the Black sea). Didn’t the Swedes raise up an entire 17th century ship of the line (the Vasa? something like that) pretty much completely intact?
Like you said, “ideal.” Wood, skin, hair, antler, and bone, the most common organic building products, are usually deposited where conditions are ideal in the other direction.
Oh, I agree with you. This would be more along the lines of a lottery win I suppose…or a series of lottery wins. Think about all the wooden ships that have ever sunk. How many of them survive intact more than a year or so? If there WERE a lot of proto-civilizations out there before ‘history’ started then perhaps one day we’ll get lucky.
If you think about it, most longtime preservation is the result of “winning the lottery,” be it buildings or the Missing Link, a point often lost on Creationists.
About 65 million years ago a branch of the dromaeosaurs evolved sentience and constructed a modest civilization. In Antarctica they were entering an industrial age, with large steam based machines mining coal and oil. Unfortunately a large space rock fell on their head and they went to sleep forever.
I’d say no - the reason that I think that is that we don’t just have evidence for the earliest civilizations (and that means cities, practically by definition), but also for those cultures’ non-city-building forbears. I don’t doubt that there are individual locales and even cultures found in some places that are more advanced than previously thought *for that region *(Eastern European “pyramid” mounds come to mind) - but not older than the first civilizations, no. Or, in other words, put down the Hancock and read an archeology textbook.
In about 1999, I received a fascinating email on a “Siberian Atlantis” - evidence of a vast, complex, previously unknown trading community on the northern Arctic shore, artefacts of which were being revealed by receding icecaps caused by recent climate change.
Middens, huts, castles, cooking vessels, fishing implements, and, most amazingly, oceangoing wooden ships, were being uncovered as Russian architects dug into the thawing permafrost. It appeared that during a particularly warm part of the current interglacial period, dated to about 6,000 years BC, the civilization had been able to use the liquid Arctic ocean as to trade with northern Scandinavia, and there was even evidence of some kind of trade with Alaskan or even Canadian native peoples.
Sadly, it was a hoax that I myself had written for April Fool’s day. It was quite gratifying to receive it back though.
Are there civlizations we don’t know about? Yes, probably so. But they are going to be minor and not terribly important to history.
The key thing to remember here is that civlization and culture spreads. You’re not going to just find a couple of real cities which were just off the (modern) coastline and which sadly sank beneath the waves leaving no traces. Civilization is sticky and it spreads. You don’t just get a city out somewhere - populations increase, centers of trade form, and one might be bigger but you’ll have several. And any one city being slowly inundated will simply cause the inhabitants and their trade to move to another site.
Look at the American Southwest. We have cities ther which were slowly abandoned. But even if the cities had somehow been swallowed up and vanished, the culture remained in a number of other, more resiliant locations. People survived, culture survived, and cities survived. I can’t think of any precedent for a civilization actualy vanishing wholesale. Even the comlete destruction of cities, such as Aquileia, simply forced the people to move. And in this case, we’re talking about a city which would simply slowly move itself back away from the sea, not an “instantaneous destruction” event.
In any case, easrly civilizations were not sea-dependant. While most had access to the sea somehow, it was not a requirement. Babylonia, Egypt, China, India - none of these were great sea-faring cultures. The Greeks were, but even then many of their early cities were land-based powers.
