Did it hurt?
Did it hurt to drag that piece of shit in here and link to it?
You know, I was going to mention this as well, but I didn’t know that they knew its exact location.
I dunno, but the wreck of a submarine was recently brought up in South Carolina – a place where the existence of a civilized culture was never before even suspected! (Even now the implications remain controversial.)
This is like that old joke about smuggling books into the South…how do they KNOW it’s a submarine??
-XT
In fairness, there are reports of an arguably semi-civilized protoculture in the region, but the natives’ well-documented practice of putting mustard on barbecue makes the classification dubious.
Well, the domestication of food crops would mark the first opportunity for the development of civilization, wouldn’t it?
The earliest evidence of cultivation is from 11,050 years ago in Mesopotamia.
And spoke- nails an important point. Suppose you’ve got your 10,000 year old civilization. What did they eat? They had to farm, or they’re not civilization, by definition. So we have to assume that their crops all went extinct with them. Except that would be pretty weird. I mean, we have the first civilization on earth, with agriculture and so forth…and then what? They up and disappear?
Sure, if your city gets flooded by rising sea levels the city is abandoned. But the people don’t all die, they move a few hundred feet inland and start again. It’s possible that there are dozens of ancient cities preserved underwater, but is it probably that those underwater cities were earlier than other ancient cities that we already have evidence for? There could be a city on the Black Sea that’s underwater, but why suspect that city is older than any of the other cities in the region that were built on high ground?
Of course we’re still digging up all kinds of stuff, and every earliest known example of technology X is only provisional, because tomorrow we could find an even older instance. But these things work like “Gee, the earliest known instance of bronze working used to be a site in China that’s dated at 4,500 years old. Now we’ve found another site in China that’s 4,700 years old!” And that 4,700 year old site is almost certainly not the place where bronze working was first invented, it’s only the earliest site where the evidence of bronze working was both preserved and uncovered. So finding bronze at earlier and earlier sites is not unexpected, and neither is it evidence of super-ancient lost civilizations that vanished without a trace.
Or maybe they give up on civilization and go back to the forests, like the Maya did.
Some have even suggested that leaving the oceans was a bad idea, even ones that think digital watches are pretty neat.
I do wonder just how “lithic” the paleolithic really was. We call it the “stone age” because the artifacts we find are stone tools. But who knows what sort of elaborate wooden tools or rope or fiber or leather items those ancients might have produced? Who knows about their navigation skills? The remnants of those items would have disintegrated long ago.
There could have been ancient fishing-based cultures, though I imagine the vagaries of fishing would have limited the size of their settlements, and forced them to be somewhat mobile. (When the fishing plays out in one place, you move someplace else.) I doubt such a culture would have produced monumental architecture.
Rye? Is this a trick question? Spoke-'s cite says it was cultivated as far back as 11,500 BP…so if a civilization was 10,000 years old they would have had 1500 years to figure the whole growing rye thingy out, ISTM. Besides…how do we know that certain cultivated food crops DIDN’T go extinct in the radical climate shift that happened after the last glacial period? If a food crop was domesticated in a certain region that was ideal for growing it, and if said region is now under the Black Sea or under the Persian Gulf (which used to be a pretty fertile area until it was flooded out) how would we know?
-XT
But why would the earliest civilizations have been present only in areas that are now underwater or inaccessable?
We have two sets here. The set of earliest civilizations, and the set of civilizations that existed in areas that are now inaccessable. We shouldn’t expect the set of earliest civilizations to be biased to contain more inaccessable civilizations, and we shouldn’t expect the set of inaccessable civilizations to be biased to contain more early civilizations.
As for what they ate, it seems to me that you can’t support a city unless you’ve got well developed agriculture. We shouldn’t expect to see the first cities to develop directly upon the invention of agriculture, there has to be a period of growing population density.
And of course ancient people didn’t primarily use stone tools, that’s just a taphonomic bias. Take a look at, say, the plains indians. If you plow up a Kansas cornfield you’ll turn up plenty of arrowheads and beads, but not much else. Anything wood or fiber or leather or horn or even bone is almost all gone unless it was preserved by humans, and this is in only a few hundred years.
And the vast bulk of evidence for most early civilizations are potsherds. Broken pottery everywhere. You almost never find intact pottery because if a pot wasn’t broken it didn’t get thrown away, people kept it until it broke. So you find potsherds by the metric ton everywhere, and the occasional preserved pot that was buried for storage and then forgotten.
As for the Maya going back to the forests, the Mayan culture didn’t disappear, and they still farmed corn and beans and squash, even after the population crash. And of course, the archeological evidence of the Mayan culture is still there.
So if we postulate a vanished civilization even earlier, we have to ask, where is it? And the only reason it would be under the rising sea level is that if it weren’t, we would have found evidence of it already. But that’s not a reason to suspect that underwater archeological sites are likely to be older than already discovered sites. And it’s doesn’t mean that it’s therefore likely that such submerged sites actually exist, only that if they do exist they’d have to be submerged. We shouldn’t reason backwards.
On a serious note, is it possible that some kind of tool using dinosaur evolved and devolped a civilization on level with say the Maori?
One more point.
It’s pretty much mathematically certain that there are any number of lost civilizations about which we know nothing. And the likelyhood is that most of these lost civilizations will stay lost forever, because nothing is left of them to be discovered, barring unforseen advances in archeology.
The first city will probably never be discovered, because it was probably built mostly out of perishable materials. All we can say about this earliest hypothetical cities is that they didn’t build stone monuments, or we would have uncovered them. And their technology wasn’t much different than their neolithic neighbors, they just lived more densely.
Come to think of it, there’s no reason to rule it out. I very much doubt the pre-colonial Maori left any artifacts that paleontologists 75 million years from now would have any hope of discovering.
But, by the same token, there’s no reason to believe it.
No, it’s certain there are any number of lost cultures about which we know nothing. Civilizations are much rarer.
Well…why did civilization start on the Nile or the Tigris/Euphrates? The civilizations we KNOW about started out as city states in fertile areas. Not all of them expanded into empires.
We know that prior to those areas being flooded they WERE extremely fertile areas.
I’m not following that. Why is it unlikely that when the climate was different that different areas were in use…and that after a major change the climate shifted so that new areas were instead used?
If the civilizations we know about were destroyed by a major climate shift that caused them to be hundreds of feet below sea level and flooded out before they spread much…well then, doesn’t it seem likely that we wouldn’t know about them? Think of some of the early Indus civilizations. If they were one or two city states and they got wiped a major climate shift such that today they were under water…would we know about them? Now about some of the early Nile valley cities? If the Nile was at the bottom of the Med today how much would we know about them? Would we know anything about them if they never spread out from a few city states early on? If they never built the pyramids? If they never became big empires?
I’m not saying that there were earlier proto-city states out there…but I don’t think you can dismiss them based on your argument.
-XT
Hey, I said “any number”. Zero is a number…
Because natural climate changes on that scale are slow and rare. There have been no such major climate changes on Earth since the last Ice Age. There have been minor ones, such as that which made Greenland habitable (by Scandinavians) in the Middle Ages and then uninhabitable (by any but Inuit) again; but I very much doubt the melting of the Greenland ice sheet will bring to light any artifacts of a civilized culture.