This is sort of a sequel to a piece about the ancient Mediterranean megaflood that did really well on here last month - so, with my fingers crossed it's not too obnoxiously self-promotional of me to do it, I thought I'd give this one a punt as well.
Also, thank you to those who left comments saying you didn't like that former piece's introduction. I agree with you! It was rambling and a bit self-indulgent and I should have just got on with the story. This one does that (I think). Cheers.
No offense, but I couldn't get into this piece due to the upfront clutter. Some readers may find it charming, but the privilege comment, the chart tweet, the subscribe button, the references to various novels... I just wasn't finding a good starting point to latch onto the content promised by the (excellent) headline. It felt like I had jumped into the middle of a podcast where the hosts are bantering and not making much progress on the discussion.
That's a fair comment, thank you. I originally wrote it that way because it was for longterm readers, with a bunch of callbacks to previous stuff, as you mention there. But for first-time visitors, it could be seen as clutter. I've cut some of that out, and I think you're right. Cheers!
Whether you think wearing my mouse wheel down to actually get to the directions for any recipe posted on a blog is good or not - it certainly is normal... and ditto for websites having a lot of above the fold advertisements.
Thanks, I think this is great! I've often wondered if the "great flood" myths and the legend of Atlantis have any factual basis carried on in oral history. The Zanclean flood stretches credulity beyond reason (as fun as it is to think about a story passed down from the first Hominins), but this event happened recently enough to ponder links to mythology... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessair
The Gunditjmara Australian story "Dreamtime" recounts the eruption of the now-dormant volcano Budj Bim about 37,000 years ago.[1][2] So it is possible for accounts of historical events to be transmitted orally over a very long period of time.
Platos account of Atlantis which was destroyed ten thousand years prior matches geological artifacts of huge climate changes/end of the ice age. I’d say the evidence point to his stories legitimatacy
Great flood maybe, but we don't have any actual proof that Atlantis was some ancient legend vs something Plato just made up and said he heard from someone else since there are no previous accounts of it before him.
Also, please bear in mind that there's a good reason to suspect that Plato bent a lot of things to suit his goal of trying to explain philosophical concepts. Socrates is often hailed as one of the greatest western philosophers but we have almost no record of his character outside the dramatizations written by Plato. We're almost certain he was a real person but if Plato is to be trusted he was extremely against any preservation of his discourses - almost everything we've got on him comes from Plato describing his mentor.
So Atlantis might be much the same - the story of a city lost to flooding (maybe even the same root story as the biblical one) repurposed and embellished to express a philosophical point.
While I agree with you about Plato, I think you are underestimating our other sources on Socrates. The historian Xenephon was also one of his students and talked about him in his works, including Socrates' trial and death. The playwright Aristophanes also parodied Socrates in one of his works and while it is a parody what it is parodying is consistent with what we know of Socrates' philosophy as presented by Plato and shows he was a fairly well known figure at least among the play going audience.
There should be some traces of it still. Per the legend, the last day of Atlantis was the day Sahara became a desert, so inspecting it should reveal something. Also, "Atlantis" is a made up term (by Plato?). Again, per the legend, that nation called themselves "lanka" and I wonder if Sri Lanka ("Holy Lanka ") was named this way for a reason.
Lots of evidence. IF you interpret the words "covered the whole world" as they would have been understood at the time they were supposedly written.
The idea that "the whole world" means what we think of as the globe didn't really emerge until roughly 900 AD.
And there is plenty of evidence in Mesopotamia of flood events which are not inconsistent with conceivable dates for the the biblical flood event and which had the potential to have wiped out a civilization (a city/state and its government) -- thus "the whole world".
There have been many floods in many places throughout history, including the Mediterranean and Middle East. There is no evidence specifically for a global flood with all the very specific characteristics of the biblical flood, or the Mesopotamian flood myth it’s almost certainly based on.
That doesn’t mean these mythical floods had no basis in fact, and weren’t inspired by real floods. It just depends how literally you take the specifics of how they are described in the sources.
Right. If you lived near a lake in the endorheic basin at the end of the Danube, it would sure seem like the whole world had flooded when the Black Sea came flooding in.
Protip: the Bible can still be the literal word of God, because omnipotence implies the ability to use simile, metaphor, analogy, symbolism, and storytelling tropes.
Have you genuinely been unable to identify any? They're manifest and generally well documented.
A nicely topical example, given we've just had Easter, would be around the time of the crucifixion -- was it at 9am on the morning of Passover, or midday the day after passover?
The gospels provide conflicting timelines - Mathew, Mark, & Luke say 9am on passover, John says the afternoon the day after passover. There are myriad other contradictions around the descriptions of the crucifixion mythology: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Contradictions_in_Jesus%27_cru...
This may be a useful jumping-off point for other inconsistencies:
To be completely honest, I am, as you probably might have already guessed, biased in the sense that I accept and believe the Bible.
Still being as honest as possible, I'll attempt to respond constructively to the details you provided:
Instead of myriads, I counted 7 alleged contradictions, of which only 3 are related to the timeline and (again, imho) easily disregarded by answering "while" to the question of "before or after?".
The other 4 alleged contradictions are not necessarily incompatible facts, but rather incomplete, related accounts of a whole situation. What I mean by that is that there are plausible explanations on why those examples are written in different ways.
For example, the criminals mocking Jesus at the cross. Of three accounts, two say the criminals were hating. Only one of the accounts goes on to say that one of the thieves repents. You've got two possibilities here: either you examine the three accounts as a whole and arrive at the conclusion that they both started hating and eventually one repented (do let me know if you honestly don't consider this to be a possibility), or you decide that there's no explanation as to why there are no four identical accounts of that situation, and therefore the whole Bible doesn't make sense.
Another example, when the soldiers compel Simon of Cirene to carry the cross. One of the accounts does not include that, but rather says that He, bearing His cross, went forth into (towards, in the direction, with the intention of getting to...) the place of the skull. Again, the options. Could it be that the one writing the fourth account was not present when Simon started carrying the cross? Is it absolutely so impossible that there's some explanation to that?
We could go on with the rest of contradictions, but that's not the point. I acknowledge that minor details as the colour of a robe might be messed up during in history across 2000 years and multiple transcriptions and translations, because after all, there is human intervention in the Bible. One says the robe was scarlet, one says the robe was purple. Does that really compromise the Truth exposed in the Bible? Does it invalidate His sacrifice at the cross?
I am still to find or be shown a relevant inconsistency, just one point that really contradicts a fundamental truth on the Bible with itself. Something that compromises the fact that God himself gave His Son who died as a person in the world to clean us from our sinful nature and give us eternal life in His presence.
Ah, fairy nuff. I suspected, but assumed good faith. I suppose this means I can't possibly sway you, as much of your core identity is very tightly coupled with these beliefs.
I'll offer a couple of things. A small one first - consider that myriad is an adjective, not a collective noun.
For rational readers, being told that a work is inerrant, and then finding myriad inconsistencies within that work, or claims of historical actions that make no sense within the context of the times & places described, along with the conflicting contemporary historical record (in the case of the bible, basically no contemporary corroboration whatsoever) -- but then having those contradictions or inconsistencies hand-waved away by trying to claim a 'while' addresses them (it does not), or trying to bundle them all up in a dismissive 'does it matter what colour the robe was?' -- can be frustrating.
Obviously an inerrant work shouldn't contain even weirdly specific wardrobe inconsistencies, but that's not the point, as we can agree that one is a relatively trivial error (but an error nonetheless).
So, the moneylenders story - one of the most famous in the book - is a favourite for me.
Few people, including the strong believers, can answer the question of whether this happened early on in the story, or just before the end (ie. did it kick-start the character's main story arc for the next 3-5 years, or was it a key event in motivating the Jewish leaders to orchestrate his death some weeks before he was killed).
And, just like the robe's colour, it depends on which gospel you read, because both versions are in the bible.
Apologists will typically claim 'it must have happened twice', but that's a weak retort given how monumental it must have been in order to be reported in the first place.
I recently finished David Fitzgerald's second book in his trilogy 'Nailed', which was a fascinating read (the first in the series is lighter & shorter, but a compelling introduction to the subject). Prior to publishing the first book, he wrote an essay that you may find interesting [1] that describes some more profound contradictions & provably-false myths / beliefs.
I think it’s pretty clear that sophisticated societies existed long before recorded history. They may not have had the tools of working with metal, but they definitely had sophisticated philosophical views and moral frameworks. I would bet this goes back even 30-50 thousand years. This idea that humanity sprang up out of nothing in Sumerian/Babylon is very contrived. There was an ice age ten thousand years ago, the cessation of which caused the floods, which destroyed large swaths of human “civilization”
Civilization means people living in cities. To do that, agriculture is probably needed. There's also probably some level of specialization and accompanying social stratification.
History is written records.
There were many prehistoric societies, but because civilization tended to have some form of written records, the prehistoric societies are not considered civilizations.
No scholars would clai that humanity sprang out of nothing in those places. I mostly hear that from bible literalists. But if some of their people weren't in cities, the society was not civilized. And if there was nobody to write about them they were prehistoric.
You might be interested to read "The Dawn of Everything" which discusses all of this. Cities and agriculture are far from requirements to have civilization.
Genuine question, how much evidence of agriculture would survive an ice age, being crushed under the weight of 2 mile thick ice sheets and then washed away or engulfed by bodies of water once they've melted?
Major regions in which early humans evolved and migrated have not been subject to glaciation since those events. Africa, Mesopotamia, Egypt (part of Africa), the Mediterranian basin, the Indian subcontinent, most of China and Southeast Asia, central and Southern America, and much of North America, particularly south of, say, the modern Mason-Dixon line.
The regions heavily affected by glaciation are relatively few, relatively lately settled (for obvious reasons), and hence, less significant to overall availability of evidence of early agriculture.
Other disturbances resulting from glaciation, notably sea level rise and the innundation of previous coastal and low-lying regions may contribute somewhat more to obscured evidence.
Sorry to do an "actually" here but funnily enough history is not historically written records. History as a branch of knowledge was specifically operated upon the context that the likelihood of something happening historically is based on the individual's effort to ascertain the word of mouth of the people to find certainty and consistency. That is because what is written can easily be done by anyone but convincing many people over generations would be much harder. So the fact that history has shifted to what is written as the authority is actually a successful implementation of an attack vector to manipulate truth.
tl;dr Historically oral history was the only form of discovering what is true and specifically regarded as more rigorous than written accounts.
At least, when taking history into account.
Etymology is also interesting:
> From Middle English historie, from Old French estoire, estorie (“chronicle, history, story”) (French histoire), from Latin historia, from Ancient Greek ἱστορίᾱ (historíā, “learning through research”), from ἱστορέω (historéō, “to research, inquire (and) record”), from ἵστωρ (hístōr, “the knowing, wise one”), from Proto-Indo-European *weyd- (“see, know”). Doublet of story and storey.
Fascinating that history is based on "seeing and knowing."
> if there was nobody to write about them they were prehistoric
A comment from a documentary about Rome stuck in my mind, it goes something like : "There is no history of Europe before Rome because for most of Europe, history starts with Rome conquering that region. They were the first to write anything down."
Similarly, we know how slavic peoples migrated into Europe because those regions stopped sending written updates back to Rome. Did they then revert back to pre-history? Or does a region continue to "have history" even if for a few centuries nobody in that area writes anything down?
A comprehensive evidence around the world with sites and prehistoric periods are well outlined in the last David Grabaur's book "The Dawn of Everything".
> There were many prehistoric societies, but because civilization tended to have some form of written records, the prehistoric societies are not considered civilizations.
I personally find cave paintings to be compelling evidence for a behaviourally modern mind. They demonstrate great skill. The artists did not live in cities or have agriculture or writing, but I have little doubt that they perceived the world as we do, and were capable of essentially the same speech and thought patterns as we are. It’s an awe-inspiring tragedy and mystery that those lives were lived in a manner so unknown to us, and yet potentially so relatable to us.
They absolutely would have had conversations around campfires. Talking about what, I wonder?
It's the threshold between "how much do we trust the author?" and the blanket claim of "used for ceremonial purpose" whenever something isn't entirely obvious. Yes, it's a real distinction. Archeologists and historians don't consider themselves one group at all.
Yes. This is absolutely correct. The generally accepted view is that prehistory ended and history started on the North American continent roughly mid 1490's.
This only sounds prepostrous if you don't understand what the terms mean.
This is also roughly the timeframe when the last stone-age society near Europe finally got subjugated by Europeans and stone age finally ended in the old world, when the Spanish crushed the Guanches in the Canaries.
This is fine if everyone in the conversation has that same academic definition of pre-history - the problem is that bad actors will often latch onto that statement, ignore the definitions, and use that as a basis to argue that so-and-so people were sub-human.
It'd be really nice if all parts of the internet engaged in good faith debates on topics they were knowledgeable but finding that phrasing preposterous isn't unreasonable if you've spent a decent chunk of time exposed to reddit and twitter.
I agree that you're correct and reasonable, but I also agree that the person you're replying to was correct and reasonable when expressing caution over how things are worded.
Are we still not counting wampum belts or khipu as a written language? I know that those are both very different from how we comprehend written languages but there is significant evidence to support that they were used in the process of imparting information (whether that be treaties, legends, or statistics)
A language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary.[0]
I don't think NA wampum or totem poles would be considered written language by that definition.
Khipu aren't found in NA, AFAIK.
On the flip side, let's also not forget that the earliest civilizations (so to speak) were also rather different from later ones in some striking ways. Put simply, they were a lot more literal-minded, and didn't engage in as much abstraction as did their descendents. Ancient fertility statues (even as late as classical Greece and Rome) are grotesquely over-endowed; ritual sacrifices of food and symbolic objects have in many places taken the place of sacrificed slaves or wives. Mesopotamian city states would fight wars because, like a frat prank, one would steal a statue of a god like Marduk from the other's temple -- only, there was no notion that it was a statue, rather it was the god. Early Egyptian murals speak to the power of kings by showing piles of dicks their soldiers had cut off of defeated enemies (unlike Egyptians they were uncircumcised). And there's the whole mummification thing, which betrays a certain literal-mindedness about immortality. So yeah, it's a spectrum - but both before and after the "rise of civilization"
This seems like unjustified speculation; people could look at e.g. people leaving cookies and milk out on Christmas Eve as an example of how modern Americans are poor at abstraction and have to give literal offerings to their god Santa Claus.
AFAWK there has been no significant change in the anatomy of humans in the past 200k years, and similarly nothing to indicate that we’ve had major changes in things like our ability to abstract. The bicameral theory of mind has been thoroughly discredited.
You can always find examples of irrational behavior, but the difference is scale. Today a major state isn't spending inordinate resources to ensure that the cookies left for Santa are prepared using the finest ingredients (say, a few million dollars' worth of gold) by the most accomplished bakers, and then placed on a dish so large that it can be seen from space (and hundreds or thousands of people died making it).
If you can show me the tomb of a prominent world leader from the last, let's say, 500 years that's decorated with images of his/her enemies' severed genitalia, I'll concede the point.
> Today a major state isn't spending inordinate resources to ensure that the cookies left for Santa
I get the impression that the degree to which people took religion literally varied a lot from person to person, and even priest to priest throughout history.
It’s not clear whether more people took religious belief literally, or if they just said they did for political and social reasons.
I feel that the problem with your claim is that within 500 years all humans everywhere have suddenly become abstracters extraordinaire, which just seems terribly unrealistic.
Generally every theory which talks about these great leaps in human cognition, and ties these to human "development" while ascribing diminished intellectual capabilities to our ancestors, seems to fall apart after scrutiny (e.g., Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, bicameral theory of mind).
Also, we've seen plenty of "undoing" of abstraction in long-continuing cultures. E.g., in Hinduism, idol worship wasn't really a thing in Vedic times, and only became popular in Puranic times (over a 1000 years later). Many Hindus do believe that some idols contain portions of gods, especially those idols that reside ones in "big" temples. I would not say that these folks have lost their ability to abstract. As another example, post-Vedic religion underwent a large amount of abstraction in the Upanishads, but then reverted to personification of deities via the bhakti movement and in Puranic religion. Again, I wouldn't say that Hindus lost their ability to think abstractly.
> I feel that the problem with your claim is that within 500 years all humans everywhere have suddenly become abstracters extraordinaire, which just seems terribly unrealistic.
Isn’t something like this the general explanation for the Flynn effect? (that newer generations in modern societies are better at IQ tests because they’re better at IQ test-style abstractions)
> The bicameral theory of mind has been thoroughly discredited.
Sure it claims way too much, but I don’t think every nearby direction is discredited. That would mean everyone in history had the exact same theory of unitary consciousness we do (that we have free will, our actions come after conscious thought, there’s a conscious/subconscious/unconscious or id/ego/superego, dreams come from our own memories, etc.)
There’s a lot of Buddhists out there to this day, and they do officially belong to a religion with a you-don’t-exist policy. How this is integrated with resurrection depends on the lineage of course.
Myself I just want to know if the Babylonians were taught math by a fish alien named Oannes. Maybe he can tell us if P=NP.
Yeah, that's why I hesitated to include it on the list, but I don't think such representations are very common in religious contexts today (and these statues do seem to have been religiously significant, e.g. all the Venus statues from prehistoric Europe and the Middle East)
I'm not sure I've ever seen "literal mindedness" argued like this in recent works? Do you have any papers or books you could point to where an archeologist or historian argues this?
Most of the recent academic work I'm familiar with tends to emphasize the opposite case, tempered by the fact that ancient religion and culture tend to be very alien. Take, for instance, popular reviews by Irving Finkel in his "Noah" book, or Ed Barnhart's work on the Moche, etc.
Well, I am a working professional historian of the premodern world, and this is certainly my impression from years of reading Chinese-language primary sources about China during the Shang, Zhou, Qin, and Han dynasties. Spend some time with the literature, and you'll read how Mohists coupled careful logic and quasi-scientistic reasoning with "ghosts who will punish you if you're bad," about how Han dynasty tomb exterior-door inscriptions talk extensively about how the decedent's family loves them but earnestly hopes to never, ever see them again, because if they did it would mean the decedent left their tomb to punish them for their unfilial conduct. (And you'll read how gingerly the subject of human sacrifice in the distant past, or emperors indulging itinerant "Daoist" rainmakers, to the considerable chagrin of more secular-minded officials, is handled.) I can't point to anything synoptic on the Chinese case -- early China scholars tend to make a lot (frankly too much) out of a little (we don't have that many texts -- but Herbert Fingarette's "Confucius: The Secular as Sacred" was formative for all the early China people I studied with on a more intellectual register. One controversy that gets lots of play: whether Confucius urged performing the rituals "as if" the dead were present, or if they were actually present. Linguistically, the phrasing is entirely open to the latter, even if people like to make the thinking presented in the "Analects" out to be more modern-seeming. At the risk of giving too much of a peek behind the curtain, so to speak, broadly speaking -- this being several decades since Foucault made his mark -- careers get made by either emphasizing the past's surprising lack of alterity or by finding some spectacular, flamboyantly surprising new form of alterity. And the former is rather easier to pull off than the latter.
But, I read about the piles of genitalia in Toby Wilkinson's "The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt" and about the god-statues in Trevor Bryce's "Babylonia: A Very Short Introduction."
Sounds like I have reading to do! I guess I really just take exception with the claim that the currently living are any more (or less) literal than our (distant) ancestors. For instance: my wife wants to get two, adjacent, cemetary plots so that we can "be together after we die, and our kids can visit us easily." I want to be mulched. Where I'm living, now, the number of Biblical literalists isn't a "quirky few" its the bulk of the people; these aren't hicks, either: this is one if the wealthier exurbs in the country.
Reading about Çatalhüyük (thanks autocorrect for making it properly squiggly) I was struck by how actually different it seems to have been despite being city-shaped.
There aren’t streets, rather everyone supposedly traveled on top of everyone else’s roofs. There were family homes but not public buildings. And they buried their dead family members right inside their own houses and sometimes kept their skulls out for decoration.
I warmly recommend to anyone interested in this line of thought James Scott's "Against the grain" for oldest evidence of the first agrarian states in the middle east.
"Against the grain" points out that it's not obvious as number of people increases everyone wants to live in cities ruled over and taxed by someone else.
"I think it’s pretty clear that sophisticated societies existed long before recorded history."
If you mean beyond 12k years or so I would not say it's "pretty clear". I would go as far and say it's psychologically and biologically feasible, but we have no evidence to back this up.
What archaeological evidence does prove, is that arrival of anything resembling civilization was a shambolic affair lasting thousands of years, composed of waxing and waning city-sized polities that could at maximum control only few tens of square kilometers of area.
I think you would need to expand on the meaning of "sophisticated". I don't want to presume your intent with the use of this word.
But, a hunter gatherer society looks quite a lot different from an agricultural society.
Of course the people living in a hunter gatherer society could very well be artistically and philosophically very developed. But the likelihood of an "Atlantean supercivilization" would be very small.
I think both options are pretty cool. As a species we have a history of 200 000 years. Either our past is riddled with complex emergent societies that have been ground to dust, forgotten, only for the cycle to start again a new over and over again over thousands of years. And only on our current cycle we've managed to start to reach the full potential of our species.
Or, there have not been "civilizational cycles" which would make our anthropocene epoch with it's industrialization and science something even more mind blowingly astonishing.
Isn't the theory that agriculture meant some book-keeping was needed, to keep track of the seasons and when to plant. This book-keeping then caused the development of writing in general. And writing caused the birth of inter-generational memory and the ability to accumulate knowledge. Of course oral histories can be cross-generational as well, but writing is much more efficient storage medium than human brain alone. Writing allows human brains to co-operate over vast geographical distances and time-scales.
I think bookkeeping may be a related catalyst. But it's primary use seems more for inter-societal trade (settling accounts), than intra-societal education.
Bookkeeping is not the only prerequisite for written language, e.g. in the new world, sophisticated bookkeeping mechanisms existed for centuries without written language.
We can only go by what we know and what we have evidence for. Sure, other small civs likely existed, but we don't have known evidence of them and their history, etc. At most we have tombs and archeological ruins to go by. So we go with the earliest civs for whom we have written evidence as well as lots of physical evidence for in addition to present-day influence. Otherwise things start to get very speculative.
> We can only go by what we know and what we have evidence for
There is nuance here, in the degree to which uncertainty due to lack of evidence is surfaced in scientific communications for the public.
Take for instance, the behavior of dogs. Science cannot [yet] objectively answer the question of how much the subjective qualia of a dog is comparable to the qualia of humans. What then can we say about whether dogs feel 'love'? Some might say that science has not yet answered this question; that is fine.
But others get overeager and assert that because science hasn't demonstrated that dogs feel love, the scientific position is to assume all apparent demonstrations of love from dogs are little more than elaborate food seeking behavior. This goes too far, it assumes a lack of evidence is evidence to the contrary, implicitly treating science as complete until proven otherwise. I think this overzealous sort of 'scientific' thinking reflects a dogmatic attitude which is actually antithetical to the real scientific method.
There's strong evidence that some animals, at least, process visual stimuli similarly to humans, as illustrated by cats responding to the "rotating snakes" illusion:
And if you pause to consider that emotions, particularly such core and foundational ones as love (maternal, partner, tribal) are all but certainly evolved, then existence of them or precursors in other species seems all but certain. That thought had occurred to Charles Darwin, who wrote a book on the question, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
When you get to the edge of knowledge, ignoring obvious things and glossing over tends to rule the day.
Knowing what we know about people, it seems absurd to think that people just went poof, “civilization” has arrived! There were a lot fewer humans in the past, and hundreds of generations are lost to time. But the narrative of the pageant of history, often leading to the <insert nation here> greatness of today doesn’t work with “I don’t know”
Well, it would seem like the middle way would be to postulate things such as these but not assert them as 'received knowledge'. And just as we might postulate that dogs can experience love, we can also postulate the opposite and discuss both without giving one a preponderance of support till we can develop such support.
I chose to use that word to preempt nitpicky objections about measuring oxytocin in dog brains (which doesn't actually tell you anything about the subjective experience the dog feels.) 'Qualia' refers specifically to the subjective conscious experience, which is something science is presently ill-equipped to answer questions about. The word 'qualities' does not have the same rhetorical effect.
As an aside, what's the point of complaining about uncommon words? Dictionaries have never been more convenient to use. If you didn't know the word before, then in about 5 seconds you can learn what it means and your personal vocabulary will be enriched.
Precise language is useful for discussing complex ideas precisely.
If HN is to be a place for gratifying intellectual curiousity [1], then dismisisng dismissing accurate terminology as pretentious purely because it is unfamiliar is counter-productive.
“qualia” are the internal experiences of sensory perceptions of the subject, “qualities” are the attributes of the subject. They look a bit similar, and are etymologically connected, but their denotations are about as far apart as is possible for words that are the same part of speech.
Qualia are not limited to sensory perceptions. We have conscious experiences of things internal to our minds too, such as emotions and thoughts and memories and these too have qualia.
Qualia is your subjective experience of your senses - how can we discuss whether we see the color red the same way, or whether we smell a rose the same way? The core concept we would discuss is qualia.
Qualia is not plural qualities so I’m afraid I don’t see the connection, or the downside to using an expanded vocabulary for that matter.
Yeah we shouldn't say we "know" that advanced civilizations existed, but there's nothing wrong with hypothesizing that they did. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
“Let me begin by observing, first of all, that nine thousand was the sum of years which had elapsed since the war which was said to have taken place between all those who dwelt outside the Pillars of Heracles and those who dwelt within them: this war I am now to describe.
Of the combatants on the one side the city of Athens was reported to have been the ruler, and to have directed the contest; the combatants on the other side were led by the kings of the islands of Atlantis,”
The ice age itself would have had glaciers grinding down all evidence to nothing. Even our metal based structures would not withstand it very well over a few thousand years.
I agree that it doesn't make sense for there to be a single 6,000 year time period of human prosperity and collaboration, its much more likely that there have been multiple periods over a 200,000 time span. Perhaps some traits in humans continually set us back to a rudimentary lifestyle with thinned populations.
> Even our metal based structures would not withstand it very well over a few thousand years.
Well, not steel framed buildings or anything like that. But our modern civilization has certainly done things that I think stand a good chance of lasting hundreds of millions of years. Take for instance glass bottles. Those tossed into the ocean won't last more than a few decades before they're eroded to nothing (see: sea glass), but we've created so many glass bottles and distributed them so far and wide, it is virtually certain that many of them will survive in the soil for a very very long time. There is no doubt that glass can last for millions of years under the right conditions; there is a lot of volcanic glass around that attests to this. There are so many glass bottles in landfills or littered around the world, at least some of them are certain to be in geologically stable conditions.
Then there are things like mountaintop removal mining. Maybe normal quarries get filled in and hidden over time, but there's no hiding the top of a mountain being sliced right off.
Humans were not mass manufacturing things back then, and there were orders of magnitude less people.
On top of that, we don't even have exact knowledge of where to look. Most places we do discover have plenty of signs and evidence, they are just buried under 10ft of dirt and thus essentially undiscoverable.
> Humans were not mass manufacturing things back then
Ah, but how do you know that? You weren't there. ;)
Sometimes the absence of evidence really is evidence to the contrary, but other times it isn't. It all depends on whether or not it's reasonable to expect evidence to be found given the amount of looking we've done and the nature of the evidence we're looking for. If we don't find a ton of glass coke bottles in the soil around the world, after digging around in innumerable construction sites on almost every corner of the globe, that's strong evidence that nobody was mass manufacturing coke bottles 50k years ago.
Contrast that with the lack of evidence for ancient wooden sailing vessels. We don't have any evidence of wooden ships 50k years ago. But supposing there were a shipbuilding culture back then, would we really expect to find evidence for it? All those wood artifacts would be LONG gone, even the oldest bog wood ever found is less than 10k years old. In this case, the absence of evidence is weak evidence to the contrary at best.
Old things aren't necessarily that far under our feet. I've excavated 4,000 year old sites under a couple inches of dirt, and found 10,000+ year old artifacts on the surface.
Were that the case we'd have evidence of the "Material culture" of these cultures, yet we do not. Conversely, we have literally TONS of archaeological evidence of Neolithic hunter-gatherer people spread across the entire world during these so called "Lost ages" so personally I think it's preposterous to assume that somehow some advanced civilization that left absolutely ZERO trace of it's supposed grandeur existed beside a hunter-gatherer civilization for which we have plenty of archaeological evidence.
It's a certainly fun through experiment to think of some lost ancient civilization with glittering cities and high technology that was ground down to dust by the last ice-age, but there's literally no factual evidence to support such a notion and plenty of factual evidence to disprove it, so it's best not to get sucked too far down that particular irrational rabbit-hole.
Early civilizations did not appear out of nothing 6000 years ago. The earliest evidence of cereal harvesting in the Middle East is from 23000 years ago. The transition from hunting and gathering to sedentary farming communities took over 10000 years, and those communities needed thousands of years to grow into large sophisticated cities.
It's also good to remember that there has been an ice age for the last 2.5 million years. The climate is generally too cold and dry for agriculture, except during relatively short interglacial periods. Maybe there was an opportunity for a civilization to develop in the Eemian period 130k to 115k years ago, but that was likely the only window of opportunity.
Eh, that doesn't get you much. Glaciers weigh heavy on the minds of North Americans and Northern Europeans, but they didn't reach much further -- no civilization south of, say, 40N would be obliterated by the glaciers themselves such that we would expect no trace to remain today.
Sea level change would be a bigger global risk, but aside from sudden flooding, you would expect that to just push back an established civilization to the uplands of their territories rather than wiping them out root and branch.
The fact that civilisations tend to cluster near shorelines and waterways means that the impacts of sea level rise would likely be quite significant. Particularly at eliminating incidental traces of, say, groups or cultures migrating along such coastlines. I suspect virtually all of the early migrations of native Americans would be so affected, especially along the west coast of the Americas.
This fits a pattern in science: the further we look, the more we find.
First we thought the Earth was the center of the universe. Then we thought it was just our solar system. Then we thought the Milky Way Galaxy was the whole of the universe. Some astronomers persisted in this belief all the way up to the 1920s. Now...
It'll probably get pushed back some more. Also I've always thought there are too many flood myths around the world for it to be chance. No I don't think there was a true global flood since it makes no sense, but the end of the ice age would have brought sea level rise and enormous regional floods due to things like the bursting of glacial dams. This would have occurred over the same period of time across the world, leaving behind traces in myth and legend but also physically destroying a lot of evidence of civilizations in the path of these disasters.
Why is the default assumption that since we can't prove humans had sophisticated and complex lives comparable to our own, that we must assume they are simpletons. Their minds were no less capable of our own, why shouldn't we assume they had complex morals and social structures?
Divine/Holy are how powerful people prevent others from questioning things. I didn't mention Divine or Holy, just theology.
The core difference between Science and Theology is how they deal with statements of "truth" without evidence.
Theology starts with "it's true because I said so"
Science starts with "it's true because I can demonstrate it"
That humans were complex in the past is a good hypothesis. It needs evidence before it can be accepted as fact, or even necessarily expect respect from others. The lack of recent skull changes would seem to be a good start.
If someone believes the hypothesis to be true, they will go explore and find evidence to back their claims. If there was a complex society in the English Channel, it's likely well preserved, just waiting to be found!
God speaks to someone. That someone says "It's true because God told me so."
I have read religious works, I'm not cut off from them. It's impossible to be cut off from theology in the USA. However, they all start with "it is true because I (the author) say so".
Because complex social structures tend to be innovations and inventions similar to those in the physical realm. It thus stands to reason that a 'social evolution' has taken place over the millennia, and there's ample evidence of that progress in the world around you. No one says prehistoric humans were individually simpletons, just that societally they were far simpler (as in strictly less advanced).
Please specify, what do you mean by "less advanced"? I doubt a randomly picked person has a more complex net of social interactions today than 50,000 years ago - probably the personal level is a lot simpler today, since we can outsource many needs to corporate and national structures, with whom you also have pretty straightforward relations.
"I doubt a randomly picked person has a more complex net of social interactions today than 50,000 years ago..."
Why? 50k years ago the average person lived with a small group of people and barely ever interacted with anyone else in the world. Whereas the common person, today, interacts with a large number of people socially; if you include virtual and physical interactions.
Yes, by simple count the social net may have been smaller in the past, but I was talking about complexity. Just imagine living with one tribe for the rest of your life, having to partake in everyone managing each other's friendships and relationships with each other.
> Why? 50k years ago the average person lived with a small group of people and barely ever interacted with anyone else in the world.
I think at least some of the people in this thread would argue against that, seeing as how it is about the idea of advanced or at least extant cities in the distant past. That would be exactly one of the points being argued on.
What you mean isn't something many of the relevant experts would agree with, but the words in the second sentence aren't bad.
Similarly to biological evolution, on any sufficiently long time scale the descendents aren't more advanced, simply better adapted to different conditions. Our ancestors' societies reflected wildly different contraints and path dependence, not primitiveness.
>Similarly to biological evolution, on any sufficiently long time scale the descendents aren't more advanced, simply better adapted to different conditions. Our ancestors' societies reflected wildly different contraints and path dependence, not primitiveness.
I understand what you mean, yet I refuse to call concepts like universal human rights, rule of law and the unacceptability of war crimes as simply different adaptations, as opposed to being strictly more advanced than the predecessor ideas.
There's actually pretty solid archaeological evidence of at least the cognitive capacities which would prefigure in civilisation through toolmaking and their complexity.
This is a long but highly informative presentation by Sander van der Leeuw from 2012:
Actually I think platos account of Atlantis and how it coincides with the dates of the flood is evidence. How could he have known the exact years back of the flood? Sure it’s shaky, but the geology checks out.
2. the ability to specialize is driven by access to surplus energy
3. before the advent of agriculture bands of humans simply did not have the excess calories available to them to support a priesthood and philosophers and bureaucrats, etc.
Or maybe they simply choose to not spend those excess calories on philosophers and bureaucrats because doing so provided no immediate benefit? We have evidence showing that the rise of civilization and agriculture were a net negative for an average individual. It seems that at least in Egypt and Mesopotamia climate change, specifically an end of warmer and wetter climatic cycle, is what pushed people into fertile river valley. Most people would had probably preferred to remain hunter gatherers had that been possible or even independent farmers (which is what happened in the rest of the world.
The people in Mesopotamia (and in other similar areas which were slowly turning into a desert) didn't really have a choice. Building and maintaining irrigation systems takes a lot of people and coordination. Since most would probably prefer to be the ones handling 'coordination' aspect rather than digging trenches in the mud priests and philosopher classes had to appear to maintain social cohesion. It's much easier to convince peasants to give X% their harvest to the local strongman when they know that he's an divinely appointed king or maybe even a living god himself.
As long as it has been investigated scientifically, then "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is actually not correct. To my understanding that is exactly how particle physics research is conducted.
My understanding is that there is no evidence for pre-historic human societies that had advanced technologies. We have hard data in our genetics for the timeframes of human existence (statistical rate of random genetic drift vs nearest ancestors) in addition to the fossil record, we have good information from ice cores about when/what of particulates were in the atmosphere, we know general rates of tectonic movements , and it's easy to observe what's under kilometers of strata with drilling cores if anyone has a good hypothesis as to where to drill.
> This idea that humanity sprang up out of nothing in Sumerian/Babylon is very contrived.
I don't think anyone believe that's the case? It's just what we have records for. You need a lot of prior development to arrive to the point where you have recorded history.
Eh, maybe no one who's thought critically about it, but past the "earth is 6,000 years old" crowd I think you'll find a "cilization is 10,000 years old, before which we were hunter gatherers" crowd
I think most people are just repeating what they learned as children and haven't given it much more thought. So the answer is usually some combination of religious influences, when you were schooled, and what textbook your teacher was using.
In 2008, this is what a certain group in Hollywood thought 10,000 B.C. was like... anachronisms and all.[0]
It's pretty fascinating to comprehend how different Europe's land mass is from a couple thousand years ago. Imagining the current world with shore lines as different as that is pretty hard to Fathom.
It puts the climate change narrative in perspective a bit. In someways, the change we are experiencing isn't as unprecedented as some people perceive. In other ways, if we are going to be on a highly accelerated version of something like the event in the story than we are going to be in for a hell of a ride.
Reminds me about the theory about how the Persian Gulf was the origin of the first civilisations and the origin of the myth of paradise. As the water rose people was displaced and eventually ended up forming ur.
> Ur was an important Sumerian city-state in ancient Mesopotamia, located at the site of modern "Tell el-Muqayyar" in south Iraq's Dhi Qar Governorate. Although Ur was once a coastal city near the mouth of the Euphrates on the Persian Gulf, the coastline has shifted and the city is now well inland, on the south bank of the Euphrates, 16 kilometres from Nasiriyah in modern-day Iraq. The city dates from the Ubaid period circa 3800 BC, and is recorded in written history as a city-state from the 26th century BC, its first recorded king being Mesannepada.
The pictures of the Ziggurat are really impressive.
I also wasn't. Quite depressing laws they had, I think:
6. If a man violates the right of another and deflowers the virgin wife of a young man, they shall kill that male.
7. If the wife of a man followed after another man and he slept with her, they shall slay that woman, but that male shall be set free.
... and slaves of course ...
Where are you getting the 2.5m figure from? The article you linked doesn't give a figure as far as I can see, but it says sediments have been found 4m above _current_ tide levels and that water went 29km inland in Scotland. Both of those figures seem to be at odds with a relatively small 2.5m tsunami (for comparison, the Fukashima earthquake produced a 15m tsunami).
> The north-eastern coast of the UK experienced waves between 3–6 m, much like the eastern coast of Scotland ... Wave heights are predicted to be around 1 m on the UK coast and up to 5 m on the northern coast of Doggerland. The maximum elevation of Doggerland here is less than 10 m, with large areas of less than 5 m. It is therefore possible that much of Doggerland would have been flooded by such a wave.
In reading now about the factors involved in this work, one issue is the amount of post-glacial rebound. While I've found that Scotland has rebounded a lot, I can't figure out how much that has been since 8,000 years ago. If I read figure 1 of http://people.rses.anu.edu.au/lambeck_k/pdf/152.pdf correctly, the Bridge of Earn, Firth of Fourth was 4 meters lower, relative to sea level rise back then.
I also know that geography can cause tsunamis to have local effects which are much stronger than average, as when a narrowing bay channels the wave upward. But I have no clue how that relates to the deposits seen in Scotland.
Edit: and figure 3 seems to say Dogger Bank was 6 meters higher (relative to sea level) than now, again, due to post-glacial rebound effects.
I got the 25 metre figure from a paper on the Storegga collapse - and I'll return and cite this when I'm back at where my notes are. It's the upper limit of the cited proposed model of what happened. It looks like Britannica is referencing the same model here (although I'm not claiming Britannica is a rock-solid source for the facts):
"Some models of the Storegga slides estimate that tsunami waves exceeded 20–25 metres (65–80 feet) in height along the coast of the Shetland Islands, 10–12 metres (33–39 feet) along the Norwegian coast, and 5 metres (16 feet) along the coast of eastern Scotland."
> The resulting tsunami had run-up heights of around 10–20 m on the Norwegian coast, over 12 m in Shetland, 3–6 m on the Scottish mainland coast. ...
> We compare results from our multiscale model to previous results using constant-resolution models and show that accounting for changes in bathymetry since 8.15 ka, neglected in previous numerical studies of the Storegga slide-tsunami, improves the agreement between the model and inferred run-up heights in specific locations, especially in the Shetlands, where maximum run-up height increased from 8 m (modern bathymetry) to 13 m (palaeobathymetry).
> The Storegga tsunami has previously been theorized as having brought about a swift and catastrophic end to Doggerland, the submerged palaeolandscape of the southern North Sea (Weninger et al., 2008). However, a more nuanced understanding is beginning to emerge in the wake of numerical modelling of the wave’s dispersal (Hill et al., 2014; Hill et al., 2017), and the discovery of the first confirmed evidence of the tsunami from a submarine context, “core ELF001A” from the “Southern River” submerged river valley, recovered by the Europe’s Lost Frontiers team (Gaffney et al., 2020). Clearly the Storegga tsunami hit some of the coastlines of the southern North Sea with considerable force, but the severity of this impact was probably variable (Walker et al., 2020).
It cites "run-up heights in excess of 25 m recorded in parts of Scotland and Norway".
Thanks for that. Yep - I think the widely (wildly) varying numbers are due to there being various models currently being explored. The paper I referred to was recent but not "2020" recent. I'd also trust Gaffney's team's findings as the Lost Frontiers team are at the cutting edge of all this.
There is an interesting Youtube video by AlternateHistoryHub on exactly this topic ("What if Britain Wasn't An Island?"), so if you're interested in a bit of theorizing about what could've been or might've been, I recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssoKkvDbJpE
> since there’s no evidence that Mesolithic people were seafarers, who knows if there were people living there?
Whyyyyyy?
To hedge your bets with "no evidence" that these people managed to navigate shallow sea waters to a nearby island, which they had inhabited for thousands of years and knew like the back of their hand, seems… unnecessary? Disrespectful?
I mean, we already know Mesolithic "hunter gatherers" managed absolutely mind-boggling feats of both art and engineering. More is becoming known every year, and it consistently amazes us in the direction of "No way!"
Building a boat / canoe for island-hopping over well-mapped marshes and shallow seas is the least of it.
If speculate on "no evidence" we must, my bet goes 100% in the opposite direction: The gradual increase in sea levels prompted new inventions and spectacular constructions, now lost to time. As far as speculations go, it seems a safer bet than "couldn't paddle".
> Evidence for Mesolithic seafaring includes the colonisation of islands involving long sea journeys, such as Shetland and the Outer Hebrides (Warren 2005), as well as the location of sites on islands involving very difficult sea crossings, such as Ynys Enlli (Bardsey Island) in North Wales, where one must negotiate the treacherous Swnt Enlli (Edmonds et al 2009).
> Tolan-Smith (2008, 151) notes that at this point there is clear evidence for Mesolithic seafaring, with Ireland being occupied along with the Isle of Man, Rhum, the Hebridean Archipelago and Howick on the East coast of England. Thus, as Warren (2005) and Garrow and Sturt (2011) have argued, there is ample evidence for a strong seafaring tradition in the Mesolithic.
Thanks for the links. I was starting to wonder whether I'd said something unforgivably controversial.
What Doggerland – and underwater archeology in general – has to reveal is quite exciting. How did these Mesolithic people conceptualize the world and themselves? What innovations and dead-ends "didn't quite make it" (in the evolutionary sense) to the start of protohistory, to us today?
So much of the juiciest evidence from that era is now under the sea!
And which of those now-dead innovations were genuinely obsoleted ideas, and which died out due to ecological happenstance? A bad timing, bad place for an otherwise brilliant life hack… especially on the psychological/cultural/spiritual front.
Unfortunately such aspects of prehistory are the hardest to piece together. But given the jaw-dropping accomplishments of many Paleolithic and Mesolithic peoples, and given the time scales, even their maladaptations must be worth a study.
In this age of Twitter, imagine something chiseled to perfection by groups of smart humans over thousands of years. Then swept away by something as "trivial" as a tsunami, or the agricultural revolution/slavery that marks the dawn of history. A truly multivariate optimization problem, with a rather shady objective function.
We can get some of this by paying more attention to other indigenous cultures.
Australian Aborigines have an oral culture with ancient roots, and life hacks that have resulted in an astonishing long-lived culture.
The Khasi, as an example of a matrilineal culture, help remind us that certain things we take for granted - like how men are supposedly more competitive than women - simply isn't true.
The title seems to use meters as the article says "anything up to 25 meters". It's a bit jarring how it switches between systems and then gives conversions on some imperial units but not others.
It's also odd to read about Europe in measurements like "cubic miles" given there's only one country in Europe using imperial and their system is different from the US imperial. The author is a self-described "Yorkshireman" so I assume it's UK imperial but I have no idea what that means for American audiences. Are US and UK miles the same?
Yes, US and UK miles are the same. And yep, I'm English - and I have that blindspot that a lot of us have, where we don't noticed how we use both imperial and metric in a confusing mash-up of systems - so yep, apologies, and guilty as charged!
(In my everyday thinking I use meters and miles alongside each other, which is...ridiculous. But I was a little too late to the world to properly learn inches and pounds, so it's centimetres and kg all the way.)
I'm U.S., and I'd assert that all of our informational conveyance (from language to measurements) is a confusing mashup. English is a pidgin language, and we're so accustomed to the weird mashup that it doesn't seem jarring to us sometimes to mix metric and imperial in the same context. Not defending it (because it's honestly awful), just explaining why we might not notice until it's pointed out to us.
Also, thank you to those who left comments saying you didn't like that former piece's introduction. I agree with you! It was rambling and a bit self-indulgent and I should have just got on with the story. This one does that (I think). Cheers.