The Origins of Human Society

Unfortunately, what ever evidence that might exist is probably buried under the Sahara or under the ocean or both.

So what we’re left with is speculative bullshit. Not that I’m opposed to the idea of looking for such evidence. Seek and you will find… something

Loaded is an overstatement.

Looking at analysis of the results it seems like it's much more likely to be acquired from other sources and bad test results analysis.

You're right. "Loaded" is a loaded word. I came across an interesting paper which discusses the issue in what seems to be an even-handed way. Note that the link ends with .edu, which may or may not add to it's credibility. FWIW I don't know what institution of higher learning to which it is attached.
There's really no way to settle the issue short of some sort of breakthrough and I certainly am not going to fall down some sort of conspiracy rabbit hole over it. However, there are several points in the analysis where the findings were dismissed out of hand because they "weren't possible." Certainly, the accuracy of the findings have been questioned and they certainly could be wrong, but I gather there aren't glaring red flags that would indicate mistakes or fraud. As the article says "...considering the several confirmations of Balabanova's work (as well as that of Caldwell et. al. prior to her study) it appears that the argument against their findings based on too little evidence is quickly vanishing (if not already obviated)."

Again, not saying this whole situation can't be logically explained, but this is an interesting commentary on the hoo-hah itself: “The initial reaction to the findings of Balabanova et. al. was highly critical. These criticisms were not based on a known failing in the authors' research methodology, rather they were attempts to cast doubt on an implication of the research - that cocaine and nicotine were brought to Egypt from the New World before Columbus. This conclusion is not acceptable to conservative investigators of the past. In fact it suggests a deep-rooted aversion to what Balabanova suggested might mean an unraveling of aspects of history contrary to basic reconstructions. This aversion, according to Kehoe (1998) stems from the conviction that Indians were primitive savages destined to be overcome by the civilized world - that the acme of evolutionary success resided in the conquering race itself. ‘Childlike savages could never have voyaged across oceans.’ “

You know what the Sphinx looked like before Napoleon showed up, right?


And have you heard about the discoveries made at Doggerland?

The simple fact is that even if something's buried, or underwater, we can find it. And all kinds of people will pay big money to find it. The folks who own Hobby Lobby have been busted several times for buying stolen artifacts. And they didn't merely give the money to unscrupulous archeologists who are like Belloq, in Raiders, they fucking paid goddamned ISIS folks for that shit. Because who cares if the money is going to terrorists when you can get stuff for your museum dedicated to that book no one's ever heard of? You know, The Bible.

Something else, up until the early 19th Century, they were a lot more ancient monuments built by Native Americans standing than there are today. Why? Because prior to the early 19th Century, it was assumed that they were built by folks who lived before the Great Flood (which never happened, ask any credible geologist and they'll explain to you why not only did it never happen, but it never could have happened), then when it was realized that, no, they were built by the Native Americans, we started destroying them, until we came to our senses at the end of the 19th Century and decided to preserve them.

Why is it we treat non-western ancient societies differently, is that what you're asking? I don't think now that we do treat them differently. I've been to Chichen Itza, it's really the only ancient ruin I've ever seen. (Though I'm not certain how old the Kremlin or the Tetris church is.) I was truly amazed. It astonoshes me that things like that were built while Europe was in the dark ages.

I studied a little bit of native american culture and practically minored in anthropology (I was one or two classes short of a minor) in college. You'll get no argument from me over the sophistication of these societies, I know they were sophisticated, but they were lost to history until around the turn of the century.

The Sphinx was discovered in the early part of the 19th century and Machu Picchu wasn't discovered until the early part of the 20th century. It's not that there weren't records or stories about these places existing, but as you point out, racism did likely play a factor as to why we as a society don't treat those societies with as much respect as our own.

Obviously those societies likely influenced some of our founders and further politicians throughout the settling of the western United States, but the biggest factor has been western philosophy itself, building upon Roman, Greek and medieval society, then British society and law. We didn't fashion modern society after the French for example, and good thing we didn't at the time, although one could argue that we would have had better relations with the Native Americans, but still.

If that isn't what you're asking then sorry for rambling.

On a related note, I stumbled across this article about a new book that's just been published that argues we really need to rethink how we view the Egyptian Pharaohs as we don't exactly have an unbiased account of what they were like.

Something else to think about: When it comes to great European democracies, you naturally think of ancient Athens, the Roman Republic, and Great Britain. Why not the Republic of Venice? It lasted roughly 1000 years, contrast this with Athens that was a democracy for less than 200 years, and the Roman Republic which clocked in at a respectable 500 years or so. Great Britain has some fiddly issues, but really you can't call them a democracy until sometime in the 1700s. So, about 300 years. Not bad.

Now, this question is for non-UK folks (don't worry, the next one is for everybody), how many British PMs who held office before 1937 can you name without googling? Me? I can name one. Next, again, without googling, how many elected leaders of ancient Athens can you name? How many elected leaders of the Roman Republic? How about Egyptian Pharaohs?

Do you see the issue here? We claim to value democracy as a form of government, but in our discussion of history, we don't necessarily focus on it. And it's not because it's a new form of government, or that it tends to be short-lived. Do some digging on the Hopewell tradition. Now let me throw this out to you, the Hopewell's (or Adena's) started the idea that tribes (regardless of what nation they happened to belong to) would align themselves with either a plant or animal. So a tribe of Cherokee's might consider themselves to be "people of the beaver," while another might be "people of the buffalo." This was true all across North America, regardless of if one was Cherokee, Navaho, Apache, or whatever. You know how Sacajawea was able to guide Lewis and Clark across the US, even though they would have encountered tribes that didn't speak the same language as her (or the other natives in the party)? Because she was able to seek out other tribes who had the same spirit animals as hers. They didn't have to speak the same language, or even technically be at peace with one another (so, if the Cherokee and Navaho were at war with one another, and a Cherokee tribe that had the beaver as their spirit animal encountered Navaho that also had the beaver as their spirit animal, they couldn't fight one another) they had to give aid and comfort to them. Also, because Sacajawea was born in one tribe and raised in another tribe, she had multiple spirit animals that she could claim, so this increased the opportunities for them to find tribes that were inclined to guide them.

This indicates that there's ways to organize societies other than the traditional top-down systems that we tend to think of. The Hopewell, and other groups in Latin and South America, didn't have things that we'd consider to be even tribal systems of governments, yet they created very complicated things. Not just the various mounds scattered across the US, but large, sophisticated cities. There are places in Europe (Stonehenge being an example) as well as Asia, where folks built really sophisticated things (often without the use of metal tools) that we tend to think required at the very least a tribal society, or a king, but we've no evidence that this was the case. In fact, many times we have ample evidence that this was not the case. They had some form of organizing their society that wasn't remotely what we can imagine since there was no hierarchy as we would tend to define it. Yet they did some really complicated shit. How? Why? And what can we learn from it?

Is it possible that we can figure out a way that not only does away with a rigidly centralized form of government but also ensures that everyone in a society not only has the greatest opportunities but we don't have to worry that some asshole will dump toxic waste all over the place since they don't have to worry about a centralized government holding them accountable for doing so?

Nevelle Chamberlin , spitballing... Sir Walter Raleigh, Lord Fairfax?

Pharos: Tutt, Remises 1,2, and 3, Akanoten (not sure of the spelling), Cleopatra.

Elected leaders of Rome: Ceaser, ...Brutus?

Elected leaders of Athens: I got nothing.

Talk to the various Native American tribes who are risking their lives to stop fossil fuel pipelines from being routed through their areas, when it would be shorter to route them through areas where the majority population was White.

Serpent Mound in Ohio and Fort Ancient are both older and closer than Chichen Itza.

The Kremlin was started in the late 15th Century, Moscow itself was founded in about the 12th Century. Now, try and think of places in Asia, Australia, and the Americas, that are nearly as old. You probably can't, even though you know of at least some of those places.

Think about it: We're taught that civilization began in the Fertile Crescent ~10K or so years ago, with places like Ur. And yet, we have evidence that folks were getting up to some pretty sophisticated things (not necessarily massive cities, but certainly sophisticated things like large, migratory societies) in other parts of the world. If any of this is talked about, it's largely mentioned in passing. Then we'll jump to something like Babylonian society, ancient Egypt (focusing primarily on the various kingdoms), then Greece, then Rome, then things like the Holy Roman Empire, before discussing the UK, the Americas (once Columbus bumbled his way there), and then the rise of modern Europe. If we talk about Asia, Polynesia, and Australia, it's only in relation to Europeans showing up in those places.

We don't say that while the city of Ur was being founded, the people who'd become known as the Chinese or Indians, or whomever, were doing this or that. We act as if nobody was there at all. Technologically, the Chinese were more advanced than the Romans were at the same time period. Shouldn't they be equally as interesting and covered at the same time in history classes as we cover the Romans?

Point of order: The Dark Ages weren't as dark as we tend to think of them, and they were only dark for Europe. Asia and the Middle East, as well as the Americas, were chugging along without any technological backsliding. If we're trying to talk about how human civilization has progressed over the centuries, shouldn't we give them at least as much weight in our discussion of history as we do Europe in the Dark Ages?

Not merely lost, but Westerners actively tried to erase their histories.

It goes deeper than that. Racism is why the Elgin Marbles are in the British Museum, instead of being in Greece. And however racist we might have been in the past, if we're trying to say that human progress has been an ascension out of hunter-gatherer type societies to one where we live in cities and can do things like the wheel, New York, wars and so on, shouldn't we give equal weight, if not more weight to those societies who were doing the most sophisticated things?

But the French certainly got a number of their ideas for the Revolution from us. Again, the Republic of Venice was chugging along when the Founders were casting around for a model to base our society on, why didn't they look to them? Granted, the Republic of Venice would cease to exist in the 1800s, not because they imploded, but in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, like the rest of Italy, they figured that they should all merge together if they wanted to be able to fight back against some assgasket who decided he wanted to conquer Europe.

Raleigh's pre-1700, so he doesn't count, and nope.

Yup.

Yes, though we don't really remember them as being elected leaders of Rome. And at one time, our education about Roman leaders was much more detailed. Because the Founders were so impressed with an elected Roman leader, who was given absolute control during a time of crisis, and then, once the crisis had passed, went back to being a farmer that they named a city after him. Who was that Roman? Cincinnatus.

You probably know of one, but because of how history is taught, you don't think of him as being an elected leader of Athens: Pericles.

Well, a lot of what I learned about Non-Western civilization I learned in college. I specifically took a class about China from 1400s-1900 give or take where we were assigned this book
https://www.amazon.com/Search-Modern-China-Jonathan-
Spence/dp/0393307808
and this book
https://www.amazon.com/China-1850-History-Charles-
Hucker/dp/0804709580/ref=sr_1_1?crid=4W6UD5YMI9HL&keywords=china+to+1850+a+short+history&qid=1639450943&sprefix=china+to+1850%2Cstripbooks%2C174&sr=8-1
Now we were only assigned certain pages from the first book because it's dense and we didn't neccissarilly need to read the whole thing because the professor had his own lecture that we took notes from, but I learned a lot.

Another class I took was about Pre-Columbia Americas where I learned about the Olmecs, which I had never heard of until then and of course the Myans, Aztecs and the Incas. I think college is an appropriate time to learn such things because in high school you're just going to get the broad strokes and in the US the focus is going to be US history.

Laugh if you want, but when watching Ancient Aliens they talk about ancient societies that I might not have otherwise would have heard of. Obviously they skew the history to fit their narrative, but at least it gets me interested in googling what they are talking about. I may joke about aliens a lot, but I don't buy into the narrative, it's entertainment for me. If The History Channel actually taught history again, I'd happily trade that for Ancient Aliens. Listening to The JRE has done this as well. I select the ones I want to listen to and often times seek out podcasts that talk about these type of things. It's not like the information is locked away in the Raiders of the Lost Ark vault, it's out there.

I would agree that we should stop treating Columbus like some noble explorer in the likes of Kirk and Picard, he wasn't. All you have to do is visit Puerto Rico and the museums there to see what a piece of shit he was. Let's also talk about the Vikings who made it to the Americas much earlier.

The anthropology classes I took, yeah they were problomatic at times because it was sacreligous to discuss people coming to North America earlier than 13,000 years ago or to suggest that people from Europe could have crossed the Atlantic via an ice bridge, yet there's some evidence that suggest there were "light skinned" people in the DELMARVA area and there have been papers written on it. As @MikeH92467 points out, it's speculative at this point, but I think it's worth looking into.

That's the thing, though, Chinese history is pretty dense, and unless you're someone who takes a specific course on them, you're not going to learn much, if anything about them. But given that they're likely to the largest economy in the world soon, it would behoove us to learn more about them.

But I learned about the city of Ur when I was in Sixth grade. I learned very little about Native American society, even though Ohio not only produced the Mound Builders, but also Tecumseh.

But how many people actually go searching for it? That's the problem.

Sure, but since we're in the Americas, shouldn't we spend a lot of our time talking about things that happened in the Americas? I get that modern American society has a considerable cultural heritage shared with Europe, but ignoring things that happened here prior to the arrival of the Europeans does a bit of a disservice, not only to the people who were already here, but also to ourselves (especially since so many people claim Native American ancestors).

Thanks to DNA analysis, we can put a date when the mutation for light skin showed up. ~7K years ago. Studies indicate that the Native Australians are the closest living descendants of people who were around before that mutation showed up. In fact, it's estimated that they were largely cut off from other human societies for about 40K years. This indicates that there was either a spontaneous mutation in the Americas for lighter skin, or that contact between the Americans and other parts of the world (likely Siberia, but also some of the Polynesian islands) far more recent than what Australia saw, and in larger numbers.

Scientifically sound debunking of crackpot theories is bound to result in interesting findings. Some significant, some not, some just...interesting.

I just want to thank you @Tuckerfan for starting this thread, it’s by far the most interesting topic we’ve had here in a long time and while my knowledge is limited and rusty at best, it’s gotten that little hampster wheel in my head spinning a little bit.

Lloyd George, I assume? But surely you're aware of people like Gladstone, Disraeli, Wellington and Pitt?

I agree, especially with your point that if we’re going to talk about the americas then Pre-Columbian history should be added to the curriculum.

Now that you mention George, I have heard of him, but the only one that I could have thought of would have been Disraeli, and that's just because of his unusual name. Temple should be another one that I ought to be able to name since he refused to get involved in our Civil War.

I have to say that as I've gotten older, I've realized that there are some pretty glaring errors in the education that I got as a kid (and I had teachers on all sides of the political spectrum, so it wasn't like I was being fed propaganda by one political side). For example, in the Sixth grade, we were "taught" about some of the different governments in the world at that time. (This would have been in 1980, for those of you playing the home version.) What I can remember was watching a film strip about the constitution of the USSR, it pointing out that while their constitution technically granted citizens freedom of speech, and saying that it wasn't enforced. I can also remember my teacher claiming that the UK was "socialist." I put that in quotes because what she really described was a form of communism and not something at all that was practiced either in the UK or the USSR. According to her, in the UK, everyone was paid by the government. So, if you hired a plumber to fix your pipes, you didn't pay him, you paid the government, and then they paid him. If your neighbor happened to be a plumber, and you had a minor problem that you needed fixing (say a leaky pipe and you didn't have a wrench big enough for you to tighten it) and you offered to buy him a couple of pints in exchange for him bringing over his wrench so that you could do the job yourself (or letting him do it), that was illegal. This made no fucking sense to me at all, and if it was true, I couldn't see why we were allied with the UK, since they sounded just as bad as the Soviet Union.

Honestly, I think that even at the middle school or junior high school level, there would be a tremendous advantage if students were shown not only the constitution of their nation but the constitutions of other nations so that they could compare and contrast them. Do it in a non-political way, so that the kids can make their own minds up about the positives and negatives of the various ones and if there's any positives that their own nation could learn from.

https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-S...d=1639585090&sprefix=gun germs,aps,163&sr=8-3

This podcast episode is somewhat related to the subject matter.

Nichols raises some good points, but I think that he's wrong on some of what he says. He, essentially, claims that during times of peace and prosperity, democracies do poorly, then admits that the actual issue is that they don't have a sense of purpose. He's not wrong on what the actual issue is, and if we were to focus on, for example, pushing out into space, then there wouldn't be the threats to our society from internal forces as we're now having to deal with.

I remember Larry King reminiscing about an interview with Lenny Bruce. It was during the height of the Cold War. According to King, Bruce had said that if the Cold War ended and Communism was no longer a threat the U.S. would be in serious trouble. Without an external threat to draw the nation's hostility Bruce feared that we would turn on ourselves.

As Preet points out when he's talking to Nichols, the pandemic should have been the kind of external threat needed to unite us. I think we can all agree on how well that worked out.

This isn't to say that there aren't elements of truth to it, but what's lacking is a vision of a greater society. You know, how one could take an apparent immediate threat, and spin that into a larger vision. To put this in terms that those of us of a certain age can understand, how the idea of the Cold War would lead to the things described in this Donald Fagen song.

I'm reading The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone by Edward Dolnick, and his discussion of Ancient Egypt reminded me of this book, and made me think of something that the authors of The Dawn of Everything didn't address: Our population estimates for how many people lived in the Americas have to be way off (or something else was going on).

He gives a population figure for Ancient Egypt, and it was higher than what I can recall hearing about for most of the Americas. Here's why this strikes me as probably wrong. Humans have been mucking about in the Americas for around 25K years or so, and until Europeans showed up, there weren't a lot of diseases here. Couple that with there being a wider variety of food available here than in the rest of the world (60% of the crops grown in the world today are derived from species that were only found in the Americas before the 1500s). Given that population size is heavily dependent upon food supply, with more food, there should have been more people here than in Ancient Egypt, when you factor in the lower prevalence of disease, it seems even more likely that the populations of the Americas should have been some of the highest in the world in Pre-Columbian times.

Something to do with society's infrastructure to support more people avoiding war.

What I find most interesting is that hominids have been around for over a million years…

anatomically modern humans have been around for about 300,000 years…

humans had migrated to every part of the habitable globe by 15,000 years ago (other than the Antarctic and the Pacific Islands)…

the first known human settlements and evidences of agriculture are dated to 12,000 years ago…

the first historical records appear 5500 years ago in Sumer and Egypt…

That’s a lot of time for many, many cultures and civilizations to have risen and fallen outside the ones we already know about.

Wars, conquests, diseases, famines, natural disasters, and geological shifts may have wiped away many more societies that we will never know anything about.

I feel like when it comes to our knowledge about human history we have barely scratched the surface.

Not a thing wrong with wondering. However, it is easy to fall into the trap of equating a lack of proof against as proof (or at least an indication) for something. For sure, the discovery and constant reinterpretations of Gobekli Tepi has pushed back estimates of the beginning of "Civilization" a few thousand years, it's an incremental difference. It really doesn't support the speculation about lost "advanced" (however you define "advanced") civilizations, it doesn't debunk that speculation either. I'm interested and willing to listen to claims of proof, but I've long since exhausted my interest in that kind of speculation.

ETA: Here's a link to a brief refutation of one of the leading theorists who points to Gobekli Tepi as "proof" of a more advanced civilization waiting to be discovered.

instead of ancient aliens ("white people can't figure out how this was done, so obviously..."), try some of good old James Burke with either The Day the Universe Changed followed by the Connections series.

sad though, as I recall being introduced to the existence of mesoamericans like the Olmecs and Toltecs in 5th grade. Obviously not in great depth, but the fundamental idea that there were complex societies before "classic", post pre columbian contact was rooted.


Speaking of the earlier viking contacts though, have you ever noted the similarities between their villages and those of the Pacific Northwest tribes? Besides the obvious longhouse communities built around natural harbours they share several artistic, technological, and cosmologic styles. All despite being half a world apart.

opps, forgot one key factor of being on the west facing, mountainous and forested, coasts of their respective oceans in comparable climate zones

heh... one of the things I recall about my 4th grade teacher in '78 was her having lived in AZ at some point and her concerns over fluoridation of the water.

also, a few years later the high school I attended offering an elective grade 10 social studies course in communism-but you required parental permission to take it.

Are there estimates of the ancient populations of northern America versus Mesoamerica? I'm wondering if urbanization might have something to do with it -- in terms of urbanization decreasing the natural factors that killed people off, and being far more common in Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, and Mesoamerica than in northern America.