Civilization is WAY older than we thought!

Would you like to know more?

There's much more at the link. This is just... wow. When we think we've figured out everything, all of a sudden it all gets knocked on its ass!

Ground-penetrating radar?

Sure.


I've seen it in action. Pretty cool stuff.

The desire to sensationalise and talk up discoveries like this always makes me wary. Even if it is that old, Mr. Schmidt appears to be drawing some very wide-ranging conclusions. In particular, the idea that agriculture arose to accomodate such religious buildings rather than vice-versa can hardly but be ass backwards.

Similarly, the article claims that the discovery "rewriting the story of human evolution". That's not true. Humans existed in their modern form long before civilisation began, way farther back than 11,500 years ago.

Intriguing, but still a little early to begin rewriting the history books...

I think he meant 'evolution' of human culture.

OMG, you know what this means? Sid Meier is a plagiarist!

WOW

Doesn't every civilization start off with the ability to irrigate and build roads? They actually have to research ... something to get temples.

It's been too long since I've played.

Ceremonial Burial.

In the latest version, they all start with two primitive techs, but those can be any of about ten.

If the dating on this turns out to be correct, it will not demonstrate that this temple complex predated agriculture and all the rest. It will only show that, in that area at least, they were much older than we had previously thought. They necessarily predated such a complex construction.

The idea that a high level of civilization existed thousands of years before the Sumerians and the rise of the Old Egyptian Kingdom is not actually all that revolutionary. It shows only that knowledge of the distant past is much more incomplete than we like to think.

Why, in a primative society?

Because a prerequisite of building something like this is lots of people, well organised, in the same place, with surplus labor.

That's it.

Civ IV? Got that for my father in law a couple years ago, but I never have time to play it.

Yeah, that's the one. Although Civ V is being released soon - see my thread in the Press Start forum.

Possibly correct. I read somewhere that our cave dwelling, hunter/gatherer ancestors only "worked" around 20 hours a week to keep food on the family table. Left plenty of leisure time for other activities.

Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of. Let us tell you of the days of high adventure!

Granted this discovery is a bit of a moot point now, but it certainly does support some of the theories of Dr. Daniel Jackson.

Yeah, I'm absolutely convinced our knowledge of mankind's history is woefully incomplete.

They've found a lost city in the Amazon jungle that might be responsible for the tales of El Dorado and could rival the Aztecs and Incans in sophistication:
http://news.discovery.com/earth/deforestation-unveils-lost-amazon-civilization.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/earth-environment/article6982391.ece

There is also a possibly major find on the path of the old Silk Road of an advanced civilization 2500 years old at the bottom of Lake Issyk Kul in the Kryzgyz mountains:
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/1194

And then of course there's the Yananguni formations off the coast of Japan, that might be remnants of a civilization at least 6000 years old, though there's debate whether the location is natural or not:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonaguni_Monument

Thermal imaging also revealed that about 90% of the Mayan civilization is largely still unexplored, lost to the jungles of Central America:
http://www.nytimes.com/1984/06/19/science/satellite-discovers-lost-mayan-ruins.html

All sorts of cool things going on.

Where's Indy when you need him?

Yep, anyone whose ever studied up on the numerous non Inca cities and ruins know we're woefully ignorant of prehistory.

Plus anyone who thinks that agriculture was a top down sophistication from some centralized religious authority is a fucking moron.

The article doesn't say that. It says the train of thought was "We need more time to worship - let's make the food supply more predictable," not "The high priest said we should plant our own seeds in tilled fields".

The best part about this is knowing that if you wanted to just fuck off from your job and be the next Indiana Jones, it's still possible!

You'd still have a world of discoveries that could make you very rich or famous, assuming you don't get flattened by a giant rolling boulder, get stung by the world's most poisonous spider, or get you heart ripped out and head shrunk by angry brown tribesmen.

It's also amazing to realize that these civilizations were likely once the major forces in the world, and then something happened to relegate them to the dustbin of history, long forgotten, only to now be rediscovered.

Could our own major cities be felled by such a fate, eventually?

You think it's cool now, but wait until those Goua'ld are unsealed from their tomb and then you will be sorry.

The challenge to being Indy is financing it. Even Indy had a day job (as an archaeology prof). And he had a sugar-daddy to pay for his trips. Although if you took a camera crew from Discovery or The History Channel...

There was something on the discovery channel a few weeks ago about the search for an inferred but as yet undiscovered Incan city bigger and better than the ones we know about too.

Possibly in fact predating the Incas.

My reaction was to this line:

Bet your ass it's NOT. As Async and others said (or implied): the more we find out, the more we find out how little we know.

There's a school of thought - no idea how credible because I haven't given it any attention in a LONG time - that there was at one time previous to any history we know about, a highly civilized human population - civilied, IIRC, even up to something like a 14th Century AD level or some such, if not beyond.

Or even that such a degree of civilization might have risen and fallen multiple times in the past.

Not preaching it mind you, just think it's fascinating to consider.

Interesting stuff!

Fossil evidence has dated the first appearance of homo sapiens to about 2,000,000 years ago.

And our continuous recorded history only begins maybe 10,000 years ago.

That is A LOT of time for civilizations to have risen and fallen. And there were earlier races of man like homo erectus and the neanderthals that predate even our species...

I just wish I was an immortal so I could see the whole course of human history from beginning to... whatever.

The problem with these theories is that a superior technology doesn't tend to disappear from the face of history (unless it blew itself up). Aside from a sunken Atlantis-like island, taking all it's advancements along to bottom sea with its demise, it would be tough to construct the scenario where they had e.g. iron or alloy smelting but yet not a single artifact survived until today.

They've found like 22 layers of cities on Turkey's coast at the site of Illium ("Troy"), so there has been some digging here and there in places, even if the great flood has washed most evidence of it away. My guess is that most of history has been revealed, aside from the kinds of stone and bronze? civilizations that're the thread subject, or some kind of new progenitor to 'Lucy Afarensis.'

I'll agree that there sure was enough time in the millions of years that have passed with an 'erectus' under the sun for development and then devastation, but the problem is to bury it beneath enough stone (an intervening period with a molton surface that buried it all hardly seems possible, given what the geologists have told us) for there to be no trace of the civilization.

If there's a mysterious past to be found my money would be almost all on remnants to be found deep beneath the seas.

Are you sure of this? Because according to my understanding, your figure is off by over a full order of magnitude.