Is history wrong?

[THE Bigzoman]

Is it possible there were civilizations far older than the ones we know of? Were they more advanced than we think?

Is it possible? I guess so. I don't think scientists are saying we know EVERYTHING about the distant past.

But i'd peg it as unlikely.

[Dezerte]

I have to wonder when the planet was in it's more primordial phase when it was just Pangaea.

Well, the planet has seen a few extinct level events since then. Many of which would have sufficiently wiped out any evidence of any pre-civilizations that might have existed.

As mentioned it seems unlikely. We can find fossils that are millions and billions of years old (i.e. they survived numerous extinction events) and we find evidence of very primitive human civilization. A advanced ancient civilization would definitely leave something behind for us to find, something that big would leave a mark.

With that said, nothing wrong with a little harmless imagination now and then.

[Alydael]

Yes, history is wrong.

It is mostly incomplete (records of civilizations destroyed etc) and was written by the winners of conflict, so it is also one sided.

We only really have a "good" record of the last two hundred years or so, when we started keeping records and we developed the technology to preserve them.

[Shadowferal]

*shrugs*
What bothers me anymore about this current generation is this crappy desire to have their imagination already taken care of. It's as if it's too much work to enjoy...

[Dezerte]

*shrugs*
What bothers me anymore about this current generation is this crappy desire to have their imagination already taken care of. It's as if it's too much work to enjoy...

I think everyone has imagination, but not necessarily in the same way. I like imagining and working with what we know and what seems to be true, and believe me there's plenty of wiggle room for me to be excited about in that. But it's not for everyone I suppose, some desire more fantastical ideas and some don't.

[THE Bigzoman]

I cant discuss things with this person, they literally are the status quo and will never be able to have an original thought in their lives.

I have also watched every graham hancock video as well as ANY video you could imagine and ive come to this conclusion, we WERE more advanced but not in the way your human mind thinks. Its not that we lost some recipe on how to smelt steel or copper, we have an advanced knowledge on how to be as a PEOPLE. Look how fragmented our religion today makes us, do you really believe that is as good as it gets? I truly believe there is a connection between the structures left here on earth from thousands of years ago, and KNOWLEDGE OF A CREATOR. I am not talking about religion here, i am talking about actual knowledge of why we are here and what our purpose is. You see this is the way those types of buildings get completed, it is that kind of knowledge that pushes people to accomplish such things.

I know i am just a random on the internet but please hear me out, i have taken our knowledge of the cosmos as well as our far reaching history and stictched out something that i believe is a truth. For hundreds of years before einstein came along everyone believed the earth was in the center of the universe. This knowledge the christian church had was simply scraps of a greater knowledge our ancestors posessed from thousands of years ago, when these structures were built. I think todays religions are simply scraps of what we have known in the past, that have simply been lost to time.

What really bothers me about your posts @Endus is the way you assume to know how things are, when in reality you are incredibly off course and dont give near enough credit to the times. Stop typing like you do and think for a second, try and imagine what kind of motivation it would take to build the structures that still exist on this planet 4000-10000 years later (some have been dated to those numbers). Big things were happening then, please lets not belittle them.

Gonna break down your logic piece by piece here:

Premise1: Civilizations older and less advanced than us made some pretty awesome shit.
Premise2: Civilizations older and less advanced than us can make some pretty awesome shit ONLY IF they're highly motivated and/or informed.
Conclusion: Civilizations older and less advanced than us made some pretty awesome shit because they were motivated and/or informed either by an almighty creator, knowledge of one, or both.

Yeah, your conclusion doesn't follow from your premises.

Even if we accept 1 and 2 as true, that doesn't mean that they were motivated/informed by an almighty creator. Do you see the leap in your logic there? It's as clear as day.

The pyramids were created by slaves who worked for food and water, for example. They weren't motivated by gods or their belief in gods; they were motivated by hunger, thirst, and fear of punishment from authorities.

Sure, we may not know how older civilizations figured out how to build these things. But that doesn't mean they got their sources from a creator. They could've gotten them from a non-divine thing that we're not yet aware of.

[GodlyBob]

You're just posting shit just because...why?

Better yet, don't bother with a response...You just stay in your safe closed box where everything is already figured out for you.

I'll go back to the reason why humanity evolved with an imagination...

If you stopped reading there, I'll be happy to reiterate. What-ifs and Jules-Vernian musings are perfectly acceptable with the context of whimsy and logical extension, but there is a huge difference between postulating "lycanthropy is a virus" as a theoretical discussion and allocating funds to cure werewolves just in case.

[Protean]

There was clearly something huge happening before written records given the megaliths that scatter this world today, my honest guess is of a knowledge we simply cannot comprehend today. What else would possess so many cultures to erect such magnificent structures? There is also the how, maybe the knowledge of a creator came with advanced knowledge on how to harness energies on this earth?

Maybe it's more simple than that. Maybe people just tried see how high up the stars are.

I think they're more likely to be religious in nature, or simply failed experiments. After all, if you build something complex that doesn't work, how are people with no prior knowledge about the object going to figure out what it's meant to do?

[Endus]

Possible? Yes.

Likely? No.

The issue is that it would have had to be some sort of culture that never really did anything large scale, developed no metallurgy, no major earthworks, little to no urbanization and very little agriculture. It would had to be a civilization that also went extinct in its very early development phases.

Even then, we would have pre-civilization hints of culture leading up to the development of civilization, like tool making, like stone tools. The same has happened with humans. We only had civilization for about 12K years, but we have been making and leaving around our tools for 2.8 million years. Technology is a gradual process.

Some of this is based on assumptions that could, in theory, be wrong.

A lot of the evidence of human development we've uncovered has been found either in caves, conveniently preserved due to some natural events/circumstances, or the like. It's a wafer-thin slice of the past. Without evidence to the contrary, we assume that they were representative of the whole of human development (and I'm not contesting that), but there could have been exceptions.

Just as a hypothetical what-if, modern humans (homo sapiens) have been on the planet for about 200,000 years. That covers not just this interglacial cycle, where all of human civilization has developed, but also the last interglacial cycle. So imagine if a culture developed somewhere in northern Europe/Asia, about 120,000 years ago, during the last interglacial period. They emerged in an iron-rich river valley, that was fertile and had ready access to fresh water and game and the like. Because they had rich iron deposits, their initial metallurgy skipped right over copper and bronze straight to iron. With iron tools, they carved stone and built stone houses and temple complexes. They remained relatively isolated and non-expansionist, because their locale was rich and their neighbours weren't competition. They developed language and writing, which they recorded on pelts or thin clay tablets. Early iron-age levels of technology.

And then the interglacial period ended, and everything started to get cold. At the same time, there was some natural disaster that devastated their valley; a volcano, a flood (perhaps a glacial lake bursting), or a massive earthquake, what have you. Either way, their society was shattered. A few may have fled and brought traces to other groups, who were ill-equipped to make use of them, due to the disparity in development. And as the glacial period continued, the glaciers pushed down through the valley, scouring all traces of their construction from the landscape. Their iron tools and works remained, but iron rusts, and they simply didn't last the tens of thousands of years until we could discover them. Their writings were similarly fragile, and rotted away to nothing. Their agricultural developments were destroyed in the cataclysm. The ONLY things that would survive from that far back are the echoes of the story of their demise, carried by the few survivors, which may have become the seeds for what became certain myths.

It's POSSIBLE. There's no evidence to back it, but that lack of evidence is reasonable and easily explained. It doesn't mean I'm convinced this ever happened, but if we uncovered evidence of it deep in some arid cave somewhere, I wouldn't be totally shocked, either, because it's definitely not impossible. Just as a for-instance, take cave paintings. They've survived, and are the only traces of stone-age art other than carvings that we know of. Did they ONLY paint in caves? Almost certainly not. But paintings on hides or on exposed rock surfaces simply would have weathered or rotted away to nothing; arid cave systems are simply the only places where conditions allowed for preservation for this long.

[Deleted]

The pyramids were created by slaves who worked for food and water, for example. They weren't motivated by gods or their belief in gods; they were motivated by hunger, thirst, and fear of punishment from authorities.

That's just a popular (mis)belief that refuses to die. The pyramids were built by egyptian serfdom, farmers/larborers that were idle during the months of the Nile floods.

And they were paid in beer, the fermented food at the time (not the liquid beer of today).

[Shadowferal]

That's just a popular (mis)belief that refuses to die. The pyramids were built by egyptian serfdom, farmers/larborers that were idle during the months of the Nile floods.
And they were paid in beer, the fermented food at the time (not the liquid beer of today).

*nods*
Not just beer though. They were very well fed...

Great Pyramid tombs unearth 'proof' workers were not slaves

The ancient Greek historian Herodotus once described the pyramid builders as slaves, creating what Egyptologists say is a myth propagated by Hollywood films.

Egypt displayed today newly discovered tombs more than 4,000 years old and said they belonged to people who worked on the Great Pyramids of Giza, supporting evidence that slaves did not build the ancient monuments.

The modest 9ft deep shafts held a dozen skeletons of pyramid builders, perfectly preserved by dry sand along with jars of beer and bread for the afterlife.

Graves of the builders were first found nearby in 1990 by a tourist. Egypt's chief archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, said the finds show the workers were paid labourers, rather than slaves.
Hawass said the builders came from poor families from the north and the south, and were respected for their work – so much so that those who died during construction were bestowed the honour of being buried in the tombs near the sacred pyramids of their pharaohs.

Their proximity to the pyramids and the manner of burial in preparation for the afterlife backs this theory, Hawass said. "No way would they have been buried so honourably if they were slaves."

The tombs contained no gold or valuables, which safeguarded them from tomb raiders throughout antiquity, and the bodies were not mummified. The skeletons were found buried in a foetal position – the head pointing to the west and the feet to the east according to ancient Egyptian beliefs, surrounded by jars once filled with supplies for afterlife.

The men who built the last remaining wonder of the ancient world ate meat regularly and worked in three-month shifts, said Hawass. It took 10,000 workers more than 30 years to build a single pyramid, Hawass said, a tenth of the workforce Herodotus wrote about after visiting Egypt around 450BC.

Hawass said and that evidence indicates they the approximately 10,000 labourers working on the pyramids they ate 21 cattle and 23 sheep sent to them daily from farms.

---------

Fascinating stuff...been reading about Cahokia mounds too...

[Mihalik]

It's POSSIBLE. There's no evidence to back it, but that lack of evidence is reasonable and easily explained. It doesn't mean I'm convinced this ever happened, but if we uncovered evidence of it deep in some arid cave somewhere, I wouldn't be totally shocked, either, because it's definitely not impossible. .

Yes, that is a fairly plausible scenario, and it would be easily missed due to its localized nature, but again the issue is with probabilities of all those conditions aligning both for their development and the loss of traces.

I intentionally avoided absolutes and said possible and not plausible. I mean if you are what is called a skeptic in the scientific context of the word you always have to keep a door open even to the improbable, and a scenario like you described is much more likely on the probable scale than... magical pyramids.

[xenogear3]

The age of the universe is 13 billion years.
The age of the earth is 4 billion years. From the first cell to human takes 4 billion years.

In theory, there should be a civilization 9 billion years old.
The universe should populate with "advanced" civilizations by now.
Yet, nothing !

If you ask if there is another civilization before human on Earth, no.
It takes 4 billion years to evolve.

As for the 5000 or 4000 years "written history" part, this is not accurate.
For example, the Egyptian who built the pyramid are not the people who currently live in Egypt.
We don't know where these ancient Egyptian go.

Chinese are always proud that they have "pure" blood.
However, they only have 3000 years "written history".

[GodlyBob]

The age of the universe is 13 billion years.
The age of the earth is 4 billion years. From the first cell to human takes 4 billion years.

In theory, there should be a civilization 9 billion years old.
The universe should populate with "advanced" civilizations by now.
Yet, nothing !

If you ask if there is another civilization before human on Earth, no.
It takes 4 billion years to evolve.

As for the 5000 or 4000 years "written history" part, this is not accurate.
For example, the Egyptian who built the pyramid are not the people who currently live in Egypt.
We don't know where these ancient Egyptian go.

Chinese are always proud that they have "pure" blood.
However, they only have 3000 years "written history".

In indigenous population intermarries with whomever conquers the area. It's not like Alexander kicked out all the natives and instilled only Greeks after he came to town.

[Rudkobing]

History is written by the winners.

[Frontenac]

"History, idol of the modern times, has always slept with the victors, despised the vanquished, ended the widow and the orphan, fed herself with blood and quenched her thirst with tears."

- André Frossard

[cubby]

Oh no. We had a solid surface for about 3.8 billion-ish years. And life for about 3.5. The 300 million years I was talking about is that intermediate period between those two dates when the planet's surface was chemically extremely active but didn't really have "life", just lots and lots of chemical precursors.

Civilization can develop and possibly fall extremely quickly. Human civilization has only been around for about 12000 years. So it is not completely unreasonable to say that perhaps a civilization developed and completely fell, but it did so before developing metallurgy or advanced technology. Think of something like the Mayans. Or the Indus Valley Civilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilisation which were in many ways extremely advanced, yet developed very little in the way of metalworking.

If such an event would have occurred like 250 million years ago (Dino civilization!) there would be very little left of them that wasn't eroded by time. What we would mostly have to go on are fossilized tools and most importantly geological evidence.

You see, civilization to emerge it requires population concentrations, that require agriculture, that requires earthworks, irrigation, deforestation, concentration of livestock etc. all those end up leaving impossible to erase signs.

All the things that you are talking for a civilization are basing them on human beings - but if life developed before 300 million years ago, as an entirely different intelligent life form, isn't it entirely possible that all evidence of their existence would be erased - even structures they might have created, because of geological erosion and time? Even fossilized structures might have been destroyed if they were from 1 billion years ago.

[Mihalik]

All the things that you are talking for a civilization are basing them on human beings - but if life developed before 300 million years ago, as an entirely different intelligent life form, isn't it entirely possible that all evidence of their existence would be erased - even structures they might have created, because of geological erosion and time? Even fossilized structures might have been destroyed if they were from 1 billion years ago.

What they would have built from is limited by the materials available on Earth. Essentially they would have built using the same materials we build with, obeying the same rules of physics we do, and would have been made up from the same stuff we are, mostly water and carbon, with essentially the same metabolic systems and requirements.

Essentially our planet dictates which evolutionary paths are available on it.

A billion years ago isn't worth discussing here as Earth was just evolving the very first multi-cellular organisms. Life only became abundant abundant about 550 million years ago.

And no, the fossil record would have not been erased, at least not the fossil record of a species that developed significant civilization and the use of tools.

The period which was most conductive to the development of intelligent life was roughly around 225 million years ago. Life was abundant and diverse with a very rich ecosystem, enough oxygen, lots of marine life, plenty of predators etc. It was the ripest moment for intelligent life of some sort to develop.