Is our cultural origin story just a reset?

Post Reply New Topic

I find this theory fascinating, particularly as a lot of evidence seems to suggest very odd contingencies across culture in how they handle astronomy that might not be explainable by the silk road trade of ideas.

The story goes that the younger dryas was quite possibly triggered by a comet roughly 5 or 6 kilometers in size hitting the northern hemisphere, roughly in Canada, sending a direct hit on a glaciated area that melted, washed out the Scablands of Washington state with millions of cubic feet of water flowing per second over perhaps a two week span of time, and that this clearly would have been enough force to wipe North America clean of any signs of previous civilization. That is to say that North America may not have necessarily been without megaliths so much as that there was enough mass destruction between heavy glaciation and comet strike to wipe the slate clean.

We have fully formed megalith architecture from 9,600 BC in the way of Gobekli Tepe, we also have Gunung Padang in Java where the geologists are claiming the pyramid structure under the surface ruins to be some 18,000 years older.

All of this makes me wondering if we may very well have a major revision to our sense of what ancient history was all about, perhaps less something to the tone and tenor that we went straight from savages to farmers to empire-builders in the span of 8,000 years and perhaps something closer to the idea that we'd been empire builders before, were decimated by an event of the size that we couldn't imagine today close to 13,000 years ago, the world was in shambles for at least a couple thousand years, and about all that really survived were the least specialized and least sophisticated cultures of the world. In that case, outside of a few tantalizing relics such as Egyptian cultural oddities, overly precocious stories and symbolism among African tribes like the Dogon, little else remains.

The "Impact Hypothesis" has been questioned by research that shows most of the conclusions cannot be repeated by other scientists, misinterpretation of data, and the lack of confirmatory evidence. For example, sediments claimed by the hypothesis proponents deposits resulting from a bolide impact were dated from much later or much earlier time periods than the proposed date of the cosmic impact.

The "Gunung Padang"? A survey conducted in 2012 showed that the site was dated ~10,300 BCE by carbon radiometric dating at 8 to 10 meters below the surface, and the artifacts at the surface date to ~2,800 BCE. This is a margin of error covering over 7,000 years!

Now, if archeologists were to discover something more technologically advanced than charcoal ash and pottery shards at the ten-thousand year level, then there might be reason to speculate an earlier origin of human civilization that what we can prove so far.

As it stands, this is just another archeological "find" that will be argued ad nauseum for many decades to come.

I hate to say, Fnord is right.

Nothing technological with dates before recent events.

There are older sites, with technological advances for their time, but with materials and processes they had.

Vera Cocha's city at Lake Titicaca has some unexplained stonework, and transport of huge stones.

Just because we do not have the answers, does not mean they involved anything more than the local people.

There were older people, who did have a technology, 35,000 years ago. They lacked space ships.

They did live through two ice ages before the megalithic period.

They were not savages, they survived for thousands of years where any modern would die in weeks.

These are not times of merit, if the power fails the famine starts in a week. Most of what our culture runs on we cannot replicate locally.

There have been population reductions in the past, asteroids, super volcanos, ice ages.

We have built our own, that will fall when the light switch stops working.

Well, there's nothing to hate really - its either right or wrong and as far as I could tell he was suggesting that both the evidence for comet impact 12,800 years ago and any type of major stonework deeper in the Gunung Padang dig site hasn't been substantiated yet.


I'm certain they lacked space ships. Any society of that kind of wherewithal would have had ample tools to divert a world changing impact of that magnitude, if that's what were the kind of thing that happened. Technically with today's technology we could muster the resources to divert an incoming object if we needed to. While we might not have particularly good warning of an asteroid coming at us from behind the sun it's tough to imagine (at least as it's presented to a laymen) us missing a comet's entry into our area of the solar system.




I guess I'm really raising the Hamlet's Mill question. If the Egyptians, Chaldeans, etc. claim that they, or at least humanity, had been studying the sky for tens of thousands of years, I get that modern archaeology flatly considers that to be mythological and embellished. What I wonder about though is whether some of the pieces do fit that narrative a bit better than the idea that everything the Egyptians, Babylonians, Indus civilization, etc.. had in the way of culture was cultivated in in a few hundred years.


If I'm being way too taboo I'll drop it. I was just curious to see what other people are thinking on it if anything.

The oldest civilization is sumeria but that was an "instant civilization" they had hot and cold running water,multistory buildings and a system of writing since the beginning.

You would expect that civilization would slowly develop, not just spring into existence, so this suggests that Sumeria was a colony.

The most weird thing is that the Sumerian language has no relation to any other, usually languages are inspired by others or inspire other languages but Sumerian is like no other language.

Just as when europeans came over to the Americas they had their technological knowledge already, so there is no archeological evidence of europeans slowly developing writing or building in America.
English is completely unrelated to any language of native Americans because Europeans were colonists, like the Sumerians could have been.

So this suggests we don't know the most ancient civilization yet.

Ancient Egypt also has the 'instant civilization' thing.

Pretty much every religion has mankind's technology being given to them from God's,
Fallen angels in Apocrypha
Prometheus in Greece
Knowledge of good and evil in the garden of eden
The same goes for the native Americans and their gods.

http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly ... za,00.html

Last edited by slenkar on 24 Mar 2016, 11:45 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I agree with everything I cut out from your quote but this one I make a note of because of the assumption of significant advancement. I'd just like to point out, human technological improvement (outside the dark ages) has been an exponential growth curve. If we look at Ur through Second kingdom Egypt we find there wasn't a lot of advancement in an approximate 3000 year period. We look at today and every decade seems to bring a new revolution in technology. It could be feasible to find two pieces of technology from the same site that are virtually identical but literally a thousand years between manufacture of said technology.

I really want to hear some better explanation as well as far as proposed purposes for Gobekli Tepe. I can see religious reasons perhaps for building megalith structures and that regardless of efficiency enough religious fervor can get almost anything done (case in point - the Great Pyramid). To suggest that a group of hunter-gatherers decided to throw these things together without some rather advanced sociology behind it seems a bit half-baked.

http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly ... za,00.html

Even the mainstream archeologists can't explain it.

The Faux News monument was constructed ~3500 BCE, which was about 6500 years after the first known agricultural settlements.

When they say "more or less the same time", they're engaging in journalistic hyperbole - a hallmark of Faux News pieces.

There's one thing we must remember:

People have a way of being mighty resourceful when they feel the desire to be.

It's incredible what was accomplished without the aid of the wheel. Case in point: the Pyramids.

I do hope we find some evidence of an advanced civilization with an urban presence and writing older than the Egyptians/Sumerians.

What was Jericho, circa 10,000 BCE, like?

No...this is not taboo at all!

This is helluva better than talking about Trump all the time!

It's a direct quote from a Peruvian archaeologist, so it can't be fox news making it up.

The article was written by someone from the associated press, fox is merely hosting it.

It would be nice if we can find a transitional culture between purely agricultural societies and civilizations like Egypt.

No one ever suggested that "hunter gatherers built the pyramids".

The people of Egypt had ceased to be hunter-gatherers at least five thousand years before the Pyramids were built. The was a Neolithic stage starting 8000 BC. in which they had farming.

I was referring to the hypothesis that hunter/gatherers built Gobekli Tepe.

Catal Huyuk pushes that back, and could be the Proto Sumerians.

The view from Geology is it was weather. During the Lesser Dryas Period, a world wide dust storm that lasted 1500 years, people survived in high places, Catal Huyuk, Lake Titicaca, the Altai Mountains.

Wind, dust, dry and all three sites have irrigation. Snow capped mountains supplied dependable water.

According to genetics, a mountain grass in the area of Catal Huyuk, Eincorn, had been crossed with another grass and produced wheat, about 35,000 years ago. That hybrid spreads to the Altai mountains.

The same wheat later shows up in Sumaria and Egypt.

8,600 years ago the world got suddenly warmer, climate change lead to irrigated river farming, Sumaria, Egypt, and the Upper Yalu, and the coast of Peru.

22,000 to 17,000 years ago a lot of the earth was covered in three miles of ice. Canada down to Saint Louis, Europe down to a line from London to the south end of the Ural Mountains. It was very dry, sea level much lower, and most humans moved to the beach. Low, warmer, the food of the land and sea.

Then the ice melted and covered that part of our history.

The original settlement of Egypt was far up river, as the lower part was part of the sea. During the ice age it looked like the Grand Canyon, as the river cut a deep V, and ended in a water fall. As sea level rose, a delta formed, up river. Much of Sumaria is now the Persian Gulf.

We know where they first learned things, and that through some rough times they kept them.

Anthropology calls 40,000 to 35,000 The Human Explosion. Minor apes developed a technology and a relationship with the plants and animals.

Other species had used sticks, rocks, fire. They did not change over a million years. This new ape learned and changed in generations. They are the only line that survived, so they can make up any story they want.