Is our cultural origin story just a reset?

Post Reply New Topic

The Sumerians have an interesting story where the secrets to civilization are stored in objects (probably scrolls or books)
the gods want to own them and trick each other sometimes to get them

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_(mythology)

You could easily make up a fantastical back story to this, such as the me's are some type of advanced technology like computer hard drives (but read only memory) and that's the reason the gods steal them instead of merely asking a scribe to copy them.
The gods are marooned on earth and only have these data discs and a subservient population.

The First 1000 Years of Human Civilization
(To convert years BC into Human Era years, subtract the BC year from 10,001.)

0000 BEGINNING OF THE HOLOCENE ERA (Or Historical Era, Human Era, et cetera). Year Zero of the Holocene Calendar. Modern human history begins. (CEH, GHMC,1979, p.24)(LSA, Spg/97, p.6)

0000 (Approximate Year) Agriculture and the domestication of animals begins; All continents (except Antarctica) inhabited

0000 (Approximate Year) Hunter gatherers settled for part of the year at a site later called Wadi Hammeh in the Jordan Valley. (NH, 11/1/04, p.15)

0000 (Approximate Year) Ice from this period is stored at the Physics Inst. of the Univ. of Bern, Switzerland. (NOHY, 3/1990, p.240)

0000 (Approximate Year) In 2008 archeologists in northern Israel found a female skeleton in a grave containing 50 tortoise shells, a leopard pelvis, a cow tail and part of an eagle wing and believed they were the remains of a witch doctor from the Natufian culture. (AP, 11/18/08)

0000 (Approximate Year) Little Petroglyph and an adjacent canyon in the Coso Mountains, northwest of the Mojave Desert, contains carvings dated to this time. (PacDis, Summer '97, p.8,10)

0000 (Approximate Year) Petroglyphs dating to this time were later discovered in the Big Smokey Valley of Nevada, where Lake Tolyabe and Lake Tonopah provided for human habitation. (USDI, 2004)

0000 (Approximate Year) The 1st known outbreaks of smallpox occurred about this time among agricultural settlements in northeastern Africa. (SFC, 10/19/01, p.A17)

0000 (Approximate Year) The Nez Perce are a North American Indian people of the Sahaptin family. The name is from the French and means pierced nose. They lived in the Wallowa Valley of Oregon, Washington and Idaho for some 12000 years. (WUD, 1994, p.964)

0000 (Approximate Year) The world’s human population was about 5 million. (Econ, 12/24/05, Survey p.9)

0000 (Approximate Year) This marks the approximate time of the Natufian cultural stage, just before the domestication of plants and the spread of settled farming groups. The Natufians were the last group to occupy Kebara cave in Israel for a long period. (NG, Oct. 1988, p.463)

0000 (Approximate Year, to ~3500 BC) Beginning of the Neolithic or New Stone Age. (WH, 1994, p.19)

0000 (Approximate Year, to ~400 BC) The Jomon culture of Japan is associated with the introduction of rice agriculture and the use of metal and probably came from the Asian mainland. (AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.34)

0000 An alteration in the Earth's magnetic field occurred. (E&IH, 1973, p.94)

0400 (Approximate Year) A site of human habitation in Peru was dated to about this time. Later excavations indicated complex stone tools that appeared to date back to at least 28000 BC. (SFC, 2/17/98, p.A2)

0400 (Approximate Year) End of the 1,300-year ice age known as the Younger Dryas.

0400 (Approximate Year) Radiocarbon date for the cave paintings at Le Portal, France. The last period of cave art is called Magdalenian. (NH, 7/96, p.18)

0400 (Approximate Year, to ~8500 BC) Some dozen villages piled one on top of the other occupied the site of Jerf el-Ahmar at a bend of the Euphrates River. In 1999 Syria flooded the area under the Tishrin Dam. (AM, 11/00, p.56)

0440 (Approximate Year) The alleged year of the destruction of mythical Atlantis, according to Plato

0500 (Approximate Year) A female skull, aged 20-25, from this period was found near Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in c1995 and named Luzia. It was found to have characteristics similar to people from the South Pacific. (SFC, 5/23/98, p.A13)

0500 (Approximate Year) People of the Early Natufian settlements in the Middle East began to settle for a 2nd time following 1300 years of drying climate. They became known as Pre-Pottery Neolithic. (Econ, 6/27/09, p.86)

0500 (Approximate Year) Romito 2, a dwarf from a cave in Italy's Calabria region, suffered from a form of chondrodystrophy, a lack of normal cartilage growth and stood no more than four feet. That he lived to about 17 years of age indicates group support. He was found buried with an old woman, possibly his mother. (NG, Oct. 1988, p. 452)

0500 (Approximate Year) Two cultures of migrating hunters lived in the present territory of Lithuania in the 2nd half of the 10th millennium BC. One group came from the banks of the middle Vistula river in the south-west. The other was from the north-west of Europe. (DrEE, 10/12/96, p.2)(TB-Com, 10/11/00

0500 (Approximate Year, to ~6100 BC) The Neolithic site of Abu Hureyra, 40 miles downstream from Jerf el-Ahmar, Syria, was flooded under the waters of the Taqba Dam in the 1970s. (AM, 11/00, p.58)

0600 (Approximate Year, to ~9200 BC) In 2006 researchers reported the discovery of nine carbonized fig fruits stored in Gilgal I, an early Neolithic village, located in the Lower Jordan Valley, which dated to this time. (Reuters, 6/2/06)

1000 (Approximate Year) Caribou lived in the area of Connecticut. (WSJ, 9/3/98, p.A16)

1000 (Approximate Year) Earliest evidence of a walled city, later called Jericho

1000 (Approximate Year) Fisher in the late 1980's, while he was excavating an 11000-year-old mastodon found at the Heisler site in southern Michigan, found evidence of butchery and underwater meat caching by Ice Age hunters in North America. (LSA, Fall 1995, p.38)

1000 (Approximate Year) Harpoon heads of intricate design were in use by this time. They were hafted to wooden shafts and easily replaced. (NG, Oct. 1988, p. 451)

1000 (Approximate Year) Human middens began piling up along the coast of Peru reflecting a diet of tropical mollusks. (SFC, 9/13/96, p.A2)

1000 (Approximate Year) Humans reached Florida at least by this time, before the end of the Ice Age. Sea level was lower and the peninsula was much larger. (NH, 11/96, p.46)

1000 (Approximate Year) In 2007 French archaeologists discovered an 11000-year-old wall painting underground in northern Syria which they believe is the oldest in the world. The 2 square-meter painting, in red, black and white, was found at the Neolithic settlement of Djade al-Mughara on the Euphrates, northeast of the city of Aleppo (Reuters, 10/11/07)

1000 (Approximate Year) Plato later wrote that the island continent of Atlantis existed about this time. In 1998 Richard Ellis wrote an account of the Atlantis literature: "Imagining Atlantis." (SFEC, 7/26/98, BR p.3)

1000 (Approximate Year) The town of Chemi Shanidar, later part of Iraq, was the largest city of the time with 150 people. (SFEC, 8/27/00, Z1 p.2)

1000 (Approximate Year) The wooly mammoth became extinct about 11000 years ago. [article about the atlatl, i.e. spear thrower] (WSJ, 10/24/95, p.A-1)

1000 (Approximate Year, to ~4000 BC) The finest record of Mesolithic and Neolithic peoples exists in Denmark, due to the country's numerous bogs. (PacDis, Winter/'97, p.9)

1000 (Approximate Year, to ~8000 BC) In Neolithic times Mongolia was the home of small groups of hunters, reindeer breeders, and nomads. (http://www.gobiexpeditions.com)

Is this list comprehensive?

About as much as I can get without risking a "tl;dr" response.

It's part of a larger file that covers the last 12,016 years.

Oh come on we're autistic, someone here is bound to find 12,016 years of raw data to be as addicting as heroin.

Just post the whole damn thing, man LOL

Maybe in a separate thread ... later, maybe after a little more polishing.

I just wanted you to post it so I could say: it's too long I'm not reading a wall of text.

You dont need all of that.

You just need a few key dates to peg things around.

12000 years before present: End of Ice Age, end of Upper Paleolithic (old stone age), beginning of transformation away from pure hunting/gathering.

Between 12000 and 6000 years BP - Mesolithic, and Neolithic phases (middle stone age,and new stone age) invention of farming and domestication.

4000 BC copper metulurgy.
3000 BC- the beginning of the Bronze Age,written records, cities, history, and civilization. But only in a few small widely sepeated places like Egypt, Sumer, and the Indus Valley.

The Pyramids were built around the start of Egyptian history:2600 BC. But at about the same time the unlettered tribes of Britain were building magalithic monuments like Stonehenge.

Both Giza, and Stonehenge were at the end of the transformation from the Paleothic to civilization. But Gobleki seems to have been built at the start of the transformation right at the end of the Ice Age when we were all still hunter gatherers. So its a mystery.

I thought this was kind of interesting:

http://www.ancient.eu/Egyptian_Culture/

This article offers claims of settlement starting around the Nile at 6,000 BCE and the first artisan workshops around 5,500 BCE. If the overall timeline is accurate they had the time to draft or at least elaborate most of their own mythos by the late 5th millennium BCE.

Most of the really large pyramids were built, I believe, in the 3rd to 5th Dynasties (about 2800 to 2500 BC). I believe there were even pyramids in the 1st dynasty (3000-3100 BC).

After the Old Kingdom, they didn't build pyramids any longer.

Right, I'm inspecting cultural germination more.

http://www.cemml.colostate.edu/cultural ... 01enl.html

What are you looking for in all of this?

Egypt obviously was NOT the "instant civilization" someone described it as. Your data shows that Egyptian history had a long local prehistoric preamble.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 25 Mar 2016, 6:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Ahh ... but detailed history is fascinating!So in some people's minds, "mystery structure" equates to "advanced civilizations" and contributes to another layer of the Atlantis Monomyth.

It's like seeing a light moving in the night sky, and not only attributing it to space aliens, but inventing an entire space alien society, complete with religions, traditions, teachings, laws, and moralities.

It's also not uncommon for an archeologist to attribute a carved figurine as important to the artist's religion, and not just something as mundane as a prehistoric kid's toy or gaming piece.

People like John Anthony West have a way of embellishing the story in that direction which is part of why I felt like clearing the air on that.