I'm utterly stunned that I'm only hearing about this now on the Discovery Channel.
Basically this discovery shows that there was a civilization that predates the earliest known sedimentary civilization in mesopotania and is roughly 12,000 years old.
Holy crap, doesn't seem to be the usual history channel hoax documentary either, this looks legit.
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A Wikipedia article legitimizes Discovery Channel? Isn't that the pot calling the kettle full of crap?
Posts: 1204 | Registered: Mar 2003
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Um, the Wikipedia article provides several links to external sources and articles, including articles in Newsweek and the Smithsonian website, whereas Conservapedia only provides a rambling argument against the accuracy of carbon dating (a widely accepted scientific tool), while providing no sources to back their claim up...
... So I'm going to have to side with Blayne on this one...
Posts: 1158 | Registered: Feb 2006
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quote:Originally posted by SoaPiNuReYe: Um, the Wikipedia article provides several links to external sources and articles, including articles in Newsweek and the Smithsonian website, whereas Conservapedia only provides a rambling argument against the accuracy of carbon dating (a widely accepted scientific tool), while providing no sources to back their claim up...
...
Are you seriously doubting the credibility of Conservapedia? Especially given that this 'new civilization' that science just conveniently recently 'found' is twice as old as the actual age of the earth?
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Before this irrevocably turns into a "make fun of Conservapedia" thread (not that Conservapedia doesn't deserve being made fun of, but this topic is too cool to devolve into that so soon), I would just like to say that this is really interesting! This indicates that the nomads of the time felt that they had enough of a stake in making some sort of monument that they actually banded together long enough to do it. It implies that either their society allowed for enough specialization for there to be artists, coordinators, and maybe priests, or each individual had enough skill in each area to contribute to each stage of construction.
It also implies that people were building long-term structures long before they figured out that they could live in them in the long-term, which makes one wonder about how these people got the idea or motivation to build these things. Was it solely religious, or did it serve other purposes?
Posts: 1029 | Registered: Apr 2007
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The wikipedia article places the advent of sedentism at approx 11,500 years ago. I thought sedentism could only occur when a culture had attained the video game console, cable tv, and cheetos.
Posts: 270 | Registered: Apr 2009
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C3PO, I can easily imagine having a shelter for a quarter of a year probably makes building a long-term shelter (depending on local building materials) quite worthwhile. Probably also ceremonial or otherwise signficant, though.
Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Teshi: C3PO, I can easily imagine having a shelter for a quarter of a year probably makes building a long-term shelter (depending on local building materials) quite worthwhile. Probably also ceremonial or otherwise signficant, though.
I was thinking something similar. It's not exactly rare for a culture to be nomadic for most of the year and bunker down somewhere for the winter.
Also, building could be very useful landmarks and meeting places if there are no other conveniently placed landmarks around.
Posts: 1321 | Registered: Jun 2006
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Hey, Blayne, thank you for posting this. I'd never heard of the place for some reason before this, and the layman's research I've done on it since your post has been fascinating.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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Blayne Bradley
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See not all my threads are noise
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I saw info on this site for the first time on "Ancient Aliens", LoL, which by the way is a great show. Sometimes they reach, sometimes they reach a lot, but some of the stuff on there is crazy conclusive.
How do near cavemen move multi-ton monoliths anyway?
Posts: 6683 | Registered: Jun 2005
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Sure I guess it's possible, logs and a lot of people, but seriously, what could have been the motovation?
You are a protocaveman, which means your lifespan is short and brutal, there is no agriculture, we are talking hunting and gathering here, and Grog the leader of clan cavern grizzly says that all the clans in the area are getting together to drag a huge rock miles and miles to make a (no one knows for sure) thingy. So put down your rock and sharpened stick ignore the malnutrition and help us drag this twenty ton rock! Yay, go team!
Posts: 6683 | Registered: Jun 2005
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I've read some books on the subject of moving heavy rocks. In many areas where these rocks were moved, there weren't trees with trunks that could withstand that much weight. The logs would simply be crushed when the rock was laid on it.
Posts: 1937 | Registered: Nov 2006
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Well, that was the plan. But sometimes the logs wouldn't be crushed, and they just kept rolling until they wound up with a pyramid because, hey, what else were they going to do with the rock?
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: You are a protocaveman, which means your lifespan is short and brutal....
While average lifespan for hunter-gatherers was pretty low, that's because they had a staggeringly high infant mortality rate. Expected lifespan for an individual who made it through adulthood was actually pretty high--60s and 70s, I think I've read. The assumption that hunter-gatherer life was brutal isn't actually all that well supported by the evidence either.
Posts: 1087 | Registered: Jul 1999
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Hunter gatherers generally had fairly good nutrition, especially in the areas where there were more of them (they moved to where food was more abundant). As for why they'd do it, the glib answer is religion, which has motivated a rather large number of people to do a rather large number of things a rather large number of other people would consider crazy. While it wouldn't have been easy, I doubt it would have been especially grueling, either -- only occasionally would a stone be ready to move, and moving it could well have been a matter of pride, undertaken by the strongest men in the area.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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quote:I've read some books on the subject of moving heavy rocks. In many areas where these rocks were moved, there weren't trees with trunks that could withstand that much weight. The logs would simply be crushed when the rock was laid on it.
I'm suspicious of any assertions like this. It assumes distributional knowledge of tree types that I doubt the people actually had access to. I mean, a giant rock would crush humans, but get enough of us together and we can lift some pretty darn big rocks. I suspect those involved in moving rocks just had a good eye for trees.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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quote:That seems more like a point to the "lost alien technology" side of the argument, hundreds of miles away...come on!
What's hard to believe about that?
quote:Oh yea, and also, how did they carve the granite? We use diamond tipped power tools these days.
Lots of time and simple tools. Take another look at the time frames for the site. This wasn't put together in a year or a few years, it was put together over hundreds of years. Years to separate each block of stone. Years to move them.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: Because they are hilarious!
They got the quote wrong!
Soap, I was joking above.
I thought you were after I posted, but I wasn't sure. Especially since the guy above you seemed to be serious.
Posts: 1158 | Registered: Feb 2006
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In the middle of a desert? Atlantis, sure, but everyone knows that merfolk's skin dry up if they are away from water!
Posts: 6683 | Registered: Jun 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: Because they are hilarious!
They got the quote wrong!
Soap, I was joking above.
I thought you were after I posted, but I wasn't sure. Especially since the guy above you seemed to be serious.
Precisely my reason for posting it. Posts: 8741 | Registered: Apr 2001
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Blayne Bradley
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quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: That seems more like a point to the "lost alien technology" side of the argument, hundreds of miles away...come on!
Oh yea, and also, how did they carve the granite? We use diamond tipped power tools these days.
Water, water could help cut through it eventually.
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Only if that water was filled with mindbending merfolk! How could a protocaveman use water to cut the image of a lizard into a twenty ton monolith?
Posts: 6683 | Registered: Jun 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: You are a protocaveman, which means your lifespan is short and brutal....
While average lifespan for hunter-gatherers was pretty low, that's because they had a staggeringly high infant mortality rate. Expected lifespan for an individual who made it through adulthood was actually pretty high--60s and 70s, I think I've read. The assumption that hunter-gatherer life was brutal isn't actually all that well supported by the evidence either.
Where are you getting that from? Maybe I'm misremembering, but I thought that infant mortality was actually pretty low among hunter gatherers compared to agricultural societies.
Posts: 1658 | Registered: Sep 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Jake: And besides, the rocks used for megalithic construction were sometimes imported from hunderds of miles away. The rollers could've been too.
They brought these rollers in using bigger rollers, which were already there.
Posts: 270 | Registered: Apr 2009
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quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: You are a protocaveman, which means your lifespan is short and brutal....
While average lifespan for hunter-gatherers was pretty low, that's because they had a staggeringly high infant mortality rate. Expected lifespan for an individual who made it through adulthood was actually pretty high--60s and 70s, I think I've read. The assumption that hunter-gatherer life was brutal isn't actually all that well supported by the evidence either.
Where are you getting that from? Maybe I'm misremembering, but I thought that infant mortality was actually pretty low among hunter gatherers compared to agricultural societies.
It seems like it would be very difficult to determine the infant mortality rate in hunter-gatherer societies. Unlike agrarian societies, they move around frequently, so it seems like the likelihood of stumbling across remains would be significantly lower. If you compound that by the fact that smaller bodies are, naturally, harder to locate, it gets worse. Then, if you consider the fact that, if infant mortality was high, it's unlikely that infants were buried with the same care as adults, it gets even worse since infant corpses would frequently have been carried off and torn apart by scavengers.
I think any type of mortality rate that science could come up with would be pretty rough.
Posts: 1321 | Registered: Jun 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: You are a protocaveman, which means your lifespan is short and brutal....
While average lifespan for hunter-gatherers was pretty low, that's because they had a staggeringly high infant mortality rate. Expected lifespan for an individual who made it through adulthood was actually pretty high--60s and 70s, I think I've read. The assumption that hunter-gatherer life was brutal isn't actually all that well supported by the evidence either.
Where are you getting that from? Maybe I'm misremembering, but I thought that infant mortality was actually pretty low among hunter gatherers compared to agricultural societies.
Hm. You know, I'm going to retract the assertion (the bit about infant mortality rates in hunter-gatherer populations). I'm in the midst of a book that makes reference to that as a supporting point in a larger argument, and much of the book is well researched, but digging into the footnotes and references for that section, I don't think that the authors are actually making a compelling case for this having been the case. They mostly seem to be extrapolating from infant mortality rates among Australian Aborigines, which I don't necessarily find all that reasonable. Thanks for prompting me to dig into the footnotes and realize how shaky that aspect of the authors' argument really was.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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