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Very old, very sophisticated tools found in India

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Re: Very old, very sophisticated tools found in India

#41

Post by drieddust »

000000000000001 wrote: post #11
kumarvvr wrote: post #2

The fourth verse of the Rigvedic hymn 1:50 (50th hymn in book 1 of rigveda) is as follows: तरणिर्विश्वदर्शतो जयोतिष्क्र्दसि सूर्य | विश्वमा भासिरोचनम | taranirviśvadarśato jyotishkridasi sūrya | viśvamā bhāsirocanam || This means “Swift and all beautiful art thou, O Surya (Sun), maker of the light, illuminating all the radiant realm.” Exlpaining this verse in his Rig Veda commentary, Sayana, who was a minister in the…

Isn't it an irony, that the parent posts this long comment, supposedly to glorify the ancient texts of the East, attempting to assert an innate superiority of the scientific thought achieved in the past by their culture and yet s/he uses a device invented more or less in the West using science ( math, physics, chem) developed by western minds in no more than last 300-400 years. I suppose it is in our nature to beam i…

Where exactly he is glorifying? Merely stating a amazingly correct piece of information from the past cannot be considered glorification. Donald Knuth has a hobby of researching the origins of algorithms and giving the credit where its due[1]. By your logic he too is struck in past and a hindrance to progress. When Carl Sagan famously quoted this, he too was engaging in glorification of the past. If India possessed this knowledge in the past then what should we do? Hide it somewhere, erase it from our memories? I can quote many more examples of East and West drawing from each other but you get the point.

“The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang.”

― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

> yet s/he uses a device invented more or less in the West using science ( math, physics, chem) developed by western minds in no more than last 300-400 years.

How did you arrive at this conclusion? He is just doing plain Arthematics. Do you think this was invented 300 years back by western minds? Well then I will say you are giving too much credit to "Western Minds". In-fact you are engaging in glorification of Western Mind.

> some of us still fall for the trap laid down by scheming politicians and (unholy) religious gurus, we truly should not be very proud, either of our past or of our present.

Did you notice the irony in your argument? You are proud of Western Minds but you do not want to be proud of Indian history?

[1] http://steiner.math.nthu.edu.tw/disk5/js/computer/1.pdf

Re: Very old, very sophisticated tools found in India

#42

Post by pingu »

givinguflac wrote: post #40
pingu wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's something called a Conchoidal fracture, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conchoidal_fracture ... the presence of which is technically diagnostic of material that's been artificially manipulated.

Link didn't work for me, this did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conchoidal_fracture

Thanks for the heads up, i fixed the formatting.

Re: Very old, very sophisticated tools found in India

#43

Post by lappet »

rrrazdan wrote: post #36
narag wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what's with the Sangam Era that (some people thinks) the gov is trying to cover?

If I had to guess the conspiracy is that Central government does not want to excavate sites that prove that Sangam culture was greater and earlier than the Northern Indian culture.

I have never heard of this, but knowing the mistrust for the Centre in the Southern states I can believe how it is accepted.

Re: Very old, very sophisticated tools found in India

#44

Post by lappet »

kumarvvr wrote: post #2

The fourth verse of the Rigvedic hymn 1:50 (50th hymn in book 1 of rigveda) is as follows: तरणिर्विश्वदर्शतो जयोतिष्क्र्दसि सूर्य | विश्वमा भासिरोचनम | taranirviśvadarśato jyotishkridasi sūrya | viśvamā bhāsirocanam || This means “Swift and all beautiful art thou, O Surya (Sun), maker of the light, illuminating all the radiant realm.” Exlpaining this verse in his Rig Veda commentary, Sayana, who was a minister in the…

One question: doesn't the definition of a Yojana vary a lot, with differences across texts and times? I am also very curious about Ancient Indian math, but I think we should also question how results were calculated.

For instance, 108 is a sacred number in Hindu and Buddhist cultures. Some people say it was chosen because the ratio of distances of the Sun and the Moon to Earth is 108 times their respective diameters, and Ancient Indians knew that! But how did they know that?

Re: Very old, very sophisticated tools found in India

#45

Post by d13 »

Hiking in the hills outside of Bangalore I found some absolutely ancient stone dwellings completely covered in thick shrub. The villagers down below told me that they "belonged to an ancient race of dwarves." And a few km away, I stumbled across an obviously very old cave painting in a style I've never seen before anywhere in the world. Not soul in sight and miles from the road. My guess is that there are huge archaeological discoveries waiting to be found in India for anyone who takes the trouble to look for them.

Re: Very old, very sophisticated tools found in India

#46

Post by gkilmain »

Steuard wrote: post #37
gcb0 wrote: post #33

"spans 385,000 to 172,000 years ago (plus or minus about 50,000 years on either end)" do journalists now get paid by word?

This sounds like a perfectly natural description of the estimated date range to me. Is there some significantly more efficient way of phrasing it that I'm overlooking? (Without resorting to scientific ± notation, at least?)

I'd be okay if we removed 'on either end'.

Re: Very old, very sophisticated tools found in India

#48

Post by danans »

nnain wrote: post #13

Ah, when I read "very sophisticated" I was hoping to see something more than images of few stones. To clarify: for a few days in my pre-adolescent years in India, I had gotten into a quirky habit of picking chipped-stones lying around (which I imagined could be from pre-historic ages). Finding some really interesting shapes wasn't all that difficult. I'm genuinely curious about how archeologists/anthropologists come…

Regarding the age, the tools were found via excavation in soil layers that have a known geological age range determined via Geochronology[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geochronology

Re: Very old, very sophisticated tools found in India

#49

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

d13 wrote: post #45

Hiking in the hills outside of Bangalore I found some absolutely ancient stone dwellings completely covered in thick shrub. The villagers down below told me that they "belonged to an ancient race of dwarves." And a few km away, I stumbled across an obviously very old cave painting in a style I've never seen before anywhere in the world. Not soul in sight and miles from the road. My guess is that there are huge archae…

"Dwarves"? Is that just the closest word you have for the rendering, or is that really a thing in their local mythology? I thought they were strictly a Germanic/Norse staple. I've never seen them mentioned in Hinduism.

Re: Very old, very sophisticated tools found in India

#50

Post by ChuckMcM »

d13 wrote: post #45

Hiking in the hills outside of Bangalore I found some absolutely ancient stone dwellings completely covered in thick shrub. The villagers down below told me that they "belonged to an ancient race of dwarves." And a few km away, I stumbled across an obviously very old cave painting in a style I've never seen before anywhere in the world. Not soul in sight and miles from the road. My guess is that there are huge archae…

Well that would match up, apparently the Elven city was in Guatemala (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-42916261)
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