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Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off

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Re: Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off

#41

Post by QuarterReptile »

jpollock wrote: post #33
mynameisvlad wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard disagree here. There's a lot of differences between science and theology. There is nothing divine or holy about potential past civilizations.

Divine/Holy are how powerful people prevent others from questioning things. I didn't mention Divine or Holy, just theology. The core difference between Science and Theology is how they deal with statements of "truth" without evidence. Theology starts with "it's true because I said so" Science starts with "it's true because I can demonstrate it" That humans were complex in the past is a good hypothesis. It needs evide…

>Theology starts with "it's true because I said so"

To believe this is to cut yourself off from an unfathomably rich collection of human knowledge, and it is sad to see someone committed to it.

Re: Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off

#42

Post by drewcoo »

greatpostman wrote: post #4

I think it’s pretty clear that sophisticated societies existed long before recorded history. They may not have had the tools of working with metal, but they definitely had sophisticated philosophical views and moral frameworks. I would bet this goes back even 30-50 thousand years. This idea that humanity sprang up out of nothing in Sumerian/Babylon is very contrived. There was an ice age ten thousand years ago, the c…

Civilization means people living in cities. To do that, agriculture is probably needed. There's also probably some level of specialization and accompanying social stratification.

History is written records.

There were many prehistoric societies, but because civilization tended to have some form of written records, the prehistoric societies are not considered civilizations.

No scholars would clai that humanity sprang out of nothing in those places. I mostly hear that from bible literalists. But if some of their people weren't in cities, the society was not civilized. And if there was nobody to write about them they were prehistoric.

Re: Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off

#43

Post by Spooky23 »

robonerd wrote: post #32
mc32 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can only go by what we know and what we have evidence for. Sure, other small civs likely existed, but we don't have known evidence of them and their history, etc. At most we have tombs and archeological ruins to go by. So we go with the earliest civs for whom we have written evidence as well as lots of physical evidence for in addition to present-day influence. Otherwise things start to get very speculative.

> We can only go by what we know and what we have evidence for There is nuance here, in the degree to which uncertainty due to lack of evidence is surfaced in scientific communications for the public. Take for instance, the behavior of dogs. Science cannot [yet] objectively answer the question of how much the subjective qualia of a dog is comparable to the qualia of humans. What then can we say about whether dogs fee…

It’s a great point.

When you get to the edge of knowledge, ignoring obvious things and glossing over tends to rule the day.

Knowing what we know about people, it seems absurd to think that people just went poof, “civilization” has arrived! There were a lot fewer humans in the past, and hundreds of generations are lost to time. But the narrative of the pageant of history, often leading to the greatness of today doesn’t work with “I don’t know”

Re: Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off

#44

Post by dgellow »

christkv wrote: post #3

Reminds me about the theory about how the Persian Gulf was the origin of the first civilisations and the origin of the myth of paradise. As the water rose people was displaced and eventually ended up forming ur.

In case people aren't familiar with Ur (I wasn't): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur

> Ur was an important Sumerian city-state in ancient Mesopotamia, located at the site of modern "Tell el-Muqayyar" in south Iraq's Dhi Qar Governorate. Although Ur was once a coastal city near the mouth of the Euphrates on the Persian Gulf, the coastline has shifted and the city is now well inland, on the south bank of the Euphrates, 16 kilometres from Nasiriyah in modern-day Iraq. The city dates from the Ubaid period circa 3800 BC, and is recorded in written history as a city-state from the 26th century BC, its first recorded king being Mesannepada.

The pictures of the Ziggurat are really impressive.

Re: Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off

#45

Post by HuShifang »

greatpostman wrote: post #4

I think it’s pretty clear that sophisticated societies existed long before recorded history. They may not have had the tools of working with metal, but they definitely had sophisticated philosophical views and moral frameworks. I would bet this goes back even 30-50 thousand years. This idea that humanity sprang up out of nothing in Sumerian/Babylon is very contrived. There was an ice age ten thousand years ago, the c…

On the flip side, let's also not forget that the earliest civilizations (so to speak) were also rather different from later ones in some striking ways. Put simply, they were a lot more literal-minded, and didn't engage in as much abstraction as did their descendents. Ancient fertility statues (even as late as classical Greece and Rome) are grotesquely over-endowed; ritual sacrifices of food and symbolic objects have in many places taken the place of sacrificed slaves or wives. Mesopotamian city states would fight wars because, like a frat prank, one would steal a statue of a god like Marduk from the other's temple -- only, there was no notion that it was a statue, rather it was the god. Early Egyptian murals speak to the power of kings by showing piles of dicks their soldiers had cut off of defeated enemies (unlike Egyptians they were uncircumcised). And there's the whole mummification thing, which betrays a certain literal-mindedness about immortality. So yeah, it's a spectrum - but both before and after the "rise of civilization"

Re: Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off

#46

Post by jltsiren »

vmception wrote: post #13
greatpostman wrote: post #4

I think it’s pretty clear that sophisticated societies existed long before recorded history. They may not have had the tools of working with metal, but they definitely had sophisticated philosophical views and moral frameworks. I would bet this goes back even 30-50 thousand years. This idea that humanity sprang up out of nothing in Sumerian/Babylon is very contrived. There was an ice age ten thousand years ago, the c…

The ice age itself would have had glaciers grinding down all evidence to nothing. Even our metal based structures would not withstand it very well over a few thousand years. I agree that it doesn't make sense for there to be a single 6,000 year time period of human prosperity and collaboration, its much more likely that there have been multiple periods over a 200,000 time span. Perhaps some traits in humans continual…

Early civilizations did not appear out of nothing 6000 years ago. The earliest evidence of cereal harvesting in the Middle East is from 23000 years ago. The transition from hunting and gathering to sedentary farming communities took over 10000 years, and those communities needed thousands of years to grow into large sophisticated cities.

It's also good to remember that there has been an ice age for the last 2.5 million years. The climate is generally too cold and dry for agriculture, except during relatively short interglacial periods. Maybe there was an opportunity for a civilization to develop in the Eemian period 130k to 115k years ago, but that was likely the only window of opportunity.

Re: Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off

#47

Post by mc32 »

robonerd wrote: post #32
mc32 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can only go by what we know and what we have evidence for. Sure, other small civs likely existed, but we don't have known evidence of them and their history, etc. At most we have tombs and archeological ruins to go by. So we go with the earliest civs for whom we have written evidence as well as lots of physical evidence for in addition to present-day influence. Otherwise things start to get very speculative.

> We can only go by what we know and what we have evidence for There is nuance here, in the degree to which uncertainty due to lack of evidence is surfaced in scientific communications for the public. Take for instance, the behavior of dogs. Science cannot [yet] objectively answer the question of how much the subjective qualia of a dog is comparable to the qualia of humans. What then can we say about whether dogs fee…

Well, it would seem like the middle way would be to postulate things such as these but not assert them as 'received knowledge'. And just as we might postulate that dogs can experience love, we can also postulate the opposite and discuss both without giving one a preponderance of support till we can develop such support.

Re: Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off

#48

Post by gibolt »

robonerd wrote: post #36
vmception wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ice age itself would have had glaciers grinding down all evidence to nothing. Even our metal based structures would not withstand it very well over a few thousand years. I agree that it doesn't make sense for there to be a single 6,000 year time period of human prosperity and collaboration, its much more likely that there have been multiple periods over a 200,000 time span. Perhaps some traits in humans continual…

> Even our metal based structures would not withstand it very well over a few thousand years. Well, not steel framed buildings or anything like that. But our modern civilization has certainly done things that I think stand a good chance of lasting hundreds of millions of years. Take for instance glass bottles. Those tossed into the ocean won't last more than a few decades before they're eroded to nothing (see: sea gl…

Humans were not mass manufacturing things back then, and there were orders of magnitude less people.

On top of that, we don't even have exact knowledge of where to look. Most places we do discover have plenty of signs and evidence, they are just buried under 10ft of dirt and thus essentially undiscoverable.

Re: Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off

#49

Post by MisterTea »

drewcoo wrote: post #42
greatpostman wrote: post #4

I think it’s pretty clear that sophisticated societies existed long before recorded history. They may not have had the tools of working with metal, but they definitely had sophisticated philosophical views and moral frameworks. I would bet this goes back even 30-50 thousand years. This idea that humanity sprang up out of nothing in Sumerian/Babylon is very contrived. There was an ice age ten thousand years ago, the c…

Civilization means people living in cities. To do that, agriculture is probably needed. There's also probably some level of specialization and accompanying social stratification. History is written records. There were many prehistoric societies, but because civilization tended to have some form of written records, the prehistoric societies are not considered civilizations. No scholars would clai that humanity sprang…

> There were many prehistoric societies, but because civilization tended to have some form of written records, the prehistoric societies are not considered civilizations.

What about cave paintings?

Re: Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off

#50

Post by dleslie »

drewcoo wrote: post #42
greatpostman wrote: post #4

I think it’s pretty clear that sophisticated societies existed long before recorded history. They may not have had the tools of working with metal, but they definitely had sophisticated philosophical views and moral frameworks. I would bet this goes back even 30-50 thousand years. This idea that humanity sprang up out of nothing in Sumerian/Babylon is very contrived. There was an ice age ten thousand years ago, the c…

Civilization means people living in cities. To do that, agriculture is probably needed. There's also probably some level of specialization and accompanying social stratification. History is written records. There were many prehistoric societies, but because civilization tended to have some form of written records, the prehistoric societies are not considered civilizations. No scholars would clai that humanity sprang…

There are known city sites that predate agriculture in their regions.
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