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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

#51

Post by jpollock »

QuarterReptile wrote: post #41
jpollock wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except, that's what it literally is.

God speaks to someone. That someone says "It's true because God told me so."

I have read religious works, I'm not cut off from them. It's impossible to be cut off from theology in the USA. However, they all start with "it is true because I (the author) say so".

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

#52

Post by saalweachter »

7speter wrote: post #18
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…

A good chance that the glaciers might have also grounded whole societies as well

Eh, that doesn't get you much. Glaciers weigh heavy on the minds of North Americans and Northern Europeans, but they didn't reach much further -- no civilization south of, say, 40N would be obliterated by the glaciers themselves such that we would expect no trace to remain today.

Sea level change would be a bigger global risk, but aside from sudden flooding, you would expect that to just push back an established civilization to the uplands of their territories rather than wiping them out root and branch.

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

#53

Post by pas »

MisterTea wrote: post #49
drewcoo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's archeology or something, not real history :)

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

#54

Post by pmlnr »

dleslie wrote: post #50
drewcoo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Example, source, etc?

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

#55

Post by api »

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…

This fits a pattern in science: the further we look, the more we find.

First we thought the Earth was the center of the universe. Then we thought it was just our solar system. Then we thought the Milky Way Galaxy was the whole of the universe. Some astronomers persisted in this belief all the way up to the 1920s. Now...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field#Hubble...

... and we've just launched the JWST which will be able to see a lot further than Hubble.

Gobekli Tepe pushed the date for civilization back a few thousand years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe

It'll probably get pushed back some more. Also I've always thought there are too many flood myths around the world for it to be chance. No I don't think there was a true global flood since it makes no sense, but the end of the ice age would have brought sea level rise and enormous regional floods due to things like the bursting of glacial dams. This would have occurred over the same period of time across the world, leaving behind traces in myth and legend but also physically destroying a lot of evidence of civilizations in the path of these disasters.

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

#56

Post by Swizec »

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…

> if there was nobody to write about them they were prehistoric

A comment from a documentary about Rome stuck in my mind, it goes something like : "There is no history of Europe before Rome because for most of Europe, history starts with Rome conquering that region. They were the first to write anything down."

Similarly, we know how slavic peoples migrated into Europe because those regions stopped sending written updates back to Rome. Did they then revert back to pre-history? Or does a region continue to "have history" even if for a few centuries nobody in that area writes anything down?

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

#57

Post by jcranmer »

dleslie wrote: post #50
drewcoo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I assume you're referring to Çatalhöyük (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%87atalh%C3%B6y%C3%BCk)?

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

#58

Post by heavyset_go »

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…

Genuine question, how much evidence of agriculture would survive an ice age, being crushed under the weight of 2 mile thick ice sheets and then washed away or engulfed by bodies of water once they've melted?

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

#59

Post by robonerd »

gibolt wrote: post #48
robonerd wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Humans were not mass manufacturing things back then

Ah, but how do you know that? You weren't there. ;)

Sometimes the absence of evidence really is evidence to the contrary, but other times it isn't. It all depends on whether or not it's reasonable to expect evidence to be found given the amount of looking we've done and the nature of the evidence we're looking for. If we don't find a ton of glass coke bottles in the soil around the world, after digging around in innumerable construction sites on almost every corner of the globe, that's strong evidence that nobody was mass manufacturing coke bottles 50k years ago.

Contrast that with the lack of evidence for ancient wooden sailing vessels. We don't have any evidence of wooden ships 50k years ago. But supposing there were a shipbuilding culture back then, would we really expect to find evidence for it? All those wood artifacts would be LONG gone, even the oldest bog wood ever found is less than 10k years old. In this case, the absence of evidence is weak evidence to the contrary at best.

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

#60

Post by dylan604 »

imilk wrote: post #25
argomo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but I couldn't get into this piece due to the upfront clutter. Some readers may find it charming, but the privilege comment, the chart tweet, the subscribe button, the references to various novels... I just wasn't finding a good starting point to latch onto the content promised by the (excellent) headline. It felt like I had jumped into the middle of a podcast where the hosts are bantering and not making…

Just scroll past the 2nd picture and start reading.

Just... do that thing that nobody does on a normal basis, nor should they be expected to. Just. Has to be one of my favorite words.
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