Fire was used by early humans at least 200,000 years ago, perhaps as long as 1.2m years ago. Given how forest/bush fires are generally an effective hunting strategy today (e.g., by indigenous Australian), I'd expect that the first major effect of the anthropocene would be from large scale deforestation events. But, I can't find any evidence for it.
>> A Himba homestead in the Kunene Region of Namibia.
It looks like there are two homesteads in the picture- one in the lower right half of the picture and one diagonally above it and to the left, at the top of the clearing.
The Himba are a beautiful people, probably best known for covering themselves in ochre and colouring their braided hair with it.
Having read Graham Hancock, he's at least a historical anthropologist with simple questions of the sort "what if the pyramids are much older than commonly accepted?".
I start to think more and more that those things he finds are not from aliens but from former failed civilizations... Which all failed für the same /similar reason line us (climate change, atom bombs etc) just millions of years back not just a few thousend... Like a cycle which continues until either we survive and we don't kill us self or the sun burns out... Very weird thought, no? :)
I don’t think it’s a weird thought, but earlier humans wouldn’t have been able to cause climate change as we understand it today or destroy themselves with nuclear weapons because the evidence would be readily available in the geographic record. I am a fan of the line of reasoning from people such as Hancock because I think he’s scratching on the surface of lost human history, but I think it’s something we have to look at scientifically and skeptically (in general). I find the work he’s discussed with the pacific north west in the United States to be particularly interesting.
Full article not accessible because of soft paywall, but: I feel we're surprised by these revelations because our current timeline of civilization is constructed using surviving artifacts and fossils, both of which are exception, not norm. The vast majority of evidence of ancient civilizations probably got completely buried. It's not outside the realm of possibility that there were early civilizations over 100,000 years old, whose artifacts have now been wiped away by plate tectonics and the ocean.
Seems unlikely in the absence of metal mastery and we are reasonably sure we've found no evidence of iron usage in tool making before the iron age. Humans traded even in prehistoric times, so such tools would have been discovered in sites even remote from this mythical advanced civilization. It seems unlikely that such is the case.
Actually there are iron weapons made from meteoric iron from before the iron age. Small scale for sure for obvious reasons. Not that relevant to the topic but it might interest you.
Meteoric steel isn't just iron, that's why it's interesting. And why it survives, compared to very early iron made before people learned how to turn it into steel.
NB: Meteoric ferrous metals are almost universally iron or iron-nickel, not steel (iron-carbon). I find few or no hits outside the gaming world for "meteoric steel".
Are you referring to steel found indigenously within meteor fragments, steel forged from meteoric iron, or was this just a misspeaking?
Sorry, I was misremembering stories about things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutankhamun%27s_meteoric_iron_... -- the point being that as an iron alloy (iron-nickel not steel) it doesn't rust away quickly in graves like early human-smelted iron does.
Yes, there are some instances of meteoric iron being used.
I'd thought there were archeological finds of pallasite as well, though may have been confusing those with the Fukang meteorite. Gorgeous material, though.
Well metal is critical because it's really really hard to chop wood without metal. So you've got stones, bones, and loose timber to work with. About the closest evidence I can find is Mezhirich, a small paleolithic village built out of mammoth bones: https://www.thoughtco.com/mezhirich-mammoth-bone-settlement-... about 18000 years ago.
Yes well I'm talking about chopping trees down and building homes out of them (and enough homes for a civilization). No doubt smaller sticks and loose timber could be used, that's how man mastered fire in the first place. But chopping whole trees probably didn't happen much until after metal.
You can build enough homes for a civilisation without felling any big trees at all. Stone, clay bricks, earth, small trees and branches, straw, etc. would be sufficient.
That looks extremely laborious but it's a fascinating technique. It still limits the amount of lumber one group can use. I agree on clay (in some regions) and stone being available and useable. It still says nothing about supporting a civilization, which requires agriculture.
Most early construction was based on found shelter (caves), hides, sod or turf, brick, or stone. Locally-available and hand-workable with very simple tools.
I'll go along your argument, that it seems very unlikely that there was a advanced civilization but just hypothetical:
if there was a really really old civilization, wouldn't their iron tools be degraded beyound recognition?
(especially if it was a coastal civilization later drowned in the salty sea)
Oh and a (spaced out) esoteric explanation, some people tried to convince me of:
this old civilization was so advanced it had quantum technology aka magic to get things done and eventually wiped itself out in a civil war ..
Not “buried” but “drowned”. The oceans have risen almost 50 meters since the peak of the last Ice Age. Assuming the biggest human settlements, then as now, were near large bodies of water, then they are drowned.
So they built cities on the coast, but not along river valleys? How did they feed the cities without agriculture? If they had agriculture, we’d see the selection process in the genetic history of the plants, and the geographic spread of plants, and again they’d definitely have colonised river valleys that are better suited to agriculture than the coast.
Then of course their tools and other artefacts would have been traded all over the place. Stone tools from 100k years ago and more got traded or carried thousands of miles and all we see are implements for the hunter gatherer lifestyle.
For most of these cultures, "cities" did not exist, and even assuming they did, from the times of the first early-agricultural settlements, might have numbered a few thousand, perhaps tens of thousands of souls. With little transport, food was either sourced locally, or brought in on boats, rafts, or barges. Total collection areas for bulk goods of more than a few kilometers would be highly unlikely, though longer trade routes for rare materials (timber, metals, spices, hides) might have existed.
A principle relic of such settlements are their rubbish tips. Again, lack of transport meant that waste and filth were moved a few meters, for as long as the settlement existing -- decades, centuries, or millennia. In many places these are the principle evidence of early settlements, particularly shell mounds (shellfish are an easy, reliable, and sustaining prey), and can themselves measure several meters high and tens of meters across, particularly on otherwise flat aluvial or riparian landscapes.
The TLDR is that a huge low-lying basin of fertile land around what is now the British Isles was inundated at the end of the last interglacial. (What is now the North Sea/English Channel was one of those river valleys you alude to.) The British Isles today would have been the relatively cold, arid, mountainous uplands survivors migrated into when their fertile, low-lying territory got flooded out. Assuming population density in the chilly uplands (glaciers, remember!) was low, then you'd expect the frequency of surviving stone tools to be lower, reflecting that. People don't leave stuff lying around in places where people don't live!
I'm fully aware of doggerland, but so what? Given all of Africa and Eurasia, doggerland was a tiny benighted patch of lowland in a cold remote corner. I'm sure some people called it home, but I don't see any compelling reason to put a lost civilization on it 100k years ago.
There are plenty of very fertile, habitable areas in the same region that would have been just as attractive. So settlements? Sure. But surely a civilization is more than just a settlement?
Why wouldn't they have just moved their cities inland? This doesn't seem too plausible. Maybe I could see some village suffering from rapid advance and the village gets abandoned but sea level rise isn't instantaneous, so it's doubtful to have caused deaths.
This image shows the fastest sea level rose was around 15K years ago, which is pretty close to the Neolithic era. At it's fastest rate sea level was rising at 30 meters per 1000 years, or about 3 centimeters a year. Ok, that's a very slow moving train. It's pretty easy to get off the tracks before it hits you. Doubtful to have cause civilization decline especially when it lines up closer to the onset of agriculture.
I don't think we're talking about Atlantis here. We're talking about ruins being inundated. There is some tipping point where every society collapses, and those inland and upland we occasionally locate. Except that we're having a damned difficult time doing that in aggressively biologically active regions like swamps or rainforests.
Say you built your town on a 3% grade next to the water. That's 3 meters of descent for every 100 meters of distance. If sea level rises 50 meters, your town's ruins aren't just ~45 meters underwater, there's also almost a kilometer and a half out to sea. Nobody is looking there.
The last time this issue came up on HN, I googled and discovered that archaeologists definitely are looking at the right places underwater. It is relatively expensive to do so, but it's hard to imagine that they totally missed a bunch of huge civilizations.
See my post below where I link to actual data on sea level rise rate. The ice caps don't melt instantaneously there's not enough energy in one summer to do that. The fastest it ever rose was 3 cm a year during a 1000 year period. Even at 3 cm a year you can build new buildings on higher ground as the water advances and never lose a beat. Especially when we're talking an era when most homes were built out of bones and deerskin and maybe clay. Without metal they couldn't even chop wood but even wood buildings go up rather quickly. I just fail to see how we could believe our ancestors made it through several ice ages,
mastered fire, avoided being eaten by saber tooth tigers and hunted wooly mammoths and populated the whole globe but failed to avert a 3cm a year sea level rise.
Well if we're still talking about "advanced civilization" like Mesopotamia, I can definitely see climate change causing a gradual collapse. I still doubt it was possible to have a large city prior to metallurgy and agriculture. Maybe megafauna was abundant enough that it could support that but it seems like a stretch.
As far as I am aware, none of the civilizations in South and Central America ever had metallurgy.
Having a civilization and keeping civilization are two different things. Once humans are capable of thinking of it, it would happen over and over again. But when it fails, the survivors might have a sort of cultural PTSD comparable to the Sodom and Gomorrah story in the Bible. People might resist trying again for generations (also, how many places could you found a civilization in a world without sanitation, metallurgy or medicine?)
I think the claim is not that sea level rise caused civilizational collapse, but that sea level rise could have obscured many coastal cities (which presumably suffered run of the mill, non-watery deaths).
People have pulled artefacts off the seabed where Doggerland used to be (and still is, it's just under quite a lot of water). Mostly by accident: fishing sometimes fetches stuff up from down there.
Venice of course, is 1500 years old and people still very much live there. It's also made of materials that are impossible to craft without metal. I said a village might be abandoned due to sea level rise, but it's unlikely to cause civilizational collapse. Highly, highly unlikely, since it moves sooo slooow.
With changing climate, entire regions which may have been formerly hospitable, were not. Settlements may have been small and largely ephemeral. And they're now flooded under 300' of water and miles out at sea.
As an example: the initial human settlement of the Americas likely followed sea routes along the North, Central, and South American coasts. The region near Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, with the Channel Islands, extended much further out to sea, with some of the islands being connected to land, others being only a short distance (rather than 20-30 miles) offshore.
Settlements along both the coast and shore -- the most viable parts of these regions -- would now be utterly flooded. There are few or no traces of the initial migrations, save for a few inland settlements and venturing / foraging parties, though later settlements may exist.
Much construction and many artefacts would be of earth, wood, hides, and plant fibres, most rotting or melting away under water. There are simply few surviving remains, and those which might exist are hard to find and access.
The climate change itself would have occurred over centuries, with multiple moves and resettlements, or disappearance of entire cities. It's rare for even preindustrial civilisations to endure at their peak for more than a few centuries.
Kinda puts the old religous flood stories in a different context eh? There were almost certainly costal communities who were consumed by rising sea levels the world over. Recent global flooding.
The most likely origin of the middle eastern religious “meme” of the flood (Noah etc) is Sumerian plain floods (Mesopotamia). In fact, the stories in Genesis are most likely the retelling of Sumerian technological achievements (farming, building and the concept of time and seasons).
Yeah, but the article seems to be about 3,000 years ago. I am not shocked that there were relatively advanced civilizations in 1,000 BC - when did we think otherwise?
You could argue that, but I would be inclined to question how advanced a civilization was that didn't prosper enough to alter the environment. A civilization that is "advanced" should be fairly good at logistics, and that leads to a large population, which leads to a large environmental impact.
How in tune with nature or whatever people in a society are on an individual basis wouldn't affect the total impact if whatever they are doing works well enough that everything keeps growing. I'm kind of thinking of Jevon's paradox.
If you're talking wood and clay and stone, I think your supposition is potentially reasonable for some very narrow definition of civilization. Perhaps two digits worth of humans.
Surviving artifacts of the metal ages are very much the norm though, so I wouldn't expect early human villages to have gone beyond the stone age. And with coastal weathering it would be hard to identify any stone tooling from that long ago.
> Full article not accessible because of soft paywall
Off topic: I sometimes browse in in-cognito mode. This was one of those times. I clicked through to the article, and the website detected that I was in in-cognito mode and said I wasn't allowed to read the article in in-cognito mode. I feel as if this walled-garden approach is getting out of hand.
Yes the Incas overtook previous societies. But the Inca civilization is quite recent (15th century AD) so what was before was probably not that old either.
It's not just possible, but highly likely. Graham Hancock has compiled an impressive amount of evidence for pre-Younger Dryas civilizations in books like Magicians of the Gods.
Graham Hancock is not an archaeologist, and actual archaeologists disagree with him. That "impressive" evidence sounds like cherry-picked non-sequiturs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_hum...