Gaps in human history you can fit a civilization in?

[Tolya]

Many many years ago I've read some book about how advanced human civilizations existed in the past. The stuff that the author was proposing was more amusing than convincing: like how some ancient civilizations possessed nuclear weapons (there are supposedly some scorched sand formations in a desert in asia that are supposedly evidence of this), or how indians (the ones in asia) had flying machines called vimanas.

Looking at the history, only the last couple thousand years have been documented at all. And homo sapiens has existed much longer than that. Why was the initial progress of the early societies so slow and why has it sped up so much in the last couple of hundred years that allowed us to go from making castles from rock to putting a man on the moon?

Any thoughts on this? I don't buy any of the Deniken's crap or any other theories, but from time to time the thought that some kind of an advanced human civilization could have existed 20,000 years ago which we have no knowledge about occasionaly gets into my head. And by advanced I don't necessarily mean flying machines, just something much more complex than living in caves, making rock axes and scribbling on the wall incomprehensibly.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, it's at least conceivable that there were Neolithic city-states (town-states?) that could have existed somewhere before the rise of the well-documented ones. A number of ancient sites have only been confirmed to be the ruins of ancient cities in very recent times by careful archaeological work; there could be others we haven't found yet. Something like the Mound Builder culture in the Mississippi valley.

Major civilizations are less likely, though. Any technological advances they made would tend to spread beyond the immediate era they ruled and would thus survive their collapse. The major cities and temples of a civilization 20,000 years ago might be completely lost, but if they'd learned how to domesticate crops and tame animals I'd expect that knowledge to survive.

[Sea Skimmer]

More and more evidence is suggesting that human civilization is older then we think, possibly by more then 4,000 years. However such early civilizations would only be advanced compared to cavemen. Civilization requires a lot of enabling technology, which is very slow to ramp out. It also requires good conditions to maintain a stable population which can support all that technology and pass it on to new generations. You go back a couple thousand years and mere wild animals eating people are still a serious limitation on the spread of humans. Very early civilizations wont leave much evidence because most technology was made of wood and other biodegradable objects. The further back you could the more deeply stuff will be buried as well, making it far less likely to be discovered by casual observations that cue archaeologists to sites. If we could scan the whole earth with high resolution ground penetrating radar we might find a lot of new stuff that's 30-40 feet underground now. That may be possible in the not so far future too using UAVs and some advances in ultra wide band radar.

The reason progress is so quick so recently is because like I was saying, you have to ramp up. Every major breakthrough in technology is actually the product of thousands of much smaller enabling steps. But each breakthrough also enables work to go forward on countless new steps. As we increase in population and health and education standards each new generation is inherently able to do more then the last. So the process multiplies itself. But it had to start damn slow, and back in the day people just didn't have much time for learning an development vs. mere survival. Today meanwhile survival isn't even a serious issue for over a billion people on earth who live in decently modern countries.

[Anguirus]

This reminds me of an old article on TetZoo that I stumbled across the other day. Why limit yourself to lost human civilization?

http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology ... s_2008.php

[Simon_Jester]

A lot depends on your definition of "civilization."

If by "civilization" you mean an Iron Age 'antediluvian' society like the ones some fantasy authors invoke (like Tolkein or Robert E. Howard of Conan the Barbarian fame)... no, there almost certainly weren't any before the ones we know about. Such a culture would have too many advantages over the Neolithic or Mesolithic people around it; it would spread across the globe and almost inevitably leave readily detectable remains somewhere.

If you mean a 'high Stone Age' culture (like ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia might have been before the discovery of bronze working, or like the more advanced Native American cultures were when Cortez showed up)... that's a bit more plausible, but still very questionable. Again, without a disaster large enough to flatten a whole continent, such a civilization would almost have to leave offshoots and remnant cultures that would survive whatever collapse destroyed it. This is probably why "lost continent" legends feature so prominently in stories about lost civilizations. It's hard to imagine a civilization being totally destroyed without a trace short of a massive disaster like a whole continent sinking into the sea.

Now, if you mean a "low Stone Age" civilization, one with a few major ceremonial centers supported by limited cultivation of crops or hunting and gathering in a rich landscape... well, they're finding new examples of those all the time. They seem to be the immediate ancestors of the more famous ancient "civilized" cultures we already know about, which is not surprising. On the other hand, they fit into the known historical narrative, so we're not talking about truly lost civilizations that existed fifteen or twenty thousand years ago.

[Commander Xillian]

Looking at the history, only the last couple thousand years have been documented at all. And homo sapiens has existed much longer than that. Why was the initial progress of the early societies so slow and why has it sped up so much in the last couple of hundred years that allowed us to go from making castles from rock to putting a man on the moon?

I can actually answer that question with a simple math equasion, actually.

It's a basic formula of multiplication, twice the men working on a project means twice the speed. Four people farming means four times the yeild of a single mans crop. Eight men, twice the yeald. As the populations grow, more people means higher supplies. Higher supplies leads to a growing excess to supplies. Excess of supplies means less time needed to spend on production. As a by product, scientific advancements increase exponentually as the tool we have grow, and we create more tools for the specific purpose of creating better tools.

I hope I answered the question. Sorry if I failed to do so.

[Mayabird]

Many many years ago I've read some book about how advanced human civilizations existed in the past. The stuff that the author was proposing was more amusing than convincing: like how some ancient civilizations possessed nuclear weapons (there are supposedly some scorched sand formations in a desert in asia that are supposedly evidence of this), or how indians (the ones in asia) had flying machines called vimanas.

How long ago did you read it? Probably too long for this, but I think it would be hilarious if Marina's made up quote for a fanfic about ancient jets and nukes had made it into books as well as government webpages.

I have wondered if there could be some ancient bits of something deep underwater, like along the Ice Age seashores or, more likely from a possible ruins standpoint, along the earlier coastline of the Black Sea. Those aren't very accessible to us, though.

[Serafina]

You can pretty much rule out every form of civilisation with anything close to "modern" technology. Or which used metal.
Simply because these leave pretty good evidence - even if a piece of metal is worn out, you can still see that it was once manufactured by metallurgical methods.

[Coyote]

I was thinking of the opposite, in a way-- current technology is starting to lean more and more towards 'biodegradeable' stuff, and it could be that far in the future we have made biodegrade-ability so important that our civilization no longer leaves behind anything. So the only stuff left for future archaeologists to pick over will be th e"primitive" things we built before switching to biodegradeable tech. How confused they'd be! They'd probably think we were all grabbed by UFOs or a plague or something.

But as for the past... there is the notion that the past was more advanced than we thought. There was that funky clockwork computer thing that was found in the Aegean sea...

But it is feasable we haven't found everything there is to find. Radar that Skimmer mentioned has discovered jungle ruins deep in Central America that are so overgrown with jungle that the ruins weren't identifiable as such. And the old Middle East mud-brick stuff tended to "melt" easily in rain if it wasn't constantly being re-plastered so who knows what has been turned to sludge and looks like an ordinary hill but has stuff buried in it... or if there's another Pompeii-like civilization buried somewhere, waiting to be rediscovered.

[Serafina]

Well - in that case, we would see signs of advanced civilisations before they develop their magically vanishing stuff.
Besides, i do not think that we will ever create all our materials out of stuff that decays rapidly on purpose - if you take buildings as an example, you do not exactly want to make them out of degrading material if you have a choice.

Oh, another good piece of evidence that there were no advanced civilisations before:
Natural resources.
A civilisation takes up resources. The more advanced it get's, the more it needs and the more it can access.
That starts with easy-to-mine metals and stones (say, Egypt), goes to better mines (Rome), develops into deeper mines and fossil fuels (Industrialisation) and later into off-shore rigs and gigantic mining projects (modern age). Oh, and eventually into asteroid mining
Either way, you can detect wether or not such resources have been mined. Not merely by their absence, but also because a mine will leave traces.

Since we do not find such traces, we can conclude that there was no advanced civilisation way before those we know about.

[Jeremy]

Archeological research is essentially criminal forensics being done hundreds and thousands and millions of years after the event. A temple complex has been noted at Gobekli, Turkey dating 12000 years ancient.

Personally, I suspect there was an early state level civilization in the Black Sea which was destroyed by the flooding of the Black Sea by the Mediterranean Sea. Apparently there are some underwater ruins near the coast of India and Japan as well. So there sure could be some traces of civilization at the end of the recent glacial period but nothing substantive. The same holds true for nonsapiens and even nonanthropomorphic intelligent species. Unless it was contained to Antarctica, nothing ever reached 19th century levels of technology on Earth besides man.

As for our "slow" progress, it was really hard to be inventive when the average person didn't live beyond 40 and there was no division of labor. Some ideas get passed by or forgotten as well. Heck, the Romans may have pulled off a Steam Train if their Senate invested in a DARPA.

[Simon_Jester]

I can actually answer that question with a simple math equasion, actually.

It's a basic formula of multiplication, twice the men working on a project means twice the speed. Four people farming means four times the yeild of a single mans crop. Eight men, twice the yeald. As the populations grow, more people means higher supplies. Higher supplies leads to a growing excess to supplies. Excess of supplies means less time needed to spend on production. As a by product, scientific advancements increase exponentually as the tool we have grow, and we create more tools for the specific purpose of creating better tools.

I hope I answered the question. Sorry if I failed to do so.

Well, that's part of it. Another part is what you might think of as "threshold" conditions. For example, you can't discover agriculture without staying in the same place for several years to observe the consequences of planting seeds in fertile soil and watching them grow in great quantity. But unless the surrounding land is very fertile and you're lucky enough to avoid disasters, you can't stay in one place for that long as a hunter-gatherer band.

So in order to discover agriculture, populations first had to develop the tools and techniques to survive in one place for a long period of time. Once they were sedentary, then they could start to get the hang of cultivating crops... at which point they became independent of the food resources that made them sedentary.

You can pretty much rule out every form of civilisation with anything close to "modern" technology. Or which used metal.
Simply because these leave pretty good evidence - even if a piece of metal is worn out, you can still see that it was once manufactured by metallurgical methods.

Well, at least over historic time scales.

Go back into geologic time, and a medieval-level civilization's worked metal and stone structures might well have been destroyed by erosion to the point where they are no longer in evidence.

I was thinking of the opposite, in a way-- current technology is starting to lean more and more towards 'biodegradeable' stuff, and it could be that far in the future we have made biodegrade-ability so important that our civilization no longer leaves behind anything. So the only stuff left for future archaeologists to pick over will be th e"primitive" things we built before switching to biodegradeable tech. How confused they'd be! They'd probably think we were all grabbed by UFOs or a plague or something.

Not likely, because while we might make our tools and materials biodegradeable, we certainly wouldn't make buildings biodegradeable. You don't want your house to dissolve naturally due to sun and wind action over the course of the next ten years, after all.

It's the buildings that are going to be most in evidence in any case. For many, many millenia, archaeologists will be able to dig up the huge ribbons of concrete and asphalt we left all over the country, even after they're reduced to nothing more than dense gravel beds. And that will be very conclusive evidence of a high civilization, all by itself.

But it is feasable we haven't found everything there is to find. Radar that Skimmer mentioned has discovered jungle ruins deep in Central America that are so overgrown with jungle that the ruins weren't identifiable as such. And the old Middle East mud-brick stuff tended to "melt" easily in rain if it wasn't constantly being re-plastered so who knows what has been turned to sludge and looks like an ordinary hill but has stuff buried in it... or if there's another Pompeii-like civilization buried somewhere, waiting to be rediscovered.

All true to a point, but I doubt we'll find anything that pushes back our notion of when basic 'levels' of civilization were reached (the Iron Age around 1500-1000 BC, the large Stone Age civilizations around 4000 BC). Most recent finds push back the origin of early proto-civilizations, the ones that actually did discover agriculture and such.

[Marcus Aurelius]

But as for the past... there is the notion that the past was more advanced than we thought. There was that funky clockwork computer thing that was found in the Aegean sea...

The Greek and Roman civilizations certainly were more advanced than thought until fairly recently. By the late Empire the Romans had gathered virtually everything needed for true industrialization to start except the printing press. The lack of cheap and rapid dissemination of knowledge meant that the feats of individual Roman engineers were not as widely known as thy could have been and it was also the main reason why so many of them were forgotten after the fall of Rome.

As for why the development of civilization took so long; the best theory is that the hunter-gatherer society is extremely stable because it is biologically determined. As long as there were new possible hunting grounds in the immediate vicinity it was easier just to continue the hunter-gatherer existence and little incentive to invent new technologies not related to that.

Although it's only a hypothesis, there is reason to believe that population pressure and diminishing hunting success due to neighboring tribes finally forced the invention of agriculture, because it was in some ways easier than to try to beat the neighbors in war. The transformation was probably quite hard culturally, since it meant that the men had to abandon their ancient hunting culture, which explains why it did not happen more often. In any case, only agriculture produced enough excess food that more fine-grained trade specialization became possible. This hypothesis also explains fairly nicely why agriculture was invented somewhat later in the Americas. Humans arrived there later and it took some time for them to populate both continents. On the other it took less time than in the Old World, since the hunting technology of the early settlers was already fairly advanced.

[Sky Captain]

The most likely place where remains of lost civilization could hide is the below sea level on some part of continental shelf which was dry land during the last ice age. After all early civilizations tended to develop near large bodies of water. Another possibility if we accept that civilization could have been developed ~100 000 years ago in previous interglacial is that the remains of such civilization is completely wiped out by advancing glaciers if it were located in northern part of North America or North Europe.

As far as technology goes a lost civilization with ancient Egyptian or Indian technological level might be plausible. Anything with Roman, medieval or more advanced tech level not so likely.

Speaking of aircraft a simple glider made of lightweight wood frame covered by canvas that can glide and carry a man when thrown off the cliff seems to be plausible even with ancient Egyptian or Mesopotamian tech level. It would be far easier to build than many amazing stoneworking achievements made by ancient Egyptians.

[Commander Xillian]

Stonework? Yeah, sure the Egyptians were quite skilled masons, but I find it rather silly you haven't mentioned the "hero Engine", the Aeolipile. I mean, steam engine. Doesn't get more awesome than that. Rather, that is kind of late for the discussion, but to develop a precursor to the Steam Engine, which wouldn't really come about again until the 1500's.

[Temujin]

The most likely place where remains of lost civilization could hide is the below sea level on some part of continental shelf which was dry land during the last ice age. After all early civilizations tended to develop near large bodies of water. Another possibility if we accept that civilization could have been developed ~100 000 years ago in previous interglacial is that the remains of such civilization is completely wiped out by advancing glaciers if it were located in northern part of North America or North Europe.

As far as technology goes a lost civilization with ancient Egyptian or Indian technological level might be plausible. Anything with Roman, medieval or more advanced tech level not so likely.

Speaking of aircraft a simple glider made of lightweight wood frame covered by canvas that can glide and carry a man when thrown off the cliff seems to be plausible even with ancient Egyptian or Mesopotamian tech level. It would be far easier to build than many amazing stoneworking achievements made by ancient Egyptians.

Yeah, since the end of the Ice Age there has been a lot of changes in both the climate and sea level. There were no doubt plenty of Neolithic and even early Bronze Age proto city-states that once existed whose remains now are buried in the muck of the continental shelf, buried in the sand of places like the Sahara, or were even wiped out due to something like a mega tsunami.

[Serafina]

Stonework? Yeah, sure the Egyptians were quite skilled masons, but I find it rather silly you haven't mentioned the "hero Engine", the Aeolipile. I mean, steam engine. Doesn't get more awesome than that. Rather, that is kind of late for the discussion, but to develop a precursor to the Steam Engine, which wouldn't really come about again until the 1500's.

It has already been mentioned that the roman empire (and the greeks of the same era) had most of the technology we had at the start of the industrial revoltion.
It is debatable wether they did not go the next step due to social reasons or due to the few technologies they were lacking.
However, such discussion would warrant a thread on it's own.

[Simon_Jester]

It has already been mentioned that the roman empire (and the greeks of the same era) had most of the technology we had at the start of the industrial revoltion.
It is debatable wether they did not go the next step due to social reasons or due to the few technologies they were lacking.
However, such discussion would warrant a thread on it's own.

I'm going to start that thread.

[Sea Skimmer]

Stonework? Yeah, sure the Egyptians were quite skilled masons, but I find it rather silly you haven't mentioned the "hero Engine", the Aeolipile. I mean, steam engine. Doesn't get more awesome than that. Rather, that is kind of late for the discussion, but to develop a precursor to the Steam Engine, which wouldn't really come about again until the 1500's.

The Aeolipile is neat indeed, but the reason it was made so early is related to it being such a dead end design. Uncontained steam expansion like that will never generate any useful amount of work. At least not when you are limited to iron and a coal-wood fire, which places a major limit on how fast you can generate steam. Making a steam engine with valves and pistons that can operate at higher pressures is far more demanding technology.

[Simon_Jester]

Speaking of aircraft a simple glider made of lightweight wood frame covered by canvas that can glide and carry a man when thrown off the cliff seems to be plausible even with ancient Egyptian or Mesopotamian tech level. It would be far easier to build than many amazing stoneworking achievements made by ancient Egyptians.

Yes, but why bother? Someone might have tried it, and might even have succeeded, but there was a lot of risk that the glider would fail and kill the test pilot. The early history of aviation is full of fatal experiments, and designs that rely on getting a running start by dropping your glider off a cliff leave no margin for error.

The thing wouldn't have any practical application beyond entertainment, and the enormous risk involved in creating a workable design would tend to stymie the project.

[Sea Skimmer]

It would be well within reason for someone with money or slaves to create a counterweight driven catapult to launch a glider a short distance for tests.

[Simon_Jester]

Again, this would be well within the means of the elite in the era; it's just... why? It would be rather expensive (especially in slave test pilots), and not at all useful. In theory, someone who was absolutely mad with the desire to fly and who had an enormous sum of money could do it. But it's so inherently difficult, and risky compared to other things they could do with the money (like throw parties) that I wouldn't be surprised to learn that no one ever did it.

[Jeremy]

Stonework? Yeah, sure the Egyptians were quite skilled masons, but I find it rather silly you haven't mentioned the "hero Engine", the Aeolipile. I mean, steam engine. Doesn't get more awesome than that. Rather, that is kind of late for the discussion, but to develop a precursor to the Steam Engine, which wouldn't really come about again until the 1500's.

The Aeolipile is neat indeed, but the reason it was made so early is related to it being such a dead end design. Uncontained steam expansion like that will never generate any useful amount of work. At least not when you are limited to iron and a coal-wood fire, which places a major limit on how fast you can generate steam. Making a steam engine with valves and pistons that can operate at higher pressures is far more demanding technology.

If Greek Fire was made from oil, perhaps they could have started using that.

[loomer]

Again, this would be well within the means of the elite in the era; it's just... why? It would be rather expensive (especially in slave test pilots), and not at all useful. In theory, someone who was absolutely mad with the desire to fly and who had an enormous sum of money could do it. But it's so inherently difficult, and risky compared to other things they could do with the money (like throw parties) that I wouldn't be surprised to learn that no one ever did it.

Why not? People have been wanting to fly since we saw a bird do it, and have been trying to figure it out since.

Besides, if you own enough slaves, what does it matter if the glider doesn't work? So he goes splat, so what? Make some changes, put another slave on there, threaten punishment to his family if he doesn't do it and make him try with the new version, because the profit you could make with a working version would be worthwhile, since if nothing else, you'd suddenly be an Idea Guy who people would hire to make shit happen.

[Axiomatic]

Since it is hard to explain the lack of stone remains for our lost civilization, why insist on them having built with stone? If we instead said that they built everything out of wood and mud daub, they can have huge cities which would be entirely lost just centuries after being abandoned.