Age of human culture

[iomegaman]

So recently to entertain myself I've been watching some youtube on Graham Hancock and John Anthony West, both men with a TON of experience in Egyptology and the pyramids....as well as some videos about Göbeklitepe and several other sites there in Turkey...

Basically there is very compelling evidence of a very advanced culture PRIOR to what all my history teachers and most modern scholarship suggest...

For instance if you simply goggle "When were th epyramids of Giza built" you will get the MAJORITY of hits saying between 2550-2490 BC...and if you follow the standard model of human development in Gobekli Tepe you will be told that the people of that era were "hunter gatherers"...and did not have advanced technology of any kind...but the evidence clearly on the ground indicates a much older society with very advanced technologies BEFORE these dates and an inclination to date things based on archeological timelines developed in the 1950's and strongly adhered to with no chance of questioning them.

I believe in science, I believe the majority of scholars but it seems to me that there are some obvious bias in the scientific community where long held beliefs are not allowed to be questioned...

For instance the great pyramid of egypt takes up about 13 acres and is almost perfectly aligned (true north not simply magnetic north) NESW within half a degree...not only that but if you take its height and width it is an exact representation of the dimensions of the earth (on a scale of 1/43,200) in fact if you measure the height of the pyramid and multiply by 43,200 you get the polar radius of the earth, then if you multiply the base perimeter of the pyramid and multiply it by the same number you get the equatorial circumference of the earth...egyptologist are aware of this but say it is simply a coincidence...and they base the age of the pyramids upon the dream stone in front of the Sphinx which is an obvious addition added at a later time...speaking of which there is obvious water erosion at the base of the Sphinx pretty much the same kind of water erosion that carved the Grand Canyon...which most archeologist deny is possible...the upper parts of the Sphinx show no signs of this type of erosion, and archeologist claim it is due to wind and sand...its like they are in complete denial of obvious things because the timelines do not meet up with the accepted story.

My point is archeology shows some pretty strong evidence of ancient culture vastly advanced to what the assumed science is telling us is possible (for instance some of the jewelry found in the Tepe locations has perfectly drilled minute holes in the beads through very hard obsidian and other rocks---coming from sites where science tells us these were hunter/gatherers with no advanced technologies)...and these kind of technologies and astrologically significant monuments are all over the world in precisely located sites (all on meridians that are multiples of the number 72)...societies that seem to indicate an advanced culture dating back nearly 20,000 years that seems to have been lost in various 26,000 year cataclysmic earth cycles ( a repeating pattern in the geology of earth)...

I wonder what is to be made of the evidence and why the reticence to accept optional ideas regarding human development?

We do have human skulls that have been dated to 160,000 years ago that are exactly the same as modern skulls, yet history will suggest that modern culture is the most advanced we have ever been and that is roughly about 6,000 year old...

The fact that pyramid is off less than a degree kinda disposes the idea that aliens had anything to do with it in my book...if you came form outer space and helped build that monument it would not be off at all...the degree of less than 1% makes me think it is purely human, but on a scale of advancement that makes modern culture seem weak in comparison.

What if there were cultures far more advanced than we are willing to admit who were wiped out by cataclysmic events so that ONLY monuments and myth survived...?

If there was a storm to hit America only 3 magnitudes bigger than Katrina it would wipe out 100 major cities and take years and years to rebuild...(Parts of New Orleans are still not rebuilt)...go up one more magnitude and you take out 1000 cities and the chance of modern culture surviving moves waaay down to single digit percentages...and if you want to see how quickly civilisation can be lost simply park a car in a forest and come back in 10 years...in 100 years it will be completely unusable in 200 it will be gone.

 

[JohnRoberts]

I only half joke that the pyramids are counter weights, like the lead weights attached to car wheels to balance them . Without the pyramids where they are located the earth could develop vibrations that could disrupt our thin rock shell... Of course it would require some higher intelligence to know where to place them.  :

===
I am currently reading an interesting book from Yuval Harari. He offers and interesting take on how we got here, and where we are likely to end up... 400 pages so I won't attempt to paraphrase.

JR

 

[PRR]

> perfectly drilled minute holes in the beads through very hard obsidian

Bead Spitters.

 

[iomegaman]

> perfectly drilled minute holes in the beads through very hard obsidian

Bead Spitters.

While I always appreciate good scifi there is a subtle point being made that cultures pass TECHNOLOGY via myths and story telling...

I wonder how much REAL technology we have missed because we disMISSED ideas that came via myths...?

Almost all of the ancient cultures share very similar stories and when you get into the Nile Delta the overlap and repurposing of myths bleeds into all of the major religions with each one claiming the originality and ownership of said myth...the Flood/Noah/Ark/etc and even the creation vignettes are so familiar as to be impossible to ignore.

 

[PRR]

> park a car in a forest and come back in 10 years...in 100 years

My neighbor Jimmy would take it. He watched a 1933 Chevy on a farm for 50 years, while trees grew through the rust, until he got permission to take it. He drives that every weekend. He has a Ford AA a little too far gone to be worth patching.

I'm sure you know the book/movie series "After We're Gone"? Some people believe there will be a Last Call and all souls taken Up (or Down). If we stop running the place, what happens? Aside from instant collisions, and oil refineries blowing up the next day, the books trace the decay of large bridges and buildings and other technology. Cool pictures. A lot will be hard to spot in 1,000 years.

The last to crumble may be mega-stone, pyramids and bridge foundations, which is not high-technology. The *first* to crumble IS metals. Much recent technology is about turning red dirt into Iron. Iron desperately wants to turn back into red dirt. As your woods-car and Jimmy's rust-rod show; also many bridges around here, my patio table.

Why limit the thought to "humans"? Mammals come all sizes and smarts. A hippo has no more use for steel wire than a brontosaur. But the common dinosaur in New Jersey is more like a biped deer. While a deer would not pierce beads, there were other dinos who could be even smarter and "handier". It is only in the last decades that humans really dominate over "dumb animals". In a richer climate a community of smart dinosaurs could smelt steel and drive cars and vape tobacco; thousands of years after they die out it would be hard to know they ever did that.

Remember that most of the earth surface is over-turned every so many million years by plate tectonics. The coast from Boston to Nova Scotia is a fairly recent land-slam which twisted and folded a vast section of earth. Also glaciers. The glacier here crushed mountains to boulders and smeared boulder-dust (clay) from Quebec to the sea. Any mere pyramid or car is long gone.

We humans use our hands. But "After we're gone" and the cockroaches develop Archeology, and all they find are mineralized bone bits, could they tell if a raccoon, a lemur, or a minor ape's hands were most suited to gross and fine manipulation?

The Iron Ore fields off the Great Lakes could really be the junk-yards of dinosaurs.

The Canadian Shield, about the least disturbed part of the earth's surface, could be the result of a massive thermonuclear blast from a pre-dinosaur technology. So extreme it passivized all tectonic strain, so old that the radioactivity has faded. Full of Nickel and Copper... could be a factory area targeted by an enemy? Yes, the more likely explanation is volcanoes, and volcanic concentration of metals, but...

 

[alexc]

So interesting  ..

How about those Egyptian 'vase' s  - perfectly formed out of some very hard materials ..  and tonnes of them found all over archeological sights.

I wouldn't want to try making one of these incredibly beautiful and mystifyingly perfectly formed objects of art.

Then there's those perfectly made 'channels' with 'non cyclindrical holes' bored thru ..  in granite!

I guess you could do that with copper tools and 'granite drill bits'  ...  NOT.

I really enjoy listening to Graham Hancock when he speaks at length on the many subjects of his deep knowledge. 

When I nod off on my 'mid-morning' nap after a heavy half-hour in the garden, his voice sends me blissfully to dreamland  ;D

 

[iomegaman]

On a completely unrelated note, I notice you're from "Hobart" due  to my lack of travel the only  Hobart I know of is in Western Oklahoma about 30 miles from where we moved my Sr. year in high school...I played lead guitar in a band that would go to go Hobart and host dances at the VFW building there...bought my first Les Paul in Elk City  (it was a 1959 Les Paul Jr. which I sold for $250!!!!!?????wtf?)...

Is it the same Hobart near Sentinel?

 

[alexc]

It's nice to know there are more than one Hobart in this wide world.    ;D

...

'My' city of Hobart is the capital of the island of Tasmania, which is just below the eastern lower tip of the great island continent of Australia 

It's a lovely little city, and reminds me of Sydney 40years ago [where I grew up], which in turn is about 40 years 'behind the times' as compared to typical cities in that  great nation  U S A 

Hobart Tasmania is a 'port city' with fantastic deep water facilities and a long maritime tradition - architecturally,  in the style of quaint English port towns but done in local 'sandstone'  which is ubiquitous in all of Australia.

The whole island of Tasmania has something like 500K inhabitants and has two 'cities' [more like towns really]  Hobart in the very far south, east coast    and Launceston  at the north, east coast.

I think you could fit a dozen or so Netherlands into Tasmania  - and I would like that, being a big fan of the Dutch people.

It takes about 3.5hrs to drive the whole nth-sth extent of the island and it's quite a lovely rural drive too, without much traffic or pol - ic -e  speed-cam  entrapments.

Mostly rural -  farming of cattle, sheep, pork, dairy and poultry plus quite a lot of fruit ..  it's known as the 'Apple Isle'.  but here  also grows huge quantities of potatoes of many, many varieties.

And of course much Timber Industry  activity ...  they are not too bad, the loggers ..  and there are an awful lot of trees in Tasmania.  Trees like I never saw before .. in size and stature ..  the old growth forest remnants are still going .. alongside the more modern 'plantation timber' enterprises  .. both soft and hardwoods.

Then there is the 'fabled'  Huon Pine which was so prized for furniture and boat building, that it now only survives in secret places. It's an amazing tree ..  takes around 1000years to fully mature!

I have been doing  some germinations  of them, since the seeds are nowadays available.  How's that for 'hope and faith in the future' 

The hardwoods of the region are incredible ...  for furniture and instrument making, the most prized is 'Tasmanian Blackwood'.
At it's best, it's a bit like braz. rosewood ... stable, hard and incredible figuring  with the glowing of deep lustre.

I have a local made acoustic guitar of 'adirondack pine' and 'tas blackwood'  and it's now about 30years old  ..  just reaching it's 'tone'

And in modern times, the 'aqua-culture' industry has boomed  ...  farming salmon, oysters  that sort of thing.  The 'wild' fisheries are amazing for those brave enough to venture into the 'southern oceans'.

So far, those giant 'factory fishing ships' are rare, but will undoubtedly get going in a big way in the future.

Same thing  with g.e mod organisms  - not common here yet [re foods and animals and fishes]  but surely will be in the future; yes even here, on the 'outskirts of empire'.

....

My locality is near Hobart, about 40mins drive further south - it's called the 'Huon Valley'  which has a mighty river flowing through it  - the 'Huon River'  ..  deep, dark [almost black], tannin rich water [from the forests] ..  and  with crazy 'sea-horses' like you never saw.

The 'Huon River' empties into the great southern ocean but is sheltered by a big island 'Bruny Island'  so we don't  get  the full 'fury'  of southern swells and winds.  It's a slice of heaven. 

...

Cygnet, the little village where I live, is the 'apple centre' of the 'Apple Isle' and it was settled around 1815 or so  I think. It's named for the swans, particularly the 'black swan'  ..  which are local and do quite well in the well-kept farms' grass-lands.

Not much has changed since then except the huge horses that powered the agriculture are replaced by even huger 'John Deer' and 'Mack'  machines

Cygnet, my village, is also known for the annual 'Folk Music Festival'  which is an excuse for all the 'countrified peoples' to have a big party in many of the village common areas  ...  much eat, drink and music  ..  acoustic guitars, banjos, mandolins, hand tambour 

...  all those great things that country folk do to 'amuse' themselves ... 

We also have the 'mid-winter Night of Lanterns'  shindig  [big bonfire with people gathering in the coldest night]  ...  as well as the spring 'Scarecrow' competition   where people put their best 'scare-crow' in the front yard with a little sign explaining.

Got to love it to live it, of course.

...

There's lots of people in the 'hills' of Cygnet that live 'off the grid / system'  in little self-made shacks [yurts]  amongst the trees.  'Hill folk' I call them

They often wear colourful  'home weaved clothes', have long dreadlocks and don't wear shoes ...  The little kids can be quite 'earthy' looking  - and I mean that in the best way possible, not at all 'looking down upon'.  Like 'free range' people, largely  free of chemicals and other horrors.

I like them , being a little 'off the beaten track' myself  [Australia thing]  ....  kind of an 'escapee from the uber tech world' I am ...  after 30years in factories, underground labs, 33rd Floors of Finance  and lastly in scary high security 'bio' stuff, I avoid modern 'city' life as far as I can!  These last 10years of 'gardening leave  and diy'  have just flown by and I miss the 'city' not one little bit! [not one little bit!]

When my time comes [not soon I pray], I plan to end my days under the 'wide blue sky' where the good Lord can just 'scoop me on up' - not in some hospital.

I like the 'yurt in the hills' concept, but I prefer a little homestead on a small acreage (about  4ac) with all the comforts of home, where I have a small orchard and garden and *a lot* of top quality 'rye'  hay.

It reminds me a lot of 'The Netherlands' in climate - lots of rainfall, quite cold  but not often below 0C. It snows, but lightly and not too often.

I spent many years working in Antwerpen which is a little south of Amsterdam, so it is quite comfortable for me. 

The main diff is the high summer, where the day-to-day temperature variations can range to 30C ! 
ie. one day it is 15C ..  the next can be 45C. 

And the winds can be huge ...  W I N D  super frightening when they hit the nearby forests  ..  like many 'freight trains' about to go thru your bedroom    [I was a 'railways' guy in my early days].

It's very much 'Four Seasons In One Day' most of the time ..    to quote 'Crowded House'  [Aust band with NZ star Neil Finn].
Grey -> Rain -> Blue Sky -> Sun -> Wind -> Calm -> Rain -> Sun etc etc  all  before nightfall!

...

Cygnet is the 'last civilised place', going south, before 'falling off the edge of the world' - after here, it is downhill all the way  .. to Antarctica

Indeed, there is a big facility nearby my village which is    Australia's    'Antarctic Research Station HQ'.

About 30mins further south from where I am, is the 'edge of the world'    - literally.

Only lonely coastlines with remnants of the 'old whaling industry' which used to be very big 'back in the day'. 

You would have to be brave and reckless to be a 'whaler'  - the deep waters off the coast are indeed perilous; the great Southern Ocean is a place where many have met a watery end, historically speaking.

Real 'Captain Ahab' wild oceans with monster waves  and generally awful weather  ... very  cold, huge winds et al.

Each year after Christmas, here in Australia, they do the    'Sydney to Hobart  Yacht Race'    where some of the best pit their skill and tech against the southern oceans.  Once in a few years, they can have some really tragic outcomes. But mostly they get by OK

...

Thanks for asking 

 

[alexc]

.I played lead guitar in a band that would go to go Hobart and host dances at the VFW building there...bought my first Les Paul in Elk City  (it was a 1959 Les Paul Jr. which I sold for $250!!!!!?????wtf?)...

That's pretty sad really - I feel for you.  I played a really early LP Jr and it was total machine!

My own 'pick of the litter' is a 1971 Gib Les Paul Custom sunburst and in perfect condition - a real 'fretless wonder' with the original paf pups -  absolutely roars with my  Super Reverb  [hand wired by moi].

I think I payed something like 500usd for it about 20years ago.  Nowadays it goes for around 7Kaud in Sydney and rising quickly.

 

[alexc]

And iomegaman, I guess as someone from Arizona (I think?) , you would be familiar with 'Coast-to-Coast' from wayback, with the late, great  mr Art Bell ?

He moderated many, many fantastic and detailed discussions on these kinds of topics ...

I listen to lots of his historical interviews more than any other.

 

[Kingston]

> park a car in a forest and come back in 10 years...in 100 years

My neighbor Jimmy would take it. He watched a 1933 Chevy on a farm for 50 years, while trees grew through the rust, until he got permission to take it. He drives that every weekend. He has a Ford AA a little too far gone to be worth patching.

I'm sure you know the book/movie series "After We're Gone"? Some people believe there will be a Last Call and all souls taken Up (or Down). If we stop running the place, what happens? Aside from instant collisions, and oil refineries blowing up the next day, the books trace the decay of large bridges and buildings and other technology. Cool pictures. A lot will be hard to spot in 1,000 years.

The last to crumble may be mega-stone, pyramids and bridge foundations, which is not high-technology. The *first* to crumble IS metals. Much recent technology is about turning red dirt into Iron. Iron desperately wants to turn back into red dirt. As your woods-car and Jimmy's rust-rod show; also many bridges around here, my patio table.

Why limit the thought to "humans"? Mammals come all sizes and smarts. A hippo has no more use for steel wire than a brontosaur. But the common dinosaur in New Jersey is more like a biped deer. While a deer would not pierce beads, there were other dinos who could be even smarter and "handier". It is only in the last decades that humans really dominate over "dumb animals". In a richer climate a community of smart dinosaurs could smelt steel and drive cars and vape tobacco; thousands of years after they die out it would be hard to know they ever did that.

Remember that most of the earth surface is over-turned every so many million years by plate tectonics. The coast from Boston to Nova Scotia is a fairly recent land-slam which twisted and folded a vast section of earth. Also glaciers. The glacier here crushed mountains to boulders and smeared boulder-dust (clay) from Quebec to the sea. Any mere pyramid or car is long gone.

We humans use our hands. But "After we're gone" and the cockroaches develop Archeology, and all they find are mineralized bone bits, could they tell if a raccoon, a lemur, or a minor ape's hands were most suited to gross and fine manipulation?

The Iron Ore fields off the Great Lakes could really be the junk-yards of dinosaurs.

The Canadian Shield, about the least disturbed part of the earth's surface, could be the result of a massive thermonuclear blast from a pre-dinosaur technology. So extreme it passivized all tectonic strain, so old that the radioactivity has faded. Full of Nickel and Copper... could be a factory area targeted by an enemy? Yes, the more likely explanation is volcanoes, and volcanic concentration of metals, but...

An awesome article    Thanks

 

[dmp]

For instance if you simply goggle "When were th epyramids of Giza built" you will get the MAJORITY of hits saying between 2550-2490 BC...

My understanding is it was dated to the pharaoh Khufu because of a mark found in the relief above the king's chamber, however, it is dubious because the explorer who discovered it went up alone after others had been up there and might have made the mark himself to gain fame.  This is the only historical evidence that dated the pyramid.
I also doubt much of the accepted story of the great pyramid. 

I believe in science, I believe the majority of scholars but it seems to me that there are some obvious bias in the scientific community where long held beliefs are not allowed to be questioned...

I think there also must be a lot of exasperation from scholars with the videos and TV shows on ancient aliens in Egypt  ;D.
I'm not too worried about the popular consensus since popularity is often a terrible judge of quality.  ;D

For instance the great pyramid of egypt takes up about 13 acres and is almost perfectly aligned (true north not simply magnetic north) NESW within half a degree...not only that but if you take its height and width it is an exact representation of the dimensions of the earth (on a scale of 1/43,200) in fact if you measure the height of the pyramid and multiply by 43,200 you get the polar radius of the earth, then if you multiply the base perimeter of the pyramid and multiply it by the same number you get the equatorial circumference of the earth...

The dimensions of the great pyramid are related to a circle (c=2*pi*r). If the height is r, the length of the four sides sum to c. So the designers seemed to understood the relationship between radius and circumference of a circle and the constant number pi (not clear if they understood it was an irrational / transcendental number). 
It also, as you say, is related to the radius/circumference of the earth. The height in royal cubits is 280, and 1 cubit is pi/6 meters. Why is a cubit related to a meter? The meter was defined in 1791 to equal 1/10e6 of the distance between the equator and the pole, so the meter is directly related to the earth's circumference.  The fact that the royal cubit is a factor of pi with the meter, implies that the ancient Egyptians knew the radius of the earth centuries earlier, and based the unit of measurement on it, such that 280 cubits = 1/43200 of the earth's radius.  You're explanation is equally valid though - that they knew the radius AND circumference and built the pyramid in representation, at 1/43200 scale.

The fact that pyramid is off less than a degree kinda disposes the idea that aliens had anything to do with it in my book...if you came form outer space and helped build that monument it would not be off at all...the degree of less than 1% makes me think it is purely human, but on a scale of advancement that makes modern culture seem weak in comparison.

Perhaps the pyramid wass dead on correct, and  what we now measure as true north is different? Currently the earth rotates ~365 rotations / year, 23.5 degree inclination, but this may not be the same as it used to be.  I think I read somewhere that the ancient Egyptians believed there were 360 days/year. It's surprising they would have gotten this wrong. Maybe they didn't? Maybe the earth was rocked on its axis of rotation at some point.

 

[L´Andratté]

Not to cast doubt on your discussion in which I am too uninformed to take part,
but there is a beautiful passage in Eco´s "Focault´s Pendulum" where he takes
measurements from his favorite cornerstore´s dimensions and "proves"
several connections to the pyramids of Gizeh´s dimensions (or something
along those lines, it´s been decades since I read that, need to do it again)
It´s a terrific book about the human mind and it´s pitfalls...

I think the oldest known "high-civilization" was the mysterious Indus-Culture,
fascinating stuff to look up, like planned cities with flawless sewer systems 2000 years BC (but there´s always the chance the Chinese did it already thousand years earlier... ;D)

N.Y.Harari is a wonderul author, even if one disagrees on some points, his thinking is inspiring, I read everything I can from him.

 

[JohnRoberts]

N.Y.Harari is a wonderul author, even if one disagrees on some points, his thinking is inspiring, I read everything I can from him.

Definitely thought provoking. His discussion about past history introduces some interesting explanations. The future has not happened yet so who knows? His speculation seems pretty well informed. 

JR

 

[iomegaman]

N.Y.Harari seems to replace one set of myths with another, his book Sapiens had some inaccuracies that made reading it a waste of my time, thats not to say he does not have some interesting ideas, but accepting certain myths as facts is not a good step forward when you are trying to dispel myths.

For instance he has suggested that human consciousness can be replaced by AI based on the myth that we are basically biological machines...as far as I can tell human consciousness is not limited to a reduced set of biological arrays as we are discovering in AI research itself...making a pile of silicone and metal bits self aware is not something we are capable of in spite of all the Scifi memes presented to us by Darpa and MIT.

 

[JohnRoberts]

N.Y.Harari seems to replace one set of myths with another, his book Sapiens had some inaccuracies that made reading it a waste of my time, thats not to say he does not have some interesting ideas, but accepting certain myths as facts is not a good step forward when you are trying to dispel myths.

For instance he has suggested that human consciousness can be replaced by AI based on the myth that we are basically biological machines...as far as I can tell human consciousness is not limited to a reduced set of biological arrays as we are discovering in AI research itself...making a pile of silicone and metal bits self aware is not something we are capable of in spite of all the Scifi memes presented to us by Darpa and MIT.

I finished the book and it got weaker near the end when he tried to tie together loose threads, and make perhaps relevant observations about now.  He does not seem alone in his respect for the power/value of data.

I was more impressed with some observations he made about past history, but that may just be history lessons he learned attending Oxford (well respected place AFAIK).

I consider reading the book a positive learning experience but it is not my new bible. I still recommend it as an interesting read with some different perspectives on the world. Hard to debate about the future.

JR