Did prehistory look like middle earth?

reply to post by criticalhit


I am actually 100% cool with dragons being Dino fossils they couldn't explain. That's just too perfect.


I loved the rest of your post tho. Well done!

reply to post by criticalhit


Oh and I'm pretty sure the megaladon thing was a more of a docudrama "what if" type deal. Along the same lines as mermaids the body revealed.

rickymouse
Well, six hundred years ago you could live in the forest here in parts of North America and never venture out into the sun during the summer. There was a high canopy above the land, the Indians created this place. White man came and cut it all down and sent the wood to Europe. Yeah, it may have looked like middle earth.

While white man did "cut it all down", the American Indians were VERY good and efficient about deforestation and really the shape of America's land and forest was created by them.

As for prehistory looking like Middle Earth - nope, most humans were pretty much Iron Age right away, the Elves and the Valar etc saw to all that... Tolkien made the world from an amalgam of Northern European Iron Age mythology mixed with his First World War experiences which is when he wrote the early drafts of what later appears in The Silmarilllion and Books of Lost Tales and so on.

It is however possible to at the very least speculate on real world geographic and historic locations when you overlay the map of Third Age M.E over Europe, The Shire and Arnor being Britain, Gondor possibly as Rome, Mordor as Eastern Europe on the lands of the Hun with the Easterlings from Mongolia and so forth.... it's not perfect in it's correlation but it's pretty close and matches his stated aims of a mythology for England using all that feeds into the land per the cultures that helped populate it and influence it's culture in ancient times.

Plus he used what he knew - he was a professor of Norse, Anglo-Saxon and Celtic Languages with a particular love of Beowolf and The Kalavala.


reply to post by Rapha


I used to GM MERP with a bunch of mates many years ago, and if someone did not agree to putting the kettle on, i'd threaten them with a roll on the "D" crush critical chart (not "E", i'm not a complete monster). The tea must flow!

reply to post by criticalhit


any information you have relating to reports of neandertal being seen in Russia in the last century would be eagerly appreciated.

ArtemisE
reply to post by criticalhit

 

Oh and I'm pretty sure the megaladon thing was a more of a docudrama "what if" type deal. Along the same lines as mermaids the body revealed.

alive or not today doesn't matter, it actually was alive until around one Million years ago... that we know of from fossils, it would be ridiculous to assume that the most recent fossils we found were the very last of the species, we know for fact they were around while hominids were walking erect making tools etc, it is far more likely even if no longer around today that they lasted a lot longer than our most recent fossil find particularly when you consider that the entire ocean of remains for us to find happens to be under water...

Doesn't have to all fit perfectly, regardless at some point in out history almost as a certainty by location our ancestors looked out at the Ocean off South Africa and saw this Leviathan do it's thing...

bigfatfurrytexan
reply to post by criticalhit

 

any information you have relating to reports of neandertal being seen in Russia in the last century would be eagerly appreciated.

doubtfulnews.com... ana-wild-woman-has-been-solved-through-dna-analysis/

This is interesting, one of the accounts I was thinking of was in regards to Zana... Apparently Zana is now thought to have been a Sub-Saharn African. But you should read the original story which involves humanoids they used to "break" in wells and use as labor in the region. There are a lot of stories from the area to this day, some of the older finds we have are from within the Urals, but again I have to maintain that the odds are dramatically in favor of any species having survived at least a bit longer than our newest fossil records. To leave fossils at all there are still likely a lot of you running amok at the time.

reply to post by ArtemisE


That would be so cool if did. If there was a time machine invented i would go and never return. The world we live in is a sick place, take me somewhere magical please

reply to post by Baddogma


Conventional wisdom and literary criticism holds that Tolkein's stories of Middle Earth are a political treatise on the perils of industrialization, disguised as a boy's adventure tale.

I rather like your take however. Perhaps the Elves are the origin of flying saucer stories. His elves flee across the sea (space?) to the "Grey Havens" IIRC....

reply to post by 0zzymand0s


Yeah, obviously Tolkien was influenced by the politics (read wars caused by non-nuanced evil, mainly) of his time. Colonialism, industrialization,too... heh, any good art reflects some reality and resonates with the observer.

I was having fun with the premise of this thread, but sure... it IS possible.

originally posted by: bigfatfurrytexan
reply to post by criticalhit

 

any information you have relating to reports of neandertal being seen in Russia in the last century would be eagerly appreciated.

I am looking for an article in a book I had as there was a chapter on an incident where a Russian army unit fired on and killed some humanoid people in the 1800s that were not quite human. It gave the name of the captain and described the people as having "sloping foreheads" and it was surmised that they were Neandertals. I will keep looking for you.

a reply to: ArtemisE

I heard that as little as 100 millions years ago when the dinosaurs were roaming the earth that there was still volcano activity in the west from the underwater shelves in the ocean merging together and building the mountains that we see today. This info is probably way off, but it is cool to think of when the mountains were actually being made.

The History channel gives a wack and unbelievable explanation which is what we can expect from the corporate world of television liars. They say it was the earth was spinning around in the solar system and super hot asteroids / rock matter was clinging onto the earth eventually forming a sphere. Stubborn ignorant man is still incapable of teaching that mother earth has a consciousness because they arrogantly need to think that they are masters of physical reality.

The reality is that in the first billion of two of the earth's creation things were probably astonishing to the utmost magnificence. The forming of earth and the solar system was probably like a magical event, these large spheres of matter coming together with all the amazing power and events happening in the creation of star systems. We are talking about having no sky for a billion years - nothing but fire and dust everywhere. It is reality, and such a real amazing reality to know that after billions of years of flying through the galaxy, our solar system has matured, earth was formed in it's splendor, and earth was living. Earth proved to be living because the light from the sun dispersed a kind of nutrients for the matter of earth which was also the former matter of a star, and up came trees which gave oxygen and created the environment and atmosphere to house beings. Natural selection doesn't discount the Creator to the least bit.

originally posted by: greyer
a reply to: ArtemisE

I heard that as little as 100 millions years ago when the dinosaurs were roaming the earth that there was still volcano activity in the west from the underwater shelves in the ocean merging together and building the mountains that we see today. This info is probably way off, but it is cool to think of when the mountains were actually being made.

Then get ready for extra cool, because what you describe above has never stopped since (and before) that time, it's happening as you read this.

Harte

a reply to: grumpy64

that would be tres cool.

The prevailing theory is that the last stronghold of the neandertal was the Iberian peninsula. Finding out differently would be interesting.

Thanks for the effort.

a reply to: Harte

You are talking about the tectonic plates merging together over millions of years, yes that is one way the mountains are formed, but I am talking about a separate way much before that - when magma covered the whole surface of the earth and the whole earth was more or less volcanic activity, asteroids were constantly hitting the earth because the atmosphere had not been created yet.

Much more action back then.