Why Historically Known cultures hid information about the Ice Age

I'm trying to form a complete hypothesis. I think this is version 3.0

My hypothesis about why history about the Ice Age was so taboo in cultures such as the Qin Dynasty of China, Dynastic Egypt, or even how the Bible discusses people before "the flood" being "wicked".

My hypothesis is that the Ice Age was simply a better time. Humans lived comfortably as hunter gatherers who did not need to move around to find prey. The population was small because a favorable "young to old" ratio was unnecessary. Everyone basically lived the life of an aristocrat.

Unlike the others, Greek legend actually says this was the case.

en.wikipedia.org...


Mammoths have to eat 150 pounds of food per day to survive (for a small one. Bigger ones require more). The Earth had many big herds of them.

The Boreal period, which came after the Younger Dryas event, is the time when Europe got most of its forests.

en.wikipedia.org...(age)


Presently, my thinking on this is that most of the terrain prior to the Boreal, was covered in "fast growth" vegetation, like tall grasses. The Mammoths would basically walk around stripping the land bare, and then come a few months later to find it had all grown back.

Humans hunted mammoths. But Mammoths are more intelligent than most prey animals, so I'm sure they probably knew about the threat and tended to avoid human occupied lands.

But, because they avoided those lands, the vegetation just kept growing greener and greener, until they couldn't resist. (Sort of like how if you try to crack down on the illegal drug trade in a major city, the street price of drugs just goes up until someone is crazy enough to try selling it.)


Or maybe lone stragglers would go there if they lost their herd.

Also mammoths can be territorial. Those tusks aren't there just for warding off predators. They also allow pairs of mammoths to have tusk offs to fight over mates, or grazing privileges.

The loser, or losing herd, might find they have nowhere else to go and try their luck in human lands.



Either way humans could just sit and wait, and food would come to them. One kill could feed their whole tribe for a month or so, and during a cold winter, they didn't even need to eat it right away.

The basic idea?

Rulers who came after the Younger Dryas event didn't want their people learning about that age, because they wouldn't be content with their circumstances.

Having to plow and harvest is mind numbing, repetitive, joyless work. And the majority of the population had to do it every day.

The overpopulation that came from having large families, to create the needed "young to old" ratio meant constant, and frequently genocidal, wars between groups of humans. You were lucky if you could go a whole century without watching a generation march off and many not return.

What ruler WOULDN'T want to bury the older history?

a reply to: bloodymarvelous
I thought the reason pre flood people were so wicked was the fact they lived up to a thousand years.

www.stevenmtaylor.com...

The above book is quite a good read.

Its not about the suppression of the knowledge more an attempt to explain why life was so good pre 'civilisation' and the lack of violence and why as we settled pressures naturally grew. iirc

Actually with the advent of "civilization" came stratified societies with bullies called kings or chiefs who tend to hoard stuff for his / her friends and families. .( Taxes) , they turned bands of hunters into organized professional thieves, who took other Ppls stuff and people's bodies.
all this maybe symbolised by various stories from across the globe e.g. Cain vs Abel, the whole eating from the tree of knowledge Adam and Eve .
If the lifestyle of the Khoisan folks and Ba-twa folks then life was very egalitarian.

originally posted by: JON666
a reply to: bloodymarvelous
I thought the reason pre flood people were so wicked was the fact they lived up to a thousand years.

Thus humans growing denser bones and having a pronounced brow.

I tend toward the idea that a world wide catastrophe, like an Ice Age or universal flood, would tend to wipe the cultural memory of those that survived it. Also, without a written language, any such stories of paradise lost would have changed over the centuries and may not have survived in any recognizable form 10,000 or more years later. I also can't think of life being any easier or better before civilization became firmly established. I doubt it was very easy to take down some mega fauna prey, bring it back to the village, and then process it for consumption.

Culturally, primitive people tend to worship angry/vengeful gods and spirits that require appeasement at every turn. With less control over their food supply and the dangers of primitive living, I'd suspect they were in constant fear of their deities along with everything else.

I do like this theory though and can see it being applied to "Eden" like areas where there is plentiful wild foods and a mild climate. However, with better living conditions comes extra time to invent a civilization, even if it is sort lived and dependent on local conditions.

a reply to: JON666

A bit twisted logic all the same if that was indeed the case.

Age brings with it a modicum of wisdom, understanding, and empathy that people in their younger years fail to grasp.

Can't see why living for a millennium in perpetual harmony with our natural surroundings would make whatever constituted humans back then wicked.

If they did live longer or grew to 10ft tall i imagine it had more to do with the higher oxygen content of the atmosphere if im honest.

a reply to: bloodymarvelous
Are you taking into consdieration the fact that the Ice Ages (by definition) were periods when most of Europe was covered by ice?
In the circumstances, idyllic esistence seems implausible.

originally posted by: andy06shake
Can't see why living for a millennium in perpetual harmony with our natural surroundings would make whatever constituted humans back then wicked.

One word: Incredible boredom.


I would be all kinds of wicked. I'd be the primary reason they wrote the Ten Commandments.

This comment is going to be a bit tangential I'm sorry, but I'm surprised the Ice Age isn't, at least as far as I know, referenced at all in what we've excavated so far of Gobekli Tepe. That place is 12,000 years old, right on the cusp of the end of the Ice Age.

It's still being excavated but for something as unbelievably advanced as that, as early as that, a remarkably ancient time, there has to have been some form of writing or a way of planning. I can't imagine the logistics of designing a place like that with no written language. Surely there should be some pictographs or something depicting more than juts animals.

A true anomaly that in my personal opinion is not adequately explained by the current theoretical timeline for the evolution of civilization we've come to know.

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

I suggest the primary reasons for the Ten Commandments were probably about boredom.

Well, that and control.

a reply to: bloodymarvelous

Ice age people was peaceful because it was too cold to go out. Like protesters in winter today.

originally posted by: Trueman
a reply to: bloodymarvelous

Ice age people was peaceful because it was too cold to go out. Like protesters in winter today.

And they would have been killed by short faced bears, cave lions and cave hyenas.

a reply to: Trueman

Generally, people who come from cold, tribal cutures, are anything but peaceful.

I mean the cold weather dont seem to have put a dent in the likes of the Vikings stride.

originally posted by: andy06shake
Generally, people...are anything but peaceful.

FTFY.

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

True dat.

LoL

originally posted by: DISRAELI
a reply to: bloodymarvelous
Are you taking into consdieration the fact that the Ice Ages (by definition) were periods when most of Europe was covered by ice? In the circumstances, idyllic esistence seems implausible.

In Europe. But not in India, Indonesia, Japan, southern China, even Africa. Europe is not the center of the Universe,

a reply to: MichiganSwampBuck

Culturally, primitive people tend to worship angry/vengeful gods and spirits that require appeasement at every turn. With less control over their food supply and the dangers of primitive living, I'd suspect they were in constant fear of their deities along with everything else.

I have to respectfully push back on the above, it is civilized people who tended to be the most murderous, priest/ kings who sacrificed virgins to appease the Gods/ Goddess, to have rainfall to replenish the earth or the sun God sky daddy to play his part, typically a "primitive " Hg , would pray for good hunting or thank the animal who gave it's life for the benefit of the tribe, yes in lean yrs there maybe competition for hunting grounds, but sud busters and herders hate each other up to the present, e.g. Cowboys vs farmers in the American West back in the day, Fulani herds men vs Dogan farmers today.

Matter of fact the more "civilized" the more murderous , everything is ratchet up to a massive scale, right now we are at our most advanced and "civilized" yet we can end us at any moment, with or without nukes.

originally posted by: andy06shake
a reply to: Trueman

Generally, people who come from cold, tribal cutures, are anything but peaceful.

I mean the cold weather dont seem to have put a dent in the likes of the Vikings stride.

Yet today the cold nations of the North are the most peaceful, the temperate and hot nation zone nations are always on edge.
And the Romans from the temperate zones could 🐕 walk the Vikings and other northerners on open ground.

a reply to: Spider879

Yes ""civilised"" first world nations now, if thats a thing.

Took them a while all the same.

Cold regions tend to breed hardy warrior clans just down to nature of there way of life, climate, and geography.

Only stupid people fight on open ground my Man.

Rome(the city anyhoo)has been seized and occupied by enemies so many times that it is hard to come up with an exact number.

Great civilisation all the same but it had its faults, anyway its back now, just look at both our respective nations similar parallels.