Why Historically Known cultures hid information about the Ice Age

I remember reading about this a few years ago

the author suggested that man's earliest memories should have been nightmarish--wandering, forever one step from starving, competing with saber-tooth tigers, dire wolves, etc.

instead, cultures seem to have Eden myths, in which people were once much happier and had easier lives before (fill in blank) happened and ruined everything.

Christians / Jews of course blame the exile from Eden and the later flood.

someone suggested the transition from hunter-gatherer (a fun easy life, in his opinion) to settled farms, near-slavery, drudge work, limited diet.

imagine how Native Americans lived before the Europeans. less efficient, fewer numbers, but much more freedom and healthier lifestyle.

other than some Norse myths I'm not aware of any ice disaster stories. one would think that the ice would have been recent enough to have inspired some memory.

a reply to: ElGoobero

imagine how Native Americans lived before the Europeans. less efficient, fewer numbers, but much more freedom and healthier lifestyle.

Be careful here, America was filled with...errr Native Americans, and not all lived in simple villages or were nomads, matter of fact some of the most advanced and crowded civilizations were in the Americas North Meso-America and South.
What they lacked was hard metal technology.. and could die if a Euro-African stranger coughed on them,first contact.

a reply to: bloodymarvelous

You might want to rethink this. It would appear that the ice age was talked about in very indirect fashions during many ancient stories and myths. I touched a little on the subject in this thread ATS: Atlantis. In this thread I posted there is a discussion about how in the dialogs of Critias major hints are dropped that discuss an event that takes place during the end stages of the last major glaciation period. While they don't flat out call it an Ice Age, they do discuss some events that clearly point to the events taking place. Around the globe there are other tales that hint at the end of the last major glaciation period as well. You just have to loo at what a story says, and focus on what the story is telling you.

a reply to: ElGoobero

The last period of glaciation which is often informally called the “Ice Age” peaked about 20,000 years ago.

Not much history from back then to be found left around or intact if we are honest.

Technically speaking, our Earth remains in an ice age, as ice still sits atop Greenland and Antarctica, holding enough water to raise sea levels by a few hundred feet.

Plenty of flood legends in just about every ancient culture on Earth.

originally posted by: Spider879
a reply to: ElGoobero

imagine how Native Americans lived before the Europeans. less efficient, fewer numbers, but much more freedom and healthier lifestyle.

Be careful here, native Americans were filled with...errr Native Americans, and not all lived in simple villages or were nomads, matter of fact some of the most advanced and crowded civilizations were in the Americas North Meso-America and South.
What they lacked was hard metal technology.. and could die if a Euro-African stranger coughed on them,first contact.

I acknowledge that Native Americans were a varied bunch with a wide range of cultures, from MesoAmerican empires to hunter/gatherers.
I tend to think in terms of local (Northeast) nations which tended to be loosely managed villages.

a reply to: bloodymarvelous

Maybe NOT hunter gatherers, were humans are found today was the cold windswept and often barren hinterland's were indeed there would have been primitive inland tribal community's and nomadic hunters but the bulk of the human population probably lived on the more fertile lower land and probably even had city's and town's hugging the now long lost coast line today hundreds of feet beneath the waves.

The ancient Persians had a legend about the world freezing to the far north, an ancient Noah type figure built a stone ark under ground and sheltered with his family and animal's until it was safe enough to journey south.

It may be true despite protestations from the sceptic community that the pyramids and even the plateau of Giza are actually far more ancient putting them back either to during the last ice age toward it's end or according to some even before the last ice age, that they may have been renovated in dynastic Egyptian time's (though there is a great theory out of Russia that the King's Chamber is actually the top of an analogue elevator shaft and a fake tomb with the real one having been lowered into place and still holding the king's body and his treasures somewhere below).

There are huge stones that are obviously artificial at Gornaya Shoria in Siberia indicating a completely unknown civilization once existed there, stones large enough to have weathered the ice age.



And ever hear of the Lena Pillars also in Siberia.


And that elevator theory.



Back before the flood there were giant's that ate all the work's of man then consumed the people themselves.

Today we have corporate Giant's that eat all the work of people and then consume the people themselves.

I don't see how anyone can say that Ice Age "history" was "hidden" by anyone.

There is no Ice Age history. There was no writing.

And oral histories change over a few hundred years - think what 20,000 years would do to any oral history.

Harte

originally posted by: ElGoobero

originally posted by: Spider879
a reply to: ElGoobero

imagine how Native Americans lived before the Europeans. less efficient, fewer numbers, but much more freedom and healthier lifestyle.

Be careful here, native Americans were filled with...errr Native Americans, and not all lived in simple villages or were nomads, matter of fact some of the most advanced and crowded civilizations were in the Americas North Meso-America and South.
What they lacked was hard metal technology.. and could die if a Euro-African stranger coughed on them,first contact.

I acknowledge that Native Americans were a varied bunch with a wide range of cultures, from MesoAmerican empires to hunter/gatherers.
I tend to think in terms of local (Northeast) nations which tended to be loosely managed villages.

I'm sorry but you really could t be more off base with you assessment of North Eastern tribes. Look at the
Iroquois/ Haudenosaunee. They controlled most of NY, parts of Southern Canada and down into Pennsylvania with outliers as far south as modern day Maryland. I would dare say that they woukdnt have been able to form a Confederacy that controlled such a large swath of land without a high-level of organization.

They were incredibly well organized, lived in a matriarchal society, had vast farms in addition to hunting and gathering

originally posted by: andy06shake
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.

Nope just the biblical record and didn't the kings records of Egypt have those dudes living thousand of years?

a reply to: peter vlar

Also they had a higher form of understanding compared to modern Hu-Man because everyone knew the mushroom.

In many ways they were more advanced than we are right now.

a reply to: JON666

The Babylonian records and clay tablets/seals also record their earliest kings living in excess of a 1000 years and being rather tall.

Hyperbole being as thing back then also may be the case.

Ile entertain the notion humans lived longer under different atmospheric conditions 10s of thousands of years ago, but not a thousand years.

And some actual evidence might be nice.

a reply to: andy06shake

Atmospheric conditions were quite different the bible says it had not rained that the was water in the and above it too. Prehistoric winged creatures can not fly in our encounter atmosphere.

a reply to: JON666

Yes im aware of the firmament.

Bible says a lot of things.

Ever herd of a thunderbird?

Those have been reported throughout history, as have alleged pterodactyl sightings.

How the hell you can determine the flight characteristics of winged prehistoric creatures is beyond me.

Unless you have a spare Tardis handy.

originally posted by: Harte
I don't see how anyone can say that Ice Age "history" was "hidden" by anyone.

There is no Ice Age history. There was no writing.

And oral histories change over a few hundred years - think what 20,000 years would do to any oral history.

Harte

I wouldn't say there was no writing. There was no modern writing. But, as Genevieve Von Petzinger has pointed out, there are 32 symbols that keep repeating through cave and rock art all throughout Europe. what these symbols denote is anyone's guess, as their meanings have been lost to time. But when the same symbols keep showing up in different places with different dates attached to them, accompanied by well done paintings, it's safe to say they had an important meaning. Now just speculating, could it also have been possible that these same symbols also could have been applied to biodegradable surfaces such as wood or bark? If so, and these symbols were recognized as having meaning by others, wouldn't this be considered an early form of writing?

What we do know of life before the advent of an agrarian society is that people were larger, healthier, and ate a better diet than at any time until the most recent modern times. we know this by examining their skeletons. We also know that infectious diseases were not as prevalent either. From examining how modern primitive hunter/gatherer tribes live we can make assumptions on how heir lives went. They didn't have to work as long to secure their food. They had more leisure time. A traumatic injury almost certainly meant death though. Securing meat and defending against both predators and other tribes had great risk of these injuries. Still, mankind lived for a hundred thousand years with little advancement or change from this and survived, and even at times flourished. Nobody knows why we decided to change our way of life, as there are more than a dozen competing theories. My personal favorite is that some men were living in an area that allowed them to become so successful that they began to acquire more important items than they could carry, and that is what led to the idea to form the first settlements and acquire a more stable method of obtaining food.

a reply to: Harte

Strangely I have to ask your opinion about this article:

From: ancient.eu

Writing is the physical manifestation of a spoken language. It is thought that human beings developed language c. 35,000 BCE as evidenced by cave paintings from the period of the Cro-Magnon Man (c. 50,000-30,000 BCE) which appear to express concepts concerning daily life. These images suggest a language because, in some instances, they seem to tell a story (say, of a hunting expedition in which specific events occurred) rather than being simply pictures of animals and people.

Although they do admit that a structured written language doesn't emerge until much later, they do bring this point up;

The earliest form of writing was pictographs – symbols which represented objects – and served to aid in remembering such things as which parcels of grain had gone to which destination or how many sheep were needed for events like sacrifices in the temples. These pictographs were impressed onto wet clay which was then dried, and these became official records of commerce. As beer was a very popular beverage in ancient Mesopotamia, many of the earliest records extant have to do with the sale of beer. With pictographs, one could tell how many jars or vats of beer were involved in a transaction but not necessarily what that transaction meant. As the historian Kriwaczek notes,

"All that had been devised thus far was a technique for noting down things, items and objects, not a writing system. A record of `Two Sheep Temple God Inanna’ tells us nothing about whether the sheep are being delivered to, or received from, the temple, whether they are carcasses, beasts on the hoof, or anything else about them."

So what limits the thoughts that the Lascaux caves (I hope I spelt that correctly) aren't descriptive writings in an early yet lost language? Why waste time painting it if it wasn't important for some reason?

a reply to: Guyfriday

I am not sure the cave paintings (Of animals) were anything but a pictorial type of symbolism however that can be regarded as a precursor to writing so you have made a great point there but you know there are many mysterious markings that seem to be symbolic that have been found at very ancient sites that though not REGARDED as writing by the archaeological mainstream may very well be just that.
But back to the cave painting's not all of them were of animal's and some bear uncanny resemblance to a form of early writing.
www.newscientist.com...

a reply to: LABTECH767

Well we know from sites such as Gobekli Tepe that symbolic writings were being used for communication as far back as 9100 bce. I don't see why we should just discount cave paintings as "just art". Think of the resources that went into creating those paintings and then wonder why they were even made. They mean something we just haven't figured it out yet.

A modern day equivalent to this would be a car's engine. A person that has years of experience building, fixing, and working on internal combustion engines would have a hard time working on an electric car engine. it's the same thing here, we've been using a systematic language of regulated symbols for thousands of years, so when looking at a purely none regulated symbolic written language we're lost.

a reply to: bloodymarvelous,

You have to grasp that during the Ice age the weather was different , the polar vortex was more stable, the trade winds more predictable, the Sahara was fertile with rivers running from West of Africa to Egypt. The land masses were more as the water was locked up in ice. I think that the Phoenician port closest to the Americas on west Africa, had been there long before it was called Phoenician. Seasonal winds were predictable, it was just a matter of dropping the sail , latitude navigation would work well. It probably stopped during the Bronze age collapse, didn't they find Hides of copper which were made from smelted ore from Canada? if their was a profit to be made the risk would be worth it.

a reply to: Guyfriday

Personally I believe you are correct however for a writing system to be identified we need to have a set of repeating symbol's in a repeating pattern, this pattern may then have abstract meaning and represent words and concept's beyond the simple image of an antelope or a hunter BUT those images were never that simple.

Look at Australian Aboriginal art and cave painting's, some of them too may have perhaps been a form of proto script and the native people certainly seem to believe that they can often interpret there meaning in ways which have been lost to our view of the world.

I personally believe we are not the only human civilization to have climbed the long ladder to a technological age, the absence of rubbish tip's and ancient coke can's does not preclude this it merely mean's they may not have been the same kind of consumer society as we are, there scientists may have held a priestly cast in there society and much of there technology may have been reserved for the elites of there world but just how advanced such a limited and stymied civilization could then become is anyone's guess.

Then again there is the whole field of Oopart's of which this site has an innumerable number of threads about.

Just to give some examples the Istanbul Rocket was an ancient Artefact that resembled a man in a Rocket plane it's wing's and his head missing but unmistakable for what it represented, it was handled by many experts over time and may have been swapped for a fake copy the real one then entering private hand's since there is a huge black market for such enigmatic antiquities, claim's that oopart have been solved therefore are not necessarily accurate and may be based on false evidence in the form of the fake plaster replacement used to replace it.

An object resembling part of a rocket engine was discovered under Pakals tome (and note the similarity between his famous tome carving rocket man and the Turkish object.


Recent Lidar Discovery's have shown that the Mayan ruins are actually mostly part of a single gigantic city that once housed millions of residents making the so called wars between the accepted city's merely gang turf wars within that city.


I think it fair to say that most views of these ancient civilizations have been shown to be wrong but archaeologists will cling to there paradigm views kicking and screaming like baby's having there rattle taken away from them.

I am not saying that these people had that technology but that just perhaps they had memory of it or legend's about it.

Have another look at this video I posted above as well and jump forward to 14:12 mark, what is that under the ground in that part of Siberia on the arctic coast, is it the remains of a very modern looking multi storey apartment complex? (and how old would it have to be for it's current geological location to make any sense?).