If there really had been an ancient super-advanced culture ..........

originally posted by: bloodymarvelous

en.wikipedia.org...

Yes of course, why? It has no validity like so many of the old fringe stories that live on in fervent belief.

A couple of diehards are missing something EXTREMELY OBVIOUS that pokes massive holes in their hopes for super-ancient cultures --- you know those nifty satellites in orbit that can detect ancient rivers, lakes in deserts, the occasional ancient town, and on occasion, Amazonian cities buried under jungles?

They haven't found any mythical highly advanced cultures for a reason.

They flat out aren't there.

Otherwise, those scans would yield more than just...dried up river and lake beds under sand, small towns buried under sand, or crumbling ruins under dense jungles.


I think the best you're going to get is what we already got. Sometimes, once in a while, you have to admit your hopes were a bit higher than reality could deliver on.

originally posted by: Xtrozero

originally posted by: Hanslune
When the gate was removed it was revealed that it rotated on a metal shaft and rested on a truck bearing.

Lol good to know, but still I do not think people truly understand what raw manpower and all the time in the world can accomplish. My personal belief is there has been those Leonardo da Vinci's throughout history and when one pops up at the right place humans are greatly advanced for a short period of time. Sometimes that knowledge is lost and with the lack of communication past local areas, or deemed secret society stuff, it wasn't allow it to spread and that knowledge is needed to be reinvented down the road, but we can see great things accomplished with limited tech due to these moments in time of super genius inspirations.

Yes little techno pops up but then many were then lost. You have to get a system that can pass these ideas on (writing and a way to preserve it). Its on this premise I've searched for a flowering of humanity in the Eemian. Which then flared up again at the end of the last ice age and this time it reacted a critical number of people, cultures grew and enough technology was kept and maintain that progress was made. Both AE and Sumer fell but others took up the torch so to speak.

As to the Eemian - nothing so far.

en.wikipedia.org...

originally posted by: Hanslune

Yes little techno pops up but then many were then lost. You have to get a system that can pass these ideas on (writing and a way to preserve it). Its on this premise I've searched for a flowering of humanity in the Eemian. Which then flared up again at the end of the last ice age and this time it reacted a critical number of people, cultures grew and enough technology was kept and maintain that progress was made. Both AE and Sumer fell but others took up the torch so to speak.

As to the Eemian - nothing so far.

en.wikipedia.org...

I have worked with a super genius and I have always said that super geniuses can invent things out of thin air quite easily and once they do that then really smart people can understand and duplicate their work. The one I worked with needed a programing language and there were none out there that he liked so he just made his own...as example.

Would Ecmain still be in Africa? The sea waters were rather high about 125 kya.

originally posted by: Xtrozero

originally posted by: Hanslune

Yes little techno pops up but then many were then lost. You have to get a system that can pass these ideas on (writing and a way to preserve it). Its on this premise I've searched for a flowering of humanity in the Eemian. Which then flared up again at the end of the last ice age and this time it reacted a critical number of people, cultures grew and enough technology was kept and maintain that progress was made. Both AE and Sumer fell but others took up the torch so to speak.

As to the Eemian - nothing so far.

en.wikipedia.org...

I have worked with a super genius and I have always said that super geniuses can invent things out of thin air quite easily and once they do that then really smart people can understand and duplicate their work. The one I worked with needed a programing language and there were none out there that he liked so he just made his own...as example.

Would Ecmain still be in Africa? The sea waters were rather high about 125 kya.

Smart people are smart like the folks who came up with the idea for a bow and arrow, or planting seeds, or domesticating animals.

Eemian. I've looked for evidence of a flowering of human culture at that time by scanning papers in archaeology,anthropology, geology, etc., nothing so far. The first 45+ years have been a bust - I have hopes for the next 45. I did site surveys in Europe, Middle East, India, Nepal and few other places - nada.

Another thing to remember about super-advanced types is, they might only have been on Earth for about 400 years before they reached space.

With other grand cultures, like Egypt, we've got thousands of years worth of relics. Because they lasted, thousands of years.

originally posted by: Nyiah
A couple of diehards are missing something EXTREMELY OBVIOUS that pokes massive holes in their hopes for super-ancient cultures --- you know those nifty satellites in orbit that can detect ancient rivers, lakes in deserts, the occasional ancient town, and on occasion, Amazonian cities buried under jungles?

They haven't found any mythical highly advanced cultures for a reason.

They flat out aren't there.

Otherwise, those scans would yield more than just...dried up river and lake beds under sand, small towns buried under sand, or crumbling ruins under dense jungles.


I think the best you're going to get is what we already got. Sometimes, once in a while, you have to admit your hopes were a bit higher than reality could deliver on.

The radar scans mostly only pierce desert sand. Anything with a lot of water will reflect the radar, and the radar waves can't fit between the gaps in grains smaller than sand.

They can also see through forest/jungle canopies, but only things that aren't fully buried. Normal dirt isn't penetrable (not very deep, anyway.)



This all, of course, assumes that they built a lot of structures out of stone. If they built mostly with wood, we'd be lucky to find anything.

Or if they used steel reinforced concrete like we do, and then the steel fails after 100 years or so, bringing the structure down with it.

theconversation.com...

originally posted by: bloodymarvelous
Another thing to remember about super-advanced types is, they might only have been on Earth for about 400 years before they reached space.

With other grand cultures, like Egypt, we've got thousands of years worth of relics. Because they lasted, thousands of years.

400 years from what from evolution to intelligence then space? I don't think so.

The radar scans mostly only pierce desert sand. Anything with a lot of water will reflect the radar, and the radar waves can't fit between the gaps in grains smaller than sand.

They pierce jungle and forest also. Lidar

www.bbc.com...

This all, of course, assumes that they built a lot of structures out of stone. If they built mostly with wood, we'd be lucky to find anything.

Basic archaeological knowledge - a wooden stake driven into soil will retain that for hundreds of millions of years.

Or if they used steel reinforced concrete like we do, and then the steel fails after 100 years or so, bringing the structure down with it.

Leaving the foundation, the concrete and the quarries and mines where the iron and materials for the cement were taken from along with the slag from the processing not to mention the foundations of the foundries and millls.

originally posted by: Hanslune

originally posted by: bloodymarvelous
Another thing to remember about super-advanced types is, they might only have been on Earth for about 400 years before they reached space.

With other grand cultures, like Egypt, we've got thousands of years worth of relics. Because they lasted, thousands of years.

400 years from what from evolution to intelligence then space? I don't think so.

Looking backward into our own history, I suppose you could put the Renaissance at 1400, but that feels kind of early.

It's true iron working predates that time by a lot.

However, the most important invention of the whole era was the printing press. And nothing about the printing press requires iron.

Indeed there is nothing about a printing press that couldn't have been done during the stone age, so long as the inventors had a written language to print.

The radar scans mostly only pierce desert sand. Anything with a lot of water will reflect the radar, and the radar waves can't fit between the gaps in grains smaller than sand.

They pierce jungle and forest also. Lidar

www.bbc.com...

This all, of course, assumes that they built a lot of structures out of stone. If they built mostly with wood, we'd be lucky to find anything.

Basic archaeological knowledge - a wooden stake driven into soil will retain that for hundreds of millions of years.

Yeah, but plenty of hunter/gatherers drove wooden stakes into the soil.

Or if they used steel reinforced concrete like we do, and then the steel fails after 100 years or so, bringing the structure down with it.

Leaving the foundation, the concrete and the quarries and mines where the iron and materials for the cement were taken from along with the slag from the processing not to mention the foundations of the foundries and millls.

How many layers of dirt will have accumulated over it by now, though?

Remember Lidar can't see very far through dirt. Sand, and forest/jungle canopies, but not normal dirt.


And then what happens if they lived near the ocean. An ocean going culture is the most likely to trade enough to find reason to invent a written language. (And encounter new ideas by interacting with other cultures.)

Instead of looking for numbers, or "specialization", we should look for force multipliers.

We have about 8 or 10 thousand years of recorded history, of cultures that had both the numbers, and the "specialization" levels to get to the stars.

But everything you might think of as "high technology" of fast technology growth has happened in the last 4 to 6 hundred. And the biggest growth has happened in nations that don't have a formal aristocracy.

I'm thinking all it takes is a printing press and a written language. The rest will happen on its own.

originally posted by: Hanslune

Eemian. I've looked for evidence of a flowering of human culture at that time by scanning papers in archaeology,anthropology, geology, etc., nothing so far. The first 45+ years have been a bust - I have hopes for the next 45. I did site surveys in Europe, Middle East, India, Nepal and few other places - nada.

I think it got to be Egypt as that was about the only place to cross then. Maybe older race of Homo that ended up in China. Didn't that wave actually have the best tools out of all the waves?

originally posted by: Xtrozero

originally posted by: Hanslune

Eemian. I've looked for evidence of a flowering of human culture at that time by scanning papers in archaeology,anthropology, geology, etc., nothing so far. The first 45+ years have been a bust - I have hopes for the next 45. I did site surveys in Europe, Middle East, India, Nepal and few other places - nada.

I think it got to be Egypt as that was about the only place to cross then. Maybe older race of Homo that ended up in China. Didn't that wave actually have the best tools out of all the waves?

Some folks seemed to have crossed/ or could have at Straits of Mandeb and Perim Island

upload.wikimedia.org...

www.geotimes.org...

science.sciencemag.org...

originally posted by: Hanslune

Some folks seemed to have crossed/ or could have at Straits of Mandeb and Perim Island

Man that would be tough, so maybe not too many... I wonder if they could actually see the other side?

originally posted by: Xtrozero

originally posted by: Hanslune

Some folks seemed to have crossed/ or could have at Straits of Mandeb and Perim Island

Man that would be tough, so maybe not too many... I wonder if they could actually see the other side?

The strait is 20 miles (32 km) wide and is divided into two channels by Perim Island; the western channel is 16 miles (26 km) across, and the eastern is 2 miles (3 km) wide. With the building of the Suez Canal, the strait assumed great strategic and economic importance, forming a portion of the link between the Mediterranean Sea and East Asia.

I would say that from the height on Yemen you could see Africa not sure about Africa to Arabia. There are some islands to the north where a continuous line of sight of land is possible too.

upload.wikimedia.org...

The Muhabbara Island Zugar etc to the north of the strait.

a reply to: MerkabaMeditation

hear hear, why build a crane when you can just use your mind.

originally posted by: OutTheBox
a reply to: MerkabaMeditation

hear hear, why build a crane when you can just use your mind.

Or sonic vibration. Or some kind of weird quantum or antigravity technology using crystals.


I think Quantum Mechanics, and especially use of waves, are the two biggest weak areas of modern technology. Where the biggest future inventions will come from.

Too few engineering majors who really want to deal with the multi-dimensional complexity of it. Most prefer computational mathematics, rather than trigonometry.

But the ancients (like Sumeria) excelled at trig, and failed miserably the computational. Because they were good at using compasses and squares to simply draw their equations.

originally posted by: Xtrozero

originally posted by: bloodymarvelous

But I think there was a time when getting food required only a small fraction of the available work force.

Well not until about 1900...Food was pretty much a big deal and not a short process to prepare. If the men worked the fields and farm animals from sunup to sundown and the women spent all day preparing I would say food in general was pretty much what everyone did all the time. Take a live chicken you raised from an egg and put it on your table using coal as your fuel as example. You were either growing, making, trading all the time everyday. This is why Sundays were a big deal, but it was still a big process even on the one non-work day.

I'm thinking during the ice age.

A wooly mamoth is easily 2 tons of food. During winter, you can use nature's refrigerator.

Beside that, I'm betting they were able to use the fat as tallow to fuel their fires, so gathering wood might not have always been necessary.

originally posted by: bloodymarvelous

But the ancients (like Sumeria) excelled at trig, and failed miserably the computational. Because they were good at using compasses and squares to simply draw their equations.

So they were good at what we call 8th grade math. It would be really hard to suggest any culture came before us that was even what were were 2000 years ago.

originally posted by: bloodymarvelous

I'm thinking during the ice age.

A wooly mamoth is easily 2 tons of food. During winter, you can use nature's refrigerator.

Beside that, I'm betting they were able to use the fat as tallow to fuel their fires, so gathering wood might not have always been necessary.

I think we survived because we were hunter gathers more than the Neanderthals, and so migrated south with the animals while the Neanderthals slowly died out staying more north. Later when we learned basic farming and animal husbandry it didn't provide us better food as much as a stabilized food source. When you look back at our dark ages we were a sorry group of animals. I love a documentary that basically stated that beer saved what we became in the Europe areas.

originally posted by: bloodymarvelous

I'm thinking during the ice age.

A wooly mamoth is easily 2 tons of food. During winter, you can use nature's refrigerator.

Beside that, I'm betting they were able to use the fat as tallow to fuel their fires, so gathering wood might not have always been necessary.

Neolithic Lake Dwellings in the Alpine Region. These folks stored meat in the lakes which had little oxygen in the water and the temperature preserved the flesh.

www.researchgate.net...

upload.wikimedia.org... gs._Wellcome_M0015374.jpg

originally posted by: Hanslune

originally posted by: bloodymarvelous

I'm thinking during the ice age.

A wooly mamoth is easily 2 tons of food. During winter, you can use nature's refrigerator.

Beside that, I'm betting they were able to use the fat as tallow to fuel their fires, so gathering wood might not have always been necessary.

Neolithic Lake Dwellings in the Alpine Region. These folks stored meat in the lakes which had little oxygen in the water and the temperature preserved the flesh.

www.researchgate.net...

upload.wikimedia.org... gs._Wellcome_M0015374.jpg

The same thing was done by plains Indians in North America as well. www.pnas.org...