Ask An Atlanteologist

[Senethro]

Back in the day, an oft discussed topic over Saturday night campus pizza and beer was this;

If Cro-Magnon (modern man) has been around for 50-100k years, than why has civilization only been around for the last 6-7k?

The answer seem to be in the unpredictable irregularity of the ice-ages. During H. sapiens' early days there were a series of short interglacials - most of them less than 2-3k years. Our current understanding of prehistory is that it takes at least that long for a culture to coalesce around (typically) a fertile river valley and to begin to advance into a civ. So early civs might have just been forming up in Europe and then, SMASH - the next ice age crushed them under two-mile-high glaciers.

Our current interglacial has extended well beyond 10k, so civs have formed and spread all over. Scholars have often wondered why our climate has been so fortuitous, but if anthropogenic warming is true, we may very well ourselves precipitate the next ice age.

So I suppose the point is, that if earlier cultures existed, they wouldn't have gotten very far along before new glaciation stamped them out. Early cultural remains would have been fairly primitive (no reinforced concrete military bunkers, no satellites, no plastics) and either decayed or were weather-eradicated. The few real remains, if any, may have been misdated (early archaeologists being frankly somewhat careless and sloppy) or in the hands of pot-hunters. The excavation of glacial moraines, however, reveals no evidence of these theoretical early cultures.

I'm grossly oversimplifying. By "SMASH", for instance, I mean a series of long term destructive processes initiated by radical and unrelenting climate change. These would include but would not be limited to desertification, agricultural failures, herd dieoff, social upheaval and breakdown, Internecine wars over remaining resources, zombie attacks, etc., etc.

I call this my DGSBS (Drunken Grad Student) Theory. And by the way, where were von Daniken's helpful aliens when our ancestors really needed them?

Sign me up for civilization needing your local grass-derived crop to be sufficiently selectively bred over the course of many generations that farmers can support an aristocratic class of some kind. Priests, warriors, whatever.

 

[Willem]

So early civs might have just been forming up in Europe and then, SMASH - the next ice age crushed them under two-mile-high glaciers.

A couple of holes here. First of all, civilization began in the Tigris-Euphrates valleys, which weren't affected by the last Ice Age, as this map shows:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Last_glacial_vegetation_map.png

Even in earlier Ice Ages, not all of the world would have been covered in ice, especially in the areas where human societies were most prevalent, like Africa and the Middle East, or even southern Asia. So there's no reason to suppose that the rise of civilization had anything to do with glaciation. The retreat of the glaciers only allowed humans to migrate to new territories that were inaccessible to them before.

 

[timtofly]

Is it really any stranger than believing the universe to be 6000 years old?

The universe or life on earth as we know it? The Bible does not rule out that the space in the universe has not always been there. The space is probably infinite without beginning. Space is a major part of the universe, so, the universe is more than 6000 years old. It is interesting that scientist seem to think the big bang is hard to explain. They say there is no central point, and that it happened everywhere at the same time. They claim that it took a long time after wards for things to come together again. Expansion has nothing to do with things coming back together again. Expansion means they are moving apart. Space can expand faster than light can travel. The least thing in the universe that expands would be the smallest particles known to man. If those expand too much, then larger structures in the universe would not bind together. According to the Bible matter was fixed throughout the universe and then light was infused with that matter, which explains nicely what scientist attempt to say about the big bang.

BTW life on earth as we know it, is only 6000 years old. The rest is pre-history and while we do have fossils, what we know is imagination based on speculation. At least that is what most posters are saying and more than likely thinking about the topic.

 

[Glassfan]

A couple of holes here. First of all, civilization began in the Tigris-Euphrates valleys, which weren't affected by the last Ice Age,...

Yes and no.

While some valuable real estate would not have been literally covered in ice, the general climate degradation would have led to a cascade of destructive events. Growing seasons would have been out of wack, herds of food animals dispersing or changing migration patterns, ocean currents stopping or changing - altering planetary weather patterns, locusts, drought, pestilence, flood, etc., etc. Not to mention displaced human tribes desperately overrunning remaining islands of stability - looting, burning, pillaging, massacre (infrastructure destruction).

An ice age affects the entire planet in ways detrimental to the development of human society, not just where the glaciers plow.

 

[Willem]

Yes and no.

While some valuable real estate would not have been literally covered in ice, the general climate degradation would have led to a cascade of destructive events. Growing seasons would have been out of wack, herds of food animals dispersing or changing migration patterns, ocean currents stopping or changing - altering planetary weather patterns, locusts, drought, pestilence, flood, etc., etc. Not to mention displaced human tribes desperately overrunning remaining islands of stability - looting, burning, pillaging, massacre (infrastructure destruction).

You make is sound like it was an overnight thing. An Ice Age takes hundreds to thousands of years for it to reach it's peak, which it did about 10,000 years ago. That would have been plenty of time for early humans to adjust to the climate changes. And there certainly wouldn't have been "displaced human tribes" because of it. We were nomadic hunters and gatherers then anyway, so overall having to deal with climatic changes would have had very little impact on us. We would just have moved on in search of better hunting grounds. They certainly wouldn't be "looting, burning, pillaging,". At least no more than they would to begin with.

An ice age affects the entire planet in ways detrimental to the development of human society, not just where the glaciers plow.

That's not necessarily true. I'm sure there were many areas that actually benefited from the climatic changes the Ice Age made.

 

[GoodGame]

At OP:

Where do you think Atlantis is? Why? How will you test it archeologically?

 

[Glassfan]

Yes (Willem), humans as opportunistic omnivores would survive, but the conditions necessary to produce a civilization would not be met.

 

[timtofly]

At OP:

Where do you think Atlantis is? Why? How will you test it archeologically?

It was already answered as "Atlantis is not a place" and it is "a metaphor".

 

[Senethro]

The universe or life on earth as we know it? The Bible does not rule out that the space in the universe has not always been there. The space is probably infinite without beginning. Space is a major part of the universe, so, the universe is more than 6000 years old. It is interesting that scientist seem to think the big bang is hard to explain. They say there is no central point, and that it happened everywhere at the same time. They claim that it took a long time after wards for things to come together again. Expansion has nothing to do with things coming back together again. Expansion means they are moving apart. Space can expand faster than light can travel. The least thing in the universe that expands would be the smallest particles known to man. If those expand too much, then larger structures in the universe would not bind together. According to the Bible matter was fixed throughout the universe and then light was infused with that matter, which explains nicely what scientist attempt to say about the big bang.

BTW life on earth as we know it, is only 6000 years old. The rest is pre-history and while we do have fossils, what we know is imagination based on speculation. At least that is what most posters are saying and more than likely thinking about the topic.

Hey, this is the Atlantis thread. Could you please keep your bogus pseudoscience out of it please?

 

[timtofly]

Hey, this is the Atlantis thread. Could you please keep your bogus pseudoscience out of it please?

Said the fisherman to the fish.

 

[Willem]

Yes (Willem), humans as opportunistic omnivores would survive, but the conditions necessary to produce a civilization would not be met.

That doesn't necessarily follow. Looking at that vegetation map, the conditions in the Tigris-Euphrates are weren't all that unfavourable to an earlier civilization, and there would be the two rivers adding even more to the local ecology. And there would be other areas, in Africa for instance, that would be favourable for the start of a civilization at that time as well. Whatever the conditions were for a civilization to begin, it had nothing to do with climatic changes due to the Ice Age.

They say there is no central point, and that it happened everywhere at the same time.

No they don't. It's generally accepted that the Big Bang started from a single point and has been expanding from there ever since.

Space can expand faster than light can travel.

Where are you getting this from? Nothing can travel faster than light, that's an accepted fact in Physics.

At least that is what most posters are saying and more than likely thinking about the topic.

Seriously? I think you'll find that very few people these days believe that the world is only 6000 years old.

 

[Borachio]

What is Atlantis a metaphor for?

Is it referring to the idea that notions of progress are delusional? That we only think we're becoming more civilized and technologically advanced?

When actually we're steadily losing ground?

(I don't see this as being reality, myself. But then I probably buy into the delusion.)

 

[Thorgalaeg]

No they don't. It's generally accepted that the Big Bang started from a single point and has been expanding from there ever since.

It is a common misconcepcion to think that the Big-Bang started from a single point in space because it was the same space what started with the Big-Bang and has been expanding since, so Tymofly is right. There is not a center or place in the space you can point at and say: "the Big-Bang happened there!". It happened everywhere. And here you have an image of the early universe, when it was muuuuuuch smaller than at present. It is everywhere around us in the sky:

Where are you getting this from? Nothing can travel faster than light, that's an accepted fact in Physics.

It is the same again: nothing can travel faster than light through space, but space itself can expand faster than light, and in fact it does and is getting faster and faster. So things distant enough in an expanding universe can move away one from the other faster than light. The sphere around us beyond which galaxies recede from us faster than light is called the Hubble Sphere,

 

[Borachio]

But if they're receding from us faster than the speed of light, sooner or later they're going to zip up behind us and bang into the backs of our heads.

This is simply inescapable logic.

(Oh. Nuts! This is an RD thread! But look, it's an RD thread about Atlantis. So I think I deserve cutting a little slack on this occasion, don't you?)

 

[Kyriakos]

So, do you recommend any good books on Atlantis? Fiction and non fiction.

The obvious one would be Timaeus, by Plato

(in the September circle i will have to research it a bit, along with some other dialogues of Socrates).

 

[Thorgalaeg]

@Borachio: Well, we cant see what is happening beyond the Hubble sphere so that one may be one possibility too.

I don't think that they contend aliens from that far back. They question why the science allows for such long times spans. Why can't modern humans picture the polar caps free from ice? We agree that Antarctica broke away at some time, but no one is that great at placing ice at the proper points in the time line. There are indications that humans have lived through major plate tectonic changes, but these accounts are just relegated to human mythology and that they just "made things up". How could they be that far thinking that they would make things up for people thousands of years in the future to say they did? I suppose it could be said in 10,000 years if future humans had no clue how to tell the difference between what we write as fiction and non-fiction, that may cause some strange reactions. Are we saying that 10,000 years ago they wrote down fiction and non-fiction and we are able to tell the difference?

AFAIK we can know with some precission the whole history of Antarctic for the last million of years or so through ice cores study, and it seems the whole continent has continously been under an ice cap since then.

Anyway, even if ancient aliens are not involved here why to think that such map is based on ancient knowledge from some pre-glacial civilization? It is much more probable that the map maker didnt know very well the size of southamerica, dont forget america was just discovered some years before, or simply the guy rotated the map becuase it didnt fit in the piece of paper.

 

[Masada]

BTW life on earth as we know it, is only 6000 years old. The rest is pre-history and while we do have fossils, what we know is imagination based on speculation. At least that is what most posters are saying and more than likely thinking about the topic.

Wrong. Prehistory simply refers to the period before we had written sources and does not represent a decisive break in the historical record. Second, history prowler,y speaking is all about probability. Historians cannot, and do not, believe we can really know what happened. Moreover, relative age is no guarantor of historical accuracy. An example. Some schoolers think that Suharto was tipped off about the 30 September Coup in advance which would force a complete rewrite of our narratives. Interestingly, I'm considerably less sure that happened than I am about say Gobelki Tepe existing even though the latter is rather older than the former.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

How close is the Disney movie Atlantis: The Lost Empire to representing the technology, society, and ultimate fate of the Atlantean civilization?

But if they're receding from us faster than the speed of light, sooner or later they're going to zip up behind us and bang into the backs of our heads.

This is simply inescapable logic.\

Off topic, but we don't really know the shape of the universe. We think it's like the inside surface of a balloon, so expansion in all directions would just make everything further apart, no collision required.

We also are pretty sure that the force causing the universe to continue expanding is stronger than the force of gravity, so things will continue to expand until every atom is separate from every other atom, and all movement ceases completely.

 

[Arakhor]

Gravitation is the weakest of the four fundamental forces, Cheezy, so that wouldn't be hard.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Gravitation is the weakest of the four fundamental forces, Cheezy, so that wouldn't be hard.

Yeah, but the problem is that we don't know what's causing the force which counteracts gravity. It's nebulously conceived as "dark matter/energy."