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Lost human cilvilizations?

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Since being first exposed to these Hancock and similar video's on here 3 years ago, which I found both interesting but cautiously skeptical of, from just randomly listening to other podcasts and history books I think I have enough of a big picture view to put a rebuttal together. How I see it break down on his tow main topics is:

a) Geology work, primarily focusing on a massive meteor impact hitting the ice sheets in North America around 11,500 years ago - good solid work.
b) All the early advanced/lost human civilizations stuff - a massive stretch that's both highly unlikely and unnecessary.

So I'm focusing on b) here. Generally for civilization to begin you need human to transition away from the nomadic hunter gather lifestyle and towards a sedentary agricultural one. To achieve the latter you need 3 things:

1) a stable climate conductive for agriculture.
2) the necessity to abandon the hunting lifestyle and focus on putting that human brain to work at converting gathering to agriculture.
3) a good plant base source, that can be converted to agriculture and provides enough nutrition/protein in your primary diet.

The first is really a climate science thing and is all about the geological epoch known as the Holocene, which the Earth transitioned to coming out of the last ice age about 11,650 years ago. The Holocene is critical in providing the stable and reliable climate that allowed agricultural societies to emerge and human's to expand & thrive. Through most of Earth's geological history the climate wasn't so kind to us.

Next, if you're a tribe with plentiful game to hunt that's going to be your prime source of nutrition and is far more effective than early farming. It's when you no longer have enough game to hunt and you can no longer just migrate somewhere else because now there's people everywhere that you really need to turn human ingenuity to farming which is far more efficient once we figure it out.

Finally you can combine this all to see when where and how civilizations emerged. Wheat and rice are great sources and easy to convert to farming from the start. I don't know if Africa when you get to the savanna's and jungle really has a good natural staple grain, but more importantly game was always plentiful for hunting. In North America you had a late start because human's first had to cross the Bering Strait and then begin populating southwards, and corn was not a good starting grain. It took a lot of work to make strains of corn good for farming and they initially had to be combined with beans to get enough nutrition. Civilization was starting to follow the common patterns though in central America when the much more advanced Spaniards arrived and toppled everything over.

So basically while Hancock has some points of interest there's no need for an early advanced civilization that good wiped out with all evidence destroyed by his big meteor impact, and the emerging understanding of climate and human advancement makes it unlikely to have existed. If you look at some key points of commonality around the world, astrology is pretty simple as we're all looking at the same sky. Humans can be intelligent and curious, let us settle in the same place long enough not having to worry about our next meal and we'll figure out the same celestial cycles. In terms of construction with pyramids being everywhere, this is just a matter of physics as it's the most basic structure an early civilization can build that will also stay up. You don't start off building fancy Cathedrals that embrace your culture's uniqueness, pyramids are just logically the common starting point once you have enough excess manpower to start cutting and hauling rocks.

So overall I'm not an expert here trying to make a full rebuttal of this stuff, this is just my starting point for understanding why actual experts working in the field will scoff at this stuff rather than jumping onboard. I've always had a sense of 'this is highly interesting and sounds reasonable but their has to be a significant "but" in here'. I mean if you're a legit archaeologist/geologist/etc had good solid evidence of finding an advanced lost civilization that predates current human understanding you'd get famous off it.
 
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RandV said:
Since being first exposed to these Hancock and similar video's on here 3 years ago, which I found both interesting but cautiously skeptical of, from just randomly listening to other podcasts and history books I think I have enough of a big picture view to put a rebuttal together. How I see it break down on his tow main topics is:

a) Geology work, primarily focusing on a massive meteor impact hitting the ice sheets in North America around 11,500 years ago - good solid work.
b) All the early advanced/lost human civilizations stuff - a massive stretch that's both highly unlikely and unnecessary.

So I'm focusing on b) here. Generally for civilization to begin you need human to transition away from the nomadic hunter gather lifestyle and towards a sedentary agricultural one. To achieve the latter you need 3 things:

1) a stable climate conductive for agriculture.
2) the necessity to abandon the hunting lifestyle and focus on putting that human brain to work at converting gathering to agriculture.
3) a good plant base source, that can be converted to agriculture and provides enough nutrition/protein in your primary diet.

The first is really a climate science thing and is all about the geological epoch known as the Holocene, which the Earth transitioned to coming out of the last ice age about 11,650 years ago. The Holocene is critical in providing the stable and reliable climate that allowed agricultural societies to emerge and human's to expand & thrive. Through most of Earth's geological history the climate wasn't so kind to us.

Next, if you're a tribe with plentiful game to hunt that's going to be your prime source of nutrition and is far more effective than early farming. It's when you no longer have enough game to hunt and you can no longer just migrate somewhere else because now there's people everywhere that you really need to turn human ingenuity to farming which is far more efficient once we figure it out.

Finally you can combine this all to see when where and how civilizations emerged. Wheat and rice are great sources and easy to convert to farming from the start. I don't know if Africa when you get to the savanna's and jungle really has a good natural staple grain, but more importantly game was always plentiful for hunting. In North America you had a late start because human's first had to cross the Bering Strait and then begin populating southwards, and corn was not a good starting grain. It took a lot of work to make strains of corn good for farming and they initially had to be combined with beans to get enough nutrition. Civilization was starting to follow the common patterns though in central America when the much more advanced Spaniards arrived and toppled everything over.

So basically while Hancock has some points of interest there's no need for an early advanced civilization that good wiped out with all evidence destroyed by his big meteor impact, and the emerging understanding of climate and human advancement makes it unlikely to have existed. If you look at some key points of commonality around the world, astrology is pretty simple as we're all looking at the same sky. Humans can be intelligent and curious, let us settle in the same place long enough not having to worry about our next meal and we'll figure out the same celestial cycles. In terms of construction with pyramids being everywhere, this is just a matter of physics as it's the most basic structure an early civilization can build that will also stay up. You don't start off building fancy Cathedrals that embrace your culture's uniqueness, pyramids are just logically the common starting point once you have enough excess manpower to start cutting and hauling rocks.

So overall I'm not an expert here trying to make a full rebuttal of this stuff, this is just my starting point for understanding why actual experts working in the field will scoff at this stuff rather than jumping onboard. I've always had a sense of 'this is highly interesting and sounds reasonable but their has to be a significant "but" in here'. I mean if you're a legit archaeologist/geologist/etc had good solid evidence of finding an advanced lost civilization that predates current human understanding you'd get famous off it.
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Thanks for your post.

Since the younger Dryas period the earth's climate has been optimal for sowing seeds and migrating around the world. Before that the climate was volatile with plummeting temperatures and intense heat waves that would last hundreds of years. Despite these conditions mammals were still able to survive and thrive. The oldest human fossils found date back to around 200,000 years ago all around the world. As a child we were taught that the bering strait was an ice bridge that allowed for the migration into the new world Newer evidence suggests that it was a land bridge. This theory was based on lack of evidence. It seems like the science community is trying to fit everything into a brief period of time even though Humans have been around for much longer. Something your not taking into account is the geography of the earth prior to the Younger Dryas period, Lowered sea level meant like today where all of our major cities are located near major water ways so too would earlier civilizations. If a shower of meteors where responsible for sudden sea levels rising by melting ice vast swaths of the worlds population and there for evidence of a society would be destroyed too.

There has never been evidence that there was not enough game to hunt. I never thought it was possibly for hunter gatheres to hunt any living species into extinction. That's never been proven just theorized as an easy way to justify species which no longer exist. If this was true then Africa would have no mammals left seeing as that's where homo sapiens came from and having the highest populations.

I believe far more adaptations occurred during the last 40,000 years because of climate than people needing optimal conditions to survive and thrive.


in 1676, the curator of an English museum, Robert Plot, described and drew a massive thigh bone that he believed must have belonged to a giant man. In 1822, large teeth were discovered in England that were thought to be the remains of an enormous, extinct iguana.
It wasn't until 1841 that British scientist Richard Owens realized that such fossils were distinct from those of any living creature, and he named them "Dinosauria," which means "terrible lizards." In 1840, if you had told someone that a race of beings existed on earth that weighed 50 – 96.4 metric tons, was 98 – 130 ft long and had tails that measured 95–110 ft, they would have looked at you like you were crazy.

There are careers and books devoted to theories that were the standard 100 years ago. There are people today who based on those findings built their careers. Exposing new evidence is not beneficial to those peoples place in history.

It's a very cool topic and I am open to new theories.
 
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You guys should listen to "the fall of civilizations" podcast from YouTube. He has 13 civs so far, and it's really great and quite in depth.
 
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"Open mindnessess" of a public is serious contemporary hindrance of development of serious anthropologic, historical, archaeological sciences. People tends to forget what is known and why.

For example, Antikythera-device. We know from several ancient, but nevertheless historical, written sources that such devices existed, we know their general purpose, and we also know why they generally disappeared ("Barbarians" needed brass more for other purposes than counting time, games and tracking stars etc. you know). This particular device is also reconstructed using with very strict frameworks of the scientific experimental archeology.

Still there exists modern humans who seriously question could've our (Read=their, more importantly themselves) ancestors produce such artifacts.

Problem is not an intelligence and pragmatic will, or skills of our past, the problem is that we don't exactly know how they did this or that artifact or structure, but THAT doesn't mean they DIDN'T!!!

It's frustrating to try research and study about the past of our collective history when there are guys who do everything they can to mess it up, and only for their lack of understanding, faith, and god damn, so called "Open Mindnesses".

They never moved any stones, so they cannot understand how to move a stone. The never quarried that stone before moving it. Generally, these "Openminded" peoples didn't ever do anything even remotely relevant work (planning even less) in their lives to truly estimate over anything what our ancestral fathers and mothers were able for and might have been capable of doing in practice.

That something about history is unknown for us now, doesn't mean that it was unknown to them, in prehistory. But what we cannot exactly prove about them , we shouldn't declare about them either, without proofs, evidence... and what is too often and too easily forgotten, without common sense.

You don't need extra extraordinary explanations to explain humans of last 20000-30000 years, or so. You're one of them yourself.
 
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Humans have been around for at least 8000 generations and in the last 5 we've went from using horses as the primary means of transportation to autonomous cars.
 
Stylizer1 said:
Humans have been around for at least 8000 generations and in the last 5 we've went from using horses as the primary means of transportation to autonomous cars.
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We'll be virtually and physically traveling to space in another 5 hopefully
 


I love this YouTube channel. Quick and easy to watch, almost always has interesting topics. I've mentioned it in this thread already but I don't like Rogan's podcast when he talks about this sort of thing because (no offense, Stylizer) i don't like most of the counter-science claims brought up in these ancient civ narratives.

As a reasonable person you have to assume that the people who study this are making concerted efforts to be as accurate and factual as possible. So to say otherwise spits in the face of those efforts IMO.

Regardless, what this Kurzgesadt vid brings up is that there'd be little to no way of knowing for sure if there were ancient civilizations living here hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago because even metal traces of them would most likely be gone. They have another video on fossils and they mention how incredibly difficult it is for organisms to be fossilized, and how even our fossil record now is very limited to the tremendous biodiversity we've seen on our planet.

It's cool to think about and the better our technology gets hopefully the more we can discover over time.
 
x Tame Impala said:
Regardless, what this Kurzgesadt vid brings up is that there'd be little to no way of knowing for sure if there were ancient civilizations living here hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago because even metal traces of them would most likely be gone. They have another video on fossils and they mention how incredibly difficult it is for organisms to be fossilized, and how even our fossil record now is very limited to the tremendous biodiversity we've seen on our planet.
Click to expand...

Like you, I tend to be very wary of "alternative" histories and the like. The great majority of the time, it seems to start with the belief that there's something strange going on here and work backwards through whatever line of logic reinforces that belief. It leads to a lot of trash science. That stuff's great for tabloids (and, back in the day, late nite AM radio shows) but not so great for people's actual understanding of the real world.

That being said, it's kind of crazy how little we really know, even with the technology we have. If someone said they thought there were civilizations a million years ago with buildings and clothes and weapons, I would say the fossil record alone is enough to disprove that. We know that humans didn't develop until a certain point, and the predecessors species were more and more like basic apes as we go farther back into the past. But if you ask me how I know that those basic apes weren't capable of constructing basic structures and weaving clothing and whittling spears... and maybe assembling into bands with cultures and languages... well, I mean... shit. We don't know whether they did that or not. And there's really not a way to know for certain, just an absence of evidence. It's a weird rabbit hole.
 
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