Nobody Cares about Pre-History

[Soen Eber]

Oh, I believe someone will carry on the torch of civilization, unless there's some truly world-ending catastrophy. We've always had a few spotlight areas that advanced while others lagged behind, and it seems every region except for Antarctica has had its moments of flourishment and regression.

The only question is, would the civilized be numbered in the hundreds of millions, or in the hundreds.

 

[Free]

I look forward (in the esoteric sense) to the tiny tardigrade civilization.

 

[Lexxi]

Chalice Yao posted this comment a while ago, but it's an apt prelude to the article below. It's humbling to realize how quickly we forget even great civilizations. Here's this ancient, complex society -- which was densely inhabited -- and even the memory of it is gone now. We have no idea who these people were and it will take decades of archaeological work to figure it out.

Discoveries like this show how fragile civilizations can be, and I suspect our current high-tech/industrialized culture will someday be buried and forgotten in a similar way. Society collapses, huge numbers of people die, and the survivors are scrambling to find food to get through each day, not passing on "useless" knowledge of glory days gone by. No one is going to teach C-sharp to their kids when the lights go out.

Lidar reveals undiscovered city beneath Amazon rainforest

It's Friday and the world is falling apart, so let's just take a short mental health break with some interesting news out of the field of archaeology,

techcrunch.com

“Recent archaeological studies, especially in the last two decades, show that indigenous populations in the past were more numerous, more complex, and had a greater impact on the largest and most biodiverse tropical forest in the world,” said José Iriarte, an archeologist at the University of Exeter who was not connected to the study, in an email.

I'd read and seen one or two episodes about how the trees, plants, etc. of the Amazon are not actually wild and "growing naturally". One or more articles mentioned a relatively higher level of civilization than previously thought (or found when the "lost tribes" were encountered by Europeans). Some mentioned a spread out civilization, though I'm not sure how large they said they were.

“People arrived in the Amazon at least 10,000 years ago, and they started to use the species that were there. And more than 8,000 years ago, they selected some individuals with specific phenotypes that are useful for humans,” says Carolina Levis, a scholar at Wageningen University who helped lead the study. “They really cultivated and planted these species in their home gardens, in the forests they were managing,” she said.

That cultivation eventually altered entire regions of the Amazon, the study argues. Levis and her colleagues found that some of these species domesticated by indigenous people—including the brazil nut, the rubber tree, the maripa palm, and the cocoa tree—still dominate vast swaths of the forest, especially in the southwest section of the Amazon basin.

“Modern tree communities in Amazonia are structured to an important extent by a long history of plant domestication by Amazonian peoples,” says the paper.

The Amazon Rainforest Was Profoundly Changed by Ancient Humans

The region’s ecology is a product of 8,000 years of indigenous agriculture.

www.theatlantic.com

Humans living in Amazon 10,000 years ago cultivated plants, study finds

Findings from Bolivia show plants were domesticated in region shortly after last ice age

www.theguardian.com

The Amazon basin was a hotspot for the early cultivation of plants, with inhabitants having munched on squash and cassava more than 10,000 years ago, researchers have revealed.

The team say the new findings from Bolivia offer direct evidence such plants were grown in south-west Amazonia, meaning the region has a claim to join the Middle East, China, south-west Mexico and north-west South America as locations where wild plants were domesticated shortly after the last ice age. The team say the discovery chimes with other clues.

Directly on point with your comment about civilizations having been around, then disappearing and people, later people's, completely forgetting they existing to the point they think the area was a "place of nature, of little human impact." And these later people wrong.

“The human impact in the Amazon in the past was thought to be minimal,” she said. “But new research such as this study demonstrates that the nature of human occupation and alteration of the landscape is extensive, and this region now has evidence for the implementation of cultivation from as far back as 10,250 years [ago].”

There's a good chance that our civilization, the one on Earth today, not specifically tied to a particular people or country, but what's on earth today, will fade to myth, if we are remembered at all in 10,000 years.

Doesn't even need a massive collapse of our culture. Just us fading and something else taking over, and little to no effort to "remember us". Or, there have been mutliple times in history when the past, the history of the past, was actively destroyed, from the first emperor of China basically saying "History begins with me!"; to various Egyptian leaders actively working to both destory/wipe out past rulers, and put their own label to various things that were, at the time, to big to be destroyed; to active work of European invaders destroying the native books they found in the Americas because "they were the work of Satan".

Or, just think of the history, the peoples, that were lost when Doggerland disappeared by, as a study in roughly 2020 stated, the land was lost to Climate Change.

Study Rewrites History of Ancient Land Bridge Between Britain and Europe

New research suggests that climate change, not a tsunami, doomed the now-submerged territory of Doggerland

www.smithsonianmag.com

 

[Beebo Brink]

Ancient peoples in South America had both Denisovan and Neanderthal DNA — and we have no clue how it got there
Ancient peoples seem to have mingled much more than thought possible.

Archeologists in Brazil are hard at work to uncover the genetic ancestry of some of South America’s earliest humans.

While the genetic contribution of Neanderthals to the modern human gene pool is well known, these ancient hominids are generally associated with Europe, especially Northern Europe. Denisovans, meanwhile, are generally associated with populations in Asia.

You can imagine, then, the surprise of archeologists working on two archaeological sites in Brazil when they discovered the presence of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA in ancient South Americans.

 

[Veritable Quandry]

Not all that surprising given current theories about when and when the first wave to settle the Americas came from.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

 

[Beebo Brink]

Homo Sapiens May Not Have Been the First Species to Use Fire

Analysis of fossil remains unearthed from the Rising Star Cave system in South Africa indicates that Homo naledi, an extinct species of hominid, actually built fires in the underground chambers.

The same Dinaledi underground chamber has now been found to have housed controlled fires, thought to be lit and fed by the ancient hominins.

 

[Beebo Brink]

New Views of Neanderthal Are Reshaping Prehistory

Neanderthals turned raptor talons into art. What else does their society say about humanity today?

www.psychologytoday.com

 

[Beebo Brink]

We consistently underestimate just how clever hominids have been and for how long. Science has been badly skewed by the emotionally needy assumption that homo sapiens is The Chosen Species, an oh-so-special exception to nature that towers above the animals, placed in our preeminent position by God Himself. Always entertaining to see us lose another brick in that shaky pedestal.

Ancient Humans May Have Sailed The Mediterranean 450,000 Years Ago

Archaic humans may have worked out how to sail across the sea to new lands as far back as nearly half a million years ago.

www.sciencealert.com

 

[Soen Eber]

We consistently underestimate just how clever hominids have been and for how long. Science has been badly skewed by the emotionally needy assumption that homo sapiens is The Chosen Species, an oh-so-special exception to nature that towers above the animals, placed in our preeminent position by God Himself. Always entertaining to see us lose another brick in that shaky pedestal.

Ancient Humans May Have Sailed The Mediterranean 450,000 Years Ago

Archaic humans may have worked out how to sail across the sea to new lands as far back as nearly half a million years ago.

www.sciencealert.com

Well, in our chauvanistic defense, 19th & 20th century white people were trying to understand why they, of all people, had gotten to the top of the heap considering that not too many centuries ago the Mongols and Arabs turned away because "there was nothing worth while" in northern Europe. I hope that Victorian nattering is continuing to fade, along with our own American exceptionalism.

This persisted as well to pre-Homo Sapiens.

Really, how can we be "the shining city on the hill" when Washington D.C. was built on a swamp?

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Hackney girl finds ancient bear tooth on Norfolk beach

The nine-year-old fossil hunter says it is "exciting as it might be a major breakthrough in history".

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[Beebo Brink]

Human Genome Recovered From 5,700-Year-Old Chewing Gum

The piece of Birch tar, found in Denmark, also contained the mouth microbes of its ancient chewer, as well as remnants of food to reveal what she ate

www.smithsonianmag.com

 

[Beebo Brink]

A Leading Theory Behind Neanderthal Extinction May Surprise You

Scientists have long assumed Neanderthals simply lost the evolutionary race against humans. But a new Neanderthal extinction theory shows a different view of the extinction of the Neanderthals.

www.discovermagazine.com

 

[Isabeau]

A Leading Theory Behind Neanderthal Extinction May Surprise You

Scientists have long assumed Neanderthals simply lost the evolutionary race against humans. But a new Neanderthal extinction theory shows a different view of the extinction of the Neanderthals.

www.discovermagazine.com

The part where some German researchers thought the first one found may have been a
“…Russian Cossack who suffered from rickets and crawled in a cave to die…” made me laugh.

Funny how we, or rather the scientists first studying them, thought they must have disappeared because humans were stronger, smarter, etc. and edged them out. Even scientists are influenced by the society they live in (+/- meritocracy). I think most understand now how chance plays a big role not only in our individual lives, but in evolution, too.

I wonder why they believe that the two groups were friendly simply because they “bred”. Wouldn’t rape or forced copulation be the possible reason?

Also, as an aside, in French, instead of Neanderthals used as an insult, we say Cro-Magon.

 

[Lexxi]

The part where some German researchers thought the first one found may have been a
“…Russian Cossack who suffered from rickets and crawled in a cave to die…” made me laugh.

Funny how we, or rather the scientists first studying them, thought they must have disappeared because humans were stronger, smarter, etc. and edged them out. Even scientists are influenced by the society they live in (+/- meritocracy). I think most understand now how chance plays a big role not only in our individual lives, but in evolution, too.

I wonder why they believe that the two groups were friendly simply because they “bred”. Wouldn’t rape or forced copulation be the possible reason?

Also, as an aside, in French, instead of Neanderthals used as an insult, we say Cro-Magon.

Sadly, Cro-Magon is also used in the English world as a negative.

I cringe every time I see/hear/read someone using Neanderthals or Cro-Magon as a negative.

 

[Caete]

Sadly, Cro-Magon is also used in the English world as a negative.

I cringe every time I see/hear/read someone using Neanderthals or Cro-Magon as a negative.

If you ever had the "fun" of going shopping with my roommate, who aimlessly roams from one side of the store to another and often back tracks randomly, you'd know why I call her a Meanderthal.

 

[Beebo Brink]

Our human ancestors learned to sail half a million years ago, study suggests

Boats predate humans: New evidence suggests our hominid ancestors crossed the Mediterranean long before modern humans even existed

www.salon.com

 

[Free]

 

[Lexxi]

Neat - while watching (and before there was an email in view from 2023) I was curious how many years ago this video might have appeared and . . . saw it was loaded 3 hours ago. heh.

 

[Free]