1. Over 10,000 years few artifacts can survive degradation
2. There are political motivations for controlling the narrative around evolution and the birth of civilization
We know there are human built megalithic structures that are dated at the end of the Pleistocene. We know that the Pleistocene ended abruptly with all North American megafauna perishing and immense amounts of meltwater entering the oceans. We don't know if there were a bunch of distributed civilizations with similar technology levels or if there was a global civilization that shared knowledge before or after cataclysm. We also don't know what caused the end of the Pleistocene. This is the realm of hypothesis on all sides.
The upside is that we can differentiate between the quality of various competing hypotheses in a reasoned way. That's how we can say that the traditional academic narratives are epistemologically better than e.g. Tolkien's Silmarillion.
[1] https://doi.org/10.1130/0091-7613(2001)029<0987:HSESAT>2.0.C...
In recent memory just about everyone was dead certain that monumental architecture happened only where there was agriculture. And, that once a people took up agriculture, they kept at it. And, that humans got to the Americas no more than 15,000 years ago.
Science only welcomes new ideas when they offer a possible solution to a problem with the existing paradigms. For this type of theory, if you had data showing the earliest known societies were unusually advanced, or if you had artifacts that suggest more wide spread early societies, these would be facts wanting an explanation.
You can't just say something like "maybe all language was singing until 20,000 years ago" and claim it's scientific until proven false.
As for the academy, Thomas Kuhn wrote "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", where he argues that most paradigm shifts happen in revolutionary leaps instead of incremental improvements. We've been pushing back the timelines of human expansion for a long time. It was impossible and just fables that Vikings were on North America, until it wasn't for example.
But it’s true that narratives around past civilizations are controlled for political reasons
Eg in China the winners want to paint the picture that the way they govern is inevitable and mandated, when really there was a lot of diversity, experimentation, and violence
Including matriarchal societies!!
I recommend reading Dawn of Everything by graeber and wengrow for peer reviewed info on past, ignored, alternative civilizations
It does have an axe to grind but it’s a welcome contrast and asks good questions
You don’t need to invoke hypothetical pre ice age societies for any of this
However the book does give a good perspective on how much of history we simply don’t know, which leaves room for speculators like Hancock
This sort of tension exists for foundational histories in many, many cultures. South Asia's existing religious tension motivates people to evaluate and reevaluate historical events trying to show one or another religiously-aligned power as good or bad. Western history probably has it the least because it's well-preserved, well-studied, and has many copies of primary sources lying around which allows lots of people to cast critical eyes upon an analysis.
There are many things about human history that we simply don't know, and triangulating between experts with very different viewpoints is a good way to get closer to the truth, or at least make you think.
A key point is that human history is hundreds of thousands of years long, and for many periods of hundreds/thousands of years, we only have 1 or 2 artifacts. And the world is very big. Entire civilizations with complex social structures have come and gone with little trace, and many of them lasted longer than the United States or the modern governments of Russia or China. (Obviously 20th century growth rates make that comparison hard, but it's still worth thinking about)
Also, I would say that DoE is better at criticism than at making claims, or providing a concrete path toward more egalitarian societies. It's responding somewhat to "big history" books, so it's probably better to read those first.
I think it's fascinating and important that Native lifestyles were preferable to European/American lifestyles. That extended quote from Franklin raises some very salient questions, IMO.
Also, when I used "their" above I meant David Graeber and the co-author of the book David Wengrow.
While I'm at it, I should mention that when I called GH a "kook" in the other thread, I also meant it in a "takes one to know one" kind of a way. To wit: I'm a kook (by many measures, not my own) too. E.g. I believe Bigfoot is real, that they are hominids, and that they may well be as intelligent as H. sapiens or more so. On alternate Tuesdays I believe the Earth is hollow, just to keep my brain in shape.
Cheers, and well met.
Humans appeared 160-250,000 years ago. We spread to Australia 45,000 years ago and to the Americas 15,000 years ago. We have evidence of agriculture in Turkey from about 9,000 years ago.
Given the ability to travel for and wide, it seems weird that humans wouldn’t have sophisticated societies. Evidence is no doubt wiped out by time and prime land was flooded as the ice age ended.
The global population was much lower in those days. I doubt there were large cities or magical technology. But I’m sure you had tribal societies with broad reach and social structures.
We have a bias to assume that people in the distant past were quaint or unable to handle basic concepts. We benefit from standing on the shoulders of giants, but our forebearers were just as smart as we are. We have better tools.
But there's also the redefinitional arguments that the Childe definition of civilization is wrong. That's the vein you're working in and where books like Dawn of Everything are arguing from. They're much more agreeable to modern archaeologists and most wouldn't disagree too strongly (if at all).
Wengrow has a good opinion piece on this dichotomy in [1].
[1] https://aeon.co/ideas/a-history-of-true-civilisation-is-not-...
But aside from a few exceptions (people at USYD, Michael Smith), Childe's definitions are increasingly disagreeable to archaeologists. Most of the newer generations, myself included, find anti-evolutionist arguments significantly more persuasive and even those that don't aren't big fans of the original formulation of Childe's ideas.
We know extremely little about people in the Amazon basin, beyond that they had already domesticated orchard trees by 10,000 years ago, built over wide areas, and had no access to stone. They had ceramics, but did not favor bricks. They left us a few enigmatic inventions including curare and terra preta.
Assuming primitive social relations is very close to racism. Sophistication seems to need nothing more than population.
As you might have guessed from how I've written this, all these different lines of evidence consistently point to low population densities and overall populations, especially before the main human expansion out of Africa.
Advanced ice age societies aren't impossible, but there would need to be some pretty strong evidence and a good explanation to account for all the data we have against them.
Notably, none have been run on the million square miles of Sundaland and the continental shelf off China, now under water, where people lived for at least 70,000 years. We know they invented oceangoing navigation pretty early, because they got to Australia.
People did that another 100,000 years earlier and got to Crete.
The null hypothesis has to be that people in places with sufficient population have complex society, because that is baseline human behavior. You need good evidence of someplace they didn't, and an explanation why not.
As I said before, it's not logically impossible that a highly populous society existed in the pleistocene. But the constraints it would have to fit grow increasingly contorted as the state of knowledge improves. At some point it starts to resemble a small colony of advanced alien settlers who landed one day and disappeared a short while later. That explanation might honestly be easier to account for than what some people propose, since they don't have to develop their tech from scratch here on Earth.
2) it's pretty clear from both this comment and the substantial edits above that this discussion isn't in good faith
I do not understand why academics think all people on Earth were always at the same technological level at the same time.
[...] in the models developed in the twentieth century to describe hunter-gatherers, variation was something to be explained away to uncover the essential hunter-gatherer.
Obviously complex societies could have existed on a social level.
It's important to emphasise that they were definitely not less intelligent, nor did they have different behaviour. You can take a child from 50,000 years ago and they would perform the same as the average child today. The modern homo sapien sapien reached its point as early as 160,000 years ago.
The idea here is that we're expected to believe that modern humans -- like me and you -- sat idle for at least 80,000 to as much as 150,000 years before reaching a point in the last 10k years and suddenly forming civilizations (of which there are about six known, independent origin points around the globe). We lack evidence to the contrary -- sure -- but if we find evidence it will just be construed as a black swan event that would, in hindsight, be obvious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunung_Padang
This gives a very different picture of the site than the one in the episode.
I've seen him speak. (It was, IIRC, at a Fortean Times Unconvention, an event that -- in part -- intentionally gives nutcases a chance to speak publicly, for the audience's amusement.)
He is a 100% total fraud, a laughing stock among genuine historians and archaeologists.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Graham_Hancock
I am unconvinced whether he is a lunatic or intentionally a fraudster, but I am deeply concerned to learn he's on TV.
Could elaborate on this?