Complex societies existed in our most remote past, thousands of years before Stonehenge and the Giza Pyramids were built. This is a very important discovery and makes me wonder why it took us so long to evolve our technology. Given how fast we discover new technology today it makes me wonder why we haven't come further in 12,0000 years.

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http://toffeewomble.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_archive.html





Klaus Schmidt, next to one of the latest rock reliefs.


Wow!! they look a bit like dinosaurs!!!

Maybe war or natural disaster puts a damper on advancement before it is widely traded or accepted. Look how Europe fared after the Roman Empire collapsed. It took 1,000 years to truly recover.

In my opinion it basically comes down to two points. First for the thousands of years before the industrial revolution we were seperated more strictly to our own cultures without ineraction with others. Number two, when we did hit the industrial revolution, that "spark" correlated with the mixing pot that was the United States mixed ideas together at the right time as science was taking over. A last little note on past technologies, the clovis people had tools sharper than we know how to make them today. Their lithics technology unless I am mistaking made tools 1000 times sharper than our metal razor blades. Bet schick would like to get their hands on that blueprint...

Don't forget, though, the tremendous advances of the Greeks - including calculating machines (for star-gazing and time-keeping), and even the steam engine (though they failed to develop it because they preferred slaves). The Industrial Revolution rocks, but it succeeded not only because of the technology, but also because of population pressures in Europe that impelled people to migrate to the Americas, bringing those technologies to the Americas, and exploiting the abundant natural resources in the Americas, Africa, Australia and Canada. It's not just about the technology. It was also about the population and the huge masses of "open spaces" to build up.

Brillant stuff. i love it when we get closer to discovering compex civlisations that existed before our time line gives them credit for.

I agree with you, I am only saying that science as a whole "boomed" during one time. What would it be like today if electricity and it's uses were not discovered etc? To me there could have been one extra discovery that happened during for instance the bronze age that could have sparked the flow of technologies. In my opinion I believe that the "ancients" had many, many more technologies than we think they did.

Whenever they make a discovery of this type it always turns out that we've underestimated the sophistication of early man. They're always more advanced than we thought, never less (or that's the impression I have). I know that the people who built Stonehenge were sophisticated too. But the ruins at Stonehenge that we see today are 4,000 years old. These ruins are twice as old. Stonehenge was built halfway between this civilization and now. Wow.

Also rember that stonehenge is 500 years older than the great pyramids and Newgrange in ireland is 1000 years older than the pyramids. aaahhhh we have so much more to find.

Isn't it fascinating!


One of the amazing things about this civilization is that, from what I've read, they were still hunter/gatherers when they made these very sophisticated structures. The idea that

first there were hunter/gatherers
then man discovered agriculture
then farming towns formed
then professional specialization developed
then they built temples

seems so basic in anthropology. Here we have serious stone buildings made by people who were still hunting mammoths. It fills me with curiosity to realize that, when it comes to the history of civilization, we don't know squat yet.



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Sometimes I wonder if forming civilizations is instinctive to humans the way that building nests is to birds. We think of civilization a series of inventions but maybe it's actually based on an instinct that's always been there and is innate to humanity. So people in the ice age must have had civilizations because, since they were human, they had to have civilizations. (I hope this poorly worded speculation isn't totally unintelligible)

Beautiful carvings, but I didn't see any dinosaurs. I see a croc, some birds, a boar and a scorpion. What a wonderful find.