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Ice Age Civilization


TheCosmicMind

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It's already been pointed out by several other posters why no one ought to take Cremo seriously. Real-world, legitimate historical and scientific research will point you in the proper direction. For instance: decrease in longevity? No. The average person in the Bronze Age lived to be around 35 years old. And this is if you were lucky enough to survive childhood. At least 30% of all children did not reach five years of age, and infant mortality was frightening (probably around 20% of all pregnancies ended in spontaneous miscarriage). This is why, all over the Mediterranean world, girls were often married off as soon as they experienced their first menstruation—this means girls as young as twelve were often married, and having babies within a year's time. They would continue to have babies their entire lives because they well knew many of their children would not live. Decrease in physical strength? How exactly is such a thing measured? How can one prove this? It's too subjective to be taken seriously, but consider that the average man 3,000 years ago rarely grew taller than about 5'3"; for women an average height was around 4'10". These ancients were not big, intimidating people. What they accomplished was certainly impressive, but one has to balance such things with real-world evidence. Descent from spiritualism to materialism? Here I cannot argue with you. However, it has little to no effect on the development or evolution of mankind. There's both good and bad in religion, as there is in all things. Religion has often been used as a blunt weapon to keep people in their places. I should think we all prefer the way things are today to the days when the Catholic Church ruled all of Europe and stymied intellectual and scientific pursuits for centuries. I'm actually not trying to demean Catholicism (I was raised Roman Catholic and do not consider myself an atheist). I am only stating a fact.

Nice points sesh but very easily counterable neverthless you gave a lot of new material for Devolution in your arguments.Like women having lesser number of progeny nowdays as compared to before.And you have led me to think that evolution cannot be understood only in terms of the material world but it is also guided by conscious choice voiced by sentient beings or organisms in response to their environments or out of their own free will.Uptill now most evolutionist think of evolution as a defunct process based on interaction of organism with their physical environments and the infamous random mutations for improvement,while you can apply this to lower organism to some extent but once the organism becomes sufficiently complex to be sentient then probably the concious choices it makes would have definately played a big role in it's evolution along with environmental factors.Now unless we account for the impact of free will for the evolution of sentient organisms the concept remains highly incomplete.For eg- what if the first monkey to turn into a man decided to commit suicide or jumped of a cliff? probably then we would have had to wait for millions of more years to have such a random progressive mutation again for humans to evolve.

Also spirituality is independant of relegions of a book.

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When i talk of Cremo's book 'forbidden archeology' or his ideas of human devolution it doesn't mean i have to love and worship the man.You can discredit him in whatever sense you want but the facts and inconsistencies he brings to light in the above mentioned book is very sensible and with referrences and is not something i can dismiss wether people with credentials do dismiss him or not.Can anyone discredit or prove false any information he has given in 'forbidden archeology' as for me all i know and care about what he has to say is pretty much in that book that he has written.I don't care if he is a murdering pyscopath and a child molester but what he has compiled in that book makes a lot of sense.

So again i would like to restate that subtracting any other beliefs he holds or personality traits he harbors can anyone tell me what wrong information has he provided in his book 'Forbidden archeology'.

Rather i should put it this way--"can anyone please enlighten me by showing me that the book 'forbidden archeology' and the concept of 'spiritual descent of man' are crap and full of lies"

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Again i restate why would the photosensitive cells aggregate.Even if i give you that due to some random mutation(that didn't make the organism sterile or cancerous) do you realise how much of a time period and favourable random mutations along with natural selection it would take for that cell aggregate to enlarge and take a concave shape.Even if i give you that the cell aggregate did give rise to a concave indentation due to some random mutation(that didn't make the organism sterile or cancerous) that was favoured by natural selection again still do you realise that you are still not reaching a stage where this visual information due to photosensitivity is coherent or even interpreted by the organism for it to be favourably to it(the organism) in it's survival as there is no optic nerve.Even if i give you the credence that due to some random mutations over large periods of time and favoured by natural selection due to some oblivous reason the aggregate of photosensitive cells that have given rise to a concave indentation and have suddenly also given rise to a prototype mechanism(like an optic nerve) to interpret the light based signals in some mundane sense do you realise how much time and random mutations it would take(without making the organism sterile or cancerous) and how many generations of this organism would have to exist for these signals to be interpreted by it's brain in the form of any sort of Vision.

In the above paragraph i have only talked about the evolution of a mundane proto eye and it still seems nothing less then a miracle.Inorder to give a faint estimate of the probability of evolution of the eye gradually is less then the probability of the same person being struck by lightening 10000 times or probably even less depending on environmental factors persistent at those times when it was evolving.Once this protoeye along with it's optic nerve and gene group to code for it has been created then further evolution of the same can seem more explainable.Frankly speaking, beleiving in intelligent design seems more plausible then believing in this miraculous set of random events taking place in progression to give rise to the modern eye.

P.S. your description and the video is more suitable for the describing the development of the eye in an embryo when there are already genes to govern it's development but trying to extrapolate it for the gradual evolution of such a complex organ without having the complete set of genes to code for it's development is in my book next to impossible.Like i said i might as well believe that God/Aliens created us rather then in it's gradual evolution theory.

Except that that is in fact how it happened. How long would it take? Give or take, roughly half a billion years. Because that is how long it took. And you're, or at least it looks to me like you're looking at this completely backward. The teleological idea that there was something like an eye that was the ultimate goal of the evolutionary process; in fact it's the other way around. Evolution has no set course, natural selection simply favors traits which prove more useful for a creature's survival and reproduction. Basically, the premise is: traits that make it more likely for a creature to survive and reproduce, are in fact more likely to survive and reproduce. The development of aggregations of photosensitive cells is favorable for the detection of light, and thus an aquatic creature's location in the water relative to the surface. From there, each of the steps simply goes a stage further, granting sharper and sharper information with respect to the creature's environment which would allow it to survive and propagate more effectively. (Incidentally, it isn't at if an eye evolved and then later an optic nerve; they developed simultaneously: the original photosensitive cell aggregations would have been connected via nerves, just as so many other skin cells are.) And this is only referring to the "camera" eye used by fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals; the eyes of mollusks, arthropods, and other phyla are evolved independently, and are completely different. And yet, they all diverged from a common ancestor, which might have been a primitive, eel-like creature with photosensitive cells in its skin.

Edited by Arbitran
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Nice points sesh but very easily counterable neverthless you gave a lot of new material for Devolution in your arguments.Like women having lesser number of progeny nowdays as compared to before.And you have led me to think that evolution cannot be understood only in terms of the material world but it is also guided by conscious choice voiced by sentient beings or organisms in response to their environments or out of their own free will.Uptill now most evolutionist think of evolution as a defunct process based on interaction of organism with their physical environments and the infamous random mutations for improvement,while you can apply this to lower organism to some extent but once the organism becomes sufficiently complex to be sentient then probably the concious choices it makes would have definately played a big role in it's evolution along with environmental factors.Now unless we account for the impact of free will for the evolution of sentient organisms the concept remains highly incomplete.For eg- what if the first monkey to turn into a man decided to commit suicide or jumped of a cliff? probably then we would have had to wait for millions of more years to have such a random progressive mutation again for humans to evolve.

Also spirituality is independant of relegions of a book.

The fact that you can say that a "monkey turned into a man" simply demonstrates that you have no comprehension of the evolutionary process whatsoever. For the record, women do indeed have fewer children today, but in no small part due to the extreme population density of our planet as compared to times past. And yes, conscious choice can have a part in evolution; natural selection often works in this way, in fact (for example, female bowerbirds are attracted to males which construct the most impressive nest; the largest, most colourful, or most elaborate, depending on the female; ergo, future generations of bowerbird males will likely be better predisposed to being capable of building impressive nests). No monkey has ever turned into a human. And "random mutation" is far from the mechanism for evolution; the principal mechanism is natural selection and its relation to gene flow and allelic frequency shifts.

And, finally, might I ask how spirituality is independent of religious books? In what sense does "spirituality" exist, apart from religious texts which claim there is such a thing in the first place?

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Except that that is in fact how it happened. How long would it take. Give or take, roughly half a billion years. Because that is how long it took. And you're, or at least it looks to me like you're looking at this completely backward. The teleological idea that there was something like an eye that was the ultimate goal of the evolutionary process; in fact it's the other way around. Evolution has no set course, natural selection simply favors traits which prove more useful for a creature's survival and reproduction. Basically, the premise is: traits that make it more likely for a creature to survive and reproduce, are in fact more likely to survive and reproduce. The development of aggregations of photosensitive cells is favorable for the detection of light, and thus an aquatic creature's location in the water relative to the surface. From there, each of the steps simply goes a stage further, granting sharper and sharper information with respect to the creature's environment which would allow it to survive and propagate more effectively. (Incidentally, it isn't at if an eye evolved and then later an optic nerve; they developed simultaneously: the original photosensitive cell aggregations would have been connected via nerves, just as so many other skin cells are.) And this is only referring to the "camera" eye used by fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals; the eyes of mollusks, arthropods, and other phyla are evolved independently, and are completely different. And yet, they all diverged from a common ancestor, which might have been a primitive, eel-like creature with photosensitive cells in its skin.

As in many other theories my friend which seem very elegant on the surface the fallacy in these often lies in the details.It is your perogative as a sentient human is to rationalise why a aquatic animal would want to come to the surface or on land and also that vision was the only way to determine it's distance from the surface as pressure sensitivity and use of high frequency sound waves are other alternatives.The rest of the things you state are all probable but what i did was just highlight the chances of these happening in a sequential manner over half a billion years as suggested by you.When you say that the optic nerve developed along with this mass of photosensitive cell (this was highlighted by me as in my previous post as you had omitted it in your reasoning before) as a part of an organism it sounds like a very simple and plausible event but when you look at the molecular biological implications it would have on the whole organism then you can probably realise the magnitutde of this devolpment.You can also explain how man can evolve wings and start flying one day in the future and i or anyone cannot deny the possibility but the probability of that happening is something we can comment about.And like i said in that roughly half a billion years of evolution if any of the links(intermediate set of organisms) in the complex evolution of the proto eye would have been lost or interuppted then we would not have the eye.

For eg-just for a cell to become photosensitive is not a one step mechanism at a molecular level,it involves a complex process by which it achieves photosensitivity using various chemicals and chains of reactions happening within the cell along with the subsequent receptors and effectors.So even if such a development was to happen it would require a series of random mutations (which do not make the organism sterile or cancerous as in most cases mutants become so) just for the cell to become photsensitive.And this just for the photosensitivity,reorganising photo signals to provide and sort of coherent vision is light years ahead and would probably require thousands of favourable random mutations(assuming that mutations that happen on a larger scale almost 99.99% of the time make the organism sterile or cancerous).Now if you look at the great number of developments required at a molecular level for something like an eye to come into existence by gradual evolution and number of random mutations required for it to happen along with natural selection to support all the intermediate states and mind you that the whole process in not under any predetermined guidance and is happening over half a billion years then can you compute what is the probability of the same happening?

Now when you suggested that different creature evolved different types of eyes from a common eel like ancestor which just had photosensitive cells then you are telling me that such a huge number of nearly miraculous changes didn't only happen once but happened multiple times in different organisms.So it is next to impossible,you should rather say that a protoeye evolved in one ancestral organism which later evolved into diferent species and gave different types of eyes as per natural selection (not that this helps in actually explaining how the proto eye evolved).

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The fact that you can say that a "monkey turned into a man" simply demonstrates that you have no comprehension of the evolutionary process whatsoever. For the record, women do indeed have fewer children today, but in no small part due to the extreme population density of our planet as compared to times past. And yes, conscious choice can have a part in evolution; natural selection often works in this way, in fact (for example, female bowerbirds are attracted to males which construct the most impressive nest; the largest, most colourful, or most elaborate, depending on the female; ergo, future generations of bowerbird males will likely be better predisposed to being capable of building impressive nests). No monkey has ever turned into a human. And "random mutation" is far from the mechanism for evolution; the principal mechanism is natural selection and its relation to gene flow and allelic frequency shifts.

And, finally, might I ask how spirituality is independent of religious books? In what sense does "spirituality" exist, apart from religious texts which claim there is such a thing in the first place?

It is not me saying that the monkey turned into a man but it is the evolutionist,though i accept that i oversimplified the jist of evolution in the same way you tried to oversimplify the evolution of the eye.

From the face of it you seem like a person who knows a lot about evolution and you still deny the fundamental trigger of evolution which is 'random mutation in the genetic code',natural selection and survival of the fittest come into play after the mutation has given rise to a new variant and or a new gene.How do you suggest new variants come into existence without random mutation?Are you suggesting that God or biotechnologist were introducing these deviation through deliberate mutations?.

Leaving the rhetoric aside gene flow and allelic frequecy shifts can only happen once the gene(and subsequently it's allelic variants) already comes into existence,how do you suggest that gene evolved if not by insertion of nucleotides (a type of mutation)?The existance of alleles is probably due to mutation from a common template gene.You can state the great mechanism of gene flow and allelic frequency shifts which give rise to variation of a particular phenotypic expression after the gene and it's alleles have evolved (only mechanism suggested by evolutionist is 'random mutation' for the gene and it's allele to evolve).And natural selection comes into play quite later and on a macro level after the phenotypic expression of a particular trait either due to gene flow and allelic frequency shifts or 'random evolution'.

Again just oblige me and tell me that how to gene flow and allelic frequency shift give rise to new species entirely.Is it possible i.e. can a monkey become a man?Please enlighten me with the your great understanding of the evolutionary process.

And for your query regarding relegion and spirituality please read about meditation,consciousness and introspect and probably you will become more spiritual. P.S.-Bhagvad Gita might help.........don't tell me it is relegious since Krishna tells Arjun to specifically undo his mundane acceptance of any relegion or relegious practices and focus more on spirituality in the bhagvad gita.

P.S.-i am avoiding getting more technical as this is not a forum for discussion of evolution on a genetic level.

Edited by Harsh86_Patel
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Nevermind. Was reffering to Isaac Askimov the science fiction writer who wrote the foundation series with a protagonist called 'The Mule'.

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And, finally, might I ask how spirituality is independent of religious books? In what sense does "spirituality" exist, apart from religious texts which claim there is such a thing in the first place?

I think the fact that Neanderthal buried their loved ones, with flowers and personal possessions indicates a belief in an afterlife/ Spirituality. They didn't have religious "Books" .. although some of their art probably held "religious" ideology?

It's obvious, if we think about it, that "spirituality' preceded books, or writing as we know it, in many instances?

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Nevermind. Was reffering to Isaac Askimov the science fiction writer who wrote the foundation series with a protagonist called 'The Mule'.

That would be Asimov. Never read him. I have read Cremo though, and he sounds like a man desperately trying to validate his religion through "science." Fun to read but not credible.

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Can you tell me what was not credible about the information he has provided in that book?He has just stated case studies in archeology and anthropology and their interpretations by the mainstream.

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Briefly (since im at work)....his claim that modern humans (homo sapiens sapiens) are millions of years old. That the stories in Vedas are real.

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Can you tell me what was not credible about the information he has provided in that book?He has just stated case studies in archeology and anthropology and their interpretations by the mainstream.

I haven't read it but I've read the information he uses as presented online on sites such as s8int.com. From just these we can say several things about his methodology.

-He reads things that are claimed to have happened and proceeds as if they did happen with no substantiation.

-He takes things that look like other things and acts on the assumption that they are those things on appearance alone.

-He makes almost no attempts to falsify his conclusions and disregards alternate explanations if he addresses them at all..

Any one of these is enough to call his work into question.

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That would be Asimov. Never read him. I have read Cremo though, and he sounds like a man desperately trying to validate his religion through "science." Fun to read but not credible.

The Mule was a character in the Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov. he was a mentalist or some creep who count exert his mind over others and bend them to his will. he was a conqueror of galaxies and what not. He defeats the First Foundation and is aware of the Second Foundation but not its location. He tries to find the location of the Second Foundation but is finally defeated by them.

the Foundation Trilogy is an awesome read!!!!

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The Mule was a character in the Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov. he was a mentalist or some creep who count exert his mind over others and bend them to his will. he was a conqueror of galaxies and what not. He defeats the First Foundation and is aware of the Second Foundation but not its location. He tries to find the location of the Second Foundation but is finally defeated by them.

the Foundation Trilogy is an awesome read!!!!

Sorry to say....my name has much more obscure origins

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As I recall Neanderthals did not come from Africa. They arose in western Asia and Europe from a previous species (or several species) of Homo which had left Africa.

You are correct.

But a Neanderthal civilization? While there's plentiful evidence for Neanderthals, there's no indication they ever came close to the level of socio-political sophistication required for a civilization to emerge. They were simply hunter-gatherers.

Anything is possible.

Sorry, but not everything is possible.

Ass underwater archeology is still at its birth and the sea is less explored than the moon who knows what we will find in the future.

I just wanted to point out that, in underwater archaeology, usually the entire body is submerged!

Harte

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I haven't read it but I've read the information he uses as presented online on sites such as s8int.com. From just these we can say several things about his methodology.

-He reads things that are claimed to have happened and proceeds as if they did happen with no substantiation.

-He takes things that look like other things and acts on the assumption that they are those things on appearance alone.

-He makes almost no attempts to falsify his conclusions and disregards alternate explanations if he addresses them at all..

Any one of these is enough to call his work into question.

He also states that the premise he uses is same as the premise used by mainstreamers in that field.He also states how the mainstream is satisfied with half proofs for particular finds whereas it completely rejects other finds based on the same type of proofs.I feel he makes a lot of sense.
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In the mainstream though you usually have both something you can physically point to as proof of it's existence and a process for comparison and evaluation when you do.

Cremo appears to skip all this and plunge right into it without all those bothersome little things like context or probability.

If he questions these alleged practices in mainstream archaeology, it seems disadvantageous if not disingenuous for him to do the same.

Edited by Oniomancer
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Nice points sesh but very easily counterable neverthless you gave a lot of new material for Devolution in your arguments.Like women having lesser number of progeny nowdays as compared to before.And you have led me to think that evolution cannot be understood only in terms of the material world but it is also guided by conscious choice voiced by sentient beings or organisms in response to their environments or out of their own free will.Uptill now most evolutionist think of evolution as a defunct process based on interaction of organism with their physical environments and the infamous random mutations for improvement,while you can apply this to lower organism to some extent but once the organism becomes sufficiently complex to be sentient then probably the concious choices it makes would have definately played a big role in it's evolution along with environmental factors.Now unless we account for the impact of free will for the evolution of sentient organisms the concept remains highly incomplete.For eg- what if the first monkey to turn into a man decided to commit suicide or jumped of a cliff? probably then we would have had to wait for millions of more years to have such a random progressive mutation again for humans to evolve.

Also spirituality is independant of relegions of a book.

My earlier post has little to nothing to do with evolution. To be perfectly honest I'm not terribly interested in the science of evolution in the first place. My interest lies in the archaeology and research of ancient Near Eastern civilizations.

My point about women having more children in the past is unrelated to evolution. It expresses a relationship with ancient people's environmental and social conditions. As I explained in my earlier post, the only reason women had so many children in the ancient past is that many of the children (at least 30%) didn't survive past five years of age. So if anything, today's situation reflects a much better state of being. Women tend to get married later and have fewer children because there is no driving need for someone to be giving birth every year for around ten years (although I understand some women do this, anyway).

Men and women today also tend to live significantly longer, as I also explained in my earlier post. Here again, today's situation reflects a much better state of being. The average child living right now in the West can expect to live around 78 years. This is more than 40 years longer than a child could've expected to live in ancient times.

This is not evolution. Evolutionary developments usually take tens of thousands of years to appear in a species, not a few thousand years.

I agree with you about spiritually. Strictly speaking, however, spirituality and religion are two different things.

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Nice points sesh but very easily counterable neverthless you gave a lot of new material for Devolution in your arguments.Like women having lesser number of progeny nowdays as compared to before.

De-evolution is a return to a EARLIER state for a creature. Moving toward a SIMPLER state for a creature is still evolution.

Moving toward simpler does not equal deevolution.

As to women, you'd need to point out how lower fertility or less offspring is consistant with a species that existed before Homo Sapiens. The same with Strength or endurance or whatever trait you like. Simpler does not equal regression.

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underwater archeology is still at its birth and the sea is less explored than the moon who knows what we will find in the future.

That is a myth. It is not true.

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Evolution has never claimed that a monkey turned into a man. Are you under the impression that mutations and large feature developments occur in individuals?

Edited by Arbitran
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Something I'd like to throw in here... feral children - human children raised by animals - are a staple of fiction (Tarzan, Mowgli) but there are a few well-authenticated cases of real feral children. And in every case, children who were raised from infancy for several years by animals were mentally crippled. Intelligence, it seems, does not develop if there's no culture to support it.

So it's entirely possible that early h. sapiens, physically identical to us, may not have been very bright at all, until a culture had accrued that let him develop his mental potential. And that might have happened only recently.

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