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This is also an interesting bit of research, showing the slightly odd assortment of things that can be concluded from common finds:
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Here's another good example of how remote sensing can increase the scope of discovery:
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Some evidence of ancient wars.
While I obviously agree that one has to follow the evidence, I don't think anyone should assume that there's ever been a period in which people didn't fight wars, sadly.
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A huge ancient city has been found in the Amazon, hidden for thousands of years by lush vegetation.
The discovery changes what we know about the history of people living in the Amazon.
The houses and plazas in the Upano area in eastern Ecuador were connected by an astounding network of roads and canals.
The area lies in the shadow of a volcano that created rich local soils but also may have led to the destruction of the society.
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I like the LiDAR images from the guardian too
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/jan/11/amazon-archaeology-lost-cities-ecuador
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It's so unlikely for wooden artifacts to be preserved from so long ago. I've long speculated that people must have lived in non-stone-built structures for far longer than the standard caricature of ancient people as cave-dwellers makes most modern commentators believe. It's just that wood and leather and other materials that people would have used rots away so quickly that if you're going with the available evidence, they're usually not easy or impossible to detect. Human culture and sophistication goes back far, far longer than is generally assumed.
What I always say when people basically doubt the humanity of 'Neanderthals'=ancient Europeans is that the familiar image of them was established in the 19th century for undoubtedly racist reasons. They were cultured, they had names, they spoke languages, and they were most definitely not a different species to 'modern humans'.
Precisely the same thing can be said about pre-Colombian inhabitants of the Americas. The majority likely lived in at least semi-permanent settlements, they had sophisticated trade networks, they organised into confederations, they had some form of education. They very obviously knew how to clothe themselves beyond untreated fur loinclothes, but they’re still imagined as half naked most of the time (of course, there were varying levels of development across the continent).
But that doesn’t fit the narrative of illuminated white Europeans bringing civilisation to savages, which is prevalent even today. Ironically, committing genocide is far more savage than living in wooden longhouses.
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The Welsh were even less likely to hanging around half naked though.
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I've been learning about Göbekli Tepe, a place I had no knowledge of until very recently. What an incredible place, WTF was going on there? And only 3% of the area has been excavated and studied, amazing. I hope we can learn more about the people that built it, can't happen fast enough for me.
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Possibly remnants of a widely spread advanced civilisation that predates the Bronze Age but has been lost to the eons, and would have been unmatched anywhere on earth for thousands of years. Or something more recent but still pretty impressive.
I find it’s all too easy to slide into pseudo science and bs when reconciling the notion of properly advanced civilisations gone extinct with (most) contemporary scientists’ hubris about how we’re living the paramount moment of human existence. However, if we discard Victorian-like biases about strangers’ and ancestors’ capabilities, it seems ridiculous to cling onto the assertion that formed stone tools were used by hominids before Homo Erectus (potentially multiple millions of years ago), and somehow it’s only in the past 4 thousand years that humans developed something better. The argument that it’s because humans took that long to develop agriculture is equally absurd if scientifically still accurate, given how important food security has always been.
Relatedly, I find it interesting that humans may have nearly gone extinct (at least) at one point. There’s evidence that the species was reduced to about 1,300 breeding individuals some 900,000 years ago (following who knows what cataclysm or malign event). So even if we (our current civilisation) continue to fuck up the planet, there’s every chance that a random group of Amish or Sentinelese folks will survive to carry the species onwards. Perhaps they’d encode in myth how giants riding shining immortal horses used to roam the land.
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Ah yes, as predicted by yours truly. :)
https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/220312/
However, going back further, I think it was @Sumo who posted the first article about it in this thread. I hadn't heard about it before then.
Having thought about it for quite a while now, I imagine it was most likely smallpox introduced by the Spanish, particularly the de Orellana expedition, that decimated these populations.
Of course, they didn't just 'vanish', they just dispersed from larger cities that they probably thought were cursed, to where they thought they'd be safer elsewhere, and, needless to say, as in the case of the 'vanished' Maya and Aztecs, their descendants are very much alive today. I still wonder whether some of the 'uncontacted' Amazonian tribes may be such descendants who have avoided contact because the old stories about terrible plagues brought on their ancestors. I really hope their oral traditions will somehow be written down eventually.
At any rate, I'm sure they'll find many more huge places, and probably also whichever city was really the model for 'El Dorado'. The theories around at the moment are interesting, but there's nothing like more excavation.
As with the most recent Maya discoveries, it also again goes to show how quickly huge human cities can be obscured so much that modern archaeology has such trouble finding them (when they'll generally be well-known to people living locally), although obviously LiDAR is and continues to be a total game-changer in the case of cities hidden in jungles.
The main worry with all this remote sensing is that it can give looters very good starting-points, something I'm sure already happens all the time. It's not just LiDAR but also the methods used for the work in Egypt years ago. You generally have to delay publication a bit until the excavation has been done, but with immense sites that's obviously not possible. I hope they've managed to secure the site somewhat. It would be a shame if all the context were lost because of looting.
The most interesting question to me is always whether they'll find written materials, and if so, that they can be deciphered. Here's hoping. There's a lot of history still to be written properly.
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On the subject of pre-agricultural sedentary communities, I was intrigued by the idea that humans were gardeners first of all, sowing seeds in the autumn, retreating in the winter to more hospitable climes then returning in the spring/summer to forage whatever crop there was.
It serves to blur that line in history which always seemed very clear cut according to some historians and not very believable to me. I'm not sure we can ever know when we first became sedentary farmers, I guess we can know it was somewhere in the fertile crescent, but where and when??
I'm more interested in this point in history than any other at the moment. 🤓
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It is fascinating, and very well-publicised work. Anyone who likes this will find lots more. I haven't tried too many Internet rabbit holes, but I've long found this to be one of the most enjoyable. You just have to avoid the Erich von Däniken-style esoteric bullshit (and there's considerably more of that than all the archaeological evidence ever gathered). :)
There is so much still hidden in the ground to wean us off our modern prejudice that 'civilisation' only really began at the end of 'pre-history'. Memories are so short, and a stone-built ritual centre like that at Göbekli Tepe would have been surrounded by large population centres built up with less durable materials, as at Stonehenge. I don't really believe the theories that such sites were only used seasonally. They undoubtedly attracted more visitors at certain times, but I think they must have been large cities in their own right. As with all ancient cities, it's harder to find evidence of more perishable materials than stone, e.g. Babylon was undoubtedly much, much bigger than just the area enclosed in its walls, and outside them it would have been what we'd call a shanty town today.
All that said, of course these spectacular sites inevitably attract a huge amount of speculation, and interpreting them is difficult without enough evidence, so the above speculation may well be completely wrong, but it has recently been shown in the Maya domains and at Angkor that they clearly had much larger populations than previously suspected. As with Stonehenge, people tend to focus on things like religion and ritual, artefacts, or other evidence of culture and artistry, but around them a lot of completely mundane life went on that's at least equally as interesting when it comes to writing histories.
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I completely agree. There are still too many modern biases at work. I'm sure agriculture must go back hundreds of thousands of years, but it's very hard to find evidence of growing perishable crops, and indeed dating that evidence, if it exists, from so far back.
Some groups of humans will always have been nomads, but I doubt they were ever in the majority. Spreading out across the world won't only have happened in concentrated 'migrations' (as in the vision of people migrating across the Bering Strait--people would have gone backwards and forwards and kept contact with East Asia, and there will have been many groups undertaking the journey over many years), but in small communities shifting a little every once in a while.
The main threat to humans in new areas would have come from predatory animals, and there would undoubtedly have been a lot of hunting, but it would have been vital for people to know the local plants, and bring old seeds with them, before discovering useful new plants.
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I just looked up the Göbekli Tepe Wikipedia article again, and I don't think this photo was on there when I last looked:
You can see how small the area excavated so far is. They've done exploratory digs elsewhere, but this shows how slowly archaeology must proceed to excavate properly. Obviously, they will have got a little further since the picture was taken.
The larger resolution version is here. It's 10MB, so I didn't put it in this post.
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Relatedly, I find it interesting that humans may have nearly gone extinct (at least) at one point. There’s evidence that the species was reduced to about 1,300 breeding individuals some 900,000 years ago (following who knows what cataclysm or malign event). So even if we (our current civilisation) continue to fuck up the planet, there’s every chance that a random group of Amish or Sentinelese folks will survive to carry the species onwards. Perhaps they’d encode in myth how giants riding shining immortal horses used to roam the land.
I'm with the sceptics on this one. I think it shows too much confidence in the method, which simplifies things far too much, and will undoubtedly spawn many other papers. There's no doubt that larger populations were reduced dramatically again and again, by pandemics, natural disasters (the sheer number of inundated coastal settlements that we know about will be dwarfed by the number of those we don't know about), and, of course, humanity's favourite activities of warfare and genocide, sadly. Just one significant bottleneck is very unlikely.
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Interesting, thanks. Ancient people generally seem to have understood the importance of controlled burning, so quite a lot of the carbon seen in those soils is probably caused by that. I'm really most curious about how dense and contiguous the forest cover was when these civilisations were at their height--I assume not very, and that much of the forest cover we see today was not there when the epidemics swept through.
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This is also worth posting for the adjustments they've made to facilitate underwater archaeology on the wreck of the Erebus--heated diving suits and air from the surface.
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Agreed it's excellent. Absolutely fascinating.
I also have a kind of coffee table / picture book which my mum found in a charity shop, about the Northwest Passage and the expeditions.
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Lost cities / archaeology / ancient history
Posted by
@Oliver Schick
Yes! This is brilliant. It's so unlikely for wooden artifacts to be preserved from so long ago. I've long speculated that people must have lived in non-stone-built structures for far longer than the standard caricature of ancient people as cave-dwellers makes most modern commentators believe. It's just that wood and leather and other materials that people would have used rots away so quickly that if you're going with the available evidence, they're usually not easy or impossible to detect. Human culture and sophistication goes back far, far longer than is generally assumed.
This article is a good example of how tentative thinking about this can be:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/sep/19/justice-for-neanderthals-what-the-debate-about-our-long-dead-cousins-reveals-about-us
What I always say when people basically doubt the humanity of 'Neanderthals'=ancient Europeans is that the familiar image of them was established in the 19th century for undoubtedly racist reasons. They were cultured, they had names, they spoke languages, and they were most definitely not a different species to 'modern humans', and neither were the other 'species' listed in the article. They didn't 'go extinct', and the reason why they aren't very prominent in the Paabo genome analysis is simply that there were far fewer of them than later migrants from North Africa and Asia. Europe was a harsh environment for much of the time of human occupation, with plentiful predators, and later arrivals simply outnumbered them. There was undoubtedly conflict, as we're talking about humans, but also plenty of assimilation and close, friendly contact.
Very good find. I hope there will be more, although they're probably as rare as hen's teeth.