There's a lot of speculation here about cultural amnesia, but I think that's partly missing the point - which is the sheer scale of the project.
These structures are absolutely massive. I used to live in the area and it took me a long time to see Durrington Walls, partly because it's hard to imagine an earthwork on that scale. I literally did a double take when I realised that some earth banks were part of this huge construction.
The Walls are a small enclosure inside this much bigger complex, and they still cover an area bigger than Wembley stadium, which can seat up to 90,000 people.
This new ring of shafts - presumably with objects inside them - is slightly smaller than the entire town of Salisbury a few miles to the south. It makes the Old Sarum earthwork, which used to be Salisbury in medieval times, look like a footnote.
For a neolithic culture, it must have taken an absolutely insane amount of planning and physical effort - and this at a time when the total population of the British Isles was less than 200,000 people.
I'm of the firm belief at this point that we are a species with severe amnesia.
I find it significantly more plausible that cataclysmic events we no longer remember occured in our past and wiped away a rich history in which we may have feasibly been far more advanced technologically than we currently are.
This is a pretty old idea that was recently rebranded as the "Silurian Hypothesis". If you put in a bit of thought, it'll be obvious that it essentially boils down to one of two things:
Either every paleoanthropologist, archaeologist, and geologist out there is in a massive conspiracy to hide the truth, or all of the people in those disciplines are complete idiots. An event like that would leave strong genetic, palynological, and archaeological evidence, yet nothing of that sort exists. Any explanation purporting to wipe out the evidence and replace it with the consensus story we do would be better called magic than science.
You could be right. It is certainly a compelling argument; "either scientists are in a conspiracy or complete idiots" (paraphrased). The answer is however unequivocally: we don't know. And it behooves to be a bit more humble when it comes to these things, and investigate each claim individually instead of making blanket statements about everything such.
There are several aspects one can take into account that can inspire a more nuanced approach: one is that these kind of theories is an "entry-drug" for interest in archaeology and related sciences. To get on a high horse and nip such interest in its bud is counterproductive from a scientific perspective and is reminiscent of the defensive position that many professions are taking in the open data age that has opened for masses of amateur researchers doing much better work than a tiny cadre of elite professionals could do on their own.
Another aspect of this dismissive attitude is that the notion a petrified and fact-resistant "establishment" is opening the field for all sorts of nut case Youtube channels that exploit this types of interests instead. Including the age-old nazis with their Atlantis and similar theories.
So no, let's assume that we don't know, that anything is possible. But let's also inspect the evidence for each fantastical claim with best of our knowledge.
So no, let's assume that we don't know, that anything is possible. But let's also inspect the evidence for each fantastical claim with best of our knowledge.
Well, first of all, you don't know that anything is possible. To assert something is possible without actually showing it is possible is meaningless. That doesn't mean we can conclude it isn't possible, just that we don't know if it's possible.
Second, while 'we don't know' is a perfectly acceptable position, it does not lead to,'therefore my pet idea is worthy'.
You are, of course, entirely within your right to explore any idea you'd like, but to claim the scientific community is unfair or defensive to dismiss your idea because it either has no evidence to back it up, or frequently because it has been proposed over and over and has already been picked to death, is intellectually lazy. If you want people to take it seriously, you need to provide evidence. There's too much to study to be able to take every currently baseless idea and run with it.
> Well, first of all, you don't know that anything is possible
I said "let's assume (...) that anything is possible", a completely different thing, so your argument that " we don't know if it's possible" is moot, and a classic case of a straw man argument.
> "while 'we don't know' is a perfectly acceptable position, it does not lead to,'therefore my pet idea is worthy'"
Again, you are mostly having an argument with yourself, as this is somewhat a misrepresentation of what I'm saying. My main point is that it behooves to be a bit humble when it comes to dismissing ideas that are possible albeit without firm evidence and that offhanded dismissal should be discouraged, unless one can actually disprove the claim. It is after all the stuff from which new knowledge is made. That doesn't mean that every scientist must engage and clamor to inspect the evidence for each fantastical claim (but I do believe that an active interest from the scientific community would help cleanse the scene of some of the more outrageous theories).
> "If you want people to take it seriously, you need to provide evidence."
Really? so all scientific endeavors must produce evidence before they are allowed to posit something? I think you will agree that this is an untenable position hold as a general principle, and you probably mean that any layman should not be allowed to posit anything without having the proper education and academic standing. Be that as it may, such ivory towers of academic snobbishness will fall, eventually.
> If you want people to take it seriously, you need to provide evidence.
That really depends on what "people" you are talking about. There is a considerable market for fantastical misinformation about history, especially when the fantasy reinforces things we want to believe about ourselves today.
I have personally been led down a few story paths purporting to be historical but turning out to be nothing more recently constructed and idealized fantasies of the distant past.
You're right that I could have been less aggressive.
However you seem to have some misunderstandings of my post and personal positions. I am in full support of smashing the ivory tower, public access to archaeology (it's their heritage), and understanding the limits of our technology.
What I do not support is trying to find some perceived gap and slotting in made up story, especially an unreasonable one. The grandparent is firmly in the latter.
Moreover, these kinds of wild stories do a great deal of harm to archaeology. I can't tell you how many burials I've seen looted because someone believed all graves have treasure. It's better to stick with the evidence we do have.
"Archeologists hate him, this one weird trick to discover ancient civilizations".
He recently said in an interview that younger archeologists have read his work and are subversively challenging the orthodoxy. Also Randall Carlson mentioned that mainstream Geology has already come round to the idea of a catalysmic event around the time of The Younger Dryas.
Now I don't know how much of what either of these men claim to be true is true but it seems to me that it's not only stupidity or conspiracy that holds a field back. The real problem is when a fundamental mistake is made and then built on, ego gets involved and confirmation bias is abound. For example Geologists at some point all decided that everything happens gradually, the earth is stable and there are no catalysmic events. In the last 20 years that has been reversed, yet cataclysmic theories of The Younger Dryas have existed since the early 20th century.
It is certainly true that people like Graham Hancock and other fringe theorists play up the story of how much they oppressed by the mainstream as if it is evidence to support their claims. This is to be ignored as evidence and their arguments looked at on their own merit. We should however admit that mistakes are made in all fields, they gain momentum over time and require huge amounts of evidence to overturn.
One of the major problems with this particular idea is that the number of things that would have to be wrong is so large, we're essentially talking about rewriting everything from scratch. It's on roughly the same level as geocentrism at this point.
The advocates rarely if ever point out real evidence and instead claim things like gobekli tepe (or worse, yonaguni) support their argument based on very deep misunderstandings.
The answer is simple: concrete is very simple technology, which was discovered and forgotten multiple times, but archeologists are not specialists in concrete making technology, so they label kilns as temples.
If somebody will sponsor two sits from Ukraine to Peru, I will just demonstrate that using ancient temple, which is already filled with stones, waiting for fire.
This is a tantalizing idea ripe for nerd sniping, but there are practical limits to how advanced previous civilizations could have become. If all of humanity were catastrophically wiped out right now, and 50 million years from now, another species was investigating the planet, they'd find microplastics in rock and ice strata around the world, all at approximately the same age. There's no natural explanation for this material, so it would be strong evidence for a global species capable of extracting and processing hydrocarbons.
Although many people don't believe it, the fact also remains that there would be similar evidence of atmospheric changes due to our activities.
There might be no written record of our passing, all of our steel structures would be long gone, even Mount Rushmore long erased, and our efforts at interplanetary exploration could all be lost, but our plastics would remain.
FWIW, I do think some prehistorical civilizations were more advanced than we give them credit for, and ongoing discoveries seem to support this. But we're almost certainly the most technologically advanced civilization the Earth has fostered to date.
You don't present an argument for an upper limit on how advanced past civilizations can have been without detection but for an excluded middle, because, sure, a civilization at our level would be easily detectable, but one that developed to where it could operate without environmental pollution and which could clean up the pollution that it made on the way to it's advanced state would not be so detectable.
This is a line of thinking that wanders away from intellectual curiosity and into intellectual madness. You're describing a process that would somehow "undo" micro- and macro-scopic effects and chemistry in rock and ice records around the world -- including those on the ocean floor -- without, itself, leaving any trace. It would be like peeling the skin off an onion, running that layer through a food processor, and then delicately gluing it all back on, and not being able to tell the difference under a microscope.
> This is a line of thinking that wanders away from intellectual curiosity and into intellectual madness.
When we’re talking about the prospects of a more advanced human civilization in a time from which we have artifacts (but, obviously, not ones that are more obviously advanced than standing stones into which people read improbable histories), if you aren't going to lean hard into intellectual madness, what's the point?
> That's wizard wand technology
I prefer “sufficiently advanced” to “wizard wand”, but the former is, as they say, indistinguishable from the latter.
Heh. I tend to pretty rapidly lose interest in subjects when they go from "huh, that's kinda neat" to young-adult fantasy storytime. It's a mental self-defense against the kinds of ideas that sneak up on clever people and trick them into believing dumb things.
This sort of historical fantasy is surprisingly rampant. From History channel pushing 'ancient astronauts' to the founder of the 1619 NYTimes project writing an article claiming African people were helping mesoamerican Aztecs build pyramids and the Olmec stone heads - predating the arrival of Columbus and the Europeans [1].
I'm always skeptical of any sort of hidden ancient advanced culture claims. The capabilities of bored humans over an extended hundreds/thousand year timescales is always underrated. Even without modern technology trading and just the night sky to be inspired by.
Same the complex earthworks and manipulations of the environment created by indigenous Americans which is the thesis of 1491 book [2]. Or even in the complex large scale network of Eel farming in by natives in South Australia which surprised the European explorers [3]. Or even how Convergent evolution works in nature.
Let me ask you: If the earth had some major event tomorrow and basically everything quit working, do you think we'd forget about things such as the internet, phones, indoor plumbing, vehicles, or electricity?
No, probably not. We'd rebuild, though some areas of the world would rebuild better or more equally than others. I don't know why folks think the past was any different. This is the main reason I highly doubt the past was some weirdly advanced paradise. I mean, why the heck would we need to invent, say, the chimney if the past was so advanced? Sure, folks in the past were smarter than we give credit for and sure, we've eshewed some things in the past - but the major things have stuck around.
Ehhhh. It might be because so many recent events have given me cause to be disappointed in people, but I don't think a massive loss of cultural memory is all that implausible. We have great numbers of people now who either don't believe vaccines are safe, or don't believe the Earth is round, or don't believe in evolution, or don't believe in anthropogenic climate change. Even as little attention as this thread is likely to get, probably someone's going to read this comment and not believe at least one of those things. The irony of not believing one of those things while reading the comment on a device built by science, over a vast technological network of other devices built by science, likely won't occur to them.
Now also think about how much of modern stuff we take for granted rests on technological principles that are totally unknown to the average person. I have no idea how a toilet works. It would probably take me years to build a working one from scratch. I read about the principle of the plumbing in a toilet, once, but I can't recall it right this minute. Toilets are among the inventions that have had the greatest positive impact on human societies, and I could do no better right this minute than dig a hole somewhere and put some dirt on top of it.
Given a strand of copper and some magnets, I could make a crude motor or generator. But I have no idea how to extrude fine copper wire, how to identify copper ore, mine it, or refine it. I know enough to make a crappy magnet out of some iron, but it would take me a hundred years to manufacture a motor and a lead-acid battery, and without modern medicine, I could hope for maybe 20 years.
I think there are plausible scenarios where something like a sufficiently destructive solar flare could do enough damage to reset the last thousand years of technological development, and in those scenarios, people would within just a generation or two stop believing that things like an internet ever existed.
It literally took a millennium for Europe to rediscover the lost knowledge of the Romans and Greeks and to reorganise itself to a comparable level of political and economic sophistication. And the ancient world wasn't operating at anything like the level we have today.
Technical knowledge is incredibly fragile. It requires a global network of raw materials, energy sources, processing systems of various kinds, and logistics - all maintained by overlapping knowledge concentrated in a relatively small number of individuals and institutions, none of whom have a complete picture.
So even if the knowledge survived in book form, it would still be useless at a local level if the supply chains that feed it were broken.
The absolute best you could hope for is some kind of partial memory in a few local pockets, and maybe the odd genius would turn up every century or two to make another attempt at deciphering the ancient wisdom.
Do you not think that society, after living in the digital age with internet and communication, wouldn't immediately work to fix these things?
I don't know about the 'rediscover lost knowledge of the Romans and Greeks" bit. We aren't clamoring to get the 'sophistication' of the Victorian time period, in part because so many of the ideas aren't valued, and much of the same attitude probably was the same for the 'lost' information. We view the ancients in a romantic way, but... they also didn't have chimneys. Folks through history often didn't have the literacy rates we do.
And no one in history had a really good overview either, honestly. A complete supply overview isn't necessary at a local level: We all know these exist. It won't take long before we communicate easily again and we'll have electricity before long. Once you have these things, lots of other things will fall into place.
The global literacy rate two hundred years ago, at the dawn of the industrial revolution, is estimated to be under 20% [1]. Today it's over 80% because the contributions of a small number of inventors raised the tide for everyone, increasing access to education. Half the world couldn't even read until the mid-1960s.
Knowledge has always been unevenly distributed and most people who succeed do so because they were born into a supportive environment. It's unreasonable to expect that from seven billion people when a significant fraction of them grew up with illiterate elders.
It isn't that we all know how to build this stuff - but more that we know the stuff exists. We all have these ideas. It is online, it is written in books. The chances of all of our information being lost is slim. We have a pretty good literacy rate now as well. You don't need to know everything: Other folks know a lot about mining, making wire, and so on. Some folks know a great deal about making medicine, fixing bones, and so on.
This is why I say it won't be lost: We have the information, both digital and in hard copy form. We know it all exists: We'd rebuild. It isn't going to need YOU, specifically, to remember it all, but simply to know this stuff exists and understand that folks are peppered through the earth that know about the technologies you don't - and know what these things are used for. We wouldn't lose toilets - a well documented technology - we'd rebuild them. A solar flare wiping out some of the communication routes wouldn't be enough. That would simply be a setback - a major one, but not enough to destroy things.
This is all despite folks not believing in a round earth or vaccines and all of that stuff.
There are a few ancient techniques that got lost along the way as we moved to differing mathematics and languages but there is nothing significant high technology found so far.It is a bunch of trenches, hardly high technology.
If you talk to a doctor about diagnosis 100 years ago they would tell you about touch and listening to the body in various ways to do a diagnosis that a modern Doctor doesn't know because they just order an Xray. Listening to the heart is a bit old fashioned already as cardiograms have become part of the kit in your average ambulance. So the techniques will be lost in time.
I don't know about being far advanced in the past, but we've certainly lost knowledge along the way.
- Scientists still debate exactly how the pyramids were built. They have a pretty good idea, but don't know exactly.
- More recently, we're not sure we could even recreate the engines that powered Apollo and took us to the moon. It appears that some of the critical knowledge was institutional, passed from one to the next, and all the engineers are gone.
And look at any tech company now. Sometimes when one person leaves, stuff has to be rewritten because no one knows how it works. My favorite example of this, which I experienced personally, was that no one knew how the "send money" code at PayPal worked for the longest time. It was written in a language that the lead engineer made up (and then he subsequently left). Everyone knew it worked, but no one knew how. They had to eventually rewrite the whole thing from scratch, but not after creating a fleet of emulators to keep it running.
That’s a silly argument, we could build pyramids 100 times bigger than the Egyptian ones if we wanted to today, and we can build engines that are far more efficient and powerful than the Apollo ones.
Just because the specific methodology became obsolete doesn’t mean we lost anything along the way
They lost the plans. For this particular engine type. That's not the same as losing fundamental knowledge of how the engines work, or the ability to recreate one larger.
And you have not acknowledged you misrepresented what the article said.
What is it with you types that have to feel we're failing, going backwards? I had an argument once with a guy that insisted there were compiler optimisation that aren't used any more because they are now lost - there are literally books on those opts, web articles accessible in a few clicks, probably youtube vids (in fact, see godbolt's stuff) - why are you types so set on failure and ignorance? What exactly are you thinking when you post this inaccurate and negative stuff?
Aren't there enough problems in the world without making up nonexistent ones?
I find a more extreme version of this thinking in anti-science subjects like flat earth and homeopathy.
Those guys are always referencing ancient texts.
Many parts of humanity stagnated for millennia - see cave systems in France and Eastern Europe which were occupied for thousands of years without any progress.
I find it incredible that you could take a baby from that era, send them to school and they could be indiscernible from the rest of us.
> That’s a silly argument, we could build pyramids 100 times bigger than the Egyptian ones if we wanted to today, and we can build engines that are far more efficient and powerful than the Apollo ones.
You seemed to have missed a couple of points there. Of course we can build the pyramids, but can we do it with the same level of technology that we think they had? Of course we can build better engines than the Apollo ones but can we recreate exactly those? These were the questions post to highlight that we have lost knowledge before.
> Can you recreate the exact breakfast I just made? Can you crack an egg the same way twice? Entropy always increases.
This is a false equivalency because you're confounding a uncontrollable natural process with things that could easily come with an instruction manual and be as replicate as a cake or science experiment. Identity is not the goal but sufficient similarity to meet specific requirements.
> It's knowledge that we don't necessarily need, if we really needed to made pyramids in the same way, we'd figure it out.
This moves the goal post and changes the subject because the original point was whether or not we lose knowledge, not whether or not that is acceptable.
> if we really needed to made pyramids in the same way, we'd figure it out.
We've been trying to figure it out for a century and still haven't. Why do you think we could now?
Same with the engines. We've been trying to make an F-1 for over a decade. In 2013 they even tore one down to figure out how it was made [0]. They still haven't figured it out.
Mass Corona Ejection is the one theory that I find sticks in my mind most, when the question "what could possibly have reset things so drastically that none of the survivors would remember ancient civilisation?" is asked.
Its like the Degauss'ing of our planet. I can imagine even we wouldn't survive such an event unscathed.
We'd have seen the magma layers covering Earth already. Mass corona ejection has the benefit of erasing the top layers of things (including civilisation), while leaving very little behind to indicate how it happened ..
It'll be a shame when the Government starts building the road tunnels underneath Stonehenge to allegedly ease traffic. Sacred doesn't seem to be in their vocabulary.
These structures are absolutely massive. I used to live in the area and it took me a long time to see Durrington Walls, partly because it's hard to imagine an earthwork on that scale. I literally did a double take when I realised that some earth banks were part of this huge construction.
The Walls are a small enclosure inside this much bigger complex, and they still cover an area bigger than Wembley stadium, which can seat up to 90,000 people.
This new ring of shafts - presumably with objects inside them - is slightly smaller than the entire town of Salisbury a few miles to the south. It makes the Old Sarum earthwork, which used to be Salisbury in medieval times, look like a footnote.
For a neolithic culture, it must have taken an absolutely insane amount of planning and physical effort - and this at a time when the total population of the British Isles was less than 200,000 people.