Can someone tell me what Darwin theory is? Is it related to thermodynamics? Does it have something to do with the way a foot leaves an impression in a mud brick?
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2024
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Human era is predicted to begin 10k bc or something, by then human are already human. 4000 years ago is like yesterday lol.
Edit: lol, didn't realize i multiposted, sorry :/
10,000 BCE is just the approximate beginning of agriculture too, anatomically modern humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. Even the predecessors to those anatomically modern humans were pretty damn human-looking
Caveat, there was massive sea level rise around that time so early civilizations may well be older than that but we humans liked to build our early settlements next to the sea so anything older than that is going to be underwater (which is not good for preservation). iirc there are a few offshore ruins of interest that suggest there may have been older civilisations or at least some pretty impressive ceremonial sites.
There is a very simple reason that we can say with relative confidence that there were no earlier civilizations that vanished and that reason is domestication.
There is just no evidence of plant or animal domestication before a certain date range and, while that date range does keep getting pushed back, it doesn't get pushed back in a way that suggests any sort of civilization even as advanced as Sumer existed before Sumer. It gets pushed back in the "they were planting and harvesting this crop but didn't know how to make it very nutritious yet" sense.
We can see based both on morphology and genetics that there's no sign of any sort of civilization that domesticated plants and animals which then went feral after the civilization collapsed and, even with massive sea level rise, there should be some evidence. Sea levels didn't rise all of the sudden. There would have been people who had time to escape with their animals and seeds. Also, plants just have a habit of escaping on their own.
You need farming in order for a civilization to advance. You can't feed a large population via hunting and gathering.
While I don't doubt that there will be some genuinely ancient stuff now underwater, it seems unlikely that it would shift the global picture of the emergence of settle agricultural societies that much. Most "cradles of civilisation" are inland river valleys - Tigris, Euphrates, Nile, Yellow River, Yangtze, Indus, Tehuacan - with the exception being sites in Peru. Being by the coast only becomes useful once you get good at building ships, after all
I'm not in any way actually qualified on this though, so if there's some actual research saying otherwise I'd be delighted to read it. There really was a lot of sea level rise in the ~10,000 years before we know that agriculture got going, so it would make a lot of sense that at least some stuff got flooded
12,000 years ago is about when we as humans decided to stop picking up our entire lives and moving on every winter.
Or, possibly more accurately, when the semi permanent settlements we'd been using became permanent either because the crops we'd been working at raising started doing really well, and/or, because moving just wasn't an option anymore.
About 40,000 years ago we started painting, and doing other creative things.
200,000 years ago the first modern humans evolved in Africa. It took 100,000 years before we were capturing fast moving prey. Another 50 thousand to wipe out all of our bipedal competitors.
First thing we did was domesticate dogs. We've found evidence of dogs being part of our tribes as early as ≈200,000 years ago. I'm honestly not sure which came first, fire or dogs.
Fire.
Control of fire and cooking food predates humans. It's part of the reason we developed such large brains.
Homo Sapiens Sapiens (us) is generally agreed to have arrived on the world scene about 160k to 90k years ago in Africa, and genetic comparison + climate reconstruction shows that we started migrating out of Africa, first into the Middle East, about 50k to 60k years ago.
So... an anatomically modern human footprint in the ME would have to be about 15x older than this one to be any kind of unexpected.
Further, 4k years ago in Mesopotamia is... not unexpected at all, in two ways:
1 The Sumerian civilization can be archeologically traced back almost to 4000 BCE, which is 6k years ago.
2 A 4k old footprint human in mesopotamia ... is not even out of expectation for a young earth creationist, as that biblical timeline would include such people as roughly those that are supposed to have built the tower of Babel.
And an anatomically-kinda-close footprint another order of magnitude. Honestly, the mud brick is much closer to being an anachronism than the footprint..
There is footprints of homo erectus from 1.5 millions years ago showing that they were walking like we do.
https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=2571
Correction then, TWO orders of magnitude on top of the original increase.
I think some fundamentalist Christians believe the earth is 4000 years old only.
Garbage in garbage out.
Not if you believe the whole of earth history was 6,000 years ago.