RE: Evolution of Man
Actually, sheep are not natural followers. They're flockers. (Can we say that?) Cows are followers. Watch them some time. But not all followers are cows. Think "mopping up".
Meanwhile back (vaguely) on topic- The business of ancient civilisations - In the last 10,000 years the world has been in a predominantly warm phase of it's complex climatic cycles. One major effect is sea level rise, flooding coastal areas and low lying inland basins. (In other areas, like the Caspian, inland seas are slowly shrinking).
As a result, people who lived in coastal areas have had to retreat and watch villages, towns and cities drowned.Call it a global flood if you will. a very slow one though. In meso America and the USA civilisations dwindled because of falling water tables and desertification. Ditto n.Africa and large chunks of Asia.
But remember- when the Anasazi were building Canyon de Chelly, France was building Chartres Cathedral. Not so ancient, really.
Sure there are lost civilisations. There may even be a couple of really old ones we haven't found yet. But what we don't see is evidence of technology above Bronze Age levels.
Nor will we. If they existed we would have found them by now. We know where to look- coal and oilfields. No sign of them. We even explore sub sea oilfields. Ditto. There are Elizabethan coal mines in England. Roman gold mines in Wales, Tin and copper mines in Cornwall which may have been active 3000 years ago (surface or near surface drift mines anyway). But of advanced mining or drilling , not a sign.
They didn't use glass, either. Glass lasts. Obsidian is a natural glass and flint has similar physical properties. We find flint and obsidian tools all over the world in sediments dated from 3 to 300,000 years old. But never synthetic glass, which should last as long. And the tools, lovely as they are, are nowhere near as sophisticated as a Meccano set.
The Okla "reactor"is a natural phenomenon, in case anyone wondered.
Yes, there are lost civilisations, but not technological in our sense. Lots still to find though. The Black Sea basin looks like a fertile area for research.
David- if Cremo's book has reliable data on exceptions to this, I'd be keen to hear a couple.
Your point about ancient artifacts being gone or very deep really isn't correct. Human remains tend to be buried under other human remains. The Jericho tel is many metres deep, but heck, the London underground is deeper and that's hardly hi-tech. Most of the 1-4 million year old hominid / australopithecine fossils found to date are at, or within inches of, the surface. Humans just are not old enough for land surfaces to have altered much, except in glacial or volcanic regions. And even there, remains would be preserved. Santorini for instance has the town of Akrotiri, slowly being excavated. (It appears to have had water flush toilets in 1700BC, which is pretty good in my opinion, but hardly super space age stuff.).
In areas which were ice covered in the major glaciations of course, that's not so. But a high-tech pre glacial civilisation would have been based in ice free areas, where they would have access to agricultural land. A technical civilisation needs a lot of land to feed it.
Leo- my geology degree is thirty years in the past. These days I'm an oil industry "engineer". A recent interest and active study beat any number of obsolete qualifications.
Sorry to ramble on, folks. It's a quiet night. I'll quit while you are still awake. David? DAVID!
RE: Evolution of Man
Conspiritualist- Your post materialised while I was dribbling on.
First- Nobody knows how life got started. Back in the 50's it was shown that given a reducing atmosphere and lightning, some essential "organic"chemicals form spontaneously. It was half expected that full blown beasties would crawl out within a few years. Never happened. There's a lot about the early earth we don't know.
It has been seriously suggested that the "seed" of life may have arrived on earth from outer space- not in a UFO, but as a mote of dust. All we need is a molecule capable of self- copying. It does not even have to be organic if it can act as a template for organic molecules. Meteorites do contain organic molecules though. Carbonaceous chondrites do, at least.
That's a very speculative area. We dunno yet.
The next argument is whether before the DNA world, there was an RNA world. We dunno that yet either.
We're working on it.
However the process got started, we begin with a molecule capable of replication. The mutation you mention is also required. There has to be some degree of error in replication to create initial variation.
Once we have a variety of replicators, natural selection takes off. Some replicators make more copies of themselves than others, or do it faster. They will be selected by natural processes. The successful ones then provide the "breeding stock" for the next generation. Some of course, do better under some conditions, some thrive elsewhere. The selective pressures vary geographically and through time.
We are talking here about molecules. Get enough molecules together and you have something that starts to look like life.
You say it does not happen today. In one sense it does at a much higher level. New viruses appear all the time. Is a virus alive? Some of the time yes, some of the time no. Some viruses look disturbingly crystalline some of the time. Evolution among bacteria happens so fast our best antibiotics of the 1970s are already all but useless. That's because bacteria swap DNA in plasmids, passing genetic information to each other, including drug resistance. Animals and plants use sex to perform the same function, mixing and spreading genes. Mutation actually plays quite a small part in evolution. sexual selection is much more important.
But remember that any truly new life form , if it spontaneously appeared today, is going to be about 4 billion years behind in the evolutionary arms race. It will be something's breakfast in about ten seconds. And again, we're talking molecules- not seven legged giant silicon tree salmon.
I really need to lie down.
Anyway, maye there is a new replicator in the game. Have you read Richard Dawkin's book "The Selfish Gene"? If not, I heartily reccommend it to you. The chapter on "memes" is particularly thought-provoking.
RE: Evolution of Man
Sam,
Some of the kinds of evidence you say has not been found has been found. That really is just the point. It should be global news, or if doubted then it should be urgently researched. Instead it's buried. Yes, Cremo's writing does have information on ancient mines. (When I refer to 'Cremo' BTW I'm really referring more to that genre, as I've been reading of such anomalous data for decades. Cremo is a recent person to pull some of it together, but it's hardly a field only consisting of him.)
I don't have Forbidden Archeology to hand, and all other books I had on the subject are long since left behind after emigrations. But it's happened a number of times, particularly in the USA, that mines over the last 150 years, such as gold or coal mines, have broken through into unknown workings which seem to be very, very old date-wise, but surprisingly modern and well-preserved. (And I forget how they were dated, but they were modern-style mines many hundreds of feet down and not from modern Western civilisation.) Cremo's work covers this I'm sure.
If they weren't ours, and they were not by American Indians, then we are talking of sophisticated mine-workings from North American prehistory...
Conspiritualist,
I think I know you, right? 😉 Well, the kind of thing you say is how I view things as well: that there are various scientific 'explanations' for phenomena, but if you really look at the phenomena and then at the explanations, the explanation doesn't go all the way.
For example, we might say, "What keeps a body alive? What keeps us living?" And science will say, "For one thing, the heart-beat. That's essential to man." OK. Then ask science what makes the heart beat. No answer. Something, somewhere must provide the bioelectrical spark for each single beat - but where that impulse comes from is completely unknown. What science does in such cases, and they are many, is to look away, not admitting even that it's a subject of mystery, not admitting that it requires either research or the confession that it's a mysterious unknown.
I think many would look at you oddly if you suggested that the origin of the heartbeat should be researched. It's kinda taken as a given. That's what science does, it seems, at times. Looks away from obvious and wonderful mystery.
There are many examples of this, to me. What shapes life and how do we mutate? "DNA" says science. But that's surely only a small part of the answer. DNA may possibly be able to dictate what kind of cells are created for a body, but it's yet another unconfessed unknown by science that we really haven't a clue, using material, reductionist science, how those cells would be shaped together to all fit into a bodily pattern that becomes a leaf or a human arm. Sheldrake has tried to blend science with the esoteric (auras etc.) by suggesting that there's an unseen 'field' in the shape of a body and all its detail into which the physical cells 'slot' as they are made.
I find this happens often with science, then. In particular science names a thing as if giving it a name explains it. What's powering my PC? "Electricity" says science. But that, I'm told, is not an explanation, for I'm informed that electricity isn't fully understood or explained, am I right?
Well, I see the same thing happening with consciousness and the brain. Call it my personal perspective, but I've come to view it as a ludicrous idea that the physical brain produces consciousness. Or, if it does, this is entirely unproven as I've mentioned before. The 'brain' isn't an expanation for consciousness, it's an unproven hypothesis, and it doesn't even fit many known facts.
And so to evolution. Can't help but feel it's a convenient 'explanation' for reductionist science; yet there's not necessarily any evolutionary pay-off for having Love, for having spiritual feelings (don't they just make you sit in wonder, and forget to eat or hunt?) etc., etc. To me the evidence that reductionist science is wrong is as close as close can be: it's ourselves. I'm of th
RE: Evolution of Man
David, We have commented before how our paths have led us in quite different directions. I remember wondering about the whole business of how we know anything as a student thirty-something years ago, (back when dinosaurs still stalked the Earth.) It's the ultimate reductionist question.
How does something happen and what do we mean when we say we understand it?
But why balk at evolution? We can ask the question about anything.
What do we mean if we say we understand how to walk across a room?
We can put one foot in front of the other, but how do we know how to do that, exactly? Could you teach someone to walk?
We can rely on the floor to hold us up, but how does it do that, exactly?
We can get into materials science- even quantum physics. We can build mathematical models of electron repulsion fields and calculate the forces involved every time our skin comes into proximity with the repulsion field of the floor. But have we actually understood walking across the floor any better?
How does a rock know it should fall when dropped off a cliff? How, out of all the complex spacetime vectors in the universe does it manage to select the one we call "down"?
I have no idea.
But that does not mean I can't throw rocks. Science is about asking the appropriate question at the appropriate level and testing the answers accordingly. We leave the rest for future hunters.
A physiotherapist does not need quantum mechanics to teach an injured child to walk. She needs to know about muscles, skeletons, children and pain. (And she must understand parents- but that's another story).
Whether there is, or is not, a spiritual essence to life does not ( not for me at any rate) diminish the wonder I feel in the process of and the evidence for, natural selection. I don't need that level of understanding. The fossils are intriguing enough.
Incidentally, brain casts suggest that Cretaceous dinosaurs were getting pretty smart. A plot of calculated brain mass : body mass puts some of them- notably the Struthiomimids- well into the same range as birds and small mammals. Intelligence as an evolutionary advantage is not, ironically, something we know much about. So far the evidence is largely limited to a particularly wierd ape.(And the jury is still out). But birds are smart. (I love watching crows). And birds are dinosaurs...
This busines of mines is an issue of great interest to me. I would wonder how and why the discovery of an ancient mine would or could be kept secret. An attraction like that would pull tourists from far away- and mining communities are rarely rich. I'd like to see the data.
(Please don't say it was destroyed by rogue archaeologists).
Oil wells and mines actually are one of mankind's most potentially enduring monuments. For example, oil wells tend to be cased in steel, heavily cemented in place, forming a linear structure, thousands of metres long, crossing numerous sedimentary formations in a manner no geologist could mistake for a natural process. If such were found in eroded rocks today, they would be recognisable, even distorted by earth movements. In fact the distortion would give us age data.
I know several mining engineers and geologists, as well as many oil industry people in most parts of the world. If you can give me actual examples of discoveries of ancient mines, I shall certainly ask around.
People like me are interested in this stuff. We go down holes in the ground for fun . You can't keep things like this secret from people like that. We're too damn nosey.
But I remember von Daniken and his tunnels through the Andes, which are natural joints in limestone, and I wonder . There are some tall tales come out of mines. Very easy to make up. Very hard to confirm or refute.
You have to go there.
(Edited because I have RSI in my typing finger.)
RE: Evolution of Man
Hi Sam,
It may seem that it's now a long way from the opening subject to discuss How do we know a thing? Yet in a sense the kind of topic that comes up for grabs on HP, given the many belief systems here, often comes down to that. On the one hand, not trying to put 'my side' across, but taking a birds' eye view of personal knowledge or belief, I very much recall how I felt I did not just believe, but absolutely 'knew' as it was 'a fact' that materialist-reductionist science was valid, and all talk of the unseen realms was hogwash. A Steiner freind often coldn't keep his patience with me. 😉 So I've experienced 'certainty' when I've been in both camps. Certainty is dangerous, huh?
Science. I won't go at length into it yet again, but scientific method is great, and essential for the way we presently progress. My beaf is about the unscientific reactions of 'scientists' when confronted with something not a part of their paradigm. Then we see how human they are, with mere rigid beliefs and also perhaps aware of their career prospects. On this subject of forbidden archeology there are cases of attempted TV censorship by the scientific community, and of filtering the findings as to what gets published or what dates are placed upon findings. (There are examples quoted by William Corliss in which artefacts have been ancient beyond imagining according to the geological strata fond in, so the reports are written so as to suggest they "fell into" the dig from the surface - though in some cases they are still half embedded in rock.)
One nice and interesting way forward would be this business about mines. If supposed 'ancient' mines could be well proven to be more modern, it would answer on behalf of the current mainstream view. On the other hand, the mines must still be there so could also provide evidence for the heretics such as Cremo.
Unfortunately I don't have the books to hand to cite or quote detail. And I'm called away so no time to look up possible websites now. Cremo's book goes into this as I recall, but I first came across citations about ancient mines in the works of William Corliss, who collected anomalous data from every imaginable branch of science for publication from the 1970s on. (His publications are from the 1970s, but he cites periodicals back 200 years or more.) So were you to delve deeper into this yourself, I'd be interested. Cremo was also aware that this is evidence in sito when he gave a talk near me some weeks back, and he was trying to get up-to-date research underway.
(Cremo comes from a family background of the CIA or similar BTW, as I could gather, hence reads and writes Russian and umpteen languages as he was earmarked to go into this career too. That's where he gets his enthusiasm for gathering raw data from, and subjecting it to his own analysis. Reading between the lines, I think he was embarked on this career in its early stages when he came across ancient Hindu texts (which he also reads in the original) and it opened up a different life-path.)
V