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Hey everybody. Today I am going to treat you to another one of my monologues. So I'll be talking about a topic and just offering my opinions, it will be lost civilizations. But in any case. So before I go, before I continue, I want to do one of those standard plugs that people do with podcasts. I know that not all of you have rated or reviewed Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning some of you have really appreciate that actually, as of this recording, 169 of you have rated and you know, a couple of dozen have reviewed it on Apple. So I know Spotify is getting big so I appreciate the reviews there too, are the rates, I can see the rates, like couple 100 I think, just keep doing that. Mostly just so we get some discovery. Those of you who are listening to this, watching it on YouTube, I hope you subscribe and share the podcast if you like what you hear. It just helps with discovery helps with recommendations and all of those things. And, you know, I'm not doing this to just talk to myself, I guess. But in any case, I’m going to talk about lost civilizations, which seems like kind of a cheesy topic, right? Lost Civilizations, what do mean, what are you talking about? That's like a Learning Channel type stuff, you know, Ancient Aliens. But I think there's a legit thing to explore here. Now, my previous podcast, The Insight, that I did with Spencer Wells, we had a very popular episode on lost lands like Beringia, Sundaland. The lost territories of the Ice Age. So people are interested in this topic and it's not totally kooky but it's been co opted by kookiness. Before I want to explore this topic and why it's relevant to the interests that we explore on Unsupervised Learning. This is very unsupervised. Is what is the civilization? So I actually went to ChatGPT4.0 so it's like the newest one. Instead of like dictionary.com, or whatever. I asked for a three sentence, definition of civilization. So I'm gonna read one of them. “A civilization is a complex human society, characterized by urban development, social stratification, and symbolic communication forms such as writing. It typically includes a centralized government organized religion and advanced infrastructure. Civilizations also exhibit cultural achievements in science, art, and technology.” So let's just break this down a little bit. Urban Development. So that's dates back about 10000 years or so to Jericho in the Levant, and then it pops up in a lot of different places, right? Social stratification is actually a pretty generic term. And there are things that we would call not civilizations that have social stratification. So we're gonna go back to that. A symbolic communication form such as writing, “such as writing”, so I think writing shouldn’t be “such as” they should just say writing, because if you have petrographic representations like petroglyphs in Scandinavia during the Nordic Bronze Age or something. That's not what you're talking about, isn't it? That's not what people are usually talking about. So they really they're talking about writing, when it comes to centralized government organized religion, advanced infrastructure, that's all -I don't know. That's not necessary, I think to the definition, depending on who you talk to. There are some complex societies where governments pretty decentralized like Charlemagne’s Court, which moved from place to place all the time and a lot of the governance took place kind of in almost autarkic situations at the manor right? With organized religion - Early Chinese society, arguably, was quite civilized early before it really had organized religion. You know, and then advanced infrastructure? Well, I think that's a generic term. That makes sense. When it comes to cultural achievements in art, science and technology, they'll just kind of generic terms. It's kind of you know when you see it. I don't know if you guys think the Magdalenian cave paintings in Europe are achievements in art. I think they are. But we don't usually call Magdalenians a civilization. The reason that we’re going over definitions is a lot of arguments can be had over a definition. So is the Uruk civilization, a civilization? What is the Uruk civilization? Well, it's, it's the complex society before the written literate Sumerian period. We don't really know what they call themselves. But the city of Uruk was massive. And there was kind of a civilizational collapse around 3000 BC. A lot of replica copies of Uruk, like little colonies all into Syria and upper Mesopotamia just disappeared. There was kind of a rebound up, what we call the Sumerian period, the old Sumerian period, going into the Akkadian period of the Sumerian period. But that's civilization, that's history. And we usually implicitly associate civilization with history. I think a lot of people do not associated it with the period before 3000 BC. That's prehistory. Like, you know, they weren't really civilized, we don't really know much about them. We don't know what the civilization called themselves, we call them the Uruk civilization, because the site of Uruk was a city during the Sumerian period. And before that, it was a city during the Uruk civilization, and it was called Uruk, so it was probably called Uruk then. But we don't know what they call themselves. You know, people can call themselves very different things than what we think. So for example, the Hittites, we call them Hittites. Hittites are from Hatti. Hatti are the indigenous non Indo-European people of Central and Eastern Anatolia. We know that the Hittites call themselves Neshites. Neshites for the city of Nesha, which was one of the early Hittite cities, right? So the Hittites call themselves Neshites, we call them Hittites. We all understand that because it's in Cuneiform. But if we didn't have any writing we might call them Hittites from Hatti, not Neshites if we didn't have any writing from the Hittites, about their own endings, what they call themselves, right. But there were complex societies, before the Sumerians, before 3000 BCE, including in Mesopotamia and elsewhere. And we don't always call them civilizations, but sometimes we do. Sometimes we call it lost civilizations. And I bring this up, partly because there was a discussion or debate on the Joe Rogan show between - Well, Joe Rogan was kind of moderating, but it was between Graham Hancock and an archaeologists called Flint Dibble. I don't know much about Flint Dibble. I've interacted with him on social media. So Flint is a pretty Orthodox, straightforward. Archaeologists. He knows his stuff. Seems American but he's in Wales. So me along with, my friend Samo Burja kind of got into an argument with him on the internet, because, he was saying we were promoting, I think pseudoscience or pseudohistory, you know that sort of like - I’m not a Hancockian. Like, if you read my stuff, I think you understand, I’m not that weird. But Flint was pretty spicy, you know? And of course, I am assuming he's, like, just a conventional academic. So, you know, people were telling him, I believe in IQ and other like, you know, pseudoscience, and he was like, Oh, it all makes sense. And, you know, honestly, he wasn't very nice. He was kind of a dick. But he does happen to be right about a lot of things. The key though, is I think scientists, and particularly historical scientists, in light of DNA and other things should really, really tamp down the certainty. So I do think Flint is probably 90% right. But he's probably 10% wrong on some things, which I don't know, he doesn't know. He might even agree with me there. But he chooses to emphasize that 90%, which I think is legitimate when you're talking to Graham Hancock, but that 10% is super interesting, too. So let's get back to Graham Hancock. If you don't know who we are gonna have caulk is he has a bunch of things on Netflix and he's got a bunch of books. He's been around. He's a former journalist, but I think he's been around - Okay, so he has been around for 25 years in this space of pseudo don't 30 over 30 years in pseudo archaeology, I think his most popular book was “Fingerprints of the Gods: Evidence of Earth’s Lost Civilization” in 1995. But he also had “The Sign and the Seal: The Quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant” “Quest for the Hidden Legacy of Mankind”, “The Message of the Sphinx”
etc, etc. “Magicians of the Gods, the Forgotten Wisdom of Earth’s Lost Civilization” And I don't remember whether he thinks it's Atlantis or what he thinks. But you know, there's a lost civilization during the Pleistocene that left it's evidence all over the world. I watched some of his stuff. It's super interesting and super entertaining, I just think that the whole framework is very wrong. He had some really weird physics too that he was promoting 20 years ago, I don't know if he still does that anymore. That's not our primary issue here. I think Graham highlights uncertainties and quibbles with archaeology and the historical sciences. And he transforms these into - Well, let's ask the question, and let's go from the question to answering in the converse of the Orthodox answer. And then what implications does that make, and the implications are interesting, and they're radical, they transform our view of the world. There was an ancient civilization that was, you know, at least you know, as advanced as, I don't know, ancient Rome, but probably more advanced, maybe as advanced as us, I don't know, probably not as advanced as us. But like, it had some technology that was incredible. And, you know, it occurred during the Ice Age, and, you know, our own civilizations kind of grew up in the ruins of this in some ways. It's a great narrative. The only issue is it's probably false. Why is it false? I mean, obviously, people like Flint Dibbles ahave, like, all the archaeological ducks in a row. So there are things like, Oh, the Sphinx is actually way, way older, and the pyramids are older, and all these things based on kind of, I don't know if I want to say pseudo science, but, you know, questionable inferences, they just don't hold together. So could be the Sphinx is way older. But, you know, it's kind of weird that there's all these other monuments around it in the region, that are all dated to around the same time, except for the Sphinx supposedly, you know? So it could be but the issue with a lot of these claims is they make less and less, that's the broader context of the data, the evidence of the theories, individually, you know, the individually, the error is not trivial, but broadly that, you know, it's a lot less likely that it's the weird cool answer than it's the boring expected answer. Even though as I said, in the broader context of all the facts that we know, there's gonna be a lot of errors too. Those are interesting as well. So why was there not an ancient Pleistocene civilization? I'm not an archaeologist, so I'm not gonna give you the archaeological perspective, I'll give you the more biological perspective. So we know wolves separated from the ancestor domestic dogs probably like 20,000 to 40,000 years ago. So they were domesticated then. But there was a massive radiation over the last 5,000 to 10,000 years in the demographic expansion of the dogs. So something really happened then. Horses were domesticated, the modern horse was domesticated about 4000 years ago, there are some probably proto domesticated lineages a little earlier, but that's about it. Many of you know about the secondary products revolution. So you know when domesticated goats and cattle start to be used for other things, like leather and milk. And they just really, really start expanding everywhere and reproducing in large quantities. Cattle show up from the Middle East, in Europe and admix with the local aurochs. Goats do similar things. Dogs diverge into separate lineages, based on what part of Asia they're in, what part of Africa they're in. The Basenji, an African dog, is actually an ancient Middle Eastern dog. A lot of Middle Eastern dogs mostly have a lot of European ancestry. European Neolithic ancestry. The dogs of the steppe people, the Sintashta people, their primary imprint is actually left in China. They all disappeared in Europe for some reason. I bring up dogs because we have evidence from DNA about the origin, domestication, and spread of these animals. If there was an ancient civilization the Pleistocene, it is rather strange if it was more advanced - I mean, what Graham Hancock and others are saying is it is like a global civilization. You know, in some ways, it is analogous to ours, although I don't think it's quite at our level. But in any case, why would they not have domestic animals? Why would they not domesticate animals, there's no evidence in the genetics of the modern lineages. There were past domestications That we know of, and we would see, you know, extremely strong bottlenecks. Selective sweeps along certain genes and rat population expansions, maybe crashes after the civilization collapsed, and, you know, reversion to be feral, and then a shift back - We can detect these sorts of things in say wild horses in the new world. Why don't we see it in the genetics? What we see in the genetics is dogs were domesticated first. And they became very specialized over the last 10,000 years, but they were domesticated first. So maybe, okay, there are some past civilization which occupied central Eurasia? I guess? - that domesticated dogs, although, it turns out Siberians brought dogs into the new world 20,000 years ago, right? So it doesn't really fit the script of being spread by a civilization that was global. I can tell you from the genetics of cats and dogs, like I know a lot about cat genetics, because of my previous work in academia, is that colonialism had a massive impact on the genetics of cats all over the world. So there's British cat ancestry and Pakistan and European cat ancestry in Africa. So you have these indigenous lineages mixing with European lineages, all of a sudden, over the last couple 100 years. It's weird, it makes no sense unless there's a global colonial enterprise, and these small animals are spreading with them. Right. So my point here is, you know, I guess this Pleistocene civilization didn't have the domestic animals we had, because they didn't spread with them,. So like, what do they have? Do they have domestic mammoths? I don't know. You know, we should be able to see some evidence of it. You know, the issue here for archaeologists is there's kind of like a half life and material remains degrade, and, you know, sea levels rise and all these things. But the thing with DNA is it's portable, and the animals will migrate. And so the genetic historical signature of DNA will be preserved in the lineages that flee whatever catastrophe there was. And we don't see any evidence of that. We don't see any evidence that. More prosaically, you know, modern humans do all sorts of weird things. We take, you know, there is evidence that Vikings actually made it to the Azores in the mid Atlantic based on mice that look like their Scandinavian origin that seem to show up earlier than the Portuguese. Okay, so that's a tracer. Like you guys know from you guys know about DNA tracers? You guys know about DNA tracers. You know, why chromosomes and also like particular mutations and all these things? Well there's just overall biological tracers all over the place. And biology is a little bit more adaptive, a little less brittle. So it can persist through this sieve of these catastrophes, and give us information, and I don't see any information. It'd be interesting if there was, I mean, I'm not gonna lie. Like, I think it'd be cool if there was an ancient Pleistocene civilization, okay, just like putting it out there, not gonna like a lie. I don't see any evidence of it. And I don't see any evidence of it in the biology. We have red deer, Cervus elaphus, in New Zealand, you know, because we put it there. We put them there. Europeans put them there. You have all sorts of transplanted animals in every part of the world. Rabbits in Australia, grey squirrels in England. Obviously, our dogs our cats, our pigs spread all over the world. So introduced animals are part of global civilizations, but they're also part of like pre modern civilizations even. We spread dogs and spread our domestic animals. We spread our pests. Black rats spread with urbanization. So, we should see some perplexing signs into genetics of animal lineages in the world of something that happened at some point during the Pleistocene. That's not correlated with some global climate thing. It's like a bunch of different bottlenecks and expansions all around the same time, and then kind of like a decreased population size over time as the civilization collapses. And so you know, parasites and, you know, domestics of whatever these animals were, were not being used. So the conclusion there is If there was a Pleistocene civilization, it didn't have that much of a biological impact on the genomes of animals. We don't our civilization did, in fact, pre civilization, you know, the early Holocene, like after the Ice Age, we started really reshaping animals and plants in very, very detectable ways. If we disappeared tomorrow,
you know, obviously, a lot of dogs, most dogs would go extinct, Most dogs will disappear, because they're not really well adopted thriving on their own, but there'll be enough to create large populations of feral dogs. The dogs genomes would show evidence of weird adaptations of the past, okay? Some of those adaptations will not disappear, some of the adaptations that are unique to being domestic dogs will disappear. But the new genes and the new adaptations in the genomics would actually have to build upon what we have here. So as the future, I don't know, alien scientists are looking at the dog genomes, they're gonna see this sequence of events where there was a selective sweep, and then all of a sudden that lineage, that branch of the gene genealogy had to mutate back to the ancestral state, and there was no selection for that. I'm just saying there are things that I'm imagining, I should be able to see if there was, you know, demographic manipulation of animals in the past and there wasn't. So this is a civilization, if Graham Hancock was correct and I don't think he is, that didn't manipulate animals. Now, you will obviously say, well, they could have all gone extinct, they're not going to all go extinct. Okay. Do you think brown rats are gonna go extinct? Do you think all cats are gonna go extinct? Do you think all dogs are going to go extinct? They're not going to all go extinct. So a lot of them will. You know, cattle went extinct in Greenland after the Norseman disappeared, So, in some cases you're correct. They're very closely dependent on us, but they're not all gonna go extinct. Some of them are going to persist. And Greenland is not a typical environmental situation. So that's an extreme case. So that is the the biological case for why it's just obvious to me that at least over the last, whatever, 10s of millions of years, we are the first global civilization. Something, like an interconnected set of societies that spread widely. We are the first, you know, because we have terraformed the earth in a way, that will be evident, even if we just disappeared and our cities were leveled tomorrow. Okay. Nothing like that has happened in the last couple of 10s of millions of years. Okay. But I was very specific here with what I said. I said, like a set of societies. So when I say a set, I don't mean a set of one. I mean, multiple societies that are kind of networked together. The idea is think of it as globalization, used as a generic term. But check out William McNeil's “The Human Web” As Earth’s civilization, because more and more robust, as more and more societies start networking together. So that's, uh, that's what we have today. But I don't think we had that in the Pleistocene. But you know, I’m not an exhaustive Flint Dibbles listener or reader, so I don't know if he's - I tried to explain this to him. But he, I think he thought I was Graham Hancock. So he was kind of ranting. But in any case, just because we did not have an advanced Pleistocene civilization does not mean, in my opinion, that it's not possible that there were complex societies in the Pleistocene, proto societies that went extinct. So it is possible that the Holocene experiment is a one off, quite likely even. But it's also quite possible, maybe even quite likely, that there were false dawns, proto civilizations, before the Holocene that were isolated and just went extinct because, you know, civilizations go extinct all the time. The key is what happened on the Holocene is civilization goes extinct, but there's other civilizations there. So it's like a car with multiple cylinders just keeps going. I think what was possible is that there was a single cylinder, you know, operation going at some point. Not very scaled up, you know, maybe not very impressive at all, but it was something more than bands of foragers. So you know, my friend Manvir Singh has written about this, an anthropologist at UC Davis, I did a podcast a couple years ago. We imagined foragers in the past were like what they are today and where they are today, okay, like in the Kalahari, you may be the Mbuti pygmies. But these are these are populations in very marginal areas. In the past foragers occupied the most fertile areas. And what Manvir says is, you know, they could have been much larger population densities as foragers, maybe even sedentary, lived in much more complex societies that we imagine foragers live in today. And so, you know, I don't think, you know, they obviously didn't have Sumeria. But you know, they might have had something similar to, for example, the Pacific Northwest tribes, you know, where you had villages of hundreds of people, and you know, they fished for salmon. They were foragers, they were hunters, but they also had slavery, they had potlatches, they had like complex wood carvings, all sorts of other things that would be kind of impressive, and salient, and notable. Even if they're not civilization, per se, they're definitely complex and stratified. And I'm not, I'm not convinced that that could not have happened during the Pleistocene, at least after the spread of modern humans. So, I think the worst thing about Graham Hancock is he polarizes people. So that you have to be like, Oh, well, you know, this is the science, we trust the science. Or you have to believe in space, aliens and lost civilizations, all these weird things. Trust the science is stupid. Science is mostly right, more right than wrong. But there's a lot of error, there's a lot of like, you know, dead ends, false starts, and we have to be a little bit more humble, we have to be a little bit more human, there has to be a little bit more humility, you know, in our context. I think part of what's going on is also we moderns were very Whigish. We tend to see civilization and societies progress upward and onward and kind of align, and there's no regress, there's no collapse and rewinding. And so, you know, we don't automatically think of a possible rewind situation happening during the Ice Age. Also, you know, 150,000 years ago, during the Eemian of the world was actually warmer than it is now. So during that and interglacial stuff could have happened. I don't think it did. But I'm not 100% Sure. We don't think it did establish complex societies, but I'm not 100% Sure. There were modern humans then in Africa, and probably, maybe in Arabia, maybe in the adjacent areas. So we don't know. Okay, but, you know, we need to keep an open mind on this stuff. Because I think we will be surprised. And, you know, we can be 2% of the way to Graham Hancock, and get a little value my opinion. 2% a little bit, just a little bit. I kind of start to think of this actually.
Two things. You know, my friend Samo Burja wrote a piece on n Palladium about Göbekli Tepe. But you know, honestly, it was before that piece. A little before that piece. I talk to JP Mallory kind of the doyen of Indo-European studies today. And he was given kind of a potted history of Indo-European invasions of Europe during the Bronze Age and whatnot. And he mentioned offhand that the arrival of the Indo Europeans was, in some ways a dark age with very little material remains. So what happened is, you had you had villages you had large villages like the Cucuteni-Trypillia in Romania, places like that. You have megaliths, these massive megaliths. Indo-Europeans show up and they're basically agro pastoralists, slash and burn farmers. They don't create villages. There's very few remains and Mallory said we focus on burials because that's all we can find. They just didn't do anything in a material sense that was impressive to us. Perhaps they recorded massive epic poems and other things. I'm not denying that there are things that they could have done that are not left in the material remains. But Europe went through 1000 year Dark Age of material regression after the arrival of the Indo Europeans. Now those of you who have listened to Kristian Kristiansen know he believes that this is heavily due to disease, some sort of prehistoric plague that really took down these civilizations. But my point here is that perhaps we can think of the mega societies in Western Europe, the Cucuteni-Trypillia in Romania, these European societies as civilizations - Now they didn't have writing. They didn't have writing and so they're not civilizations qua civilizations of that way. But then social stratification, they have some sort of urban development. The Cucuteni-Trypillia had large villages. They may have had some sort of symbolic communication, you know, People talking about Stonehedge and what it means and all this stuff. You know, I don't want to get into the details, but I think they may, they probably did have some sorts of accounting and symbolic communication. It's just not writing. It’s not literacy. As far as centralized government, organized religion, advanced infrastructure, they had advanced infrastructure, we don't know anything about their government, because we don't have the writing unfortunately, I doubt that organized religion, but like really organized religion, as we understand it, didn't really show up until the Axial Age around 500 BC. Before that, they were all just like tribal religions, cult religions. So I mean, is Ancient Egypt, not a civilization? I guess they're, you know, Temple priesthoods. So it's kind of organized, but this is basically Egyptian folk belief that's put in like big temples, you know. There's no complex theology until relatively late until maybe Akhenaten and that period. So, you know, I don't hold it against them. And as I said, the Chinese did not have really complex organized religion even into the early imperial period, in my opinion. The government, we just don't know. The Inca had pretty centralized government, without really writing, they had the Quipu system or whatever it was an accounting system. But officially, they were illiterate. And of course, art, science and technology. You know, some of the stuff was clearly present in preliterate societies. Now, I'm gonna go over a few societies real quick. I don't know too much about them I guess, compared to an archaeologist and historian, but I probably know more than you, and so I just want you to just think about it. So the Uruk civilization, I mentioned, preceded Sumeria. So Sumeria is the southern half of Mesopotamia, the northern half was probably Semitic speaking or Akkadian speaking. And, you know, the Sumerian period was really 3000 to 2000 BCE. And there was a period of the middle where Sargon of Akkad, he's a Semitic speaker, not a Sumerian, has an Akkadian empire. So that's kind of an interregnum, but really, it's all the same culture. The high culture is mostly Sumerian, Akkadian later replaces that linguistically, but, you know, they just translate the gods and some of the motifs but really, it's all the same. So this is the earliest period of Babylonian civilization. You know, you can say that okay. But the Uruk civilization before it was almost certainly related to the Sumerians. Proto Sumerian probably. And it was actually more expansive. It was more extensive. It was in Syria, parts of Anatolia. It was in a lot of different places. It was, it was in contact with a Kura-Araxes culture, I think in North Caucasus. There was a whole world of globalized trade and interaction that we don't know about, between, say, 4000-3000 BC. And, you know, some people have said, you know, some of the flood myths, some of the myths of collapse decline are due to the fact that the early Sumerian city states were actually relatively mean, small, and primitive, in comparison to the Uruk civilization at its peak, it's just they had writing, so we know what they were doing. And we saw their slow wind back up towards complexity and greatness during the high Sumerian period, and then eventually, under Sargon, right. So my point here is the only thing that separates Uruk from the Sumerian period, the historical period is obviously writing. But also, it's important to note that the early Sumerian period that we have writing from might be kind of like, the, you know, post Roman Dark Ages, really, compared to the Uruk period, which is more like the high empire. It's just that we don't have writing for it. And so, you know, most people don't know about it. Archaeologists know about it. And, you know, this is a situation where there was a regression except for writing. And that changed everything in terms of our perception. Right, but should it? You know, that's a question. Another society and I’ll focus on Europe, because there's so much archeology from Europe. There's other cases, other situations in places like China and Thailand of things that I could mention. The Vinča civilization, kind of in Serbia, you know, 5700 BC to 4500 BC it had towns that had Palisades it was just kind of Europe's first urban civilization. And you know, if you're a Serbian nationalist in the audience, I'm sure like, you go crazy right now, because Serbians know all about it. But you know, it was in the Balkans, it was a Neolithic farmers society. And it was a big deal in its time, and it disappeared, you know, and this is 1000s of years before Sumeria. This is in Europe. So you know, we tend to think of civilization going from Sumer and Egypt Northwest. But the reality is, Eastern Europe, eastern Mediterranean Europe was was part of this greater West Asian world. In some ways. It was more advanced sometimes, later on writing, and a lot of the statecraft, I think, like political complexity enabled by writing really began in the Middle East. And so we think of Middle East is where history starts. But really, you know, semi-history was much more extensive than that, in western Eurasia. So after the Vinca people, there's the Varna period, the Varna civilization of Bulgaria, 4500 to 4000. If you guys, you know, BC. If you guys have been reading my substack for a while, you know that, you know, I have a picture in one of the posts about an elite person buried in the Varna civilization. And they were the ones who first did a lot of gold at it, like, maybe copper work, but definitely gold. They were doing a lot of gold work. They kind of pioneered that, you know, gold is obviously something we take take for granted as a luxury item, that people work it now. But, you know, this was pioneered by the Varna people in Bulgaria. So it's sort of a lost civilization. It's not lost, we just don't know what they call themselves. We don’t know their names. We don't know their kings, if they had them, but it does look like they had kings because there are people buried in gold and other people buried not a gold. So I think a lot of things associated civilization are almost certainly there. Some of you know about the Cucuteni-Tripillia culture, which is right before the Indo-Europeans arrived for like 1000 years or more than 1000 years. You have the kind of like Moldova region, Western Ukraine, parts of Romania, you know, massive villages, you know, they look like maybe they're kind of anarchist collectives or something. But, you know, you know, in terms of agriculture, you know, large numbers of people, extremely beautiful pottery, very beautiful, you know, the pottery afterwards of this in these areas just seem so primitive. So there's a massive collapse, right? With the arrival, the Indo European. Then, of course, the megalithic culture of Western Europe, that went from Malta all the way around the Atlantic facade up into Scandinavia. So, you know, in Scandinavia, after the arrival of the Battlaxe culture, these are the Indo-Europeans who exterminated the Funnel Beaker people, like literally there's no Funnel Beaker genetics in any anywhere in modern Scandinavia, they exterminated them. They actually took the Funnel Beaker megaliths, who are like kind of like passage burials, passage tombs, and they actually bury their own people underneath these stones, these tombs that are put together by their predecessors. They were not creative enough or they couldn't like organize enough people to do these sorts of operations, but they kind of like lived in the shadows of their predecessors that they exterminated. Now, these megaliths show you a society that was stratified and could mobilize resources. It also probably shows you ideology. As you guys know it looks like there's a high status lineage in Ireland that persisted for many generations, Y chromosomes are tracking it. The individuals practice incestuous marriage. This is all stuff you saw places like Hawaii and Ancient Egypt. It was a complex stratified society almost certainly, we would call it a civilization. Probably pretty barbaric. Interestingly, a little before 3000 BC, you know, with the plague, you you see massive shifts towards pastoralism or barbarism, even before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans. And the collapses were not just externally pushed, they were internally pushed, these were not sustainable. You know, some people will say that it is a cautionary tale for us, but you know, who knows. I want to talk about Göbekli Tepe. Most of you know what Göbekli Tepe is. You know, southeast, well not southeast but it's like southern cornerish Tarsus mountain area of Turkey today. Okay, so basically like, literally like 100 years after the Ice Age around the end of the Ice Age, very close, you see at Göbekli Tepe these like, you know, animal forms these like complex stone working. It looks like that it was constructed this, like massive complex was constructed by foragers, hunter gatherers in the area. So they came together, they probably weren't living around it like it was a town or anything. But it wasn't it was a ritual site. So you know, they were mobilizing a lot of economic resources, a lot of labor to do this. And it exhibited some level of workmanship, right. And what it was initially discovered, they thought it was a Byzantine era finding. That's how confusing it was to people. So Göbeki Tepe dates to I think 11,500 years ago, right at the end of the ice age. And so it shows that, you know, at the end of the Pleistocene, there are people that could do really, really fine work. Does it just immediately magically arise at the end of the Ice Age? No, I don't think so. I think There's other things going on during the Pleistocene that we will discover right? Last stratified societies right, throughout a lot of tepees actually going eastward into, you know, what used to be our media. And these tepees, I think are going to change ourselves of the liminal period at the end of the Pleistocene. And early Holocene. So in some ways, civilization, you know, these complex, complex societies are almost primal, to our epic, or to Holocene Epoch, they probably date earlier into the Pleistocene. But it co Hey, primitive, truncated forms, you know, nothing that left a lasting legacy. So just to double check the belly tepee yet 11,600 years ago, that's about 100 years after the Ice Age. So, you know, it's, it's very soon afterwards. I'm sure that there's others, as some of you know, there are, there are these like massive, mammoth tusks, constructions. I think it was done by the, by the by the revolution, people think of the battle step. You know, 30,000 years ago, I think, David Graeber, and his co author, sorry, I forget the other guy. They wrote a lot about this. I don't think that people should be revisionist, and say, Oh, well, civilization is not that big of a deal. It's not that new, quantitatively. It's an order of magnitude more or more than what came before, right, the shift to agriculture, Semitism, etc, etc, the scaling up to this network of civilizations, you know, we have the network civilization instead of does civilization, you know, this is a big deal. But, but what we try to do, in my opinion, is, it gives you a black and white dichotomies of so there was the before there was the after, there was a civilized and uncivilized. And we tend to think foragers as the small family groups, and then somehow, we have people living in Jericho, in a town, do we got your culture? How did it go from there to here? You know, I think the reality is, we will probably find, I am pretty sure that there were large groups of foragers that can mobilize resources. Now, the key is we're not going to get writing from these people. When we do the material remains, it looks like you know, their pre pottery, etc, etc. What kind of material remains are we gonna get? You know, Saba, Bria has said, you know, there could be Egypt, like remains somewhere, you know, like, or Old Kingdom, Egypt, is probably a little optimistic, but we'll see. But the point is, you know, 30,000 years is a long time, there's a lot of wear and tear, you know, that's nothing like it's way more than 5000 years, which is like, you know, the earliest period of the Old Kingdom of Egypt, it's, you know, way more, it's literally six times more, right? So you can imagine, it's just gonna be really, really difficult to detect these sorts of things. But there's new technologies that are allowing us to understand and figure out complexity of the past. So as a lot of you know Charles Mann wrote about kind of cities in the Amazon, like agricultural settlements in the Amazon, and a lot of people laughed at him 20 years ago, but it looks like using radar, satellite imaging, and other other techniques you can detect evidence of these people in the past in the Amazon. So he was right. So our technology is allowing us to figure things out that we otherwise couldn't. This is totally unrelated, but it is not totally unrelated. You know, machine learning and artificial intelligence is allowing people to decrypt the Pompeii or the Herculaneum scrolls, I think, you know, as you guys know, we know Plato was a slave and where he's buried all these things, you know hopefully we'll find out a lot more, we're not gonna find out if you'd like that about the Pliestocene because there was no writing and I'm pretty sure that there wasn't. But I think with data analysis, data crunching, we will probably, you know, have a much better chance of picking up lost proto civilizations. We might find something in the genetics of some animal. I don't give up hope for that. It's just that, you know, I'm just like Graham Hancock's theory of a global mega civilization, just no evidence of it. What could be what could be a possibility, you but I think something like the Old Kingdom of Egypt is too complicated, but maybe something like, you know, the prehistoric society of the Vinča on a smaller scale. And so I'm really bringing down expectations here for you guys, but it's still cool to imagine, you know, things going on in the ice age like that, because it's kind of a different world. But, you know, are they humans like us? Do they have brains? Do they have motivations like us? Yeah, a lot of people say they do. So if that is true, why wouldn’t they, it's not like the whole world was frozen or under ice, you know, there were temperate areas. It's just the population was smaller, the cultures weren't as developed. But you know, cultures, they come and go. And that's why I want us to break out of the Whigish sense a little bit. You know, there are people who come with bows and arrows, and that lose bows and arrows. And it's just this sort of entropic process eventually kind of affects a lot of societies. And so when you have a fragmented landscape, you don't have a lot of societies that are communicating with each other and engaging in redundancy. You could go, I think, quite advanced in processes, and they're just kind of wink out of existence, because you know, like, a bad famine or whatever, there's nowhere else to go, there's no other civilization or society that you can take refuge in, you are just lost. So it's a little bit like the Planet of the Apes situation where these humans now are like foragers out there, and they have like no relics of civilization, or understanding of their past. And I think that that's what it would be like, for there to be lost civilization. So why am I talking about this? You know, I've been talking for a while just giving you guys ideas, you know, pointers, because we're going to discover some more interesting things, I hope. And I think. Not aliens, not like engineers from another planet. But we will discover some interesting things. And I think one of the interesting things we will probably discover is Göbekli Tepe is the tip of the iceberg. And there were human stretching out reaching toward complex, stratified sedentary societies before I think somehow, but, you know, things were not in place.
You know, it never really took off, I think, you know, primary production with the warmer planet really has helped out, you know. So maybe there was a few attempts in the past, it didn't work out. So I'm just talking about like, you know, after 40,000 years, but modern humans been around for a couple 100,000 years, and I don't put it past Neanderthals honestly, I don't want to say low probability. I think lower. But, you know, I think Neanderthals were a lot more clever than we give them credit for. They were different. So they might have created different types of complexity. I don't know. But there's evidence for Neanderthal art and other things right now. You know, it's all interesting to me. I think that, you know, going back to the archaeologists and people like Flint Dibbles. I appreciate him going at Graham Hancock, I appreciate it going on go Joe Rogan, because you got to convince people of the truth. So there's like a lot of Orthodox science out there, science and history that we know about. But I also think it's not as if he's defending a theory of archaeology, like a theory of evolution, which is true. That is how the world works in a universal way, when it comes to, you know, across the generations and all that stuff. What he's defending are facts that we know. And that is something that doesn't hold together in the same way, and there's going to be weak. Weak pieces and loose links. And so I think we just need to be a little bit more humble about that, and be a little bit more open minded. Because with new technology, we will probably discover that some of our understandings of the past was incorrect, you know, so they translated the Maya Codex. The Maya were not peaceful. They were murdering each other and all that stuff. You know what I'm saying? We did ancient DNA. And it looks like it was mass replacement all across northern Europe. Probably the Battle-Axe people were battling with their axes. You know, that's just how it is. We just find out things with new technology and new techniques. So that's okay. Because we want to know the past in the truth of what it was not our expectations, you know, but I think, because people are so interested in this topic, and they get caught up into these enthusiasms with pseudoscience. Sometimes scientists overreact. In terms of being snotty. No, you don't know. And, you know, we're scholars, we know all this stuff. And if you take it down a notch, I think the best way to combat pseudo archaeology is to express the wonderment of what real archaeology is because people don't know people don't know about the Varna culture. People don't know about the Vinča culture. You know, people don't know about Göbekli Tepe There's already enough stuff that's like amazing that people should know about. You don't need to really go off on these kind of rants about people being crazy, say crazy things, you know, being maximalist, like, you know, people are interested in fiction and narrative and so we have Hancock's presenting it to him. And I think the only way that you can like defeat that is by presenting an alternative, that's just as cool, but it happens to have the benefits of being real. And also just be candid. This is not quite the same thing as what Graham is doing. What Graham is doing is, you know, he's a showman, you know, his stuff is on Netflix it's there, for you to just kind of be at the edge of your seat and finding out these mysteries. But real science does not really allied to our own understanding of what good storytelling is. It just is. Sometimes it's a little weird, it has weird angles. You know, anyone who knows, has tried to do quantum mechanics knows this. Real science is, can be like, a little uncomfortable and a little amazing, and also a little mysterious, and, you know, obscure and opaque, you know, so it's difficult, but I think we could do it. I think there's a lot of interesting stuff. And we're gonna be, we're gonna be having fun. You know, we don't need to watch documentaries about Ancient Aliens and lost civilizations. Reality is exciting enough. And if you read this podcast, if you read the substack, listen to this podcast, you will definitely know about that. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this monologue. This episode of Unsupervised Learning. Please leave a review on Apple, Spotify, everywhere. Talk about, I don't know, how I have a wide range of guests that have, you know, numerous different topics that I talked about. And, you know, I am enthusiastic and passionate like these are the things people say and it's all true. It's all true. Yeah. So keep the passion. And, you know, chill out on the smugness, you know, that's what I'd say.
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