Re-Dating the Sphinx of Egypt

[Kilik]

I find the idea of a real atlantis very interesting

 

[Roadkill]

 

[J77]

I find the idea of a real atlantis very interesting

Why?

 

[bluestreak]

I find the idea of a real atlantis very interesting

's funny, i'd already worked that out.

i wish i had a story about how scientists are all covering up their failures

 

[J77]

I wonder if they're still sexy merfolk around...

 

[kyser_soze]

I don't see why you'd have to invoke Atlantis to come up with the idea that there were pre-Babylonian civilisations - wasn't there an Ice age between 10000BC and about 4000 BC? Given that humans had been around as Hom Sap before that Ice Age why assume that they couldn't build stuff like a sphinx - it would also go some way to explaining why the culture of cities spread so quickly around the period of ancient Babylon (and - altho I am guessing a bit here - China and it's environs as well), and maybe offer some clues as to how the Central American civs exploded in development terms.

It's all very interesting stuff, and I think the reason so many are opposed to it is because the current Egyptian timeline orthodoxy has been around for so long it's seen as 'fact'.

I mean think about it - what would be left after a 6000 year ice age of mankind's current monumental architecture? I don't see why you have to involve Atlantis or aliens to argue that there was a sophisticated pre-ice age humanity spread across the world...

 

[Crispy]

Exactly. I'm willing to bet there's still some very very old stuff still to be dug up.

 

[kyser_soze]

Amongst other stuff it just goes to prove, potentially, that our ancestors were of far higher intelligence and capable of technical expertise far beyond our imagination. Not least, being able to lift 70 ton blocks of stone hundreds of foot high, which incidently would require only the very specialist machinery of the modern day.

No it wouldn't - there are loads of examples of 'miraculous' feats of ancient engineering that can be explained if you throw enough resource and manpower at them. I was watching 'Journeys round the ring of fire' the other day, talking about Macca Piccu and how they built in earthquake-resistance by having stones that fit perfectly together without mortar - how did they do this? By using a harder rock to chisel the surfaces so that they fit together.

I don't say this to denigrate the ancients - what they did was amazing, but outside of the actual energy outlay required to build say, a pyramid, any civilisation sufficiently advanced to even contemplate building such a thing would have the same grasp of math etc as we do. I mean lets face it - they were the Milau viaduct of their day, but the engineering required to build that, let alone the infrastructure to go with it, was well beyond their abilities.

 

[Crispy]

I remember a program about machu pichu once. There was a guy trying to focus the sun with mirrors to melt or burst the stone. The other guy was just going at it laboriously with a hard stone, putting the block on, seeing where it didn't fit, chisseling a bit, putting it back, taking it off, chisseling a bit, putting it back and so on and on. No lasers or aliens required.

Likewise that guy in america who figured out a neat way to shift stonehenge sized blocks around with his own strength and a couple of pivots.

 

[kyser_soze]

Yeah, there was a whole series of them - pyramids (Egyptian and Mayan/Incan), Stonehenge, irrigating the hanging gardens of babylon using archimedan screws etc (IIRC my fave was the rebuilding of the medieval siege engines - trebuchets and suchlike )

 

[beesonthewhatnow]

my fave was the rebuilding of the medieval siege engines - trebuchets and suchlike

There is a full sized trebuchet at Warwick Castle at the moment, about 60ft high. They fire it twice a day, it's awesome to watch.

I was chatting to the guy that built it and he reckoned it could throw a mini about 300 yards

 

[kyser_soze]

Any chance of getting some phots?

IIRC the one on the programme lobbed a 500kg lump of concrete about 200 yards and hit a target about 2m wide...really awesome piece of kit.

 

[beesonthewhatnow]

Any chance of getting some phots?

IIRC the one on the programme lobbed a 500kg lump of concrete about 200 yards and hit a target about 2m wide...really awesome piece of kit.

The owner reckoned that given just two practice shots he could hit a 1m square section of wall/field every time until the wind changes

 

[kyser_soze]

That is teh kewl

I'm gonna add that to my list of what I really really want

 

[beesonthewhatnow]

It's well worth a day out to see it, you can also watch jousting and falconry if you get the day right

 

[phildwyer]

I mean think about it - what would be left after a 6000 year ice age of mankind's current monumental architecture?

Surely *all* of it would be left? Frozen in ice, like the wooly mammoths. The idea of a pre-ice age civilization is just daft.

 

[beesonthewhatnow]

Surely *all* of it would be left? Frozen in ice, like the wooly mammoths. The idea of a pre-ice age civilization is just daft.

Phil has spoken. This thread is now closed. Move along, nothing else to say here.

 

[Loki]

The owner reckoned that given just two practice shots he could hit a 1m square section of wall/field every time until the wind changes

I bet he hasn't got any problems with noisy neighbours anymore

 

[kyser_soze]

Surely *all* of it would be left? Frozen in ice, like the wooly mammoths. The idea of a pre-ice age civilization is just daft.

Umm, phil, you do know what a glacier looks like don't you?

A glacier is basically an avalanche of millions of tons of ice and stone in slow motion - the carve out things like canyons and valleys when advancing so I doubt that a building made from materials that would already have been made brittle by the cold wouldn't survive 2 or 3 gigatons of ice and rock slowly rolling over it.

BTW the mammoths are actually frozen in water, not glacial ice. They tend to be dug up from the Siberian tundra from under the permafrost - not glacial ice.

This isn't the first time a comment from you has been undone by basic geology. As to the idea of a pre-ice age civilisation...

If you take the view that homo sapiens originated around the 200-250K mark, and our current level of civilisation has taken 6000 years or so to come about, why is it so 'ridiculous' to suggest pre-ice age civilisation? You're basically saying that early versions of us sat around on their arses for 195-245,000 years before an ice age hit and BOOM! we suddenly develop agriculture, writing, art, cities and the rest of it. I'm not postulating a high-tech society - but what environmental conditions would have changed to alter the species so much that we went from being h-gs to farmers in about 1000 years that wasn't present in the previous 200,000?

 

[phildwyer]

what environmental conditions would have changed to alter the species so much that we went from being h-gs to farmers in about 1000 years that wasn't present in the previous 200,000?

None. Which proves that the emergence of civilization was not caused by "environmental conditions." This fact is of course another crushing blow to Darwinism: it is utterly unable to account for the emergence of civilization. Hence the postulation by Darwinists of pre-ice age civilizations: a postulation for which there is *no* evidence whatsoever.

 

[kyser_soze]

Actually AFAIK I'm the only one even playing around with the idea of pre-Ice age civs, and you're dogmatically opposed to anything that even smacks of evolution. Why you persist in calling everyone who accepts evolution as a 'Darwinist' is beyond me.

And it's funny that someone who apparently doesn't even have an elementary knowledge of geology (sorry, but thinking a skyscraper would be frozen by a glacier gave me a little chortle) is able to confidently claim that 'environmental conditions' had nothing to do with the rise of civilisation is a pretty bold claim.

How about this: HS were hunter-gatherers until the last Ice Age forced them to migrate to warmer climes around the equator where a combination of population density, local flora and the nascent knowledge of agriculture led to a tipping point whereby large scale human habitations started, and once the ice age finished and increased resource became available you see the explosion in human advancement (well, some would say that fixed agriculture has caused all the problems but I digress).

So there you go - environment driving the rise of the ancient civilisations all on it's own. So much for your 'it is unable to account for the rise of civilisation'.

 

[beesonthewhatnow]

Actually AFAIK I'm the only one even playing around with the idea of pre-Ice age civs, and you're dogmatically opposed to anything that even smacks of evolution. Why you persist in calling everyone who accepts evolution as a 'Darwinist' is beyond me

Just step away from the thread mate, you know you're not going to get anywhere other than being wound up by the twat

 

[phildwyer]

How about this: HS were hunter-gatherers until the last Ice Age forced them to migrate to warmer climes around the equator where a combination of population density, local flora and the nascent knowledge of agriculture led to a tipping point whereby large scale human habitations started, and once the ice age finished and increased resource became available you see the explosion in human advancement (well, some would say that fixed agriculture has caused all the problems but I digress).

So there you go - environment driving the rise of the ancient civilisations all on it's own. So much for your 'it is unable to account for the rise of civilisation'.

That doesn't account for the fact that civilizations developed independently, in varied conditions, and at widely different dates.

 

[Idris2002]

Eh, no, if you look at the early civilisations they're all roughly in the same belt north of the equator, and they're invariably associated with rivers, be it the Nile, or Tigris and Euphrates.

Which is entirely consistent with Kyser's model in his last post there.

 

[bluestreak]

None. Which proves that the emergence of civilization was not caused by "environmental conditions." This fact is of course another crushing blow to Darwinism: it is utterly unable to account for the emergence of civilization. Hence the postulation by Darwinists of pre-ice age civilizations: a postulation for which there is *no* evidence whatsoever.

TAKE THAT TEH INTERWEB! LOL PWN3D ONE!!!!!

 

[kyser_soze]

Nah, tis all good fun, intellectual games and all that. Besides Phil's post has indirectly led me to a reason why advanced pre-ice age civs probably didn't exist - population density. There's an environmental arguement about human intellectual development (which phil would hate since it involves memes, or concept like them) - one human without communication may be possible of a flash of divine inspiration. Tens or hundreds or thousands of humans in close proximity (or with good communications to render geography irrelevant) will work through and develop ideas far, far quicker, showing that a human created environment, those ideas will propogate through that society faster, will be amended, changed, revised etc etc.

So basically, when HS were wandering the plains/steppes/forests and had low density populations, the need to develop a civilisation based around permanent architecture wasn't needed - the architecture would most likely have been like that of the plains Indians, designed and evolved as environment dictated. However, 50,000 humans in a big patch of fertile ground, with plenty of excess productive capacity could sit back and spend time arguing about mathematics and other abstract stuff (not saying the HGs wouldn't, but given the environmental limitations on that lifestyle you probably couldn't achieve the critical mass required.

 

[kyser_soze]

Eh, no, if you look at the early civilisations they're all roughly in the same belt north of the equator, and they're invariably associated with rivers, be it the Nile, or Tigris and Euphrates.

Which is entirely consistent with Kyser's model in his last post there.

Thanks Idris, and it's even more than that: Mountains. If you look at the world, it's easier to migrate from east to West than from north to south. I'm thinking back to Guns, Germs and Steel here, where Diamond talks about animal migrations as well as flora, and how, with a few ranges here and there, it's pretty easy to move vast distances over fertile ground...

And could it be...that the last ice age carved out some new routes, canyons and valleys through previously impassable mountain ranges, thus facilitating development?

 

[kyser_soze]

widely different dates.

No they didn't - China and Babylon and North Africa all developed within a 1,000 year period, which is peanuts in evolutionary and geographical terms. And this is what I'm on about when I rabbit about pre-ice age civs - while I've provided my own reason why it couldn't happen, that doesn't preclude it happening in specific places in a limited fashion.

 

[phildwyer]

No they didn't - China and Babylon and North Africa all developed within a 1,000 year period, which is peanuts in evolutionary and geographical terms.

Don't know how a period of time can be "peanuts" (or anything else) in "geographical terms," but the fact that 1,000 years is, as you say, peanuts in evolutionary terms is proof that the rise of civilization was a process entirely separate from evolution, and thus that evolution cannot account for it, like what I said before.

 

[kyser_soze]

Umm, you said 'widely spread' and I'm saying that in terms of species development it isn't. And the evolution of human ideas happens at a far greater rate than biological evolution, as the development of human thinking in the 17th-20th centuries shows - we went from being little more than a post-Greek civilisation to our current world view in less than 1,000 years, and science or all types has been revolutionised at least twice in 100 years.

So don't be trying to play semantics with me matey. And anything less than say, 10 million years is 'peanuts' in geological time...