Were There Others Before?

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

This blog post is written in haste.  I woke this morning with a raging ear infection which makes me about moron-level for reasoning, so bear with me.  As I put the last punctuation mark on this, I am going to grab my purse and run to the doctor.  (Well, amble.  I’m not really up to running.)

Yesterday pohjalainen  made a comment about lost civilization stories and how much she likes them.  I like them too.

Of course I don’t exactly believe in them.  It’s not that they’re impossible.  The 10,000 year old city temple they found with magnificent carvings of animals (some of which are either imaginary or long-extinct) and which had no middens (something that makes us think of, say, our modern malls) is not fully explained and could not have been anticipated.  And it seems like every other day a discovery pushes the date at which humans did x further back.

I was reading Dave Freer’s blog this morning and it occurred to me that the thing about highs and lows, and an irregular line of evolution applies not just to history but also to human evolution and to pre-history as well.

We start with the fact that further back than a certain time our information is, of necessity, fragmented and scant.  No, we haven’t discovered everything there is to discover about the people alive in those days.  As with the “missing links” in evolution, likely we are missing most of the stuff that is still there to discover.

Then take in account changing coast lines and where our most advanced population centers tend to be.  Then imagine that oh, ten thousand years from now, after a massive civilizational collapse, our descendants find remnants of a “great civilization” – some long lost village in Arabia stuck circa 700 AD.

This revolutionizes their idea of how advanced we were UPWARD.  Then they discover something, say, a turnpike in Podunk Kansas.  Who in hell is going to believe it.  There will be all sorts of papers explaining how it’s natural.

Because humans like our history tidy.  And I suspect it isn’t.  Depending on what you consider advanced civilization, there might have been several in the past.  And yes, they might have been wiped out without a trace (It occurs to me an ice age would do that very handily.)  And meanwhile there are things we’ll discover that are much older/more primitive, because, well, look at the world today.

When genetic markers first came up, people were saying crazy stuff like we only split from the chimps 100k years ago and therefore they know exactly how deep human history is.  Even at the time reading it, it occurred to me those speculations had a lot of baked in assumptions and precious little solid to stand on.  In fact, every time I pick up a book on the evolution of man I feel like I’m back in my literature courses, where people call each other names over minor disagreements, then go on to make up stuff out of whole cloth.

Again, I suspect evolution is not as simple as we see it.  Not that humans aren’t much different from our ancestors, we are.  But … well, guys, we are a randy species.  And in this case species is blurred as a line.  Turns out that you can, every once in a while, not often, for instance, get a fertile horse/zebra hybrid.  In the same way the more we know of our genome, the more we find other “species” in our line.  Which frankly makes reading our genome like reading a book written by a hundred writers and figuring out whose style it is.

So, have we “advanced” towards our modern form?  Or did we sometimes recede towards more primitive forms.  “Yes.” “Maybe” and “Who are you studying for modern?”

So it is possible that there have been higher civilizations than ours, and it’s very possible that there have been civilizations around the level of say the 18th century several times before.  Perhaps wiped out by the ice age or other natural disasters.

Or perhaps the little things out of place were created by time travelers.

This is the stuff of magic, the stuff stories are built upon.

Unfortunately you can’t read or write good non-fiction speculation about it, because ten pages in, it all falls into mystic New Age or UFO nonsense.  You get the “And then the Earth changes when the goddess returns” and the book goes flying across the room.  And we won’t go into the greys orbiting the Earth, waiting to take us back.  No, we just won’t.

So I don’t believe in it, not because it’s utterly impossible, but because of the company it keepers.  (Which is not only everything for which there is no proof, but everything which has been disproven but is too much fun to let go.)

So, given all that, what is it about lost civilizations that holds such great appeal?

To me personally it is the idea that no matter how badly we screw up, someone of our genes – or our genus, at least – will be here thousands of years from now, and will be “civilized” if very different from us.  It’s the idea that, once kicked from the garden, we don’t wander in mud and darkness forever.

It also puts a fantastic spin on most myths and fairytales.  The Egyptian pyramids?  Totally the result of a muddled memory of cold sleep!  There were giants?  Well, with our food now…

You see what I mean.  It allows me to dream the past as well as the future.

And I like the idea of cyclical and near eternal things, which is why I love the seaside and the tides.

So how do you feel about the idea of lost civilizations (as story fodder, not necessarily as having existed)?  If you find them appealing, what appeals to you about them?

168 thoughts on “Were There Others Before?”

  1. Wow! First in line…
    I think any idea is prime fodder for speculative fiction writers. As for lost civilizations – look at the Book of Genesis, chapters 8-11. There’s one right there. Who’s to say how advanced it was?

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  2. Even the Bible offers a sort of “Lost Civilization” in the Eden myth. After all, why would civilization rely primarily on mechanical artifacts? Perhaps bio-engineered “soft footprint” technology was the route the earlier civilization took.

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    1. IMO “mechanical” artifacts would come before “bio-engineered” technology and you’d have to have a fairly high mechanical technolody before you could develop “bio-engineered” technology.

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      1. Another aspect of “bio-engineered” gadgets is that the gadgets could/would be used to build permanent structures that didn’t “bio degrade”.

        S. M. Stirling had a Martian civilization that used “bio-engineered” gadgets but the Martians also built large permanent structures that were “non biological”.

        A wide spread bio-engineering civilization would likely still leave permanent structures.

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  3. One of my old attempts at a novel used an idea somewhat like this for the backstory.

    What if one of the early offshoots of humanity was really, really smart and creative on average, but more than a little insane because of it? They could have the equivalent of a thousand years of tech advancement in a decade or so – but also a civilization-ending crash/war over a long weekend due to the very small population pool and a limited geographic area of a few dozen square miles.

    You’d end up with stories about a small number of people with severe personality issues. With names like “Zeus.”

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    4. For additional support of your idea, there is the history of the pantheons around the world. There are a number of obscure stories from various mythologies wherein the gods are identified and/or condemned as interlopers and usurpers, and the direction of their original approach identified. I can’t remember what they all were – though I know Odin and Zeus were two of them, which is why I was reminded of it – but I do remember that all those lines of travel intersected in Central Asia. The historian who pointed that out also identified that as the likely location of the biblical Tower of Babel, though I don’t remember whether the two aspects were directly related. Still, interesting story fodder!

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      2. A novel by A. Merritt (I forget which one — he liked lost civilizations almost as much as did ERB) suggested that Thor’s Hammer seemed an awful lot like a .45 automatic: in its wielder’s hand it would have much resembled a hammer and the bullet’s blows would have seemed like a hammer’s. Described by naive observers …

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        1. No offense, but that wasn’t A Merritt. A. Merritt had a lost civilization where the warriors used battle hammers with “ropes”. The warriors could throw the battle hammers and pull them back using the ropes.

          On the other hand, I think Poul Anderson had a short story were a man of our time was accidentally pulled back in time (along with his handgun). While a guest of the ancient Norsemen, he uses his handgun as a hammer when eating walnuts (I think). Then the ancient Norsemen are attacked by “giants from the north” and he uses his handgun against the giants.

          To top things off, the being responsible for him going back in time causes him to disappear in front of the eyes of the ancient Norsemen. (The being while “super-human” knows that it’s polite to clean up messes he makes).

          Once back in his time, he realizes that he’s the origin of Thor with his handgun as Thor’s Hammer. [Smile]

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        2. Not Poul Anderson. IIRC it was “Frost and Thunder” by Randall Garrett. [Embarrassed Grin]

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          1. Been forty plus years since I read any Merritt and time has proven memory problematic about connecting stories and authors (sometimes an idea just seems like it was So-and-so’s, know what I mean?) O read a lot of Garrett and Anderson and that idea seems more like an Anderson than a Garrett (whose magnificent Lord Darcy tends to overwhelm memories of other of his works … although his Gandalara Cycle should be recognized as a Lost Civ story somewhere in this discussion, eh?)

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  4. Michael Scott Rohan’s “Winter of the World” series had a believable “lost civilization” (pre-gunpower) that was “lost” because it was based in lands exposed by the ocean level drop during the last Ice Age. When the ice melted, the rising ocean levels forced them to move so quickly that they weren’t able to rebuild.

    I don’t think I could believe in “lost civilizations” that were “gunpowder levels or higher”. Gunpowder is so useful that somebody would remember how to make it.

    As for “human lost civilizations” more advanced than our current civilization, IMO you’d need “Alien Space Bats” to remove all traces of it.

    Now, I might believe in a dinosaur lost civilization. There’s enough time involved that traces of it could be more believably lost. [Wink]

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    1. And black powder is so darned easy. Hardest part is finding a source of sulfur. Potassium nitrate can be had from caves or manure piles, and any wood source can be made into charcoal.
      Note I said easy, not safe. Black powder is best made in small batches far from other dwellings for good and sufficient reasons. Failure to do so has been fodder for some truly spectacular historical events.

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      1. Yep, even if you have an “After The Atomic War” story and some religious nut is able to “outlaw” black powder, all you need is one group outside the nut’s control starting to make it and the nut’s “civilization” is going to be over-run by armies using black powder weapons.

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        1. One reason why I find Stirling’s “Dies The Fire” series so fascinating. He managed to successfully ground rule all high energy devices out of the culture. He had to resort to “magic” to do so, but as they say any sufficiently advanced technology can be indistinguishable from magic depending on the perspective.

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    2. I love the idea of a story involving a high-level dinosaur civilization. Naturally, it’s been done, but there are plenty of variations that could be done on that theme. And the Asteroid Extinction theory would work, if they were not ones who had gone into building greenhouses, even if their technology level was pretty high otherwise.

      For humans, I don’t see many scenarios that could have caused us to lose civilization if it had progressed beyond the level of Ancient Greece, but I would still read a story on it.

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      2. I have a very high level dinosaur civilization which rose to interplanetary spaceflight, and wiped itself out on Earth in its Final War, with the ultimate deathblows consisting of steering an asteroid into an island where would one day be the Yucatan, and crashing an anti-matter powered prototype starship into India.

        The reason we don’t generally find their remains is that some of their descendants escaped to the stars, colonized much of the Galaxy, and over the last 65 million years have systematically stripped the Earth of holy relics — the remains of their ancestors.

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        1. Actually, the True-dragon Houses on Earth came from a different spiral arm of this galaxy. Many left after a few centuries because this planet is sooooo far off the main traffic lanes that it made transport costs foolishly high and that did in any monetary gain from the colony. Once humans became sapient, a few True-dragons came back as observers. They prefer to keep a low profile. (Except Dr. Fujimori Leiji, but he’s been giving sapient creatures migraines for so long that he can’t break the habit. *shrugs* You know how it is: there’s always one, even in the best of Houses.)

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          1. No doubt the dinosaurs were their housepets, allowed to go feral? That might actually be the best explanation for the tyrannosaur’s useless upper appendages.

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            1. In _Toolmaker’s Koan_, we learn that T-Rex was the “herding animal” of the intelligent dinosaurs. The shortened “arms” was to prevent T-Rex from killing the herd. The intelligent dinosaurs killed some of their herd to feed T-Rex since the T-Rex couldn’t hunt for itself. [Wink]

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    4. I think they are relying on Japan’s ability to get rid of the gun.

      Temporarily.

      Because they were isolated.

      And using amazingly repressive techniques.

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      1. Yep, Japan was able to successful outlaw guns within its borders but couldn’t (in the long run) prevent outsiders from bring them in. Fortunately for Japan, the people who “pushed open the doors” were more interesting trade than conquest.

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    5. Ah, the Winter of the World series, one of my favorites. I get a kick over how parts of the series take place in parts of Canada I’ve been. ;-)

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  5. “Then they discover something, say, a turnpike in Podunk Kansas. Who in hell is going to believe it. There will be all sorts of papers explaining how it’s natural.”

    Did you ever read a satirical little (well actually big, just thin) book called “Motel of the Mysteries?” If not, hunt it down and read it. It won’t take you long, it’s riotously funny, and you’ll never look at archaeology quite the same way again.

    “So how do you feel about the idea of lost civilizations (as story fodder, not necessarily as having existed)? If you find them appealing, what appeals to you about them?”

    Lots of Stuff for characters to explore and learn from. Lots of potential for Great Discoveries lurking in the ruins, as well as Ancient Sealed Evils to stay away from. The possibility that devoting ourselves exclusively to science for the last half-millenium has been a mistake, and there really is an entire mystical world Out There that we’ve (almost) forgotten about.

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    1. I can’t remember the details… Help?

      There was an excavation in the near-East in a tell that uncovered all sorts of even older objects than the surrounding culture, but they covered a variety of time periods and weren’t all local. No one could figure it out, until they interpreted some of the (cuneiform?) text as museum labels. As I recall (though I can’t remember which civilization) there was an appropriate known daughter-of-emperor candidate as a museum organizer for the period, and that’s what they think they found.

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    3. Some years back, there was a guy who’d bought a lot out on Madeline Island, one of the Apostles in Lake Superior.

      He wanted to build a house on it, but he found the price of barging materials and having it constructed on site to be prohibitive.

      Now Madeline Island is one of those that has a road built to it, over the ice, every winter. So he bought a house, put it up on a trailer, and hauled it out over the ice, in deep winter when the lake was frozen solid.

      And the ice was thick enough to carry the weight of the house and the truck everyplace except that one spot.

      So now we have a rather nice bungalow, sitting on the bottom of Lake Superior. And someday, some future archaeologist is going to find it, and wonder what it was doing there.

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  6. There are a few stories out there of a civilization (a group of warriors mainly) dropping out of the main space lanes and crashing into a type of earth. Good example is Modesitte’s novels about early times of his world.

    How does it affect the current residents? Will they be able to intermingle? Will they be able to take their technology into the world and if not how do they cope? I do enjoy a good rendering of that type of story– and no, Deus ex machina.

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  7. “And we won’t go into the greys orbiting the Earth, waiting to take us back. No, we just won’t.”
    Given that their existence would imply levels of technology orders of magnitude greater that we currently possess (FTL drives), and control of energies of at least fusion if not anti matter range (in the nature of man portable nuclear devices), one must posit a culture sufficiently advanced to survive such readily available power coupled with a desire to expand and explore. IMHO such a civilization would not choose to interact with us at our current level of development for any reason short of a planet destroying event, possibly not even then.
    So, they may very well be there, but would absolutely forbid contact of any sort. And who could blame them.

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    1. Perhaps such a superior civilization is just absolutely driven by a desire to share the benefits of their enlightened world knowledge by forcing us to eschew our misbegotten ways. Think Mayor Bloomberg with an army.

      Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

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      1. I’ve been reading Prescott’s history of the conquest of Mexico. The remarkable ease with which Cortez recruited an army of native allies an order of magnitude larger than the Spanish force he brought by ship suggests that everything was not so hunky-dory in the Aztec Empire to begin with.

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  9. I like the survival aspect. Granted, I was also voted “most likely to be an archaeologist” in every grade through high school (at which point I became “most likely to be a historian”). What survives, not only of physical culture, but mental? Do any ideas continue through the disruption, and in what form? And how do other peoples remember the advanced civilization (see Plato and Atlantis, or the Navajo and the Anasazi of Canyon de Chelle).

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      1. Yep, that’s the story. To be brief, the story idea is that Mankind periodically destroys his civilizations and then rebuilds. Other species don’t destroy their civilizations but “just die out”. The twist of the story is that the POV character is writing to “current day humans” and he was born into a much earlier human civilization and has witnessed several rises and falls of very advanced human civilizations.

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        2. The An alternative to such cyclical scenarios is the Singularity.

          Or there could be cyclical Singularities, with each superspecies behaving like a leave-no-trace backpacker when it transcends to Somewhere.

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            1. That’s the same link I posted above. NESFA’s currently available books are here.

              During a more prosperous period in my life, I indeed bought my NESFA books from Amazon. The savings on price and shipping are noticeable. Throw in Amazon’s customer service and the choice is compelling.

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              1. Ayup — I had already searched out the title and link when I saw your post, so I used the embed to provide the title. Redundancy unintended.

                WP is acting up on me, skipping mailing posts to me (I’ve identified a distinct block of comments between 6:37 and 6:54 PM) so I try to remember to CTRL-F and search for phrases before commenting in response. Sometimes it works well, sometimes less so. ~shrug~

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  11. Oh, my, yes. There’s a part of me continuously hoping somebody finds something more or less inexplicable. Megalithic structures hundreds of feet below the waves. A cavern-city somewhere in the Andes. Sunken ruins in the Amazon. A tomb somewhere odd holding things way too advanced for neolithic man. Hand-hewn stones on Mars.

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    1. One of the very first adult science fiction stories I ever read was “At the Mountains of Madness” (1936) by H. P. Lovecraft. That gave me a love of lost and forgotten civilizations which has not yet died.

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      1. I always found Conan the Cimmerian a puzzling concept. There was more room to place him and his friends in Robert Howard’s ancient middle-east than in mine. But I thought it was plausible enough that I just didn’t care. (I felt about Tarzan the same way.)

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      2. one of my favorite intro to a story is from Sturgeon’s Killdozer.

        Before the race was the deluge and before the deluge another race whose nature it is not for mankind to understand. Not unearthly, not alien, for this was their earth and their home.

        Along with Lovecraft, I like the implication of the vast swath of history that is hidden and unkown.

        And 4.5 billion years can hide a lot of history.

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        1. It helps to remember that one of the major debates in Science from the 18th Century to mid 20th was the age of the Earth. This forms a core theme of Bill Bryson’s superb history of the Scientific Method, A Short History of Nearly Everything.

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      3. Maybe so. I spent about half that book annoyed with the protagonists. On the one hand, they’re on a scientific expedition exploring something that any archaeologist/paleontologist/person with a glimmer of curiosity would donate organs to join. On the other hand, they spend (IIRC?) half the book whining about how creepy it all is. (This is before TSHTF.)

        I did think the thawed out pre-cambrian aliens digging through the human’s camp and opening their cans and trying to figure out how the human’s stuff worked was one of the most thrilling parts of that book though. They were curious too! They were exploring, thinking creatures also. That connection, across vast differences in origin, is one of the things that is fascinating about the genre (and first-contactish stuff in science fiction.) It promises that there would be things to share.

        Well, it would if the author wasn’t Lovecraft. :-P

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        1. It’s a good thing I wasn’t an Old Phart Phan back when Campbell brought out “Who Goes There?” I’d have been whining non-stop about how Lovecraft already did it.

          But between The Thing from Outer Space and The Thing and The other Thing and that X-Files episode and that Doctor Who episode with the Seeds of Doom, there’s a lot of solid Antarctic sf/horror we owe to HPL.

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      4. Cthulhu fhtagn.

        That too is a scenario: our Predecessors have stepped out or dozed off, and will not be pleased to discover that pests have overrun their domicile during their absence.

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      5. One idea I had was that the Old Ones came to Earth, squatted a while, and then decided to leave, and followed the dictum of, “Leave your campsite the way you wanted to find it.” Unfortunately they liked abiotic wastelands.

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  12. We start with the fact that further back than a certain time our information is, of necessity, fragmented and scant. No, we haven’t discovered everything there is to discover about the people alive in those days. As with the “missing links” in evolution, likely we are missing most of the stuff that is still there to discover.

    This is sometimes called “Deep Time.” The analogy that Henry Gee uses in his book In Search of Deep Time is that a single discovered fossil is like a star in the depths of of the Universe, illuminating a tiny period in space and time around itself, but casting but little direct light upon anything but a short distance (in cosmic terms) away. This makes it difficult or even impossible to assemble natural histories as coherent and natural as the ones we assemble with regard to cultural or personal histories.

    To quote Gee:

    “No fossil is buried with its birth certificate. That, and the scarcity of fossils, means that it is effectively impossible to link fossils into chains of cause and effect in any valid way… To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.”

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  13. I think my favorite SF somewhat along in this vein is Vernor Vinge’s concept of “code archeologists.” Why bother re-programing something when there’s so much historical code out there, just search cut paste and you’re golden!

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    1. “Programmer-Archeologists”, and it wasn’t because there is so much “historical code” out there as it was their systems were layers and layers of libraries calling libraries calling libraries that you really, really needed to know and understand how to dig through those libraries *CAREFULLY* so you could understand any side-effects of whatever you were writing or changing.

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    2. I thought the concept was interesting. I am a very reinvent the wheel programmer myself though, perhaps more so than I should be.

      The thing that bugged me about the concept at the time I read it is that eventually you reach a point where the effort to find and understand how to call someone elses routine, what it does, what you feed it, what other environment it needs to work – is greater than the effort you need to write something you understand perfectly yourself.

      Algorithm archeologist, maybe. Implementation archaeologist? It would require a massive breakthrough in code useability and understandability.

      But then, this is also a universe with godlike AIs and interstellar travel. So it could happen.

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    4. Heh. 25 years ago a colleague at a military lab had a knack for getting half-forgotten, neglected, unmaintained software packages running when the occasional need arose. I called him a a “Fortran archeologist”.

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  14. We don’t have any unknown civilizations on the planet anymore. If you want to know what beyond the next hill, or mountain range, you use Google. No surprises. You know about them, they know about you, even when the cultures are different enough that true understanding between them may be more or less lacking there are still not going to be any big surprises to either (unless you count some very, very small tribes in the middle of Amazon jungle or something, and while they may find us rather strange to us, well, indigenous tribes may have somewhat different beliefs and habits, but they do not differ _that_ much from the other ones living in the same area, so – no big surprises as long as you have watched at least some documentaries or done some reading before meeting them…).

    Surprises can be bad, but not having any makes life a bit boring. Now it looks like we will have to wait until we can go to the stars before anyone can experience similar voyages of discovery as there was a few hundred years ago, and even if we survive long enough and get those starships there are no guarantees – perhaps there won’t be anything but rocks, or if there are others they may be so profoundly strange to us that there will never be any true – okay, I’m not quite sure what the right word would be here. Not quite communication, but maybe that is still close enough. No aliens one could feel a connection to, but just alien aliens?

    And certainly no alien princesses or princes close enough to us to romance… So, what if there is something previously unknown here? Or what if there was, and there is a time portal? Humans, but of a kind we have never seen before. Good, bad, neither but strange, alien but not too alien…

    Or maybe, even if that culture is dead, no living remnants left anywhere and no time portals, maybe they were advanced enough that finding what they left gives us a shortcut, maybe to those starships, and now we could go tomorrow (and if they had starships, maybe there are colonies…)?That would probably force very fast change on us, and while fast change is also something that can be very bad, it could also be a very heady time to live in.

    But yes, I think the main fascination lies with the idea of finding truly new humans, something completely unknown, so the best version of lost civilization is one where a modern person, somebody who thinks like us, gets to do some exploring while interacting with those unknown, alien humans. Relatable aliens?

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    1. “We don’t have any unknown civilizations on the planet anymore. If you want to know what beyond the next hill, or mountain range, you use Google. No surprises.”

      That seems to express something – I think it was Asimov in his Foundation series – about ‘researchers’ who merely compare various previous accounts, then decide which one they believe is the most accurate. No nasty,sweaty, dirty excavations to ruin one’s coiffure.

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      1. Interestingly enough, just this week I had a email from a friend showing pics of a South Pacific underwater eruption spawning an island. Mysteries are still around us – the Magic LIVES!!

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  15. We have a habit of thinking that earlier people were stupid because they did not know what we know.

    But just because they had not made some specific technological leaps did not make them stupid. If one reads the epic poetry of Homer, the writings of Thucycides about the Peloponnesian War, the writings of Cicero on politics, you find some ideas we don’t necessarily share (especially Homer) but you will find thoughts every bit as sophisticated if not more so than today.

    Farther back, before we have surviving writings, the stone age peoples of our world had very sophisticated cultures even if they lacked the technology we falsely believe a culture must have. European celts moved their menhir and Stonehenge stones of large weight immense distances by using their experience in applying the tools they did have. Likewise Egyptians built immense monuments with tools we barely recognize as tools at all.

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    1. The first piece of Egyptian hieroglyphic prose I read in class was the story of Senui (approx sp) the shipwrecked sailor. You see, he was swept ashore on an island where he met a giant snake. He bowed low to the snake who reared up and told him, “When I was a young snake, there was this time…”

      And on and on for, if I recall correctly, a seven-deep nested tale of adventure with appropriate frames and POVs. Yep, 5000 years of perfectly recognizable plot devices without a hint of unsophistication.

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        1. Remember, no vowels in hieroglyph (except semi-vowels). I don’t have the references at hand (packed away) to look it up, but I’ll guess it’s really something like “SNWH”

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  16. When genetic markers first came up, people were saying crazy stuff like we only split from the chimps 100k years ago and therefore they know exactly how deep human history is.

    Yes. When a new paleodating technology is developed, it often has bugs — consider the early history of radiocarbon dating. There are probably hidden links between genetic complexes, and evolutionary events such as mass extinctions and radiations may skew the genetic clocks in ways which we do not currently understand.

    IMO the development of genetic dating is one of the most wondrous advances in paleontology, but I am aware of its possible limitations.

    Again, I suspect evolution is not as simple as we see it. Not that humans aren’t much different from our ancestors, we are. But … well, guys, we are a randy species. And in this case species is blurred as a line. Turns out that you can, every once in a while, not often, for instance, get a fertile horse/zebra hybrid.

    Oh yes. I think it’s very likely, for instance, that there were occasional gene transmissions between humans and chimpanzees for at least a million years after the split was officially complete, which is to say all the way into the time of the ardipithecenes (around 4 MYA). And there may have been very rare transmissions long afterward — all the way up to the present day, really.

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    1. Part of the original issue with Carbon dating was the basic assumption that megalithic monuments were a fertile crescent/Mediterranean invention that radiated to Europe, but the darned C14 rations indicated that the European sites were older! So they invented this “fracture zone” to show a discontinuity between European and Mediterranean Carbon dating zones. They figured it out eventually.

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      1. And if people ate a lot of fish, you can’t get an accurate C14 date from their bones. You have to go with the dates on other organic materials found with the remains, and not everyone was kind enough to leave wood, charcoal, or animal bones with their dead.

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        1. That’s right. I remember some articles talking about how to accurately date sites in the Arctic where the food and wood resources had skewed C14 ratios.

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  17. Hmm, how best to lose a civilization? Sea level rises works for a lot, but an advanced civ is going to leave a lot of traces inland and at higher altitudes.

    But time travel, now. Go back and Oops! The civilization you left isn’t there to return to.

    No matter how many times you try.

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    1. Well, there’s still Antarctica. They haven’t mapped the whole surface in enough detail to be sure there’s nothing under the ice sheet (and it may have pushed everything off the continent anyway).

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      2. Considering that ice sheets scrape everything off, including the top layers of bedrock not much of a chance of finding any traces there, unless they are very, very old (like fossils in the deeper layers of rock).

        Unless there are caves, maybe. There is one cave in Finland which probably was there before the last glaciation, and which may once sheltered early Neanderthals. Maybe. Very maybe. Some rocks have been found there which may have been used as tools, in the deeper layers of the dirt on the bottom, but the last time I looked at the results even the dating of those layers was uncertain, so the idea that they predate the last glaciation is mostly just a guess. Interesting, anyway.

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          1. Crazy thought. Just when scientists are absolutely sure about human prehistory/evolution, God adds something to the fossil record (retroactively) just to burst their egos. [Very Big Crazy Grin]

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            1. Long, long ago I read a story in which G-D was being kept busy revising the fossil record to support the scientists’ latest theories (easy to do when you are not bound by Time.) I haven’t the foggiest idea who wrote it but as I recall, He was amused by the inventiveness of the challenge.

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          3. Oh yes. But not to worry, something like a futuristic beer can deeply embedded in an old coal seam can always be explained away, I have no doubt about that. Or it will be just ignored since it doesn’t fit. :)

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          4. Not more than a few weeks ago, I read a book I got from Gutenberg, I think it was by H. Beam Piper, not of futurians going back and planting false evidence, but modern day humans traveling back in time to plunder tech from crashlanded alien ships, which had been essentially obliterated by the ice sheets (except there were just enough remnants to tell them that they had been there).

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  18. There is a story about Tolkien saying to Lewis, back when Lewis was an atheist, “Okay, let’s grant that the Gospels and the Christian narrative are a fairy tale. Is there any fairy tale you have ever encountered that with give you more delight if you learned that it was actually true?” And Lewis went for that and became a Christian again. I think that this is probably true, because I’ve read versions of it by both Tolkien and Lewis.

    Well, if Tolkien had said that to me, any time in my adult life (starting 1967, as our society reckons these things), I would have said, “Yes, Professor Tolkien, actually I would be far more delighted if I learned that your stories of Middle-Earth were true, and there had once been elves and dwarves and wizards and Rings of Power.” And that’s a lost civilization for you, because Tolkien portrayed Middle-Earth as our world in the far past, and his own fiction as translations from the Red Book written by Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam as a historical account of that civilization.

    But seriously, no. Our technological civilization is leaving too many markers, from mass extinctions to intercontinental transplantation of plants, animals, and diseases to a spike in atmospheric pollutants. Historical geologists and paleontologists would spot those things if some lost ancient society had done them before us.

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    1. Our technological civilization is leaving too many markers, from mass extinctions to intercontinental transplantation of plants, animals, and diseases to a spike in atmospheric pollutants.

      After 4 million years? They’d assume that a big meteor (or multiple “small” ones) had hit and blew everything around.

      4 million years of plate tectonics, “Ice Ages” and such will do a number on the remnants.,

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      1. What about The Lost Cities of Z scenario? Roads we couldn’t recognize, fields we couldn’t recognize, now super-remote ruins covered by deep jungle that we also couldn’t recognize….

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      2. David Brin addresses something like this in his uplift universe: Advanced civilizations taking lease on fallow worlds are required to construct their civilization adjacent to subduction zones. Once they have moved on/died out and the planet lies fallow again geologic time will erase their presence and allow a ‘virgin’ world to arise.

        This is the kind of thing I was talking about in my comment below, our assumptions about civilization and its technological and ecological effects are grounded in our experiences, and I think the possibilities of exploring advanced civilizations that do not bear out our experiential expectations is intriguing.

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      3. Hearing my ancient history teacher talk about the trouble we have to go through to recover ceramic tablets and masonry from 8000 years ago (the metal nails and fasteners have all turned to rust stains and impressions in the stone), I think over the course of 100,000 years or a million years, a lot about any given structure could be erased. If it’s not already rock, it wants to be.

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      4. A lot of the things I described are going to leave traces that mere ice ages and tectonic collisions can’t wipe out. Try explaining how it is there were were no placentals (except bats) in Australia for millions of years—and then all of a sudden you see cattle, sheep, horses, and rabbits, all of which are native to Europe. And likely enough most of the marsupial species die out; some of them are gone already.

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          1. Which serves to demonstrate that our understanding of events, cause and effect and linear relationships on a geologic time scale are all hypothetical and subject to further revision and refinement over time.

            The fossil record is incomplete (though we have been fleshing it out over time) and our assumptions about land mass placement in the distant past are…assumptions. In the distant future, absent a written record, we can assume civilizations will be required to come at history piecemeal just as we do.

            I don’t argue either way, but I think our sense of the relative permanence of our current civilization might be somewhat misplaced. We could talk about the effect of the content of the walls around Istanbul on the permanence of their predecessor’s landmarks. But in geologic time all of these events are so close together as to be relatively indistinguishable

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  19. From a writers perspective I enjoy the idea of lost civilizations because it allows us to challenge current dogma and twist around the possibilities to account for those truly ‘lost’ elements of our known history. It allows us to take the older mythologies and assumptions and explore them from an assumption of accuracy and not mythology. In doing this, perhaps we can incite a conscious appraisal of the culture and civilization we find ourselves in and free the story up to play more liberally with the themes without the reader’s unexamined assumptions clouding the issue. It works the same with future histories, shaking up our (necessary) accommodations with our world and allowing us to explore possibilities.

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  20. Rather than a lost civilization or a lost time traveler to explain something out of place, why not a lost ‘weird genius?’ It seems possible to me that many things might have been invented and lost multiple times before they caught on….

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    1. The antikythera mechanism comes to mind. If Newton were born in the bronze age without peers to communicate with or a civilization that appreciated and propagated his contributions, the stuff he came up with all on his own would probably qualify.

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      1. The Greeks had plenty of peers to knock around with. It’s just that they thought automata were cool toys and nothing more serious. It’s like if we invented computers, and only used them to operate animatronic Disneyland and office desk toys.

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        1. It was NOT aliens! WHY do you fools immediately jump to effing ALIENS for your explanations?????

          It was an indigenous silicon-based lifeform (their coprolites are widely found at beaches and gravel pits) that lived on Earth before those lazy carbon-breathers even began to form. Their homes can be visited and enjoyed to this day in sites such as Mammoth Caverns. The fission reactor was a science experiment by one of their AG kids that was left unattended when they departed Earth for Saturn where they can be observed engaged in their traditional folk dances to this day.

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        2. I was trying to avoid the crazy, but it leaks out sometimes.
          Especially after reading Charles Forte or William Corliss lists of anomalies for ideal fodder
          Why have screws, nails, the fossilized soles of shoes and other objects been found inside solid rock and lumps of coal.?
          Why does an entire flock of birds drops dead at the same time and place.
          Heck, why do frogs, fish and other critters fall out of the sky.
          Why are there red headed mummies in china?
          Did a comet wipe out most large animals 12,000 years ago in north America?
          Why was Venus surface completely covered in lava 300 million years ago.
          What’s blowing up stars in Aquila?
          Why does a guy in Florida keep winning the lottery.
          There is a thing in the Triangulum Galaxy M33 that is the brightest object in the entire galaxy. But only in the infrared. In all other frequencies it looks like a dim start. Dyson Sphere anyone?

          Sure they may be more prosaic answers, but where’s the fun in that.

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  25. Just $0.99, part of a larger series, and dam good … at least I enjoyed it. Fantasy, not the Greys, but the fantasy is God and angels, fallen and otherwise. Reminds me to buy the next in the series with the next paycheck.

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  26. Yeah, the ancient Greeks were pretty bright, and had plenty of interaction among the Mediterranean. They also had Euclid and Pythagoras, and the rest of them.

    I was thinking more “Someone like Newton or Euler born in isolation somewhere in the hinterlands of Hittite territory or something”.

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        1. “Really, how much better do you reckon it will be when applied to genius skulls?”

          “I don’t know, that would be an interesting experiment.”

          “Ok, let’s test it out.” Thwack!

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        2. Everyone knows that piles of skulls are the fulcrums on which to shift civilizations.

          (Aaaaand I have my next tee-shirt logo)

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    1. And Robert E. Howard, too. I love how his Hyborian Age, already a lost prehistoric era, has lost cities of its owns, remnants of even older times.

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  29. How about intelligent bats or, going further back, pterodactyls? No roads. Perhaps cliff cities that have crumbled and fallen, leaving no trace? Odd dwellings one enters from a hole in the roof . . .

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    1. The problem with that is that flight is metabolically intensive. So are large brains. I think the current theory of our development doesn’t have us get really smart until we figured out hunting and had a reliable source of calories and high-quality protein. It would be difficult for a flying species to suck down enough calories to get smart. Plus there’s the tension between flight requiring weight to be at a minimum while smarts need a heavy brain.

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        1. Bone marrow, organ meats, the long muscles. Pretty much all the bits that our ancestors had to do without when they were scavengers.

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      2. This is why the New Guard’s propensity for vegetarian alien intelligence’s seems so preposterous to us. They automatically assume that all intelligent life except us awful humans will come to be by being peaceful, nature loving, vegetarians singing Kumbaya in their alien tongue.

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        1. If you look at all known life there’s a common thread. Carnivores are smart, herbivores are dumb. Part of it is simple evolution – you don’t need to be terribly bright to successfully ambush grass, say three degrees smarter than Biden – the other part is the thermodynamic limits placed by sustenance.

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  30. I dunno. I like those kind of stories, but there doesn’t seem to be much proof. I’m sure there were some “false-start” early civilizations we haven’t uncovered yet, and we certainly don’t know everything about “recorded” history yet, either. And since I’m a big Robert E. Howard fan, I’m always excited to hear about lost history.

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  31. “My name is Ozymandias”

    I met a traveller from an antique land
    Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
    Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
    Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
    And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
    Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
    Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
    The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
    And on the pedestal these words appear:
    “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
    Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
    Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
    Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
    The lone and level sands stretch far away.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias

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  32. I was going to ramble, but it seems I may have used up all my word allotment for the last few hours, because I go to the brainbanks to grab images and I just sort of grab a handful of unrelated words.

    Atlantis.

    Shangri La (oh – my magical Regency story touches on that one….yep, mental dead end again).

    The city in Lovecraft’s [SPOILER ALERT] The Rats in the Walls [/SPOILER ALERT]. Lovecraft did the lost civ thing a lot. Though I extrapolate, I guess, as I haven’t read a lot from him. But I know they’re really popular, at least, in works inspired by his….

    Yep. That’s as far as I can go with this one. Maybe I’ll curl up in bed until my best friend gets off of work. >_>;

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    1. Radiocarbon dating conducted on the construction show that the earliest ones [megalithic earthworks] were built some 2.000 years ago, and the civilization hit an abrupt decline, virtually disappearing some 700 years ago, possibly due to diseases carried by Europeans.

      Um, 2013-700=1313.
      I suppose we now know where the lost Templar fleet wound up.

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      1. It’s the go-to genuflection theory these days, same way that the Indian population has been estimated as being ginormous to allow for a huge die-off. (Like, 97% of the population huge.)

        This article: http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2013/09/finnish-archaeologist-digs-up-ancient.html#.UkJ1KMbryk0
        says 500 years, and just says it’s POSSIBLE it may’ve been from European diseases.

        BTW, somewhat tangential: I spent a good 30 seconds trying to figure out what the year 1313 had to do with space marines…..

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        1. That article is a bit better.
          Early explorers to the Amazon basin reported larger populations than were later believed credible, since the area was so unhealthy to European explorers, and the later populations were so small and scattered. One of the problems of that area, if I remember right, is protein and the low fertility of the jungle soil. Without intensive cultivation or complex and extended crop rotation and fallowing like the Mayan Milpa system it is not possible to farm it, and that in turn requires a fairly complex society to support it. A disruption, like a series of pandemics or an invasion, breaks the social structure in a traditional society and makes it unable to function. This in turn breaks the ability to produce and transport food, and that leads to starvation and depopulation.

          (The destruction of the Knights of the Temple is one of my personal hobby-horses. It is one of those theories that…well, you can talk about Vril or vampire carrots and people just think you are either overenthusiastic or the sort that doesn’t get out much. Talk about the survival of the Templars and you get treated like a possibly dangerous loon)

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        2. Back before it completely went off the rials, Discover magazine (Spring or Fall of 2004, IIRC) had an article about a Hanta-like disease that probably accounted for the initial wave of die-offs in Central America and Mexico. It seems the combination of symptoms and weather reported by the Spanish didn’t match what later medical historians thought caused the problem, but they did match symptoms and weather reported in one of the surviving pre-Columbian codices and in later, more localized epidemics.

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          1. Cool!

            Well, not for those dying, of course, but– I’m glad that somebody is doing more than waving a wand and saying “Small pox killed 95-99% of the population, invisibly!”

            I don’t doubt folks got sick, but “they were actually all advanced but it got erased” handwavium is a pet peeve.

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