Terence Newton, Staff Writer
Waking Times
What if everything you’ve been taught about the origins of civilization is wrong? Be it that certain pieces of our history have been intentionally hidden, or that we have yet to discover and realize the true story of our past, new archaeological and geological discoveries are revealing that sophisticated civilizations have likely existed in prehistoric times.
Until recently, the archaeological community has spread the view that the beginnings of human civilization started after the last Ice Age, which ended around 9,600 BC. All human ancestors prior to this time were recognized as primitive, uncivilized hunter-gatherers who were incapable of communal organization and architectural design. It was only after the Ice Age, when huge 2-mile deep ice caps that covered much of Europe and North America melted, that our human ancestors started to develop and perfect agriculture, forming more-complex economic and social structures around 4000 BC. Archaeologists believed that first cities started around 3500 BC in Mesopotamia and, shortly after, in Egypt. On the European continent, the oldest megalithic sites are dated around 3,000 BC, and the popular Stonehenge is dated between 2,400 BC and 1,800 BC.
This is the established chronology being taught in schools and believed by modern society. Prehistoric societies such as Atlantis have been declared myth.
Until now. New research now reveals that civilized humans were settled on Earth during the prehistoric era.
“Everything we’ve been taught about the origins of civilization may be wrong. Old stories about Atlantis and other great lost civilizations of prehistory, long dismissed as myths by archaeologists, look set to be proved true.” ~ Danny Natawidjaja, PhD, senior geologist with the Research Centre for Geotechnology at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (Source)
Since 2011, Dr. Natawidjaja and his team have worked on a geological survey site in Indonesia about 100 miles from the city of Bandung. The significance of the site was first recognized in 1914 when megalithic structures made from blocks of columnar basalt were found around a summit of a large hill. When the hill’s summit was cleared of trees, it was realized that the blocks formed five terraces. These were believed to be used for meditation and retreat. The site was deemed sacred by locals and dubbed Gunung Padang, meaning “Mountain of Light” or “Mountain of Enlightenment”. The age of the terrace structures was estimated around 1,500 BC to 2,500 BC.
What Natawidjaja discovered at Gunung Padang was astounding. The hill was actually not a natural hill but a 300-ft high step-pyramid. And what’s even more controversial is that the structure was much older than anyone imagined. Natawidjaja radiocarbon dated the terrace structures at around 500 to 1,500 BC, similar to previous estimates. He also used tubular drills to bring up cores of earth and stone from various depths underneath the surface megaliths. As the drills dug deeper, Natawidjaja continued to discover that the columnar basalt structures extended far beneath the surface and yielded much older dates. At depths of 90 feet and more, the material was found to be 20,000 BC to 22,000 BC years old. Using radiocarbon dating, Natawidjaja and his team proved that man-made megalithic structures and hence a prehistoric human civilization existed well into the Ice Age.
“At 7,000 or more years older than Stonehenge the megaliths of Gobekli Tepe, like the deeply buried megaliths of Gunung Padang mean that the timeline of history taught in our schools and universities for the best part of the last hundred years can no longer stand. It is beginning to look as though civilization, as I argued in my controversial 1995 bestseller Fingerprints of the Gods, is indeed much older and much more mysterious than we thought.” ~ Graham Hancock (Source)
“Gunung Padang is not a natural hill but a man-made pyramid and the origins of construction here go back long before the end of the last Ice Age. Since the work is massive even at the deepest levels, and bears witness to the kinds of sophisticated construction skills that were deployed to build the pyramids of Egypt or the largest megalithic sites of Europe, I can only conclude that we’re looking at the work of a lost civilization and a fairly advanced one. ” ~ Dr. Danny Natawidjaja (Source)
The Greek philosopher Plato was also a believer that high civilization existed well into the last Ice Age. His recorded dialogs with other scholars of his time date Atlantis and its submergence by floods and earthquakes at around 9,000 BC, which is, coincidentally, in agreement with modern scientific knowledge about the rapidly rising sea levels towards the end of the Ice Age at 9,600 BC.
The question now arises: What happened to prehistoric civilizations? Why did they not survive the “Younger Dryas” period, which dates from 10,900 BC to 9,600BC? It is known that the Younger Dryas was a truly cataclysmic period on Earth, with immense climate instability and terrifying global conditions. Scientists have long debated the mystery behind this and the reasons for the massive extinction of North American megafauna such as short-faced bears and saber-toothed cats dated around 11,000 BC. Was the same mystery responsible for a massive human population decline and disappearance of advanced prehistoric societies?
New research conducted by geologists around the world, including James Kennett, professor emeritus in the Department of Earth Science at the University of California Santa Barbara, has linked the Younger Dryas period to a cosmic-impact event, possibly a comet collision with Earth. The international research team from 21 universities and 6 countries has identified a distribution of nanodiamonds of extraterrestrial nature at 32 sites in 11 countries, spanning an area of 50 million square kilometers across the Northern Hemisphere. Kennett comments:
“We conclusively have identified a thin layer over three continents, particularly in North America and Western Europe, that contain a rich assemblage of nanodiamonds, the production of which can be explained only by cosmic impact. We have also found YDB glassy and metallic materials formed at temperatures in excess of 2200 degrees Celsius, which could not have resulted from wildfires, volcanism or meteoritic flux, but only from cosmic impact.” (Source)
It’s known that during the Younger Dryas, the Earth experienced great global instability, with a sharp decline in temperatures even colder than during the peak of the Ice Age. A return to a warmer climate around 9,600 BC caused a sudden melting of the remaining ice caps, resulting in a quick rising of the ocean levels.
Kennett and his colleagues believe that the beginning of the Younger Dryas and the sharp temperature decline were caused by a cosmic event, similar to the event responsible for the mass extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The scientists have called the moment in time illustrated by the nanodiamond datum as an isochron. Was this isochron responsible for creating the mystery of lost civilizations? Kennett believes so:
“It’s not surprising that many large animal species, such as the mammoths, went extinct during this precise time and of course it had huge effects on our ancestors, not just those ‘primitive’ hunter gatherers the archaeologists speak of but also, I believe, a high civilization that was wiped from the historical record by the upheavals of the Younger Dryas.” (Source)
About the Author
Terence Newton is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com, interested primarily with issues related to science, the human mind, and human consciousness.
Sources:
http://phys.org/news/2014-08-year-old-nanodiamonds-multiple-continents.html
http://www.grahamhancock.com/forum/HancockG9-Mystery-Lost-Civilization.php
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It is entirely possible that he’s right. We can’t know for sure about this sort of thing on the basis of one report, however.
But barring slavery, what group of people would, without obvious machine tools and energy-amplfying machinery like, er, machines that used metals, or at least well-crafted wood, spend hundreds or even thousands of years erecting 300-foot-high man-made earth pyramids, then put great rocks on the top, for….meditation….when they’d still have had to spend more than 100% of their time simply hunting/gathering food and eating it, let alone farming it?
That’s at least 25 million cubic yards of soil and fill – at a roung guess when moist, 70 million tons. Let’s be generous and say that with wooden spades a man could lift half a ton of spoil/rock a day up to 300 feet – remember that a modern human expends about 3.7 KWh a day including running his own biochemistry, not just movement – and that’s 140 million ma-days of labour, or about 384,000 Man-Years!
Assume an Indonesian human population of say 100,000 people, about 30% of whom might be fit males at any time (say 30,000 – you couldn’t even conscript by force more than about half of these without the rest of the Tribes starving to death. so your Labour Pool is a max of 15,000 youngish fit men at any one time (think of the logistics of feeding them; never mind the latrine problem…) Assume you could get your required 15,000 all at once, all the time, 24/7 for decades, and you -could do it- in about 26 years.
Oh and then there’s the problem of sex. 15,000 young fit males, 20,000 years ago, will have certainly wanted women and girls to shag – or else!…no pyramid, guv! I guess you could replace part of the actual labour force with these females, but that’d cut your work rate owing to preggancies, rape-trials, nursing of infants and the like. I don’t expcet they took The Pill much or used “condoms” as is urged upon everyone these days.
So, er, I think the entire thesis is somewhat improbable, from a maths point of view.
Then there ought, if I am right, to be somewhere nearby, traces, even just that, traces, of the many many skeletons of those who died in the course of the work, from industrial accidents, disease, etc. It’s not that long ago after all. 20,000 years?
And if the available-population-pool was even smaller than 100,000 – entirely possible – then it’d have taken much longer…Does anyone have any figures of the likely attention-span of a pre-literate civilisation, traces of the writings, priestly commands and wage-bills of which have never yet been found?
I will bear in mind your comments on this specific probability. Even so, I am inclined to believe that civilisation is older than the conventional accounts allow, and that our own may not be the only reasonably advanced civilisation that has existed, and that the motivations of these other civilisations were not entirely the same as our own.
That’s fair enough. I am also inclined to think that stonehenge and related monuments are rather older than carbon-dating of “odd bits of stuff dug up with toothbrushes and hippytype students” suggests. But I’d expect to want to see more traces of structures older than the neolithic period before being convinced.
i refer everyone to – if I can find it – a graph I’ll try to add here;-
http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cabrillo.edu%2F~rnolthenius%2Fclimate%2FDenialists%2FD-Rebound%2Fhistoricco2levels.jpg&imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cabrillo.edu%2F~rnolthenius%2Fclimate%2FDenialists%2FD-Rebound%2Findex.html&h=723&w=999&tbnid=y0I4Trfjz8iKJM%3A&zoom=1&docid=77BLYM6saYoC9M&ei=H5cSVIqMJdbfapOYgpAN&tbm=isch&ved=0CCUQMygAMAA&iact=rc&uact=3&dur=579&page=1&start=0&ndsp=15
Rather a clumsy url but the chart comes up if you click on it.
My problem is the extent of the planet’s polar ice sheets, which have been getting larger and of longer persistence as you can see, as we move towards the right of the graph which is the present time.
I’ve always liked outsider theories. As a young teenager I got quite taken with the Erich Von Lyingbastard ancient astronauts stuff, until I began to ponder why a super advanced civilisation was using stone instead of concrete, and what had happened to the plastic bits.
Contrary to Sean, I’m inclined to think that history is a bit shorter than we think it is, mainly because we’ve probably got Egyptian dynasties running concurrently when they were probably parallel, and half of the confused Manetho list is probably made up anyway. There are some suspicious dark ages (like the Greek one) that might not exist at all and just be broken dating. And so on.
But I think there’s a lot we don’t know and may never know about prehistory. Gobekli Tepe is a fascinating enigma. There is something very strange in the prehistoric mind and its fascination with expending inordinate amounts of opportunity cost on building Big Stone Things. There are easier ways to measure time than Stonehenge, after all.
I have this theory that the origin of spirituality and religion is themodynamic. I call it the Thermodynamic Religion Hypothesis. I think that one of the first things that concerned humans intellectually was the matter of entropy. The realisation that everything rots and decays. This led to the idea that a transcendent part- the spirit- does not rot but stays forever unblemished. So maybe the Big Stone Things were the best they could do to overcome entropy, to create something that lasts forever, like the spirit, and unlike mortal flesh.
They have after all lasted a very long time.
Ian, the plastic bits will have degraded utterly in the timescales we’re discussing, unlike what Marxist teachers tell you in school. There are aerobic bacterial species that digest even poly-alkenes such as polythene and polypropylene. Leave a plastic bag outside for more than a few weeks and it disintegrates almost to powder. Over thousands of years, I expect it’ll vanish.
As the article says – presently the majority opinion is that the civilisations of Middle East are the oldest (with the Sumerians being rather older than that of Egypt – and some small towns in what is now Turkey being older than the Sumerians). Scientific dating of remains (that does not rely on old historical records – but, instead, upon chemistry) shows that these civilisations are indeed very old.
However, a 300 hundred foot high step pyramid in Indonesia dating from 20 thousand B.C. would set the cat among the birds.
As David points out – there is no chance that a hunter-gathering people could have created such a thing, it would have had to be settled farmers (i.e. a civilisation).
It is true that the last Ice Age did get a lot colder before it got warmer – but I thought that was about 35 thousand years ago (leading to the near extinction of the population of Europe of that time – leaving the way open for our own African ancestors, although modern genetics suggests there was some interbreeding i.e. that the old population [the Neanderthals – beings we would consider of super human physical strength and toughness – and with brains rather larger than our own] was NOT totally exterminated), but there may have been several “cold shocks” before the (sudden) end of the Ice Age.
The end of the Ice Age – with the massive flooding (go to Gibraltar to the little room at the end of the rock where the sound and light show indicates what the flooding would have been like – the flood that created the Med – these floods would have been like that) and the extinction of the large animals that early humans relied upon for food was also terrible (from the point of view of the people of the time) – farming may have been an act of utter desperation (rather than a way of improving their lives) for the people who actually did it – and an (early) farming diet would have been terrible.
Big people (including big brained people – the brain needs a lot of food, and VARRIED food not bread-bread-and-more-bread with a few other things from time to time to stop your teeth falling out) could not have survived on the sort of food that (early) farming produced. And had the big people resorted to cannibalism other people would have united against them (even physical strength and cunning do not win against force of numbers – and early farming can sustain a large population of small people, and desperation makes hard fighters against the “demons”). However, perhaps farming was different in what is now Indonesia.
Farming might not have been the desperate move it was in the Middle East – even early farming (in the Far East) may have offered a better diet.
But a 300 foot high pyramid dating from 20 thousand years B.C.?
I will take a lot of convincing of that.
But, if true, the history books will not so much need to be “rewritten” (as what is in them would remain true) – new chapters would have to be added at the start.
“Before the civilisations of the Middle East there were………”