Ancient maps

The thing about those old maps brings to me the question so often asked about so many things that were made in ancient times that don't make sense based on what we think that we know about their available technology. My personal belief is that at one time, or maybe many times, in the past mankind rose to great heights only to be slammed down by any of dozens of possible natural cataclysms.

There are many indications that this planet has regularly been hit by work wide disasters. The layer of iridium at the KT boundary marked the end of the dinosaurs. There is a line of charcoal that is worldwide that indicates that 12 to 15 thousand years ago the world experienced a worldwide conflagration probably from a truly MASSIVE solar flare.

there are also indications that there was some sort of flood with worldwide effects. This could have been the result of an asteroid strike in the deep ocean or possibly a sudden shifting of the crust. The shifting crust would explain the fact that at one time Antarctica was a very warm and wet place with huge forests that left huge coal deposits.

The thing that I realized one day is that mankind seems to have a sort of growth pattern like most living things. We start slow and slowly grow in population and numbers and then suddenly skyrocket to new heights in both population and technological level. In 1920 the world population was 1.8 billion. In 2020 our population is 7.8 billion. In 1920 we were plowing our fields with animals. We were just starting to fly. We were steam power and in the early days of the internal combustion engines. Most people warmed their homes with fire from wood and coal. Medicine was barely above the level of healers and had no antibiotics. One hundred years later we have been to the moon and are talking about going to Mars. Technology has exploded in all possible directions. ONE HUNDRED YEARS!!! How many times could we have done this in one hundred thousand years?

If we were t be wiped out again we would fall all the way back. One of the things about our high technology that very few people actually grasp or could duplicate most of that technology. Most people now don't even know how to feed themselves other than going to a store. We couldn't fall back to animal-powered farming. The animals don't exist in the kinds of numbers we would need. Nobody knows how to make the harnesses. we would fall back to a hand to mouth human-powered level.

Modern man doesn't build with huge stones. We use other far less durable things to build hour cities. Were we to be knocked back in a thousand years there would be far less sign of us than the Egyptians, Romans, and Greek. They were an early part of our line. there are indications of other lines that existed in the far past. the higher levels of those lines left little impression so all we have are hints of their early stages. Over and over man has gone through the stone age in their rise to great heights only to fall and their heights vanish leaving only the works of their early ancestors left to puzzle people next time we rise up and search for answers.
Excellent summation of our possible history. I agree.
 
In general, people involved in the study of the past dislike talking about things that fall too far outside of the currently accepted theories of how things were. They especially dislike dealing with things that just don't fit at ALL. Those sorts of things end up in a drawer in the basement of some museum somewhere and are lost to view and discussion. If you wander very far off the accepted line you get branded as some sort of nut case and that can end a promising career and destroy a reputation.

Even when they do examine these oddities they work hard to place mundane answers on them even if their mundane answer is even harder to believe than the wilder theories. (Sort of like the military saying that bright lights in the sky that just sit there for a long time must be dropped flares or swamp gas. Or when a bright light is seen zipping back and forth across the sky being "identified" as a meteorite.)

People have an amazing ability to make sudden leaps of knowledge. They seem to have jumps in technology or understanding that lack the underlying base that would lead to that knowledge or new invention. Some of the understandings that the Maya had about time and orbital actions can't be explained when you take this knowledge and realize that it comes without telescopes or the higher mathematics that are necessary to come up with those answers. How could they have figured out that the procession of the axial tilt is a 26,000-year cycle? Do you have any idea of what it takes to predict a solar eclipse? There is more to it than just figuring out when the moon will pass between the sun and earth. You then have to figure out what part of the earth will be facing the sun at that future time and then where exactly that shadow will pass across the planet. All of this and you only have a few centuries of observations to base all of these calculations on from a VERY tiny perspective. The Mayans knew nothing about the world past a small physical area. All of this from a people that never invented the wheel.

I have often suspected that the answer to many of these weird out of time pieces of knowledge may well be somehow related to things like the Idiot Savant syndrome. You have people that can almost instantly tell you what the day of the week was on any given date that can barely count change. Imagine a world that has no writing or if it does only an elite few learn to do it. Their number system is all quantitive but not associated. (Try doing multiplication with Roman numerals!) No pencils and paper so you had to keep almost everything that you know as memory. Primitive people used their minds far more actively than people with more modern conveniences. For them, memory was life and death.

People that got lost because they couldn't remember in detail what they saw as they traveled didn't come home. If you couldn't remember in detail which plants were good to eat and nutritious and which very similar plants were poison didn't last long. I wonder sometimes what people that lived like this for many generations would be like. No, they didn't have the body of knowledge that we do but how much more precise were they in their ways of thought. A photographic memory is a rare talent now. that is because in the survival sense there is no longer much advantage to it. In the past, it would have been an unimaginable advantage.

I suspect that a "primitive" person was brought to the present they would be rather remarkable. Conversely, I imagine that was the average person from the present were dropped into the far distant past he would be considered an idiot. Where we have advanced in technological lines they had limited technology so advanced in their mental abilities. When the two first are met and brought together you had sudden huge unexplained leaps in advancement. As better and better tools and technology replace better minds things slow and eventually begin to crumble.

From this, we get stories all over the world of past civilizations that rose so high only to then suddenly fall, In out past I suspect that many civilizations have followed this track, sometimes in several different places at the same time. There are huge gaps in the evolution of these civilizations much as we have a problem finding the slow one step at a time evolution of the human species that Darwinian Evolution predicted. Many of the more primitive "ancestors" that we have found bones of in the fossil records are beginning to look more like coexisting species rather than just predecessors. Mankind arose suddenly it sometimes seems and then has periodically again leaped to the hights and then fallen. When we fall I wonder just how far we may fall. Could some of those "ancestors" have instead been degenerate descendants of some of the fallen?

As is my norm I have wandered all over. Nonetheless, I hope there was something in this that may have been of interest. Try to have at least one impossible thought a day...
 
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Dan you bring a lot to consider on the topic. I have wondered if perhaps some knowledge remained after a “fall” and this was used by our recent ancestors. The directions on the how and why of the knowledge was lost in the crisis.
 
Exactly, take the making of steel as an example. Even after the base metallurgical knowledge of how to do it is gone people that had made it could continue doing it but then as a sort of magical ritual that would be cautiously guarded. The various crafts in the past were like this and they carefully guarded their "secrets". We do things like this every day as we operate and use technology that we have little understanding of. as an electrician, I can repair, rebuild or duplicate most electrical devices. What I can't do is make all new devices because I am not an Electronic engineer.

The secrets of the ancients that allowed so many ancient people to build with stone and work it in ways that we can't explain may have simply been using various high technological techniques that they had inherited from the artisans of the past even though the understanding of the methods in detail were long lost. You would be amazed at how many seemingly impossible things can actually be made easy with nothing except knowledge of proper technique.

An example. I had a friend that was 6' 1" tall and weighed a rather unimpressive 125 pounds. He was a string bean. He could do all sorts of things that his physique would lead you to believe were impossible. He could rip a 3" thick Houston Telephone book in half with one sudden tear. I saw him do the same to a deck of poker cards and he could bend a 20 penny nail that is about as thick as a pencil into an S shape. At the time I was 6' 2" and about 250 and an OX and I couldn't even bend the nail much less rip a deck of cards in half!!

I was sure that it was some sort of trick or rigged thing but I finally got him to teach me how to do one of the "tricks". I can rip a phone book and even at my size it is sort of shocking. The thing is that it is no trick or staged trick with special tools. The method is simple and the tool for doing it is actually in your head and not your hands. Knowledge of a very specific technique makes it easy.

For all, we know some combinations of chemicals mixed and applied to stone might make it soft and easily shaped and then once set it hardens and returns to its normal state. It took a chemist and a high science to invent this but once understood the village idiot could be trained to gather the supplies and make the special stuff. He could teach his sons and long after the chemist was dead and gone and all understanding of WHY it works long gone they could still be making and using the secret family recipes to do this. The thing about secrets kept is that they can also be easily lost. The father teaches the son and then the son dies before he passes in on and it is lost.
 
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Exactly, take the making of steel as an example. Even after the base metallurgical knowledge of how to do it is gone people that had made it could continue doing it but then as a sort of magical ritual that would be cautiously guarded. The various crafts in the past were like this and they carefully guarded their "secrets". We do things like this every day as we operate and use technology that we have little understanding of. as an electrician, I can repair, rebuild or duplicate most electrical devices. What I can't do is make all new devices because I am not an Electronic engineer.

The secrets of the ancients that allowed so many ancient people to build with stone and work it in ways that we can't explain may have simply been using various high technological techniques that they had inherited from the artisans of the past even though the understanding of the methods in detail were long lost. You would be amazed at how many seemingly impossible things can actually be made easy with nothing except knowledge of proper technique.

An example. I had a friend that was 6' 1" tall and weighed a rather unimpressive 125 pounds. He was a string bean. He could do all sorts of things that his physique would lead you to believe were impossible. He could rip a 3" thick Houston Telephone book in half with one sudden tear. I saw him do the same to a deck of poker cards and he could bend a 20 penny nail that is about as thick as a pencil into an S shape. At the time I was 6' 2" and about 250 and an OX and I couldn't even bend the nail much less rip a deck of cards in half!!

I was sure that it was some sort of trick or rigged thing but I finally got him to teach me how to do one of the "tricks". I can rip a phone book and even at my size it is sort of shocking. The thing is that it is no trick or staged trick with special tools. The method is simple and the tool for doing it is actually in your head and not your hands. Knowledge of a very specific technique makes it easy.

For all, we know some combinations of chemicals mixed and applied to stone might make it soft and easily shaped and then once set it hardens and returns to its normal state. It took a chemist and a high science to invent this but once understood the village idiot could be trained to gather the supplies and make the special stuff. He could teach his sons and long after the chemist was dead and gone and all understanding of WHY it works long gone they could still be making and using the secret family recipes to do this. The thing about secrets kept is that they can also be easily lost. The father teaches the son and then the son dies before he passes in on and it is lost.
Well said Dan.
 
The problems with the ancient alien theory are in several areas. First, off why would a highly technological "people" with so much that they could teach or do spend so much time with rock and stone stacking? You would have thought that they would have given the Ancient
Central and South American natives more than just fancy stonework and some rather interesting astronomy. Little things like the WHEEL would have been a nice thing to share don't you think. The pictures that look like a spaceman in a rocket taking off isn't a picture of an Alien. You can't get much of anyplace with rockets. Those little gold airplanes that they make a big deal about...UFOs don't fly with lift from wings. In a lot of old and ancient documents are tales of flying things in the sky but how many describe are things flying like airplanes?

My other problem with the Ancient Aliens is the simple question of why spend all that time here doing all sorts of things and then just leave? Civilizations rise and fall. This planet is an IQ test. You either advance settle and GET OFF AND OUT OF THIS TRAP or you get smacked back down to try again...or like the dinosaurs you disappear and another species will give it a try in a few million years. Another species that had reached the interstellar level would not be wiped out and would have no reason to leave. If you go by the theory, They were here for a long time and had a huge investment in time and resources. Why suddenly walk away.

My explanation for the rocket ships, astronauts and airplanes is simple. Vision from precognitive seeing things that were a huge deal and viewed by millions if not billions of people. Things like that make an impression that people with the talent might be able to share over the passage of time...in both directions.

OR they wound us up like mechanical toys and then just backed off to watch us go...
 
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I think it’s possible that we have been visited by beings from some other place or time. It’s possible we have been influenced and assisted. It’s also probable that we have advanced technologically before and been knocked back to the Stone Age. I think many things come into play when looking back. I don’t believe there is just one cause for these ancient ruins.