Archaeologica.org

can do that you know
I can read Sumerian

The evidence in this conversation so far is that you
don't comprehend English very well.

thats beside the point
nice dig though 6/10
i can read sumerian
want me to try
it would take me about the same time to translate the bowl as it woudl to write up that post about afrocentrism
but im not going to do both
so you want me to translate it or not ?
then youd have something to write Clyde about wouldnt you

You have absolutely nothing to do with these artifacts.

I'm not interested but if that's what you want to do - do it in the Pokotia thread. This one needs to be back on topic.

This discussion is done. Get back on topic.

Gotcha Michelle. Conversation over.

Anything more to add here, Beags?

After 800 posts and 56 pages, I would be very interested if Min and Beagle could do a post mortem. I would love to read your conclusions.

Yeah, we should top it off somehow. Let's think about it and we can wrap it up.

Hancock proposes a remote common ancestor civilization which arose during the last ice age and was destroyed by the meltdown of the glaciers. He credits mythology with maintaining evidence of this civilization and transmitting knowledge in that form. He has many cultural and geographic anomalies which can drive one crazy thinking about. The Club attacks him....but the anomalies remain. The Club's desire to dismiss by character assassination indicates a weakness in their position, in my humble opinion.

Now, that said, I don't buy Hancock's conclusion that this RCA existed on Antarctica and his apparent reliance on Hapgood's Earth Crust Displacement Theory is misplaced as that has been fairly well demolished by the study of plate tectonics. He accepted his researcher's position that a continent-sized area was needed for this RCA to have developed and that simply flies in the face of historical reality which shows that great civilizations (Crete, Rome, Greece, and his own England) have arisen from comparatively small areas.

Somewhere in his theory's development I think he got sidetracked. The idea that the ocean front was many miles from where it is today and there would have been river valleys and wide coastal plains on the now-submerged continental shelves is generally accepted. Any number of civilizations could have grown up on these now submerged areas and flourished for thousands of years....until the ice began to melt. Had he stuck to that idea, I think he would have had a better conclusion.

Your turn, Beags.

As regards the continent sized area I think that is completely wrong. Most things start with a one off then spread from the epicenter.

I came away with much the same feeling about GH as you did Min. He seemed to readily accept the viewpoints of other researchers, past and present, such as Posnansky, Hapgood, West, Bauval, et al. Whether he meant to come across that way I'm not sure. But in doing so, he didn't seem to come across with his own position very well.

That position to me seems to one of Hyperdiffusionism, meaning that there must have been a higher civilization in humanities past and it had been lost, rather than the smooth linear growth to civilization that we are taught today.

Nothing else he said made more sense to me than the fact that at the end of the last glaciation, enough prime real estate was submerged as to equal the size of a continent. With the melting ice and subsequent rise in sea level, also came dramatic climate change. Steppes became forests, and lush savannah became arid desert. This created a human diaspora larger than any before or since. With that diaspora went bits of former culture, language, and knowledge. I personally believed this before I read this book.

More than reading this book however, the real education I got was experiencing the reactions of some people to the review, and their overt attempts to silence it. Before that I didn't realize such primitive attitudes still existed, even though history is full of the tragedies of Spanish monks and Nazi book burnings, so perhaps I shouldn't have been too surprised.

All in all, to the novice who is interested I recommend the book, along with a study of orthodox explanations. Too much of either side can create imbalance.

Thanks to Min for agreeing to help and act as the protagonist. That was in the beginning anyway. He didn't give it up. For myself, I had a lot of fun.

Maybe we need a thread on hyperdiffusion?

Rivers have always had a great attraction to settlers, water supplies, fish, wild fowl, shell fish and ease of transport. Makes sense, unfortunately these are the very sites most easily lost when sea level rises and Hancock has to be correct that many prime sites await discovery.

But if they've been underwater for 10-15,000 years what could we expect to find?

That depends Min. Water levels that rise slowly can rapidly cover much with a protective layer of silt, but one thing is certain, if we don't look we won't find.