Africa/Egyptian presence and jewelry in Mesoamerica?

[Forum Monk]

They had their own knowledge of the workings of the universe - it worked for them.

I might agree if they weren't all dead.

And who's to say we are right and they were wrong? Or that we know any more than what they did?

Me and history. Basic knowledge of medicine and science is a whole lot more advanced and yes televisons, cell phones, rockets, etc are all evidence that we know more than did. (now I fully expect the shamanists to jump in here and lecture me about invisible truth and blah blah)

Just they gleamed what they needed or wanted and we gleam what we need or want.

You probably meant gleaned.

I'm sure even they had their own versions of the club or politcally controlled themes to deal with too. Politics, religion, whatever are all very strong limiters and can be hard to overcome while you deal with every day life. Sometimes the truth of the universe is merely staying alive for as long as you can.

And what is the truth the rest of the time?

In my view point, any group that survives for any period of time has done an amazing accomplishment. And afterall, their cultures lasted longer than ours when you consider ours are only add-ons to theirs. In a sense our culture today is merely a corruption of theirs.

That's like saying a butterfly is a corruption of a catepillar.

[Digit]

The answer to some of that is simple FM. Astronomy had reached as far as it could 'naked eye', further than that required instruments for observing and measuring.
Instrument manufacture required the production of lenses and mirrors.
Lenses and mirrors required the production of glass, normally.
Glass production required the production of the necessary technology.
The mounting of the optics required the production of metals--and so it goes on.
The early advances would have become faster and faster as technology developed, as we see today.
Da Vinci had good ideas, few were practical till the necessary materials had been developed.

[Cognito]

Da Vinci had good ideas, few were practical till the necessary materials had been developed.

Sounds like a Board Meeting.

[Cognito]

The exponential climb in achievement we see today seems late in coming. If we were so smart 10,000 years ago, why are we only now discovering how the universe works? Or does the leap in knowledge require a lot of prerequisite conditions that emerge over millenia? And if that is the case, when one sees remarkable technology in ancient cultures, one must wonder, how did it emerge in isolation and why did it not flourish?

FM, that is an excellent question and at the heart of many peoples attitudes today. "If they were so smart, then why didn't they (fill in the words)". You may almost need to check Box E - All of the Above.

First off, the world's population in 10,000bc according to this link was only 1 million:

http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/history ... owth.3.pdf

Most figures that I have seen vary from 1 million to 4 million worldwide. As stated earlier - yes - there are more geniuses around today and even looking in the past with the presented chart, the population was 170 times greater by 1AD. In essence, there were no large cities or complex interacting cultures which could transmit improvements and inventions across a great distance quickly. Even in the sixth century AD look what happened to many Roman advances in Europe. They were forgotten.

Second, the knowledge and technology you are referencing does require many, many prerequisites as inferred by Digit. Complex technology may require many thousands of years of stability to develp and we were just plan lucky with the last 11,400 years of climate stability that allowed us to develop civilisation and flourish. The prior 115,000 years weren't so kind to humankind.

To search for prior civilisations on earth I would be looking at the interstadial warm periods that occur every 100,000 years or so. A good place to look would be the Eemian Interglacial about 125,000 years ago plus, when H. sapiens were in Ethiopia and possibly other areas. However, there might not be much left for evidence if there was only a handful of them.

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

Civilisation probably requires something more intellectually adept than H. erectus to develop, and we may be the first experiment on earth ever. Don't know - still need the Wayback Machine to figure that one out also.

With no evidence of Atlantis, we're it.

[Digit]

A genius around that time would have little oportunity but to produce a slightly better stone tool.
Fast forward to today and his oportunities have expanded many fold.

[Forum Monk]

I'm seeing the point and it seems valid.
As I was thinking about this, it occurs to me that many of the great discoveries we have made were the result of just dumb luck or fortunate accidents, and they lead to the next great era of technological advancement.

[Digit]

Serendipity Monk. It's made more than one person famous.

[Ishtar]

WA and all,
But one must wonder. The exponential climb in achievement we see today seems late in coming. If we were so smart 10,000 years ago, why are we only now discovering how the universe works? Or does the leap in knowledge require a lot of prerequisite conditions that emerge over millenia? And if that is the case, when one sees remarkable technology in ancient cultures, one must wonder, how did it emerge in isolation and why did it not flourish?

Couple of things on that, FM.

Much cosmology, I believe, we are not discovering but rediscovering, like heliocentricity. The Vedics knew the speed of light, the circumference of the earth, the planets and how far it was between the earth and the sun. They did this without lenses... so there is another way.

What you are seeing did not develop in isolation, imo. It's just we can only find isolated examples because most of the rest has been destroyed or is under water.

Secondly, most of what they and the Sumerians and the Egyptians and anyone else with a handle on cosmology knew was destroyed by the Christians. Many libraries containing these texts were burned down by Christians, most notably the Library at Alexandria.

So with religion, and particularly Christianity, we set ourselves back thousands of years are now having to try to piece together the meagre scraps remaining of what was lost. This process is not helped by our almost racist assumption that ancient man was a barbaric primitive who only communicated in grunts... yet he could paint astonishing cave masterpieces...doesn't add up, does it?

[Ishtar]

War Arrow

I think you mentioned about how Africa has been so little explored archaeologically in comparison with Egypt.

There are other ways, though, to explore African history, notably in the orally handed down old stories of the African people, listening to how they tell it in their own words. And unlike much of mythology around the world, many African ones I've read seem to be literal and a deliberate means of preserving history.

Two books I can recommend:

One is Malidome Patrice Some's Of Water and the Spirit, which is a first hand account about how shamanism was destroyed in Africa by the Jesuits. But he also recounts his tribe, the Dagara of Burkino Faso's old stories which seem to go back to their own version of the The Fall.

The other recommended book contains stories consisting of African tribal history by Credo Mutwa, Indaba My Children. In this book, Mutwa recounts all the old Bantu stories which includes an invasion by what sounds like the Phoenicians, which I don't think is in any of our history books.

Here are some drawings from the book, taken from an eye witness account describing one of the Phoenician warriors and the Phoenician boat:

[Forum Monk]

The Vedics knew the speed of light, the circumference of the earth, the planets and how far it was between the earth and the sun.

Link please.

[Ishtar]

http://archaeologica.boardbot.com/viewt ... &start=165

[War Arrow]

Two books I can recommend:

One is Malidome Patrice Some's Of Water and the Spirit, which is a first hand account about how shamanism was destroyed in Africa by the Jesuits. But he also recounts his tribe, the Dagara of Burkino Faso's old stories which seem to go back to their own version of the The Fall.

The other recommended book contains stories consisting of African tribal history by Credo Mutwa, Indaba My Children. In this book, Mutwa recounts all the old Bantu stories which includes an invasion by what sounds like the Phoenicians, which I don't think is in any of our history books.

Sounds good!

[Forum Monk]

So with religion, and particularly Christianity, we set ourselves back thousands of years are now having to try to piece together the meagre scraps remaining of what was lost. This process is not helped by our almost racist assumption that ancient man was a barbaric primitive who only communicated in grunts... yet he could paint astonishing cave masterpieces...doesn't add up, does it?

Yes...to a degree. You can burn my math books but I won't forget how to do math, nor will it affect my ability to teach my children about math. Once the genie is out of the bottle its nearly impossible to put him back in it.

Our assumptions are not totally unfounded. On the one hand, one could say that a certain primitive people were entirely adapted to the life they lived and so there is a certain knowledge and skill set we do not possess being modern, first world, humans. When we look at primitive man we see a warrior who is willing to attack a mammoth, one of the largest creatures on earth, yet cowers in fear during a solar eclipse, something that occurs at least every 18 years. We see a people who could make magnificent cave art and yet had no concept of an alphabet.

Yes, we look back at ancient peoples with a certain amount of arrogance and prejudice but remember; many of us cannot even look at the modern third-world without the same flawed points of view.

[Forum Monk]

http://archaeologica.boardbot.com/viewt ... &start=165

Ok - I guess I should go this thread and address the issues because, the length of the yojana is about as reliable as the person giving it and you know something is funny when one translates texts and finds trees over 100 miles high, mountains over 800 miles high and lands over 72,000 miles wide by yojana measure. So, either they could measure the speed of light and not measure a tree or something is messed up.

Then in the same thread, you give several different durations for the time represented by a nimesha. In one case you say, 16/75ths of a second, in another 8/15ths. This is not a small difference.

This is what bothers me greatly about people examining ancient texts (this is not directed at you Ish, because you merely report what you find) and then bending them a bit to suit the point they are trying to make but in the process introduce all kinds of other anomalies.

[Ishtar]

[

This is what bothers me greatly about people examining ancient texts (this is not directed at you Ish, because you merely report what you find) and then bending them a bit to suit the point they are trying to make but in the process introduce all kinds of other anomalies.

Sure, I'm no Einstein, let's face it.

But the guy who wrote that article about how the Vedics knew the speed of light (quoted in the link) is not just some hick Vedic commentator. Subhash Kak is a computer scientist who is considered to be a genius in that field, and so he has a reputation to protect.

Admittedly, he's what's known as a maverick. If you read this Wiki page about him, you'll see it wasn't written by one of his friends and it could almost have been written by Michael Witzel, (given Kak's stand on the AIT). But even this writer cannot fail to list his achievements.

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

Subhash Kak completed his Ph.D. at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 1970. He taught there and also at Imperial College London, Bell Laboratories, and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR).[citation needed].In 1979 he was tenured as Delaune Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. In 2007, he was appointed head of the Computer Science department at Oklahoma State University[11].

His research in the fields of cryptography, random sequences, artificial intelligence, and information theory are published extensively in non-peer reviewed journals. He proposed the first test of algorithmic randomness,[12] and of instantaneously trained neural networks (INNs) (which he and his students have called "Kak neural networks"). He claims to be amongst the first to apply information metrics to quantum systems.[13]

Kak has argued that there are limits to the intelligence machines can have and it cannot equal biological intelligence.[14] He asserts that
machines fall short on two counts as compared to brains. Firstly, unlike brains, machines do not self-organize in a recursive manner. Secondly, machines are based on classical logic, whereas Nature's intelligence may depend on quantum mechanics.

[Further], if machines with consciousness are created, they would be living machines, that is, variations on life forms as we know them. Second, the material world is not causally closed, and consciousness influences its evolution. Matter and minds complement each other.[15]

Kak has proposed the use of recurring decimals for error correction coding, cryptography and as random sequences.[16]

So brilliant as I know you are, Monk, for the moment, and until you can prove him wrong, I'm sticking with Kak.