Capitol Hill Blue Forums Life and Moral Issues Matters of culture Atlantis, the Great Flood, and Historical Bases of Mythology

If Venus ever passed close to Earth, there was no life here yet. Something else would have had to circularize Venus's orbit (and then presumably left the solar system?). Otherwise Venus would still be having close encounters with Earth, because orbits simply don't change unless something changes them.

You guys are compressing geological time into human history.
The great Missoula floods were 13-15000 years ago and people probably first show up here after they were over. I doubt any humans witnessed them, or survived if they did.

I dunno, PIA, we had Paleoindians here in Florida back 12,000 years ago. Artifacts are often found quite a ways out in the Gulf by divers. Since a lot of the oceans were tied up in ice at that time the coasts extended considerably farther out than today. As far as stories being passed down through countless generations since then I have some serious doubts though.
Florida's Paleoindians

The floods lasted about 2000 years and they happened about every 50 years or so. (The ice dams would reform and then break.) These floods were huge. The land would have been a barren wasteland for hundreds of miles near the coast, and solid ice inland.

This is why I think very few humans got past that until the floods stopped and the land reformed into forest. Anybody who ventured out into the new land to settle, would eventually get washed out to sea in the next mega-flood.

9 floods of biblical proportion

This is why I don't think it is necessary (or likely) that the ice age floods are the source of great flood mythology. I note, however, that Ice age floods lasted until about 8000 BC. It is demonstrable that civilization (human habitation) coincided with some of these inundations. They likely made a huge impression on the survivors. Some raised sea levels by 9 feet.

Velikovsky took a pummeling after he published Worlds in Collision. For using the bible and other ancient texts and for his reliance on the chaos theory. So he wrote another book Planets in Chaos, in which he used more scientific evidence to back his theories. He took a little less of a beating for that one.

And then, just last year, there came some vindication with this article, which proclaims, "Velikivsky Was Right." But just about the chaos thing, not the biblical and ancient text thing.

As long as we aren't trying to say that the planets were bouncing off each other in the past 10,000 years I'm okay with most any theory.

What Akrotiri demonstrated to me is that civilization was far more advanced than we realized, earlier than we expected. The Bronze Age may have only started some 5-6000 years ago, but the level of art and architecture demonstrated in that village 4000 years ago show that, though we may have been unsophisticated with regard to our place in the universe, we were a very clever species. We were problem solvers like no other species on earth, and the complexity of the problems that we have been solving since are astounding.

So, taking that brain power and our ability to capture complex thoughts, it is not improbable that civilization was more advanced then than we realize now. We only have evidence of writing some 5000 years or so ago (Cuneiform), but all that really demonstrates is that we hadn't learned to preserve writing before then (or, at least that we haven't discovered it yet).

Given the level of sophistication it took to learn smelting (Bronze Age), we had to have developed more sophisticated means of passing knowledge along. That may have been in the form of writing, or of dedicated storytellers who were given the task of passing that knowledge on verbally - or by means we don't even know about now. We are only now coming to terms with the vastness and sophistication of the society that created Stonehenge some 4-5000 years ago. There is more that we don't know about that period than that we now know.

It is not impossible that stories from 8000-10,000 years ago were preserved within their civilizations. It also not improbable that there were more sophisticated and developed societies that had developed that we know nothing about. (After all, there was a tendency in that age for winning "tribes/clans/city-states" to completely destroy conquered enemies, pulling down entire cities and killing all of their inhabitants.) Plato claimed to have had ancient sources for his Atlantis story - which may or may not have been true - but that could be an indication that records did exist, but lost the race against entropy.

I find the prospects exhilarating.

More and more evidence is leaning in that direction NW.
I haven't had time to read this entire thread. Has anyone brought up the research being conducted in Spain at the confluence if the Mediterranean and Atlantic regarding Atlantis?

Stone age humans were masters of their technology. It didn't include any metals, so we have few artifacts of that technology. But that doesn't mean it did not exist. We know they were master hunters, potters, woodworkers, stoneworkers, tanners, etc. Just look at the outfit the iceman had and you can see some of this.

They ate wooly mammoths and mastodons, after all. Think about attacking and killing animals bigger than elephants with wood and stone spears. Respect!

The Neolithic Revolution