Old Epoxy ?

[jdm61]

Guys guys guys...the Earth, the Sun, the stars and all the galaxies are only 10,000 years old; derp, i mean 5,200 years old. And baby dinosaurs were on Noah's boat...buf the flood somehow still made them go extinct...

Funny you should mention that as the whacko crowd has latched onto that supposed South African site as evidence of aline gold miners who were mentioned in Sumerian tablets. One of the biggest problems with it is that there is a serious question as to whether there were enough anatomically modern humans back then on the entire planet to have built a large urban civilization?

 

[Zombie411]

Well sir,
That in a nutshell is my point of interest in this.
To date... we simply do not know.
There are hundreds of theories as to who, what , when, and where the largest populations were.
Even Aliens have come into debates.

There are theories that we are actually descendants of Martian peoples. Pretty much as completely credible as monkey evolution in many circles.

I guess this topic is closely related to KNOWING what color smoke was, and how dense (PPM) it was from the ashes in a fire pit.
We can make educated guesses but there is so much lost evidence that the trail is pretty obscured.

I mean we do find evidence of potential civilizations mentioned from the history of the ones we do know, ie: Atlantis?
Most recent civilizations (5000-2000BC) recorded, and provided clues to civilizations that were pre-historic to them.

I hold out hope that Darwin will eventually be proven wrong.
I believe that there were/are still evolved humans on this planet but I also believe there were peoples pre dating these evolved "humans".

Chicken, and the egg is easy... Who are WE?

 

[jdm61]

There is a major difference between early urbanization and the rise of BIG civilizations. Obviously, Pre-dynastic Egypt arose from existing smaller political entities, but even then they were kind of small by modern standards. The armies of conquest that unified Upper and Lower Egypt may have initially been the size of a modern infantry battalion. By the time Narmer was done around 3100 BC, Egypt may have had a population of 1 million and I suspect that would have been the largest single polity on Earth by a large margin. That's about the same size as the Honolulu metro area today. Jericho, the first city that we know of, had maybe 1000-2000 residents 9000 years ago. Within 500-1000 years your had cities with 5000 people. But you didn't see a city of 20,000 until the pre-dynastic period of Egypt 3500 years later. I probably took another 1400 years before you had a city like Ur with 100,000 people and the first city of 1 million, Alexandria, didn't not hit that number until 300 BC. Rome, which had a minimum of 1.2 million at it zenith in the Second Century AD (and some say maybe closer to 2 million) required pretty much all of Sicily and a fair portion of the coast of Libya just to feed it with bread. We didn't see another 1 million city until maybe Baghdad in the late First Millennium and more likely one of the Song cities of China around 1100. Assuming that Rome had 2 million at one point, the next city to crack that mark was London in the 1840's. The average estimate for the population of the entire planet in 10,000 BC is around 5 million. The current genetic evidence indicates that the super volcano of around 70,000 BC may have reduced the human population to no more than 10,000. Point being that there is no way that you had a single high civilization of 200,000 130,000 years before that because there would have been 10's of millions of people if not more.
We marvel at the megalithic structures of the early ancient world, but forget that Hollywood exaggerates a bit. Current estimates say that the biggest sarcen stones at Stonehenge would have taken maybe 40-50 people to move and erect them. Some modern estimates theorize that it only took like 6700 workers at any given time to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu and that includes the quarrymen and the sailors bringing the stone down the Nile. The VERY high number is 20,000. The later estimates of 100,000-200,000 by guys like Herodotus were as wildly exaggerated as those of Cecil B. DeMille. So basically a small to medium sized modern town built a structure that was the most massive man made thing on the planet for thousands of years. I was the tallest structure in the world until 1300 AD and by internal volume is still like the 7th biggest single structure in the world , Crazy, man.

Well sir,
That in a nutshell is my point of interest in this.
To date... we simply do not know.
There are hundreds of theories as to who, what , when, and where the largest populations were.
Even Aliens have come into debates.

There are theories that we are actually descendants of Martian peoples. Pretty much as completely credible as monkey evolution in many circles.

I guess this topic is closely related to KNOWING what color smoke was, and how dense (PPM) it was from the ashes in a fire pit.
We can make educated guesses but there is so much lost evidence that the trail is pretty obscured.

I mean we do find evidence of potential civilizations mentioned from the history of the ones we do know, ie: Atlantis?
Most recent civilizations (5000-2000BC) recorded, and provided clues to civilizations that were pre-historic to them.

I hold out hope that Darwin will eventually be proven wrong.
I believe that there were/are still evolved humans on this planet but I also believe there were peoples pre dating these evolved "humans".

Chicken, and the egg is easy... Who are WE?

 

[Zombie411]

The average estimate for the population of the entire planet in 10,000 BC is around 5 million. The current genetic evidence indicates that the super volcano of around 70,000 BC may have reduced the human population to no more than 10,000. Point being that there is no way that you had a single high civilization of 200,000 130,000 years before that because there would have been 10's of millions of people if not more.

Very nice post.
I have no doubt your numbers, and education in this field are correct.

If you follow the extrapolation of human reproduction into projected populations it is more subjective that A=B.
Die-offs both large, and small scale are an important factor in these projections.
There are growing numbers of scholars/scientists that are agreeing in cyclic die-off ranging fro 20,000 years to 70,000 years.
These are following volcanic incidents, great floods, freeze thaw cycles (ice ages), magnetic pole reversal, solar incidents, ect...

I keep an open mind to almost everything that I do not have solid proof of.
Even then I still search for alternative answers/causes.
Flat earth? Sun revolves the Earth?
Black holes are perhaps the most fascinating phenomenon imaginable, and we only just began debating what they actually are.

We as humans have glimpses of thought on what is real, and why. We do not really have concrete answers to the most fundamental questions we can conceive.
In fact I do not believe we can yet comprehend the correct questions to explore.

The origins of man are directly tied into whom lived when, and where.
My belief is that we are only scraping the surface of how far back this really reaches. Simply because we do not have a video tape of 200,000 years ago does not completely eliminate the idea that the world may have had societies that had a "major impact on their environment".

"major impact on their environment" This would be MY definition of a society...

 

[jdm61]

Current theories tend to say that early homo sapiens emerged at least 160,000-200,000 years ago and a predecessor that we would recognize as pretty much like us but with some conspicuous retained features of older hominids maybe 300,000 years ago. The issue is that the smart folks thing that modern human BEHAVIOR as in stuff like material culture, didn't develop fully until at least 40,000 -50,000 years ago and maybe as much as 70,000. That kinds of lines up with the "second out of Africa" theory. Of course, these behavioral changes were a long time in the making and we started leaving Africa maybe as long as 100,000 years ago. Hominids had been engaged in activities like organized hunting of big game for much, much longer, but there is a major shift in this time period. By 40,000 years ago, many people would probably not have been all that much different in their behaviors as some of the "lost people" that we have found in certain very isolated rainforest areas in more recent years. There is also a significant physiological shift that also happened as modern humans went from being more robust to the fine boned subspecies homo sapiens sapiens that most of us belong to. That was probably in part because of climate change. Our move out of Africa lines up with the last major placation period which started about 110,000 years ago and peaked around 20,000 BCE. My pet theory about why civilizations did not develop early on is one of feast or famine. Either there was no need to organize because the natural environment was able to sustain the population in place or there were just not enough people to get things rolling. The two kind of intersect over I suspect. Thin about the huge rain forests in places like Brazil, the Congo Basin and Southeast Asia. Not a lot of people and the appearance of a lot of resources, but the typical rainforest is essentially a wet desert. You had better like eating bush meat. Contrast that with Egypt where a lot of the farmland was swallowed up by the Sahara and a lot of people were crowded into the Nile Valley. There, one piece of "technology: the ability to harness the annual floods and store water for irrigation allowed that civilization to arise. Same in Mesopotamia. So my little theory is that some combination of critical mass of population and some existential crisis are two major factors in the rise of those early high civilizations. Some didn't survive. The Indus Valley civilization was likely broken up by climate change in the form of the monsoons not being reliable anymore. So those folks moved elsewhere.

Very nice post.
I have no doubt your numbers, and education in this field are correct.

If you follow the extrapolation of human reproduction into projected populations it is more subjective that A=B.
Die-offs both large, and small scale are an important factor in these projections.
There are growing numbers of scholars/scientists that are agreeing in cyclic die-off ranging fro 20,000 years to 70,000 years.
These are following volcanic incidents, great floods, freeze thaw cycles (ice ages), magnetic pole reversal, solar incidents, ect...

I keep an open mind to almost everything that I do not have solid proof of.
Even then I still search for alternative answers/causes.
Flat earth? Sun revolves the Earth?
Black holes are perhaps the most fascinating phenomenon imaginable, and we only just began debating what they actually are.

We as humans have glimpses of thought on what is real, and why. We do not really have concrete answers to the most fundamental questions we can conceive.
In fact I do not believe we can yet comprehend the correct questions to explore.

The origins of man are directly tied into whom lived when, and where.
My belief is that we are only scraping the surface of how far back this really reaches. Simply because we do not have a video tape of 200,000 years ago does not completely eliminate the idea that the world may have had societies that had a "major impact on their environment".

"major impact on their environment" This would be MY definition of a society...

 

[Zombie411]

I absolutely agree with you on all levels in this post.
To expand on your post... The African exodus had to happen at a pinnacle of societal evolution due mainly to the vast numbers of humans required to "jump start" humanity all over the globe.
That number of humans could not have been wandering individuals or small regional tribes of people. As any society grows in numbers it also grows in abilities. These earlier peoples were able to populate most of the globe. Something not repeated until modern man.

So we are looking at approx 100,000 years ago. Far earlier than any time line accepted even a decade ago.

 

[Natlek]

I like the idea that fire and knives combined with the discovery of fermentation(bread, wine, and beer) is what led to farming and then towns. they have discovered evidence of wide spread trade of wine dating to 2500BC

Macedonia, Mende AR Tetradrachm. ca 430 BC. Dionysus, holding cantharus, reclining left on back of ass walking right / Grape vine in square frame surrounded by shallow incuse frame containing city name.

 

[Zombie411]

Does anyone else find it interesting that drugs (ethanol, tobacco, "mystical" concoctions of every sort) have been part of recorded history for as long as history has been recorded?

It's little wonder we know so little about most things before us.

 

[jdm61]

Tobacco is likely a more recent. The oldest evidence of cultivation that we have found is from like 1400-1000 BC in Mexico. There is evidence of people grinding dry plant material for food going back 30,000 years and we have been cultivating and grinding wheat and its cousins for at least 12,000 years, probably longer. Alcohol is easy to make if you don't have refrigeration. Hell, they still make certain types of beer in Belgium by leaving the tubs of mash open and letting the yeast crawl off the walls and beams of the building. Same with bread dough In the 1st Century, Pliny the Elder talked about the Gauls skimming the foam off of beer to get a good yeast in order to make a "lighter" type of bread. That may be the first example of what we could consider modern fluffy wheat bread. The Gauls (French) still arguably do it best. At that time, the Romans weren't that far removed from gruel made from salt or emmer wheat being replaced by dense bread made from the same stuff as the primary food of the common folk. That is one instance where the "barbarians" where ahead of them.

 

[Zombie411]

LOL... How do you know all of this?

I knew this would be an educational thread!

 

[JTknives]

Last year I mixed up some pine pitch and charcoal powder and it was a rather good glue. Being fascinated with the Viking blade "seax" I often wonder what thy used to secure there blades into the handles considering thy did not use pins. Some say pitch and others say cheese glue. I have not tryied cheese glue but thy say it's very strong. It's hard I'm guessing when only blades are left and not much of the handles remain. Funny how we use such crazy strong pins and epoxies for our knives and the Japanese use one tiny bamboo pin for there swords.

 

[Stacy E. Apelt - Bladesmith]

I bet almost everyone has used cheese glue. Today it is made by Borden's and called Elmer's Glue. Cheese used to be stinky, but "white glue" sounded pure and clean.

It is merely a chemical reaction that creates a polymer from the casein peptides. I am sure the first batches formed by natural souring and curdling of milk.

Just like modern polymer resins, it sets up and cures. It was made by adding an acid to milk to precipitate the caseins. You squeeze away the water and you have casein glue. If left as it is, I will set up rock hard. Cheese forms by adjusting the Ph and letting the curds ferment a bit. This creates rennin, which makes the caseins precipitate out farther. If the Ph is allowed to drop lower ( from the fermentation or addition of vinegar), it will start to polymerize and harden. Most folks don't know it, but nearly every piece of old furniture in Grandma's house is held together by "Cheese glue". Hide ( hoof) glue was also popular, but more expensive and difficult to make and use. Also, cheese merely meant the curds collected from acidified milk (separated into curds and whey). Cottage cheese, clabbered cheese, new cheese, etc. were just various names for the curds once rinsed and the Ph raised. If it was mixed with some milk after separating the curds, it was called soft cheese. These could be aged to allow bacteria ( and mold) to convert the flavor. If pressed into cakes and the water driven out, it would ferment and start to convert into what we now think of as cheese ... then called hard cheese.

American cheese isn't really a cheese at all, but merely processed milk with rennin added to make a smooth whit paste. It is died yellow/orange to make it look like aged cheese ... and sold as a sandwich or hamburger addition. That is why it has to be called "processes cheese".

 

[Willie71]

people in old times weren't stupid, they just didn't inheret as much knolledge as we did.
I also find articles like these fascinating

Homo sapiens from 20,000 years ago had brains 1/6 larger than ours. Domestication reduces the brain power needed in individuals as knowledge can be specialized in a few individuals with the rest of the herd benefitting from their knowledge. If you could time travel and bring a Homo sapiens infant from 20,000 years ago to modern society, they would be at least equal to a modern human.

 

[Willie71]

Well sir,
That in a nutshell is my point of interest in this.
To date... we simply do not know.
There are hundreds of theories as to who, what , when, and where the largest populations were.
Even Aliens have come into debates.

There are theories that we are actually descendants of Martian peoples. Pretty much as completely credible as monkey evolution in many circles.

I guess this topic is closely related to KNOWING what color smoke was, and how dense (PPM) it was from the ashes in a fire pit.
We can make educated guesses but there is so much lost evidence that the trail is pretty obscured.

I mean we do find evidence of potential civilizations mentioned from the history of the ones we do know, ie: Atlantis?
Most recent civilizations (5000-2000BC) recorded, and provided clues to civilizations that were pre-historic to them.

I hold out hope that Darwin will eventually be proven wrong.
I believe that there were/are still evolved humans on this planet but I also believe there were peoples pre dating these evolved "humans".

Chicken, and the egg is easy... Who are WE?

The credible theory is that microbial life may have hitched a ride from mars to earth via asteroid impacts and the resultant displaced material. The conditions on mars were more compatible with microbial life than in the oceans on earth which were much more hostile. Biogenesis on earth isn't ruled out, but both scenarios are plausible. I personally find it incredibly unlikely that we will not find at least microbial life on mars and/or on several moons around Jupiter and Saturn.

 

[Willie71]

There are some amazing theories as to when/where people(s) began grouping, and building "cities". The dawn of civilization as it were.

The accepted idea that Neanderthal man became extinct is a looming question.
It is accepted that 40,000 years ago they vanished. As a kid I was taught they were cave men that ate BrontoBurgers. Today it is more commonly accepted that WE are direct descendants of them.

Tying back into pre-history, there are dozens of examples today of vast cities that spread over hundreds of kilometers potentially dating back over 100,000 years.
While I am not a student or scholar of pre history, I have my own theories...
The main focus (for me) is the ebb, and flow of life on this planet. There have been Numerous extinctions or more precisely "die off-s".

The chicken, and egg problem is nothing compared to whom was-----------------------------------first, and where did they come from...

Think about this... You are a nuclear physicist. Your plane goes down on an island. Are you going to build a fusion powered banana boat or are you going to begin with a hammer?
Compare that to the die off-s through the Earths history. No matter HOW MUCH any civilization knew, it died with them.

I very much like the comment from Mr. Geoff. Knife making was second only to the hammer.+-

Edit:
I can see this thread becoming VERY interesting.

We are not descendants of Neanderthals. We were a competing subspecies that interbred with them, and apparently out competed them. About 4% of our DNA is Neanderthal. More in European populations, and less in African populations. There are three or maybe four other subspecies we interbred with, two of whom were unknown in the fossil record, but are in our DNA genetically. It's been a few years since I took anthropology, so I might be off a bit on the details, but in general this is the "current" understanding.

 

[Zombie411]

Homo sapiens from 20,000 years ago had brains 1/6 larger than ours. Domestication reduces the brain power needed in individuals as knowledge can be specialized in a few individuals with the rest of the herd benefitting from their knowledge. If you could time travel and bring a Homo sapiens infant from 20,000 years ago to modern society, they would be at least equal to a modern human.

That is a very interesting thought.
I have been following conversations about "stress, and anxiety", and the consensus is that without the strain on the body of daily survival to stimulate the endocrine system, modern people/modern lifestyles are creating their own physiological problems.
It was the stress-ors of survival that made people work together in the first place.
Today we tend to (as stated) let the next guy handle it, and we become dysfunctional as a societal contributer.
This dysfunction leads to stress, and anxiety.

Thank goodness for late night television tho. Now all we have to do is take a pill to have a sense of self worth in this "small world" we live on.

I 100% agree that ancient peoples had a much larger capacity for coping with their environment. Today we do not even acknowledge that there is a "White Elephant" in the room, and we put it there.

 

[Willie71]

That is a very interesting thought.
I have been following conversations about "stress, and anxiety", and the consensus is that without the strain on the body of daily survival to stimulate the endocrine, modern people/modern lifestyles are creating their own physiological problems.
It was the stress-ors of survival that made people work together in the first place.
Today we tend to (as stated) let the next guy handle it, and we become dysfunctional as a societal contributer.
This dysfunction leads to stress, and anxiety.

Thank goodness for late night television tho. Now all we have to do is take a pill to have a sense of self worth in this "small world" we live on.

I 100% agree that ancient peoples had a much larger capacity for coping with their environment. Today we do not even acknowledge that there is a "White Elephant" in the room, and we put it there.

We are genetically wired to be hunter gatherers. There are intrinsic rewards in that lifestyle that we don't get in the rat race. ADHD was a hunter or a warrior. Mild psychosis = shaman. Depression = tribal leader. Anxiety = berry picker. This was laughed away as absurd 20-30 years ago, but current research is bearing this out. Not being able to live "naturally" is one of the hypothesized reasons that we have so many people on meds for psychological reasons.

 

[Zombie411]

The credible theory is that microbial life may have hitched a ride from mars to earth via asteroid impacts and the resultant displaced material. The conditions on mars were more compatible with microbial life than in the oceans on earth which were much more hostile. Biogenesis on earth isn't ruled out, but both scenarios are plausible. I personally find it incredibly unlikely that we will not find at least microbial life on mars and/or on several moons around Jupiter and Saturn.

I could not agree more on any topic (other than my own name).

"The obvious is the un-seen" so let's make up some super complicated scenario as to how we began. Theology? Swamp soup?
Transplantation / emigration is more likely in my opinion.

 

[jdm61]

Homo sapiens from 20,000 years ago had brains 1/6 larger than ours. Domestication reduces the brain power needed in individuals as knowledge can be specialized in a few individuals with the rest of the herd benefitting from their knowledge. If you could time travel and bring a Homo sapiens infant from 20,000 years ago to modern society, they would be at least equal to a modern human.

I know that neanderthal had a bigger brain, but I had only heard that early modern humans were more robust than those who followed. You have to think about what FUNCTION extra brain its used for. Bottlenose dolphins are pretty darn smart critters by the standards of the animal world but probably not the much smarter than the California sea lions that share the stage with them at Sea World. A lot of that extra brain mass in their skull is used for their incredibly complex sonar whereas the sea lion is a short range sight hunter. Evolution, especially what could be considered relatively short term evolution within a single species, can be funny. Think about how your front teeth overlap instead of coming together edge to edge because you longer need to use them as "cutting tools." We may have needed a bit more brain for things like smell back in the old days. Compare a crow to a turkey vulture. Both need a good sense of smell to find food, but the buzzard needs an AMAZING sense of smell. so he probably doesn't use as much brain for what we would consider "cognitive" functions. The crow clearly does that, perhaps only bested by say something like an African gray parrot in the bird smarts department.

 

[Willie71]

I know that neanderthal had a bigger brain, but I had only heard that early modern humans were more robust than those who followed. You have to think about what FUNCTION extra brain its used for. Bottlenose dolphins are pretty darn smart critters by the standards of the animal world but probably no smarter than the California sea lions that share the stage with them at Sea World. That extra brain mass in their skull is used for their incredibly complex sonar whereas the sea lion is a sight hunter. . Evolution, especially what could be considered relatively short term evolution within a single species, can be funny. Think about how your front teeth overlap instead of coming together edge to edge because you longer need to use them as "cutting tools." We may have needed a bit more brain for things like smell back in the old days.

Brain size to body mass used to be the be the best correlation to intelligence we thought we knew. Then studies showing reptiles and birds packed neutrons in more densely and efficiently has called that assumption in to question. I would have to look at the data again, but iirc, it was global brain size, not a specific area that changed. It might have been in the frontal lobes, which would probably be meaningful, but not conclusive.

We probably needed more general survival thinking 20,000 years ago, since we didn't have supermarkets or refrigeration. If we had a major disaster, 90-95% of the population probably couldn't figure out a homemade fishing setup, or trapline. I might be wrong, but that's the numbers I see in the non scientific discussions amongst people in my field. I tend to agree.

Iirc, just before the exodus out of Africa, it's been suggested that there were only 600 H. Sapiens left, and the conglomeration along the seafood rich coasts with the abundance of omega 3 allowed brain development combined with natural selection for navigational memory and problem solving skills gave us the boost needed. As luck would happen, the climate shifted, and the Sahara became wetter, allowing trekking into Asia. It was a probable perfect storm giving us our intelligence.

Once we got into groups larger than a few thousand people, the 1/100, 1/10,000, and 1/100,000 (Einstein) level intelligence people started working together and since then we have stood on the shoulders of giants.

It's fascinating reading when you get into it. So much to learn, then unlearn, and relearn.