Posted on 05/05/2018 9:08:13 PM PDT by Theoria
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Odysseus, who voyaged across the wine-dark seas of the Mediterranean in Homer’s epic, may have had some astonishingly ancient forerunners. A decade ago, when excavators claimed to have found stone tools on the Greek island of Crete dating back at least 130,000 years, other archaeologists were stunned—and skeptical. But since then, at that site and others, researchers have quietly built up a convincing case for Stone Age seafarers—and for the even more remarkable possibility that they were Neandertals, the extinct cousins of modern humans.
The finds strongly suggest that the urge to go to sea, and the cognitive and technological means to do so, predates modern humans, says Alan Simmons, an archaeologist at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas who gave an overview of recent finds at a meeting here last week of the Society for American Archaeology. “The orthodoxy until pretty recently was that you don’t have seafarers until the early Bronze Age,” adds archaeologist John Cherry of Brown University, an initial skeptic. “Now we are talking about seafaring Neandertals. It’s a pretty stunning change.”
Scholars long thought that the capability to construct and victual a watercraft and then navigate it to a distant coast arrived only with advent of agriculture and animal domestication. The earliest known boat, found in the Netherlands, dates back only 10,000 years or so, and convincing evidence of sails only show up in Egypt’s Old Kingdom around 2500 B.C.E. Not until 2000 B.C.E. is there physical evidence that sailors crossed the open ocean, from India to Arabia.
But a growing inventory of stone tools and the occasional bone scattered across Eurasia tells a radically different story. (Wooden boats and paddles don’t typically survive the ages.) Early members of the human family such as Homo erectus are now known to have crossed several kilometers of deep water more than a million years ago in Indonesia, to islands such as Flores and Sulawesi. Modern humans braved treacherous waters to reach Australia by 65,000 years ago. But in both cases, some archaeologists say early seafarers might have embarked by accident, perhaps swept out to sea by tsunamis.
In contrast, the recent evidence from the Mediterranean suggests purposeful navigation. Archaeologists had long noted ancient-looking stone tools on several Mediterranean islands including Crete, which has been an island for more than 5 million years, but they were dismissed as oddities.
Then in 2008 and 2009, Thomas Strasser of Providence College in Rhode Island co-led a Greek-U.S. team with archaeologist Curtis Runnels of Boston University and discovered hundreds of stone tools near the southern coastal village of Plakias. The picks, cleavers, scrapers, and bifaces were so plentiful that a one-off accidental stranding seems unlikely, Strasser says. The tools also offered a clue to the identity of the early seafarers: The artifacts resemble Acheulean tools developed more than a million years ago by H. erectus and used until about 130,000 years ago by Neandertals as well.
Strasser argued that the tools may represent a sea-borne migration of Neandertals from the Near East to Europe. The team used a variety of techniques to date the soil around the tools to at least 130,000 years old, but they could not pinpoint a more exact date. And the stratigraphy at the site is unclear, raising questions about whether the artifacts are as old as the soil they were embedded in. So other archaeologists were skeptical.
But the surprise discovery prompted researchers to scour the region for additional sites, an effort that is now bearing fruit. Possible Neandertal artifacts have turned up on a number of islands, including at Stelida on the island of Naxos. Naxos sits 250 kilometers north of Crete in the Aegean Sea; even during glacial times, when sea levels were lower, it was likely accessible only by watercraft. A Greek-Canadian team co-led by Tristan Carter of McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, uncovered hundreds of tools embedded in the soil of a chert quarry. The hand axes and blades resemble the so-called Mousterian toolkit, which Neandertals and modern humans made from about 200,000 years ago until 50,000 years ago. These tools require a more sophisticated flaking method than Acheulean types do, including preparing a stone core before striking flakes off it.
Dating work on the artifacts is ongoing and Carter declined to comment pending publication. But Cherry says the Naxos evidence may be persuasive because it is well stratified, which means researchers should be able to date it more securely. “It is very convincing, because there are a lot more tools in situ,” adds Strasser, who, like Cherry, was not involved in the dig. “It is a quarry site littered with Mousterian stone tools.”
Other Paleolithic tools that appear to be Mousterian have been recovered on the western Ionian islands of Kefalonia and Zakynthos. The plethora of sites adds weight to the idea of purposeful settlement. “People are going back and forth to islands much earlier than we thought,” Simmons says.
But determining which of today’s islands were truly islands tens of thousands of years ago isn’t easy, as it depends on local land movements as well as broader sea-level changes, says Nikos Efstratiou, an archaeologist at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. On the Aegean island of Lemnos, his team found what he thinks is a Paleolithic hunting camp dating back more than 10,000 years. But he can’t yet be sure when Lemnos was cut off from the mainland. Efstratiou adds that archaeologists need to better characterize the sorts of tools made on the mainland and the islands, so they can find links between the mainland and island peoples.
Other archaeologists are already reckoning with the possibility that humans and our cousins went to sea thousands of years earlier than had been thought. “We severely miscalculated,” admits Runnels, who excavated at the Crete site. If his colleagues are right, he says, “the seas were more permeable than we thought.”
and there is no saying that some unknown ancient civilization did not use glass and copper as structural materials, both of which would have long disappeared, or been re-purposed, especially if that civilization existed before the glaciation which covered the northern continents.
BTW have you ever seen the story on the Map of the Creator?
The Mali were indeed Muslim.
The preceeding Ghanaian empire, less so, though of course Muslims today try to say they were.
Dear Lord, how many folks will now believe the Marvel Universe is real because of that piece of fiction?
Only Black Jesus knows....
Yep.
As I often point out: when a Christian follows Christ’s example that is a very good thing but when a Muslim follows Mohammad’s example that is a VERY bad thing.
I know it’s just because of a strong silly streak, but that map reminds me of the one Gilligan’s Island episode where they find a stone map made by people they at first thought were trying to leave the island, not get there.
ROTF!!! A great many of them do, from something I read. My question is: How long before it becomes part of the public school black history curriculum?
Thanks Theoria.
Here is an interesting link describing and displaying in maps the developement of civilization in subsaharan Africa. The article differentiates among Christian, Islamic, and Traditional origins.
http://www.essential-humanities.net/world-history/sub-saharan-africa/
Given the suggested age of 130,000 years old, that would put it around the peak warm before the beginning of the last Ice Age. At that point, sea level would have been similar to ours which means hominids would be living at current altitudes. Certainly if as the ice began to “swallow” the oceans, then “civilization” would have moved closer to the shoreline and now have been drowned. This whole situation tends to confirm my theory (and that of others) that hominids may have reached relatively high levels of development that were then destroyed by the 100,000+ intervals of Ice Ages.
Regarding civilization in the Okavanga Delta region. The evidence is more than tantalizing, it is monstrous. An area between 300 miles and 400 miles square shows repeated patterns of extended “canals” about a mile apart and running for many miles. Some areas look more weathered that others, and what little data I could find suggest that some areas could be tens of thousands of years old. The nearest “civilization” is Great Zimbabwe in Zimbabwe to the east. The link below shows one photo that probably covers 40 or 50 miles width of land (given that the “furrows” are a mile apart. Check out the video, and then click the Google Earth site. I once spent several hours tracing the GE map throughout the region and it was indeed about 400 miles across. I am astonished that National Geographic or other suitable group has not made a significant effort to study this.
http://solarey.net/large-ancient-irrigation-system-found-south-africa/
At this site are a number of areal images of the irrigation mixed in with a lot of other African images.
Graham Hancock's "Magicians of the Gods" makes a good case for the demise of prior civilization's demise at the hand of comet fragments. Other than that there are at least one scientific study backing up comet fragments as bringing on the end of last Ice Age as well as beginning the Younger Dryas period, Origin of the Carolina Bays
From several years ago if you can find it: A RE-EVALUATION OF THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL ORIGIN OF THE CAROLINA BAYS* by J. Ronald Eyton & Judith I. Parkhurst
A New Paper on the Origin and Evolution of the Carolina Bays
There are others as well.
Apparently the Egyptians at the Luxor Temple carved the Ramses figures with machine precision that we could not duplicate 50 years ago and perhaps not even today, according to measurements recorded by Dunn in his Lost Technologies book. Whatever machines they use are long gone, but there is no way to make them using the primitive tools attributed to have been used used by the Egyptians.
If you have not read it already, by all means get the book Sunken Civ has frequently recommended: “The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes (Flood, Fire, and Famine in the History of Civilization)” by Firestone et al. It’s main focus is about what stopped the warming from the Ice Age about 13,000 ya. A lot of scientific data there.
There’s another book, a little “out there”, and the title doesn’t really accurately express the content, but A) it’s around here somewhere, with a bookmark stuck in it, and B) worth a look.
Atlantis and the Kingdom of the Neanderthals: 100,000 Years of Lost History
Colin Wilson (26 June 1931 – 5 December 2013)
https://www.amazon.com/Atlantis-Kingdom-Neanderthals-Years-History/dp/1591430593
https://www.amazon.com/Colin-Wilson/e/B00HFW6KU0/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_book_1
and regarding the Okavanga Delta:
The Largest Ancient Man Made Canal System on Earth
earthepochs.blogspot.co.uk | April 3, 2014 | johnmjensen jr
Posted on 01/03/2015 4:10:32 PM PST by Fred Nerks
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3243255/posts
Two versions:
The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: How a Stone-Age Comet Changed the Course of World Culture - $9 (2006)
The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: How a Stone-Age Comet Changed the Course of World Culture - $16.50 (2006)
I'm convinced the little we know about 'those who were here before us' hasn't scratched the surface.
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