Indus Valley civilisation may pre-date Egypt's pharoahs: Ancient society is 2,500 years older [tr]

Thanks BenLurkin. Looks like another climate change study, so, other shoe dropping caveat -- also, what constitutes civilization? The oldest structures show up as remnant post-holes dating back 800,000 years in eastern Asia. Using a standard similar to that suggested here for the Harappans shows a huge swath of the world had large settlements, building with mud brick and/or adobe-like methods going back at least 8000 years (Cyprus, pre-ceramic settlement, populated by colonists from the mainland) and of less durable materials at least as far back as 15,000 years (in the Nile Valley and elsewhere); a domesticated multi-row barley sample RC-dated to 14K ago (plus the wiggle-matching RC calibration, which will be older) dug up in Near East/Anatolia somewhere...

earlier topic:

Is the Harappan civilisation 2000 years older? [11/14/2012]

sidebars:

Good point!

The bronze dancing girl dates to circa 2500 BC, but the clay version, previously thought to be contemporary, turns out to be a precursor many thousands of years older.

The Ageless Tale A Potsherd From Bhirrana Tells · T.S. Subramanian · September 12, 2007
CHENNAI: In a rare discovery, the Archaeological Survey of India has found at Bhirrana, a Harappan site in Fatehabad district in Haryana, a red potsherd with an engraving that resembles the ‘Dancing Girl,’ the iconic bronze figurine of Mohenjodaro. While the bronze was discovered in the early 1920s, the potsherd with the engraving was discovered during excavations by the ASI in 2004-05.

Bhirrana keyword:

Dancing Girl From Mohenjo-Daro [05/10/2007 9:30:24 AM PDT]
Symbols akin to Indus valley culture found [09/29/2009 3:17:55 PM PDT]
Is the Harappan civilisation 2000 years older? [11/14/2012 12:03:35 PM PST]
Surprising Discoveries From the Indus Civilization [05/04/2013 3:18:46 PM PDT]

Reminds me of the punchline from this one story: people in the far distant future are excavating on Earth. One guy claims it was our home world. The artifacts they keep finding are tiolets and tiles with undescipherable text (employees must wash hands).

What of the Oxus river area?

I have begun watching the series “Alexander” and it shows long gone cities about which I know nothing at all.

> In ancient Afghanistan, the river was also called Gozan... [ http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Oxus_River ]

The Gozan was one of the four places given for the exile of the Ten Lost Tribes.

for more specifically about the role of Central Asia culture in the development of, for example, India and Iran:

http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/viktorsarianidi/index

Settled by the refugees from: Sundaland

"The cradle of human civilization may well have been the prehistoric lowlands of the Southeast Asian peninsula, rather than the Middle East. Since those lowlands ‘sank’ beneath the seas thousands of years ago (actually drowned by rising sea levels), humanity has remained unaware of their possible significance up through the early 21st century"

Where Was Atlantis? Sundaland Fits The Bill, Surely!

Lost Civilisation From 7,500 BC Discovered Off Indian Coast

Nit picking: AD (or A.D.) is an abbreviation for the Latin expression “Anno Domini”, which translates to “the Year of Our Lord”. Not “After death”.

BiggerTigger: "Then you get the things scientists don’t like to explain, like iron bammers and iron pots imbedded in 3mil yo coal seams, fossilized human footprints alongside those of dinosaurs..."

None of that is scientifically confirmed.

BiggerTigger: " Was it the atomic bomb that made us treat scientists like all-knowing gods? They certainly never had the reputation before that time."

But science has never claimed to be "all-knowing", and has never been treated "like gods".
Yes, many people are fascinated with scientific discoveries, new evidence, hypotheses, debates & theories.
Though it often seems that new evidence, while settling one debate, also raises questions for new debates.

Nothing in such processes suggests "all-knowing god's", just ordinary human beings doing extraordinarily careful work on the physical clues God left us of His creation.

And your problem with that is what, exactly?

Sorry for my lousy typo.
No disparagement intended.
Please note misdirected response above.

“Nit picking: AD (or A.D.) is an abbreviation for the Latin expression “Anno Domini”, which translates to “the Year of Our Lord”. Not “After death”.”

Yes, I know. But, when I attended school in the sixties in what was then the buckle of the bible belt, it was Before Christ and After Death. I suspect this was ignorance on the part of the teachers. I learned the Latin after I graduated from high school.

That explains it.

Now, had you gone to Catholic school in the nineteen fifties...

Actually the article states: “One theory, which emerged in 2012, is that climate change led to the collapse of the ancient Indus civiliSation more than 4,000 years ago.” If the 2 mile wide bolide crater found in the Iraq Marshes was a little more than 4,000 years old, then being in the path of the prevailing wind, the Indus Valley could have suffered. Also, I wonder if that meteor strike could have generated a significant tsunami, and has anyone looked for such evidence?

The collapse of the Indus Valley civ used to be attributed (accurately, IMHO) to the Aryan invasion; in the postwar modern world, it became inconvenient, politically, to attribute the IndoEuropean domination of India to a colonizing invasion event, so the Indus Valley was appropriated as the roots of Indian civ. The written language doesn't exist in long texts, and has so far baffled the consensus of scholars, but most agree that the writing system records an agglutinative language (which is consistent with most of eastern Asia, as well as some outliers like Turkey), making it NOT Indo-European.

That doesn't negate the idea that a catastrophic event triggered the mass-migration of groups into new areas, overrunning civs under stress.