Thanks!
Posted on 07/01/2026 6:08:02 AM PDT by BenLurkin
In the last few decades especially, archaeologists have been forced to admit a humbling truth: our timelines and tidy narratives are incomplete, and in some places, wildly so. Below are fifteen ruins and archaeological cultures that either emerged from total obscurity or still sit at the edge of what we can confidently say. Some are contenders for full-blown “lost civilizations,” others are enigmatic cities that do not fit neatly into our old stories. Together, they show just how much of human history is still hidden – literally – under our feet.
Imagine a flash flood tearing through a quiet valley in southeastern Iran around the year 2001 and peeling back the earth like a curtain. What emerged near the Halil River was a sprawling Bronze Age necropolis, packed with elaborately carved chlorite vessels and artifacts that did not match any known culture. Excavations at the nearby mounds of Konar Sandal have since revealed massive mudbrick terraces, monumental buildings, and even clay tablets inscribed with scripts that are still not fully understood, suggesting a complex urban society flourishing in the third millennium BCE.
Scholars now cautiously talk about a distinct “Jiroft culture,” possibly a state-level civilization sitting between Mesopotamia and the Indus, trading in luxury goods like lapis lazuli, copper, and precious stones. Some researchers argue it may even correspond to legendary eastern lands mentioned in Mesopotamian texts. Others push back, warning against overhyping a still-young dataset. Either way, Jiroft has forced historians to redraw the mental map of the so‑called Cradle of Civilization: instead of one narrow river valley, we see a dense web of early cities stretching from Iraq into Iran and beyond.
(Excerpt) Read more at discoverwildscience.com ...
The Giant Meteor....
/$
...of death!
Remarkably, the subject came up yesterday!
Thanks!
The rest of the Toltecs keyword, sorted:
Yep. A 12,000 year cycle.
Here's what we can do for our deep desendents:
INFORMATION PRESERVATION AND CONVEYANCE SYSTEM AND METHOD OF USE
It's a bit misleading as the pyramid on the cover sheet is only 6' tall (but there are about a thousand of them scattered about the land!)
Shared this one with Jack Sasson. In terms of time saved, I find survey articles like this particularly useful, although I would have liked it to offer links or references.
Yes and I can probably find records of screaming harpies in pharaonic Egypt organizing ritual infanticide. On average the past was just as sick and just as noble as the present. It’s all about both averages and the peaks and depths of human nature. Nothings changed in those regards.
The Oxus civilization is another one for the list.
https://freerepublic.com/tag/oxus/index?tab=articles
e.g. https://freerepublic.com/focus/news/1366457/posts
I've long believed that the purpose of human life is to improve upon the prior generation. I believe that's what our maker intended as a reason-to-be, and I believe that he gave us the capacity, within our God-given DNA, and within our collective memory, to make improvements or capitalize on favorable genetic variations one generation to the next. We're not ants.
100,000 years or 250,000 years is about 4,000 or 10,000 re-generations. Some of our cousins have been left in the dust, but others have led us to the civilization we have today - or had up until recently. A waning of that civilization seems to be in the works these days, but when those demons are cast off, the new civilization won't be starting from scratch. Two steps forward, one step back ... but it's still an improvement.
I'll see your sine wave equation, and raise you a vertical shift constant.
Even if the constant improvement you posit were true, it’s unlikely that the slope upwards would be mirror smooth. It seems reasonable to me that many periods of two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back would likely occur.
Today might be part of a rough road with many humps and bumps with a potential to smooth out later. One hopes.
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