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.
I am surprised that no one is working on the puzzle south of the Okavanga Delta. There is a vast area about 400 miles square, (not square miles) where it appears at various periods perhaps thousands of years apart, civilizations were at work. They dug canals many miles long, parallel equidistant, and in one large area each a mile apart, and at least 100 miles long.
Some people try to poo poo these as natural wind blown features. However I have spent a number of hours with Google Earth surveying this entire area at distances of 100 feet, and in some cases 50 feet. I hope some of you will do the same, and say if these appear to be a human result, prepared at various times, with an intelligence behind them. If so, why is no one studying them, or is it the old racist excuse, why give Africans credit for civilizations? I wonder if some of these people at various times traveled East and were the forces behind Greater Zimbabwe?
I did NOT see any signs of large ancient developments, and very few moderately large traces of recent residents, and smaller buildings and containment areas. THe whole area is or probably has been subject to the annual flooding cycle of the Okavanga. Thus the canals and use for travel and farming for how many millennia? The canal is the major public work.
Archaelogists generally agree the Great Pyrimids at Giza are at least 4,500 yo. However there are some ancient Greek records reporting that Egyptian priests in ancient times said they were 9,000 yo or older. This would put them at the time when Firestone et Al. believe that the Northern Hemisphere was blasted by space rocks so severely that almost all the large mammals were killed off, and the Clovis native civilization in North America was destroyed. That destruction was followed by the more than 1,500 year cold spell called the Younger Dryas.
Jesus is the Stone the builders rejected, the missing capstone.
“Jesus saith unto them, Did ye never read in the scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner: this is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes?” - Matthew 21:42
a Pillar as sign and a witness:
“In that day shall there be an altar to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt, and a pillar at the border thereof to the Lord. And it shall be for a sign and for a witness unto the Lord of hosts in the land of Egypt: for they shall cry unto the Lord because of the oppressors, and he shall send them a saviour, and a great one, and he shall deliver them.” - Isaiah 19:19-20
Giza = Border
That may have been from one of Plato’s “Atlantis” dialogues.
There’s an interesting observation in Herodotus, about then-current (heh heh, ‘current’) Egyptian origin myths. Uh, let’s see if this is it before I just plaster it in here...
[snip] They said also that the first man who became king of Egypt was Min; and that in his time all Egypt except the district of Thebes was a swamp, and none of the regions were then above water which now lie below the lake of Moiris, to which lake it is a voyage of seven days up the river from the sea... the Egypt to which the Hellenes come in ships is a land which has been won by the Egyptians as an addition, and that it is a gift of the river... when you are still approaching it in a ship and are distant a day’s run from the land, if you let down a sounding-line you will bring up mud and will find yourself in eleven fathoms... and as far as Heliopolis inland Egypt is broad, and the land is all flat and without springs of water and formed of mud... From Heliopolis however, as you go up, Egypt is narrow; for on the one side a mountain-range belonging to Arabia stretches along by the side of it, going in a direction from North towards the midday and the South Wind, tending upwards without a break to that which is called the Erythraian Sea, in which range are the stone-quarries which were used in cutting stone for the pyramids at Memphis... and from Heliopolis to Thebes is a voyage up the river of nine days... the distance from Thebes to the city called Elephantine is one thousand eight hundred furlongs... it was evident to me that the space between the aforesaid mountain-ranges, which lie above the city of Memphis, once was a gulf of the sea... a gulf of the sea running in from that which is called the Erythraian Sea... If then the stream of the Nile should turn aside into this Arabian gulf, what would hinder that gulf from being filled up with silt as the river continued to flow, at all events within a period of twenty thousand years? indeed for my part I am of opinion that it would be filled up even within ten thousand years... I have observed that Egypt runs out into the sea further than the adjoining land, and that shells are found upon the mountains of it, and an efflorescence of salt forms upon the surface, so that even the pyramids are being eaten away by it ... [/snip]
The Histories, “Euterpe”, Translated Into English by G. C. Macaulay | Project Gutenberg Ebook 2707
They aren’t canals, they’re natural. This does come up once in a while.
https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1432/
“The Okavango Delta is one of a very few large inland delta systems without an outlet to the sea, known as an endorheic delta, its waters drain instead into the desert sands of the Kalahari Basin. It is Africa’s third largest alluvial fan and the continent’s largest endorheic delta. Furthermore it is in a near pristine state being a largely untransformed wetland system. The biota has uniquely adapted their growth and reproductive behaviour, particularly the flooded grassland biota, to be timed with the arrival of floodwater in the dry, winter season of Botswana.”
“Okavanga Delta”
Now you are showing up my ignorance! i have never even heard of this place before. I googled it and saw it is in Botswana, but got little more. give us more information please
There might be some conflation of different things leading to a misunderstanding.
While that is true about the delta it cant be related to the”canals” that gleeaikin is talking about. While they do exist to the south they also go far into the west across Namibia almost to the ocean. There is just a tiny hint in the far west of Zimbabwe near Hwange National Park. The “canals go far to the north of the delta area. North west they go into Angola and are stopped by the mountains.
The canal effort would at one time have to started just south of Cuito Conavale, becoming quite intense at the border with Namibia starting around Katwitwi.
I too have heard the story that these are petrified dunes from a long ago age when the wind blew differently across what is now Africa.
Even if thats true it doesnt mean that at some time in the past man hasnt taken advantage of or improved on these supposed dunes.
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