“Underwater structures offshore speculatively increases the date to pre-ice age, at least 12,000 years.”
I think there is ample evidence that civilizations flourished for as much as 30,000 years ago. Otherwise how did people get to Australia? At no time in human evolution has Australia not been an island.
To put this into perspective, the date is 2016. We, Western civilization, essentially date our civilization from the time of Christ. (When I was in school it was BC for Before Christ and AD for After Death. But as government tries to erase Christianity it has become BCE for before the common era.) So people who built technology and traveled huge distances, all things we consider civilized, lived for at least 15 times longer than our current civilization.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the actual date of farming and technology gets pushed ever backwards to include predecessor species.
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, signs of pneumatic tools on stone blocks cut for Egyptian monuments, Babylonian batteries, pre-ice age navies mapping Antarctica’s landmass before it had any ice, Egyptian mummies testing positive for Peruvian cocaine, etc. etc. etc.!!
Was it the atomic bomb that made us treat scientists like all-knowing gods? They certainly never had the reputation before that time.
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”.