Prehistoric Desert Town Found In Western Sahara (15,000 Years Old)

Reuters ^ | 8-19-2004 | Reuters

[blam]

Prehistoric Desert Town Found in Western Sahara

Thu Aug 19, 2004 01:52 PM ET

RABAT (Reuters) - The remains of a prehistoric town believed to date back 15,000 years and belong to an ancient Berber civilization have been discovered in Western Sahara, Moroccan state media said on Thursday. A team of Moroccan scientists stumbled across the sand-covered ruins of the town Arghilas deep in the desert of the Morocco-administered territory.

The remains of a place of worship, houses and a necropolis, as well as columns and rock engravings depicting animals, were found at the site near the town of Aousserd in northeastern Western Sahara.

The isolated area is known to be rich in prehistoric rock engravings but experts said the discovery could be significant if proven that the ruins were of Berber origin as this civilization is believed to date back only some 9,000 years.

"It appears that scientists have come up with the 15,000-years estimate judging by the style of the engravings and the theme of the drawings," Mustapha Ouachi, a Rabat-based Berber historian, told Reuters.

Berbers are the original inhabitants of North Africa before Arabs came to spread Islam in the seventh century.

The population of Western Sahara, seized by Morocco in 1975 when former colonial power Spain pulled out, are mostly of Berber and Arab descent.

[VadeRetro]

For sure, you didn't read this link carefully either. It is not what you cite it to be.

[VadeRetro]

That article presented no real evidence that the city was 15,000 years old. It's a date picked because of popular opinion, not hard evidence.

Again, I think 15,000 is out of the mainstream just now. From the evidence of a very sketchy article, the age of 15,000 for this Arabian settlement looks to me like some eccentric's W.A.G. (The first and last letters of that acronym are "wild" and "guess.")

[VadeRetro]

Arabian settlement

North-African Berber settlement.

[DannyTN]

"It's a date picked because of popular opinion, not hard evidence." - Danny TN

The frustrating thing is that those Ethiopian and Mexican dates and all the others, probably had no more basis for the date than this one. But they build on each other, until some evolutionists will say "there are dozens of cultures known to be 15,000 years old, so the Bible must be wrong.

I for one remain unconvinced. I don't buy the Ethiopian dates, or the Mexican dates, or the Saharan dates.

I don't buy the date for the 150,000 year old fossil. At least they had Argon dating. But then you already know I consider Argon dating to be junk science because of the assumption of the starting amount of Argon, (which has been proven false with 16 different recent volcanic flows), and no way to measure contamination from non-atmospheric Argon.

Of course there are no shortage of opinions. Here is a link to a professor from a Catholic Jesuit university talking about 500,000 year old hand axes in India. He has no problem throwing out the Bible because the axes were probably dated using radiometric techniques.

Meanwhile, I think he's an idiot. I think the radiometric dating is flawed. I think the fossil records and artifacts that would be found had tool bearing humans roamed the earth for 500,000 years would be SERIES HUGH. Thus this professor's misplaced faith in radiometric dating has left him STEWNED.

Creighton Prof on India

[DannyTN]

"I think you're using Google too robotically."

Well, I didn't start out looking for 15,000. I ran across the number at least twice on Friday while looking for oldest human fossils to resolve the 300,000 vs millions debate. It was after I had seen it a couple of times that I realized there was enough support for the 15,000 year date that that may well have influenced these guy's dating this city.

[Fedora]

There was no predisposition for the current consensus (whatever it is). It was arrived at by following a preponderance of evidence. It has changed over time as the evidence picture changed. Nineteenth-century writers on Egyptian Dynastic history used chronologies which yield older dates than those now given for things like the initial unification of Egypt, etc.

I dunno, I'm not getting into the creationist-evolutionist debate here, but just speaking strictly within a historical framework, I think there's a predisposition, in that there are a lot of a priori assumptions from the 18th-19th century that continue to underlie current theory. You mention Egyptology above, so to take that as an example, there is a problem with circular dating because Manetho's chronology is used to date finds in Palestine which are then used to support Manetho's chronology. To cite some other examples that are pet peeves of mine (i.e., this isn't directed at you, I'm just ranting, LOL!), the Bering Strait hypothesis has long been used as an assumption without any empirical justification; and C.J. Thomsen's Stone-Iron-Bronze Age progression was an a priori framework based more on Hegelian-era methodological assumptions than empirical data. I think there is a problem with some things like that which predispose the academic establishment towards certain hypotheses and against others. The problem IMO is that historians often mix methodological and empirical assumptions without realizing that they're doing so, so their intepretation of the empirical data is often premised on unsubstantiated and sometimes unconscious methodological assumptions.

[VadeRetro]

You don't buy the age of the Earth at all, anything much over 6000, and that's ridiculous. To do this, one has to find one excuse or other to throw out most of what we know. Your Sunday School teachers are asking too much of society.

[DannyTN]

"For sure, you didn't read this link carefully either. It is not what you cite it to be."

LOL Busted!!!

My apologies to any Negroes or Non-Negroes that might have been offended by that link. I still haven't read it well, I keyed in on the following sentence....

"Mr. Wells alludes to this early civilization in his Outline of History, and dates its beginnings as far back as 15,000 years B.C. "

[DannyTN]

Throw out the radiometric dating and what do we really know?

[VadeRetro]

Biased thinking of course exists, but I know of no better example than creationism. All the others are doing relatively better.

... and C.J. Thomsen's Stone-Iron-Bronze Age ...

I have a problem with this, too. Thomsen seems to have the Iron Age before the Bronze Age. ;)

[DannyTN]

Fedora said it much better if a little longer than I did.

The dating's hokey.

[Fedora]

Beat ya, see post 96.

LOL! But Fagan's "15,000" reference there is alluding to the date of the climactic trends he's talking about, not to the rise of civilization. "Civilization" would be referring to walled settlements on the scale we find at places like Sumer, which Fagan wouldn't acknowledge as existing 15,000 years ago. Fagan is a pretty conventional archaeologist who spends a lot of his time defending the established consensus on the Bering Strait hypothesis, and as such he follows the established academic view on the date of the rise of civilization.

[VadeRetro]

Throw out the radiometric dating and what do we really know?

1) Light takes a long time to get from quasars to us, but we see them.

2) Early geological estimates for the age of the geologic column based entirely upon rates of sedimentation were still far, far over 6,000 years. Well over 100,000, IIRC.

3) Lines of evidence from molecular biology tend to produce age estimates for things like the emergence of reptiles from amphibians, etc., in line with (but usually even older than) evidence from paleontology.

The Earth is obviously old, period.

[Fedora]

Thomsen seems to have a typo, LOL! I think I just introduced some unintentional historical revisionism :)

[VadeRetro]

Fedora said it much better if a little longer than I did.

Your reading skills need work. Exorcize your Morton's Demon! The world is not getting through to you, really. I'm not kidding.

[edwin hubble]

Wasn't that area more of a grassland or savanna than a desert 15,000 years ago?

[VadeRetro]

Wells is H.G. You could look him up.

[VadeRetro]

Wells, himself dead a long time, is citing such authorities as Flinders Petrie. You can certainly look HIM up.

[Ichneumon]

300,000 or a million. It's still not believable that man was smart enough to use tools but not smart enough to realize that plants grow from seeds and start planting what he liked.

Read this book and then get back to us:

It examines the factors that influenced the discovery and spread of agriculture, writing, animal domestication, steelmaking, nationstates, and so on. It does an excellent job of explaining why these developments occurred at certain times and places, and not others.

As for agriculture, the condensed version is that kickstarting an agricultural society from scratch is a lot harder than it sounds, and at the beginning the future benefits don't look all that great compared to the amount of effort and risk involved. Plus, only a few places on the planet had both a suitable climate, *and* a suitable mix of adaptable crops (and domesticatable animals), to make it possible to subsist on a reliable, steady, nutritionally workable agriculture.

Yet another hurdle is the fact that in their original natural form, even the best of today's crop plants (e.g. wheat, corn, etc.) were barely suitable for use -- it was only after thousands of years of selective breeding (first by accident, later on purpose) were they eventually refined into crops that could truly sustain farming communities.

Figuring out that you could plant seeds and make something grow was the *easy* part, and was undoubtedly recognized for tens of thousands of years before the first real "farming community" managed to make a successful go of things after solving the many other obstacles involved.

[VadeRetro]

One thing I can use your link for is to prove that I'm black, a thing people might not otherwise suspect, through my "Black Irish" ancestry:

Most readers of history know about the Celts, ancient inhabitants of Europe, whose priests were known as the Druids. It is generally thought that these Celts were Caucasoids, but Sir Godfrey Higgins, after much study came to the conclusion that they were a Negroid people. Higgins wrote a ponderous volume entitled The Celtic Druids. In the following passage from his Anacalypsis he modestly refers to it as an essay: "In my essay on the Celtic Druids, I have shown that a great nation called Celtae, of whom the Druids were the priests, spread themselves almost over the whole earth, and are to be traced in their rude gigantic monuments from India to the extremity of Britain. The religion of Buddha of India is well known to have been very ancient." (Higgins is here referring to the first Buddha, who is supposed to have lived between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago, and not to Gautama Buddha who lived about 600 years B.C. There were at least ten Buddhas mentioned in the sacred books of India.) "Who these can have been but the early individuals of the black nation of whom we have been treating I know not, and in this opinion I am not singular. The learned Maurice says Cuthies (Cushites), i.e. Celts, built the great temples in India and Britain, and excavated the caves of the former; and the learned mathematician, Reuben Burrow, has no hesitation in pronouncing Stonehenge to be a temple of the black curly-headed Buddha." (Anacalypsis, Vol. I, Book I, Chap. IV, New York, 1927.)