There's also shit-loads of lost knowledge that's being rediscovered
Events like the fire in the Great Library at Alexandria or the catastrophic collapse of civilizations like Crete or the Mayans means we're often having to make assumptions based on the evidence available.
When new evidence turns up like this mechanism it gets studied very carefully and the assumptions will be re-assessed. Saying that historians are thrown by something they didn't know is a bit ridiculous as how could they possibly know?
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evil_andy Stick stick stick stick sticky sticky stick stick, Thu 10 May 2012, 9:27,
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Indeed, the trick is not to leap to 'chariots of the gods' level on asumptions every time you find something unexpected.
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Cerebus Sticky! Sticky! Stick! Stick!, Thu 10 May 2012, 9:40,
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Ha ha, true true
but we do still seem to generally have this silly idea that mans advancement into the modern era of technical wonders was a slow and steady rise, from living like animals thru to stone tools, metals, mechanics, electronics, but anything older than a few thousand years and often pretty much nothing continues to exist for us to see or measure in any form, it's just gone, and yet if you took any child from back then and raised it as one of us it would almost certainly be capable of understanding and coping with our modern world quite normally, so there's every possibility we've been here before, not to this present global scale, but when scientists say stuff like 'Clocks were invented on this exact date by this man and computers on this exact date by this bloke here!' it does seem a bit, well, over simplified, like we're rewriting history to suit us.
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..wil, Thu 10 May 2012, 9:40,
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So you're saying it's likely that...
The Atlantians were a highly advanced civilisation, who potentially had advanced technology and an active space programme. But a war began. A war between the Atlantians and a less civilised race of humans, almost neandathals, who possessed none of their tech and were jealous. The war raged for hundreds of years and it seemed like no end was in sight. So the Atlantians, in their infinite wisdom, built spacecrafts capable of interstellar flight and fled the Earth to colonise a better world, but not before destroying all traces of their knowledge and technology by sinking their fair city into the ocean, so the jealous neanderthal race could not use their technology to advance themselves quick enough to follow them?
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Fadgebadger (1 like), Thu 10 May 2012, 10:12,
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I think you've got the beginnings of a book there
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evil_andy Stick stick stick stick sticky sticky stick stick, Thu 10 May 2012, 10:37,
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Everyone's got a novel in them
It's slightly uncomfortable when I sit though...
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Fadgebadger (1 like), Thu 10 May 2012, 10:39,
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