
Humans Dominated Earth Earlier Than Previously Thought - pseudolus
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/science/archaeology-earth-anthropocene.html
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dr_dshiv
Fire was used by early humans at least 200,000 years ago, perhaps as long as
1.2m years ago. Given how forest/bush fires are generally an effective hunting
strategy today (e.g., by indigenous Australian), I'd expect that the first
major effect of the anthropocene would be from large scale deforestation
events. But, I can't find any evidence for it.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_hum...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_humans)

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dr_dshiv
Oh, here is more recent (20,000 BP) evidence:
[https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166726)

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YeGoblynQueenne
>> A Himba homestead in the Kunene Region of Namibia.

It looks like there are two homesteads in the picture- one in the lower right
half of the picture and one diagonally above it and to the left, at the top of
the clearing.

The Himba are a beautiful people, probably best known for covering themselves
in ochre and colouring their braided hair with it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himba_people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himba_people)

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alistproducer2
Google Graham Hancock. He does a bunch of research concerning ice age
civilizations I'm the Americas. Really interested work.

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arethuza
Erich von Däniken is also famous for similar "research".

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Bombthecat
I start to think more and more that those things he finds are not from aliens
but from former failed civilizations... Which all failed für the same /similar
reason line us (climate change, atom bombs etc) just millions of years back
not just a few thousend... Like a cycle which continues until either we
survive and we don't kill us self or the sun burns out... Very weird thought,
no? :)

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ericmay
I don’t think it’s a weird thought, but earlier humans wouldn’t have been able
to cause climate change as we understand it today or destroy themselves with
nuclear weapons because the evidence would be readily available in the
geographic record. I am a fan of the line of reasoning from people such as
Hancock because I think he’s scratching on the surface of lost human history,
but I think it’s something we have to look at scientifically and skeptically
(in general). I find the work he’s discussed with the pacific north west in
the United States to be particularly interesting.

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hliyan
Full article not accessible because of soft paywall, but: I feel we're
surprised by these revelations because our current timeline of civilization is
constructed using surviving artifacts and fossils, both of which are
exception, not norm. The vast majority of evidence of ancient civilizations
probably got completely buried. It's not outside the realm of possibility that
there were early civilizations over 100,000 years old, whose artifacts have
now been wiped away by plate tectonics and the ocean.

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lkrubner
Not “buried” but “drowned”. The oceans have risen almost 50 meters since the
peak of the last Ice Age. Assuming the biggest human settlements, then as now,
were near large bodies of water, then they are drowned.

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simonh
So they built cities on the coast, but not along river valleys? How did they
feed the cities without agriculture? If they had agriculture, we’d see the
selection process in the genetic history of the plants, and the geographic
spread of plants, and again they’d definitely have colonised river valleys
that are better suited to agriculture than the coast.

Then of course their tools and other artefacts would have been traded all over
the place. Stone tools from 100k years ago and more got traded or carried
thousands of miles and all we see are implements for the hunter gatherer
lifestyle.

It doesn’t make any sense.

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cstross
You might want to read up on Doggerland:
[https://www.nationalgeographic.org/maps/doggerland/](https://www.nationalgeographic.org/maps/doggerland/)

The TLDR is that a huge low-lying basin of fertile land around what is now the
British Isles was inundated at the end of the last interglacial. (What is now
the North Sea/English Channel was one of those river valleys you alude to.)
The British Isles today would have been the relatively cold, arid, mountainous
uplands survivors migrated into when their fertile, low-lying territory got
flooded out. Assuming population density in the chilly uplands (glaciers,
remember!) was low, then you'd expect the frequency of surviving stone tools
to be lower, reflecting that. People don't leave stuff lying around in places
where people don't live!

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simonh
I'm fully aware of doggerland, but so what? Given all of Africa and Eurasia,
doggerland was a tiny benighted patch of lowland in a cold remote corner. I'm
sure some people called it home, but I don't see any compelling reason to put
a lost civilization on it 100k years ago.

There are plenty of very fertile, habitable areas in the same region that
would have been just as attractive. So settlements? Sure. But surely a
civilization is more than just a settlement?

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jakeogh
Old structures (pics, no commentary):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaLo0gqPzNc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaLo0gqPzNc)

