Re:Humans Dominated Earth Earlier Than Previously Thought
by chrisco255 on Saturday August 31, 2019 @02:33AM
(#20844919)
See my post below where I link to actual data on sea level rise rate. The ice caps don't melt instantaneously there's not enough energy in one summer to do that. The fastest it ever rose was 3 cm a year during a 1000 year period. Even at 3 cm a year you can build new buildings on higher ground as the water advances and never lose a beat. Especially when we're talking an era when most homes were built out of bones and deerskin and maybe clay. Without metal they couldn't even chop wood but even wood buildings go up rather quickly. I just fail to see how we could believe our ancestors made it through several ice ages,
mastered fire, avoided being eaten by saber tooth tigers and hunted wooly mammoths and populated the whole globe but failed to avert a 3cm a year sea level rise.
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Re:Humans Dominated Earth Earlier Than Previously Thought
by reificator on Saturday August 31, 2019 @04:44AM
(#20845248)
You're still arguing against something that no one else is.
You're viewing their arguments as "Water overtook their cities and they died because of it".
Their argument is that "They died out and then water overtook their cities".
Re:Humans Dominated Earth Earlier Than Previously Thought
by chrisco255 on Saturday August 31, 2019 @04:54AM
(#20845272)
Well if we're still talking about "advanced civilization" like Mesopotamia, I can definitely see climate change causing a gradual collapse. I still doubt it was possible to have a large city prior to metallurgy and agriculture. Maybe megafauna was abundant enough that it could support that but it seems like a stretch.
Re:Humans Dominated Earth Earlier Than Previously Thought
by hinkley on Sunday September 01, 2019 @01:59PM
(#20853653)
As far as I am aware, none of the civilizations in South and Central America ever had metallurgy.
Having a civilization and keeping civilization are two different things. Once humans are capable of thinking of it, it would happen over and over again. But when it fails, the survivors might have a sort of cultural PTSD comparable to the Sodom and Gomorrah story in the Bible. People might resist trying again for generations (also, how many places could you found a civilization in a world without sanitation, metallurgy or medicine?)
Re:Humans Dominated Earth Earlier Than Previously Thought
by sooheon on Saturday August 31, 2019 @02:40AM
(#20844941)
I think the claim is not that sea level rise caused civilizational collapse, but that sea level rise could have obscured many coastal cities (which presumably suffered run of the mill, non-watery deaths).