My very limited understanding is that traditional Hindu teaching is that human civilization is orders of magnitude older than 5,000 years. If anyone who knows more about that wants to reply I’d be interested.
It would be very strange indeed if the only things that disappeared were the ones necessarily to demonstrate that society was actually highly developed, no?
I’m no expert, but highly developed artifacts strike me as the ones most likely to be fragile to entropy and erosion.
In any event I’m only curious. Questioning an absence of evidence implying evidence of absence is just basic reasoning.
But humans were certainly sophisticated long before then, even if they didn't have complex writing and government. One of the strangest pieces of archeology to me is the Löwenmensch figurine or Lion-Man, an ivory figure dating to 40,000 bc. So humans definitely had some complex culture for a long time. One theory I heard about why civilization developed so recently, is that it's in the past 10,000 years that the planet warmed up enough that farming became practical. I don't know enough about geological history to confirm that, but it seems like an appealing theory
I keep coming across the claim that humans have been around for 300,000 years. Based on no knowledge or expertise at all, I'm sceptical. It seems fairly clear that there exist remains of cities 12,000 years old (e.g. Troy); the classical Greeks regarded the stories of the Trojan war as something close to mythology, but then Schliemann found the place. But there don't seem to be stories of ancient civilisations that go back much further than that.
I find it difficult to believe that people able to build a civilisation would have existed for tens of thousands of years, without actually building one. But evidence for ancient civilisations is hard to find, so perhaps we just haven't found it yet. So I'm open to the view that humans capable of civilisation-building have been around for (say) 50,000 years. But without evidence, I find it hard to credit the claim that humans from 300,000 years ago were at all like us.
I'm ignorant about these matters, and my sketchy opinions are based on stuff I read decades ago. Is there something written for the layman that I could read to inform myself?
What point is that supposed to make? No one's making that error here. They know these ancient mines were mines; they're not going "dunno what this is, must be a temple."
Every once in awhile there’s a headline to the effect of “Breaking: Scientists discover that Bronze Age/medieval/not European people were total idiots in <year>“
> What Ben-Yosef has produced isn’t an argument for or against the historical accuracy of the Bible but a critique of his own profession. Archaeology, he argues, has overstated its authority. Entire kingdoms could exist under our noses, and archaeologists would never find a trace. Timna is an anomaly that throws into relief the limits of what we can know. The treasure of the ancient mines, it turns out, is humility.