Not this "erased from history" crap again. There was no grand ancient civilization that existed and was wiped out before the Sumerians came around 4,000 BCE. You know how we know? Because 1) there would be archaeological evidence and there is none 2) they would have had to invent agriculture and that would've left evidence behind via genetics in modern plants of human-guided cultivation 3) they would have used all the same energy resources we have, so timber, peat, coal, oil, etc. and that would have significantly altered the environment in such a way as to leave a record - not to mention it would mean there would be no coal or oil left for us and 5) we have archaeological evidence of early humans during this time - and they were hunter/gatherers leading basic subsistence lives as evidenced by the wear on their bones and teeth and the radioactive signatures in their bones of what they ate.

So why did it take almost all of the last 100,000 years for civilization to happen? Because without the stability provided by agriculture, doing anything more than surviving is really fucking hard. Not to mention the repeated ice ages and other things that made long term progress impossible.

We use terms like "stone age" and "iron age" because those are materials that lasted long enough for us to see them. Wood, fabric, rope, animal hide, many other materials don't last that long so we have much less information about what people were doing with them.

You know that the rate of discoveries & innovations accelerates in history, to the point that the last century was more knowledge created than all of humanity before? Exactly.

Can't invent much if all you have is a sharp stone and very limited understanding of nature.

I'm gonna piggy back mine on this one. Before the invention of writing, the only new thoughts you could ever encounter, were from the people you would meet face to face.

Proto human ancestors were also far more capable than we give them credit for. There is archaeological evidence that, possibly as far back as 2.5 million years ago, human ancestors were harvesting specific types of stone in one location before transporting it over seven miles away to a different location where it was being processed. That is vastly beyond the complexity of what most people think homosapiens were capable of only 100k years ago.

People didnt have to build a society in the exact likeness of modern humanity for it to be vastly complex and advanced in its own right

Do we know that knowledge of those accomplishments has been repeatedly erased from history? That seems like a bit of a leap.

Or sometimes the technology is there, but we're just not ready. For example, a very rudimentary steam engine existed in ancient Rome, and was described by others as early as 30BC. While it was highly unlikely to happen because the infrastructure/materials were limited, imagine where we'd be now if the Industrial Revolution had happened in Ancient Rome.

It also makes me wonder if there's anything around today that's considered some oddball quirk of physics that might change the world in the future when we're ready to use it.

@Archangel1313@lemmy.ca Look into Islamic scolars, a lot of scientific discoveries done in Europe after the middle ages were made hundreds of years earlier by them. Then I guess their dark ages started, making a lot of knowledge "lost". On te other hand, you should keep in mind two things, the first is that knowledge is incremental, everything we know is built on previous knowledge. The other is that while humans were around a long time, they were not in the big numbers of today. As a consequence they didn't need farming, they could always travel further to new lands for finding food and shelter.

@LadyButterfly@piefed.blahaj.zone