Until very recently, we knew nothing about the roots of our own civilization. We had no idea who invented the wheel, agriculture, writing, cities and everything else. In addition to this, for some strange, inexplicable reason, few were eager to find out.
Even historians wanted to leave the ruins of human history buried under the desert sands. This attitude seems as strange as the mysteries themselves.
Can you really accept the loss of your own memory? Or will you do everything in your power to restore your past and your personality?
It seems as if we are hiding something from ourselves. Some will say that it was a breathtaking visit by ancient astronauts; someone will object, saying that this is an ancient human civilization destroyed by a cataclysm. In any case, we obviously buried these episodes by forgetting about them. Perhaps the memories are too painful. I have not yet been able to make a final choice between the various ideas. However, I am sure that the orthodox theories proposed by traditional archaeologists, historians and anthropologists do not stand up to scrutiny under scrutiny.
Curiously, we have developed the means to launch space probes to Mars, to split the human genome, and even to clone ourselves. But we are still marking time, trying to understand the secrets of the culture of the pyramids, prehistoric times, to explain how we made a quantum leap from the Stone Age to civilization!
Why have we, as a species, failed to preserve the threads that connect us in the most direct and concrete way with the past?
I get exactly the same nauseating feeling as crime reporters and homicide detectives have when they dig into unsolved cases for too long. We are missing something, or we are wrong about the situation.
Probably, obvious hints pass by us, for we are used to thinking about facts only in a certain light. In addition to this, it is difficult for us to ask all the right questions we need. It never occurs to you to go back to the basics, review all your knowledge and establish the real "facts."
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We always have a choice: to make sense of the world or not to make such an attempt. Life provides an incredible amount of catch-up opportunities and a tremendous degree of freedom when it comes to learning. Our ancestors perfectly mastered the basic rules of the game of survival during an unimaginably long Stone Age.
They didn't need to know that the Earth revolves around the Sun or the structure of the atom to be successful. But after the last ice age, something strange happened. The human race underwent a sudden transformation that sent us into uncharted territory. We are still reaping the consequences of those explosive events.
Let's go back and prepare the scene of early human evolution as scientists imagine it. Our ancestors found themselves in a world full of natural wonders, faced with the challenges they faced. All problems were related to survival. To begin with, people did not have the tools, they had no choice to solve the problems presented to them. They could only go in a frontal attack, as all animals did. We must be mindful of the realities of these premises.
We know exactly how people lived in the Stone Age. Indeed, many tribes around the world have continued to lead this way of life for the past five hundred years. They were studied up and down.
We know that humanity was virtually homogeneous throughout the Stone Age. Even 10,000 years ago, people lived almost the same way of life, being in Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia or the Americas. They lived close to nature, hunted wild animals and collected wild plants, used stone tools, stone, wood and bone weapons.
People learned the art of kindling and controlling fire, they had a very accurate and detailed knowledge of the habits of animals, the topography of the earth, ideas about the cycles of nature, as well as how to distinguish between edible and poisonous plants.
This knowledge and way of life was carefully acquired, experience accumulated for millions of years. Stone Age people were misrepresented and misunderstood. They are not cruel dumbass. Without the long evolution they went through to lay the foundations for everything that is to happen, modern intelligence and modern civilization could not have developed. The ancient ancestors perfectly assimilated knowledge, lived in complete fusion with nature, and, undoubtedly, were stronger and physically stronger than we are now.
In fact, the natural world that we inherited from the Stone Age man was absolutely intact and intact. Everything remained as pure and virgin as it had been for millions of years of human evolution. Nature generously endowed those early humans with its abundance. They have learned to live in this natural environment. Statistically speaking, humans are hunter-gatherers. This is how we lived 99.99% of our time as a species. At least, these are the data of modern science.
It is very easy to understand how our distant ancestors lived. Life changed very slightly and very slowly. Early man adapted and got used to what worked. It was a simple yet demanding lifestyle that was passed down from generation to generation - through examples and oral tradition.
There seems to be no mystery here. But things began to change dramatically after the last ice age. Suddenly, several tribes switched to a different way of life. Giving up their nomadic life, they became sedentary, began to cultivate certain crops and domesticate several species of animals. The first steps to civilization are often talked about, but they were never really studied at a deep level. What made people change so dramatically? It is much more difficult to explain this than to believe in the naturalness of the process.
The first question is the most basic and direct one. The people of the Stone Age did not eat grain. And cereals are the basis of agriculture and nutrition of civilization. The hunter-gatherer's meager diet consisted of meats from various species of wild animals and fresh wild herbs and fruits.
To begin with, consider the evolutionary divergence from conventional wisdom. Consider the mismatch between food after the “agrarian revolution” that began 10,000 years ago and what hunters were fed. Therefore, the human genome is ideally adapted to the food that was at the disposal of people in the period before the development of agriculture.
As a result, we have a riddle that is as difficult to uncover as the secrets of the construction of the Great Pyramid. How and why did our ancestors make this leap? After all, they had practically zero experience in cultivating wild grain crops. How did they know about the correct management of the economy, and in general about the edibility of grain?
By the time the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations suddenly emerged, crops were already being crossed. Such work requires a high level of knowledge and experience, as well as time.
If you have at least some skill in working with wild plants or fruits, any experience of agricultural work, then you know: wild varieties are very different from crossed crops. It is well established that hunter-gatherers lacked the skill of breeding varieties or domestication of animals. Therefore, it would take significantly longer than historians insist, the time to move from zero to advanced.
We must ask the question: where did this knowledge come from? How did a Stone Age man suddenly acquire the skill of domestication of plants and animals and do it very effectively? We see purebred dogs, such as greyhounds, in Egyptian and Sumerian art. How could they be withdrawn so quickly?
The following questions complicate the ability to support traditional explanations:
1) a very slow process of human evolution in the Stone Age;
2) the sudden creation and distribution of new tools of labor, new food products, new social forms that had no predecessors.
If early humans ate wild types of grains and experimented with hybridization for a long time and developed along some obvious stages of development, then this is understandable. But how can one accept the Stone Age scenario for the construction period of the Great Pyramid at Giza?
Plant breeding is a difficult science. But we know that it was practiced in the Sumerian kingdom, in Egypt and ancient Israel. If you have any doubts about this, then imagine that we are growing the same primary crops that our ancestors created. Is it so? There are hundreds of wild plant species that can be domesticated. Why haven't we bred new crops from other wild species in the past three thousand years? How did the ancients choose the best species with an extremely low level of knowledge (if we believe that they have just emerged from the Stone Age)?
Our ancestors not only identified these complex issues, but also quickly discovered the principles of making by-products from cereals. The Sumerians baked bread and brewed beer five thousand years ago, but their closest predecessors (as anthropologists say) knew nothing of such things. They lived by collecting plants and killing wild animals. It seems that people have received guidance from someone who was already involved in advanced agriculture. But this instruction could not have been provided by their hunter-gatherer ancestors.
It is very difficult to reconstruct these rapid transitions, especially if they are accompanied by radical changes in all other areas of human life. How and why did people who know nothing but a nomadic existence and a primitive social structure change so quickly and so radically? What made them build cities and create a complex civilization when nothing was known about such forms of society?
In the Epipaleolithic Age (about 8000-5500 BC), the tribes in the Nile Valley lived in semi-underground oval houses with roofs made of clay and twigs. They made simple pottery and used stone axes and flint arrowheads, continuing to lead a semi-nomadic lifestyle, moving from one site to another depending on the seasons.
A huge number of tribes around the globe led just such a way of life. After that, how did people begin to mine, process and transport stones weighing from one to sixty tons in order to use them to build the most massive structure in the world? Why did the change happen so quickly?
The fast transition simply cannot be explained rationally. All inventions and cultural achievements require time and a sequence of easily distinguishable stages of development. Where are the predecessors? It is very easy to trace the entire path of development of the Stone Age - from primitive tools of labor to a stone ax and flint arrowheads. We must find the same stages as civilization develops.
But where are the smaller pyramids - much smaller? Where is the rough stone carving that should precede the exquisitely decorated steles? The slow evolution of forms from simple to complex is all that people know. But what does this have to do with the clay huts covered with thatch - and then suddenly emerging large-scale architecture based on megalithic stone blocks, a complex artistic work that requires exquisite skill and knowledge.
Development phases are simply absent here.
Sumerian cuneiform tablets describe highly complex irrigation and agricultural systems, bakeries, and brewing. The Bible says that the ancient Jews grew grapes and made wine, as well as yeast and non-yeast bread. We take such things for granted. But the questions behind them have never been raised.
Where did people learn in such a short period of time to select grain, turn grain into flour, bake bread from it? This is also true for viticulture. This isn't about simple or obvious products.
We assume that their predecessors developed agricultural skills for a long time. This idea is quite logical, but it is not confirmed. The very first and very primitive agricultural experiment, which is confirmed by documentary records of archaeologists, was discovered in Jaarmo and Jericho. These are very modest settlements where a few simple crops were grown. But people continued to hunt forest game and gather plants, so the villages were not in the strict sense of the word agrarian communities.
The problem is that no intermediate stage has been found between primitive people - and the Sumerian kingdom, Egypt. There are no small-scale ziggurats, pyramids, or any trace of development. It turns out that Stone Age artisans suddenly began to make exquisite sculptures and steles decorated with stone carvings.
Orthodox theories are beginning to rely more on "official" instructions from authorities than on well-argued and well-documented facts. We have come to a crisis in the fields of anthropology, history and archeology. After all, traditional theses are not able to resolve the issue with an ever-increasing number of anomalies. The explanations are inconclusive, hackneyed and increasingly boring, unable to prove theories. Individual fragments do not correspond to each other and do not add up to a reasonable whole.
We have mentioned earlier in this book a quote from the eminent paleoanthropologist Lewis Leakey. A few years ago, when Leakey was giving a lecture at university, a student asked him about the "missing link" in evolution. The teacher replied: "There is not one missing link, but hundreds …"
This is even more true for cultural rather than biological evolution. Until we find these links, we will, like patients suffering from amnesia, try to make sense of modern life and our collective history.
