OK, enuff's'nuff...

Thor Hyerdahl is actually one of the leading research historians and archaeologists of the late XX Century.

His epic voyage proved a number of things - among which, you get a lithp if you ride a Thavage too long...  

Now, really... let's get serious and try thiking with an open mind.

How many of us can remember ourselves at the age of 3? 2? 6 months old?
I doubt we can remember anything at all by ourselves before the age of 3, anything before that we either resort to pictures from the family album or we "remember" because we've been told about it.

1. "I remember because they told me about it", in ancient history, is called Lore and Myth.
But if you're in a war and lose, and your king is slain in battle or sacrificed to the winning god, your memory as a people fades away.

2. History has proven, time and time again, that "the golden age" of any people is a precise moment in time; this moment can last the life of one king, or two or three, such as the Kingdom of Israel from Saul to Solomon;
or it can last a few hundred years, as in the Dutch commercial empire (The Hansa League and its commercial ports in Africa and Asia) or even a few thousand years (Egypt and Rome, not to mention China)
But it will come to a close and fade into decadence.

3. "Barbarians" need not be "barbaric", most of the time they will simply have another language and another culture; yet, if the ruling elite is sufficiently wise, the invading, conquering "barbarians" will eventually adopt the lifestyle of the conquered, decandent, yet more ancient and more sophisticated people. That is exactly what happened when "barbarian" Saxons came down from Scandinavia and invaded Britannia; they ruled as "Kings of England" until the Normans came with King William.
The Turkic tribes from Central Asia failed to invade Persia, sideswiped into Mesopotamia and became the new Caliphs of Baghdad, before turning north to Anatolia and Costantinople... which became Istanbul.

4. The more ancient, yet more sophisticated civilizations crushed by the new invaders often maintain their legacy in the form of clothing, religious festivals (unless they're forced to convert...) and, sometimes, superstition.
However, technology is often the first to succumb, because many schools are shut down as political measures.
Hence, no more medicine, architecture and metallurgy as once was.
The result is lower quality of life, crumbling palaces of old and "legends" are born, such as "Excalibur". [more on Excalibur on request]

Now, let's put all these points together, and what do we get ?
We deduce that history comes and goes in waves and tides, just like the sea.
Not only will small etchings in the sand be erased by the next wave on the beach...
...The "Golden Age" (high tide) will inevitably be followed by a "Dark Age" (low tide) only to be followed by another favorable, peaceful period in time, and so on.

So, I find it quite amusing, yet not surprising at all, that a bell of an unknown alloy was cast in a lump of coal.
Historically, it equates to the chance find of an unknown souvenir brought home by a distant great-great-grandpa, whose name we don't even recall,
and we don't even understand what the souvenir comes from, was used for, or why it was purchased/picked up at all.
It's just there, and the last thing we should do is shrug, deny it's even there and throw it away for peace of mind.

In my next post I will comment the 10 "mistery findings"  

justin_o_guy2 wrote on 09/29/13 at 18:41:09:


OK, just how old is our planet? When I was a kid, they said "The Universe is 4 billion years old, and the earth half that." These days, it seems the Earth is over four billion years old, never mind the universe...

In "timespeak", 1 million years is to 4 billion, like... 1 : 4000. Plenty of time for evolution.
So... who is to say WE are the first mankind or intelligent life of any kind at all, to roam this planet?
It's like claiming "I am the first person to live in this ancient castle..." if you get my idea.

On the "bell in the coal" I have already expressed by opinion.
The same applies to the iron hammer. What was not specified in the article, however, is the purity of the iron in the hammerhead.
It seems that whereas common iron will rust like there's no tomorrow (which explains why we find so few artifacts from the Iron Age) pure, uncontaminated iron will not.
There's a puire, "100% Fe" pillar in a city in India, which is 1600 years old, and it's always been exposed to the elements ... yet it's unscathed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_pillar_of_Delhi

3. The Sailing Stones of California... see "Ripley's believe it or Not!", mistery solved a looong time ago...

4. Mammooths in North America: so what ? there were horses too, but they were hunted for meat rather than tamed as working/riding animals.

5. The Footprint over the Trilobite: this really has me smiling... a size 13 foot (Neanderthal, easy peasy) treads through foliage and/or mud on a fossil that's been sitting there for 200 million years, case solved.

6. Pyramids in America: given the fact that carved stone will outlive man by a few thousand times... I find it interesting to find a stone architecture in the shape of... not a pyramid in the Egyptian sense, but of a Temple in the Ziggurat style.
But we shouldn't be surprised: religious architecture has been creating pyramids and towers ever since man successfully stacked rocks one on top of another.
Am I ridiculing the Pyramid issue? Not at all, I'm happy as a lark, because it proves that the North American plains were inhabited by a highly civilized people, which may have eventually decayed into the Seminoles (which were as organized as the Ancient Romans) and the Navaho and Hopi (who were rather poor but had astronomical knowledge and theology like no other nation in N.A.)

7. Mistery Hill: just like Sun Temples throughout the Mediterranean, even down to Morocco! The SUN was ancient Man's first God.
Mistery Hill is a collection of Menhir and Dolmen, just as you will find from the Caucasus all the way to the Canary Islands (which are actually off the coast of Senegal, quite a way down from Spain!)

8. The Newport Tower: the style is "romanic", i.e. early middleage derived from the Roman architecture style; Romanic gave way to Gothic in religious architecture, but was maintained for civil engineering; so the Tower may have been built by anybody, anytime between the year 1000 (when the Norse explored Newfoundland etc.) and the late 17th Century, under British rule.

9. The Piri Reis Map: it is a historical find of great value, and proves, among things, that a) seafarers knew the Earth was not flat; b) you could navigate north and south quite a bit; c) the Piri reis map is partially based on the a Ptolemaic (Egyptian) map of the World from about 200 A.D.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemy%27s_world_map

10. Graves of Giants: Giants (the Nephilim) are described and accounted for in the Book of Genesis, so if we are to believe of Noah and the Flood, of Abraham and Melkizedek, why should we deny the existence of giants?  
Because we've never seen any ? Kinda lame excuse vs. the rest of the Bible, isn't it ?

Well... here's a few more Tombs of Giants  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giants%27_grave

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aghanaglack

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaliths_in_Mecklenburg-Vorpommern#Of_giants.2C...

I have personally visited a few locations in Sardinia, makes you wonder... if "official" history really got it right...  

Awwrite,, Imgoin thru a pretty tuff down time & havent the mental acuity to read between lines.. Not sure what youre sayin, Pesci..

Well, seems to me, he is sayin' , civilizations come and go, who's to say how advanced one was before the other?

Kinda like what really happened before the ice age? was there an ice age before that? and before that ? Millions of years have passed on this planet and since it has been here how many civilizations where there?

Thats what I got & I agree,, thats my thinking, too.,

Serowbot wrote on 10/01/13 at 10:24:39:


Yup!  thems is great documentaries!

I had no idea we had so many SPECIAL people on this site.

LANCER wrote on 10/03/13 at 02:43:45:


Hello Lancer, I hope you mean "special" as in "learned", not as in "duh...", much less as in



Common academic arechaeology MUST ans WILL go by the 150-year old adage that "stone age man was up until 3000 years ago".

Many people will tell you "2000 years ago there was Stone Age Man,  then Jesus came and brought the Bible".

If you want a definition of DUMB, you have just been given one.

The Bible started with Adam... and was (supposedly) dictated to scribes by Moses (as in, all the previous Patriarchs were illiterate bedouins? I find that hard to believe...)

But then archaeology will tell you that the Egyptians were a highly civilized culture 3500 years BC (that's close to 6000 years ago)

The same archaeologists will tell you the Sumerians are even older...
Sumerians, allegedly the descendants of Shem, 2nd-born of Noah.
Assyrians came later, and Babylonians later still.

The Chinese and Indian civilizations can be traced just as well back in time...

BUT

What was there before 3000 BC ? Cave Man ? I don't think so.

Archaeologists will tell you "we went through a Stone Age, then a Copper Age, then a Bronze Age, finally an Iron Age".

That is wrong, or at least flawed.

Stone Age refers to when implements and weapons were essentially made with stone. This means grinding stones and tomahawks, period.

They forget the Wooden Age: Bow&Arrow, the thrusting spear, the javelin...
But if you correct this statement and call it the Pottery Age, you then allow for the 2nd greatest discovery after fire, with is the cooking pot!
Hence, pottery means the creation of soups, the spoon, the possibility to cook foods and store them for later.
You also allow for the cration of the bow&arrow, canoes and oars, the art of sailing and quite possibly the development of agriculture. Ovens & baking.

The Copper Age develops in different times in different places, because copper was obtained by hammering ore and obtaining coarse (rough) copper.
The art of smelting copper required better pottery to create smelting ovens (furnaces) and containers hardy enough to smelt the ore in.

The Bronze Age was already well developed in areas where tin was available (at very high prices, it was very rare) whereas other parts of the world were still in High Copper Age.
See the Egyptians against the Hittites, the former had excellent copper weaponry, the latter had bronze; guess who won the war ?  

Bronze, incidentally, requires more than just mixing tin and copper, it requires such high temperatures smelting becomes an art per se.
Not only weapons, but sacred implements for religious rituals were made in bronze, the only alternative to silver and gold. See the Instructions for the Temple of Solomon...

The Iron Age was actually a step backwards from bronze   Yup, really !

Whereas smelting bronze was a true art, in the early Iron Age iron was obtained, again, by hammering iron ore.
Hmmm... smelting in a special furnace... hammering rough ore... smelting... hammering... guess which of the two is more sophisticated ?
Add to this that iron will rust and is brittle, whereas bronze will not decay and builds a protective patina, and there you have it, bronze is actually a superior metal to iron.

Until you develop steel, that is. Allegedly the Roman furnaces were sophisticated to the point they had developed steel.
Juslius Caesar (whose true first name was "Caius") had, as Governor of Republican Rome, a sword forged for himself with the engraving "CAI • IVL • CAES • ENSIS CALIBVRNVS,"
from which the name "EXCALIBUR"  is said to derive. (Incidentally, the one and only "sword in the stone" is in Italy, you're welcome to come and visit)
The Romans called Iron "Ferrum" but steel was called "Khalybs" from greek "Χάλυψ"... hence "CALIBURNUS"  

What age are we in today ? Forget "The Space Age", we must look at tools.

Quite possibly, the Middle Ages might be called "The Glass Age", because that is when glassware became common.

Ever since the beginning of the 20th Century, we could say we are in the "Electric Age" - nothing, nothing at all will work without electricity.

Now THAT's special... Mike !  

I approve this thread... good reads!!!

I do very much HATE that my grade school education was so extremely in western civ. Even at age 10, I could tell... that someone had no clue what really happened. To this day, I cant muddle through history, except for US... and whats that a few mere 200 years? Get beyond that, US schools books, get REAL flakey.