History: A New Perspective For Me

 

History

I’m not a history buff but through watching too much YouTube during lockdown I have become intrigued by some recent archaeological discoveries. There’s an analogy now between archaeology and fishing. Fishing boats no longer go out hoping they will find some fish; they go out, turn the radar on and locate the fish. Similarly, archaelogists no longer rely on a chance find as an indicator of what might be an interesting site; they peruse satellite images and know in advance what sites could be interesting. This greatly speeds the rate at which discoveries are made and there have been some intriguing ones recently. They pose some intriguing questions..

There’s an historical theory that around 3000BC human beings stopped being hunter-gatherers and became farmers, the dawn of agriculture. However, recent finds have shown agriculture being practised in some places around 11,000BC. Even more intruigingly, ruins originating around 3000BC recently investigated in different parts of the world show that a standard measurement was used in their construction that is a precise fraction of the world’s circumference. So somebody before that time had worked out the circumference of Earth. Moreover, this was in several geographically distant regions so it seems likely that this information was shared rather than being calculated separately and simultaneously in different places. So there must have been much more widespread travelling at the time than previously thought. There is evidence, for example, that the Chinese were in north America around 10,000BC There’s also evidence of some relatively sophisticated tools, such as powerful drills, used on hard stones well before 3000BC.

What does all this do to our understanding of humans’ early history? Well, it demolishes the idea of the neolithic revolution for a start. It also demolishes any general idea of stone ages, iron ages, etc. That all varies over time depending on what region and society you are talking about. It’s also clear that very primitive and quite sophisticated societies co-existed in different parts of the world many thousands of years ago, long before we realised. And that poses numerous intriguig questions. For instance, if superior knowledge was sometimes shared across large distances, why didn’t it become generally accepted and used? What happened when a relatively sophisticted society rubbed shoulders with a relatively primitive one? Most interesting for me is what a map of knowledge per century BC would look like. You would likely find, at any one time, a high degree of understanding of maths and engineering and probably town life similar in many aspects to what we know now in odd places in India, Europe and elsewhere, with people in other places living in caves and just learning to create stone tools.

Whatever this does, it smashes any idea of people across the globe progressing uniformly from cavemen hunter-gatherers to agriculture and then some form of more sophisticated society. It just couldn’t have happened like that. It must have been very much a stop-start rocess. It also smashes the notion I was given at school that knowledge discovered by the Greeks and Romans built the foundation of modern European society. Newton said that if he had seen farther than others it was because he had been able to stand on the shoulders of giants. The same must have been true of the Greeks and Romans. And, oh boy, wasn’t the history education I received at school blinkered by European eyes. So…….what exactly was happening and what had (some) people worked out thirteen centuries ago or even before? I guess we’ll have to wait for more archaeological finds.