How amazing would it be to discover that an ancient civilization existed with a technology level on par with the iron age or so? I guess if we were finding dinosaurs though the odds we wouldn't have found anything from that time are maybe slim.
We find many dinosaur fossils because there were so many dinosaurs over so long of a time. The actual events that lead to a dead dinosaur fossilizing and then having it be in a place we find it all these years later is astoundingly rare, and speaks to the scale of numbers we are working here when we find these fossils. There were probably orders of magnitude less humans over orders of magnitude smaller amounts of time in question here than say, dinosaur finds. Then you have the issue of early humans generally settling in places that are poor for long term preservation, like along shifting coastlines. The fact we find so many hominid remains in places like caves isn't really because that's where people spent a lot of time, but that these people were all over the environment and of all the places for their remains to end up, in the cave is a good place for it to not only survive the elements but to be found by spelunkers in modern times. Most people probably died and left evidence of their life in places exposed to the elements or to time.
Exactly. The historical remains that we have are all very biased compared with how people lived.
Even from a few hundred years ago, there's not much record of how the average person lived. Most things that survived are stone castles, and other remnants of noble life.
Actually, iron rusts away so quickly that it's hard to recover them from the ground after only a millennium or two. Bronze tends to fare much better in that regard.
Wood can last quite a while if it's buried in an environment that inhibits microbial degradation, such as a highly acidic bog, where iron doesn't stand a chance.
Yeah, I guess it would have to have either been long enough ago that it's been erased by geology (which seems somewhat infeasibly long ago wrt the evolutionary timeline) or recent enough that we would likely have found a trace of it by now. I guess the only chance is for some missing link far in the evolutionary past that was erased by e.g., one of the past mass extinctions.
If a civilization was discovered with Iron Age technology before what is the currently accepted beginning of the Iron Age, wouldn't that just mean the Iron Age started earlier than previously thought?
I would argue that it needs to be more or less continuous, if we lost the technology it's a different age imo. Or at least, you can't go back globally multiple ages :) if multiple civilizations discover iron working from an otherwise similar stage of technology but aren't entirely continuous then I think it's reasonable to combine them, but if they all go back to the stone age and start from scratch I'd argue it doesn't make sense to combine them.
> I would argue that it needs to be more or less continuous, if we lost the technology it's a different age imo.
You're looking at history through modern eyes. Back in the past there was no collective `we`, we were much more separated as a species than we are now.
The idea that there is a global 'us' is a very, very new idea.
Also whole Iron Age as term is rather weird and location specific. In Europes there are places where it is considered to ended in 1200-1300.. Yes, during Middle Ages...
It would also mean that technology - and human condition - remained stagnant for half million years. If true it has [no good] implications for [the answer to] the so called Fermi Paradox.
It could have been a long time before dinosaurs, and/or limited geographically in areas where the geological activity over tens of millions of years would make finding traces of them even more rare than average.
