They Would Be Gods - 40 - Hidden Civilizations

THEY WOULD BE GODS: OUR PAST RECONSIDERED, OUR FUTURE FOREWARNED

PART V: CIVILIZATIONS

by Anthony Forwood (2011)

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40: Hidden Civilizations

There is another point to make regarding the archeological record in respect to human evolution. As we’ve seen, there’s a significant amount of evidence that has arisen over the years suggesting that fully evolved modern human beings were around millions of years earlier than we commonly understand.

If fully evolved humans have been around for millions of years, then what is described in the ancient legends has a much greater probability of being true. Many civilizations can rise and fall in the span of two million years, and so these humans may very likely have gone through at least one cataclysmic event, or perhaps even many, being almost completely wiped out but for a few of them who survived to slowly rebuild as a civilization.

These modern humans of prehistory may have been thrown into a situation – such as an ice age caused by a polar shift – where they had remained relatively isolated in one small region for thousands of years, living close together and rapidly developing into an ordered civilization in order to live comfortably and support their increasing numbers. Such a civilization could easily have advanced quite rapidly in certain areas through the combined effort and skill of the people.

After some time, perhaps when the ice age had begun to recede and the land opened up, a small number of these early humans may have eventually separated from the original group and emigrated to other regions for whatever reason, spreading out into distant lands as they began to multiply. Because of this continual spreading out rather than remaining close together, the second group would be much slower to develop into civilized societies because they wouldn’t have been nearly as close-knit and organized as their distant relatives. The original group of humans, being isolated within a relatively small region, would have been forced to develop a high degree of cooperative organization as their numbers began to increase and resources became scarcer as a result. Such a close-knit and cooperative society might advance quickly as a civilization, and as long as they remained isolated from the rest of the world and confined to a relatively small region, they might easily have been missed from the archeological record. The region where they lived may have long since disappeared, either quickly in a cataclysmic event, or more slowly through natural geological processes, obliterating virtually all traces of their civilization. Or perhaps this lost civilization might still be found in some very remote place that humans have yet to explore.

Such an isolated group who were very successful at dealing with their survival needs would have continued to develop their knowledge and skills fairly rapidly in relation to those who weren’t organized into civilized societies but were spreading out more and more over the land. The isolated group would need to develop a spoken language very quickly if they didn’t have one already, since they would need to communicate with each other in order to work and live cooperatively. If their population continued to grow over the centuries within a confined region, then they would also need to develop a system of economics, laws to maintain order, agricultural and/or hunting skills, etc. Being close together in large enough numbers, they would be able to coordinate projects that required both the physical and mental effort of many people and people with specialized knowledge and skills. As a group that has always been isolated and that was happy with what they had and knew of no other way than planning and cooperation, they wouldn’t have a strong propensity for warring with other groups and conquering foreign lands, but would instead direct their activities to more peaceful and productive endeavors that offered mutual benefits for all.

How might such a group have developed as a society, beyond what was necessary to maintaining an orderly civilization? Undergoing a rather escalated rate of social development due to their situation, they might have continually advanced in their knowledge and skills, as far as they had the inclination and ability to. Having succeeded at reaching a comfortable level of existence, they would certainly have the time on their hands to do so.

It’s important to understand that such an isolated civilization might be so unlike other civilizations we know about in so many ways that it’s hard to conceive how it might have developed. We can hardly imagine it without using our knowledge of our own and other civilizations as the basis for understanding its developmental influences and their effects, but this can easily introduce many false assumptions. For instance, there’s no reason to believe that art would have developed in any way like it did in the rest of the world, if it developed at all. Similarly, learning and education might easily have been approached differently, both in method and direction. Social attitudes wouldn’t have been molded by the same influences that the rest of the world was exposed to, such as our early religions, which have dominated the masses mostly through fear and aggression. There wouldn’t have been the influences of the outside world and the advantages of trade. We can only speculate on how such a civilization would have existed, where they might have existed, and what achievements they might have made.

The possibility of such an isolated civilization having existed in the past is itself somewhat speculative, and although there seems to be no physical evidence to support the idea, it’s still entirely possible. The point of considering this idea, more than anything, is to give an idea as to why there may not be any signs of an advanced civilization from before the ice age even if one had existed, and still might. I also offer it as a possible scenario for explaining the signs of human-like creatures left in the archeological record, as we saw in a previous chapter.