[HN Gopher] Lake Michigan Stonehenge - What have researchers lea...
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       Lake Michigan Stonehenge - What have researchers learned?
        
       Author : janandonly
       Score  : 50 points
       Date   : 2024-10-09 20:03 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.illinoisfishinghub.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.illinoisfishinghub.com)
        
       | Loughla wrote:
       | Why is the baseline assumption that early humans were not as
       | intelligent as we are now? I've never understood that. It seems
       | like levers and rolling logs would be pretty easy to figure out,
       | or what am I missing?
        
         | evbogue wrote:
         | Probably the lack of similar structures in the area at the time
         | makes this significant. If large arranged stones from 10,000
         | years ago were common around the great lakes then we'd assume
         | everyone knew how to move large rocks back then.
        
         | mykowebhn wrote:
         | There's also the assumption that humans in the Americas, prior
         | to the mass arrival of Europeans, were primitive and did not
         | form sophisticated societies like those found in the "Old
         | World". I think this has been otherwise shown, but old
         | assumptions die hard.
        
           | jordanb wrote:
           | The large American civilizations (Inca, Aztec, etc) were
           | essentially bronze-age civilizations. Perhaps Europe would
           | have been so as well had there not been a bronze-age
           | collapse.
        
         | AlotOfReading wrote:
         | That isn't the assumption. Modern archaeologists usually assume
         | that ancient people were as intelligent as we are today, or
         | even more so.
         | 
         | What's not assumed is that they had the same thought patterns.
         | People don't derive ideas uniformly from the space of all
         | possible ideas, they tend to think within the constraints and
         | realities of past experiences. If you build a house, it's going
         | to be similar to houses you've seen before. If you paint a
         | painting, it's going to be a _painting_ rather than some other
         | means of expressing yourself with colored pigments.
         | 
         | In other words, ideas are subject to the same kinds of path
         | dependence that technology is. When we see something that's
         | severely anachronistic (outside of it's "normal" place in
         | time), the initial priors are that things like the dating are
         | wrong rather than ab initio invention of a whole suite of
         | different ideas that just happened to be preserved for us.
        
         | detourdog wrote:
         | You are missing nothing they used to do brain surgery.
         | 
         | https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/in-roughly-150...
        
       | oh_my_goodness wrote:
       | I'd really enjoy actually seeing one of the pictures of
       | mastodons.
        
         | holtkam2 wrote:
         | Unfortunately they are extinct
        
           | oh_my_goodness wrote:
           | Right! The pictures on the rocks are either extinct, or close
           | to it.
        
         | oh_my_goodness wrote:
         | https://news.artnet.com/art-world/prehistoric-structure-lake...
         | 
         | https://imgur.com/gallery/lake-michigan-mastodon-rock-undoct...
        
       | coldspoon95 wrote:
       | This is just further evidence to show that there's some periodic
       | reset of civilization. Perhaps sun forced(micro-novas triggered
       | by the black hole at the center of our Milky Way flipping its
       | magnetic field). The shedding of the sun's outer convective layer
       | throws a big disturbance to the earth's tectonic plates causing
       | plates to move(or poles to be perceived as moving if the tectonic
       | plates were to be used as frame of reference). This is led by a
       | period where earth doesn't have a strong magnetic field(as it
       | takes time to recover), and low solar output which sputters back
       | up leading to an ice-age with intermittent blasts. This prolly
       | forced humans to build large underground shelters(Gobekle Tepe,
       | Cappadosia, etc) to live when there's intense solar outbursts.
       | 
       | Our genome hasn't evolved much since the last 150,000yrs meaning
       | that all faculties have been the same for ancient man. What we've
       | effectively achieved in 2000yrs must've been replicated a few
       | times in history. Even if the silicon age never came, it is
       | likely man had strong agriculture, pottery, understanding of
       | nature, evolution of animals(wolves were effectively bred into
       | dog companions 40,000yrs ago), etc that would've surely lead to
       | vast amounts of knowledge being gathered. And with high CO2
       | concentrations, it is likely that agriculture produce and access
       | to energy(coal, firewood, nutrition, etc) was abundant to support
       | fairly complex civilization that could support occupational
       | specializations.
       | 
       | There's evidence across the world in anthropologic, natural
       | history and other evidence left behind. However, the full
       | interpretation lies behind a series of walls of resets where we
       | can only guess, but not fully understand the context of how
       | things were. Imagine a 10,000yrs from now, someone finds a
       | portion of a fossilized city dump with no direct access or
       | lineage from present day. There's not much that can be gleaned of
       | things there. And some of these events are so catastrophic that
       | they move oceans/atmospheric currents at supersonic speeds and
       | cover large swathes of land under miles of slurry.
        
         | detourdog wrote:
         | One simple shift is that the Astrological calendar Was based on
         | the sun's position between the constellation's.
         | 
         | Imagine the crisis of faith when the monuments started to
         | mislead society.
        
         | franktinariwen wrote:
         | How is this evidence of the "periodic reset of civilization?"
         | Why what we have done in the past 2000 years have been
         | replicated before? These just seem to be unfounded speculations
         | like pyramid lasers and Atlantis.
        
       | AlbertCory wrote:
       | I'd never heard of this, despite growing up in Chicago. It makes
       | you wonder how many other archeological treasures are underwater
       | and undiscovered, given how water levels used to be lower.
        
       | emmelaich wrote:
       | Not convinced this is anything at all. Where's some clearer
       | pictures? Where's a diagram of the circles?
       | 
       | and sure enough from the man himself.
       | 
       | https://holleyarchaeology.com/index.php/the-truth-about-the-...
       | 
       | > _For example, there is not a henge associated with the site and
       | the individual stones are relatively small when compared to what
       | most people think of as European standing stones. It should be
       | clearly understood that this is not a megalith site like
       | Stonehenge._
        
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