[HN Gopher] Lake Michigan Stonehenge - What have researchers lea...
___________________________________________________________________
Lake Michigan Stonehenge - What have researchers learned?
Author : janandonly
Score : 85 points
Date : 2024-10-09 20:03 UTC (4 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.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| This assumes we've been comprehensive in unearthing ancient
| structures that were buried under water and dirt 10K years
| ago. We mostly find these types of sites when doing new
| construction. There is likely countless underground ancient
| structures undiscovered off the coastline, since sea levels
| rose more than 120 meters at the end of the last glacial
| period.
|
| Also, I wouldn't assume at all that knowledge would transfer
| outside of a localized area. It didn't happen like that in
| the so-called hearths of civilization like Babylon, Egypt,
| China, etc.
| 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.
| dugmartin wrote:
| Yes, for instance in 1100AD Cahokia Mounds had a larger
| population than London.
|
| https://cahokiamounds.org/
| argsnd wrote:
| I don't think London was a particularly important city in
| the world in 1100AD
| 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...
| sisisbcucksba wrote:
| How is a square hole in a skull conclusive evidence for brain
| surgery?
| defrost wrote:
| Few things in the field are _ _conclusive_ _ many things
| are highly suggestive and have few other explainations.
|
| WRT "brain surgey" - the operation in question would be to
| relieve swelling under the skull that was pressing on the
| brain - probably caused by a blow.
|
| The remaining skull would show that the hole was cut using
| an edge, likely extremely sharp flaked stone similar to a
| modern ceramic edge knife - an original blow would have
| splintered bone and caused a swelling, the splintering
| would have been cut away. Other evidence would likely have
| included signs that the bone restitched itself and "grew
| back" to a degree, demonstrating the person survived for
| some years afterwards.
|
| I know nothing about this _specific_ skull, there are
| others with similar work discussed in journals.
| fransje26 wrote:
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S18788750
| 2...
| schrectacular wrote:
| You might like Graeber's book "The Dawn of Everything". He goes
| into some of the scientific historic reasons for why.
| giantg2 wrote:
| My view is on why that is the assumption is because
| anthropology seems to put a lot of pressure on higher level
| tasks only being achievable through some mass of individuals.
| The idea is that ancient people had a struggle to survive and
| deal with daily tasks, so they must not have had enough time to
| pursue advanced topics or even care to focus on them.
| devnonymous wrote:
| One aspect of this is knowledge is part of intelligence and
| lifespans influence shared/communal knowledge.
|
| I don't think anyone claims that early humans were not as
| intelligent as we are now but the weakest link in the knowledge
| of how to effectively use levers or roll logs, or not
| (metaphorically) 'reinvent the wheel', would have been the
| eldest members in the community.
| 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.
| majormajor wrote:
| > 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.
|
| You say this has all happened before, and yet that "a modern
| city dump in 10,000 years" would have a LOT of artifacts that
| do not exist in any 10,000 year old sites we've found. If we
| were to find one, a lot could actually be gleaned from it.
| sisisbcucksba wrote:
| Which artifacts would last 10k years?
| ascorbic wrote:
| Glass bottles, aluminium cans, ceramics
| h2odragon wrote:
| you'd think we'd have more "bail top" bottles around
| today if they were so durable.
|
| I've got a gully that was used as a trash dump in the
| 1920s. We found some "rust colored areas" in the soil and
| some ~10mm shards of ceramics with recognizable glazing
| still. even the bricks were shattered and easy to mistake
| for rock.
|
| I think the speed of natural recycling is vastly
| underestimated. There's a few rare occasions and
| circumstances where preservation can happen; the default
| state is entropy eating things as fast as they're built.
| ascorbic wrote:
| It varies a lot by location and conditions. I find lots
| of stuff in fields around me, of all ages. Loads of
| Victorian ceramics, but also 1920s glass, 1980s ring
| pulls, Roman tiles, Mesolithic flint.
| majormajor wrote:
| Things made of stone are easy ones, of course, since they
| already have. The volume of those today is far higher than
| in any historical sites. Glass, ceramics could also survive
| in many conditions. Copper, I think? But just the
| stone/concrete infrastructure remains of an NYC would be
| very noticable.
|
| The volume of human remains would be wildly different too,
| admittedly we're getting away from just "city dumps" then.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Radioactive ones.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Nokia 3310s, mostly.
| 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.
| jbattle wrote:
| Lake Michigan is BIG. The location of this thing isn't public
| but Chicago is closer to Cleveland than the middle of Grand
| Traverse Bay. Washington DC and NYC are closer together than
| Chicago and G.T.B.
|
| I'm no expert in the Great Lakes but I'm surprised they found
| something that far north that old. From a little reading the
| glaciers were retreating from that area around the same time
| frame. I guess +/- 1,000 years is a big deal.
|
| There are a bunch of cool signs of the precursor to Lake
| Michigan around Chicago from the time when the lake was
| "capped" in the north and drained to the south. Blue Island and
| Stony Island were real islands. Ridge road to the north marks
| where the shore once stood. Pretty cool to imagine.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Chicago
| dhosek wrote:
| Where I live in Oak Park, there is a ridge on the
| appropriately-named Ridgeland Avenue, which marks the shore
| of the ancient Lake Chicago. I think my current home would
| have been in marshy shoreland.
|
| Edit: Just looked at the article, and see that Ridgeland
| avenue is listed as one of the shoreline areas in the
| article.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Interesting. I grew up in Roseland, and there was a hill east
| of Michigan Ave. going down. I always thought that was from
| Lake Calumet which used to be a lot bigger.
| 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._
| exegete wrote:
| >The site in Grand Traverse Bay is best described as a long
| line of stones which is over a mile in length.... Dr. John
| O'Shea from University of Michigan has been working on a
| broadly similar structure over in Lake Huron... [He] thinks
| that it may be a prehistoric drive line for herding caribou....
| It is highly possible that the site in Grand Traverse Bay may
| have served a similar function to the one found in Lake Huron.
|
| So not like Stonehenge but seems interesting to me.
| mrangle wrote:
| The "Stonehenge" reference is likely utilized as an imagery
| anchor that most people will recognize. Whereas the
| implication is that it is suspected that the possible
| structure under discussion and Stonehenge are similar because
| they both may be intentionally built megalithic structures
| (generally from the Neolithic). Of which there are a lot of
| worldwide examples that are in straight lines, as well as
| other configurations.
| technothrasher wrote:
| Funny to contrast it to Stonehenge by noting the lack of a
| henge, since Stonehenge does not actually have a henge either.
| But I suspect he means there is no ditch structure at all.
| Galatians4_16 wrote:
| Isn't it essentially a henge made of megalithic blocks?
| russfink wrote:
| ... and yet another theory was that a time traveler became
| stranded in the past, and devoted the rest of their life to
| marking their presence as a signal to their colleagues in the
| future, similar to a Vernor Vinge or Michael Crichton storyline.
| russfink wrote:
| Further thought - humans are obsessed with powers of 10. These
| stones were arranged 9,000 to 10,000 years ago. Would it not
| make sense that the traveler dialed up "10,000 years ago" in
| their machine? Can we use this with our own relative position
| to the stones' placement (eg 9,500 years) to predict when
| humans will achieve time travel (eg 500 years from now)? Lovely
| fantastical thoughts for a Saturday - enjoy!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-10-13 22:02 UTC)