I'm reading a book now called Plato Prehistorian, by Mary Settegast. True to its title, the book explores the possibility that events from Plato's books―which it's always been assumed he took from Greek mythology―were actually based on real events in what was already a distant past. Prehistoric, either because people involved hadn't developed writing yet, or they had but their writing was lost.
It's an interesting idea. The danger with this kind of investigation is that mythology and philosophy could get flattened down to a kind of historical reporting, purely utilitarian. But Settegast knows her stuff on the great epochs of the recent past. And she's got interesting ideas on what happened during the ice age.
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This one's definitely very interesting to me but the unfortunate part is that I won't be able to get hold of a copy. The library here doesn't own one - the place once again proven to be next to useless. I'm pretty sure the library there is where you got yours. On the other hand copies for sale are few and cost quite a bit more than I want to pay. Oh well.
I was fascinated to learn another scholar had become immersed enough in the study of prehistory other than the old caveman to modern man routine that she had written a well accepted book about the subject. Some professional people, not necessarily archeologists, have suggested there's evidence indicating a high human civilization preceded ours and that a traumatic event like having a barrage of comets hit the northern hemisphere ice sheets could have done just that.
It's true that the oldest pyramids in Egypt are the most sophisticated ones. There are many examples but the most relevant one as far as proof of great age is concerned was the recently discovered Göbekli Tepe - it's 11,000 years old. Interestingly, stone can't be radiocarbon dated but soil and biological material can be - they know how old the place was because it had been deliberately buried.
Thanks for introducing me to an explorer brave enough to look beyond the status quo.
Settegast is a good writer in terms of getting some arcane information and unusual speculation across in a relatively accessible way. (By the way, "unusual" shouldn't be assumed to mean "wrong.") That said, a lot of this stuff is out there to be found now. Maybe there'll be another edition and the library will pick it up this time.
One way or another we are only a few thousand years from the Bronze Age, not a long time when you think about it. And From there the Neolithic Era isn't too distant. But what exactly were these periods. That's something we're still learning about, and we probably will never get the full answer. It would make sense if our development through those thousands of years were not quite linear.
Gobekli Tepe is in southwestern Turkey. Anatolia. Now that is a busy region when it comes to archaeology and paleoanthropology. The populations of several parts of Europe came from Anatolia, at a time when there was a lot of on-foot migration in general. I wonder what the local climate was like at the time.
Not a problem. That's one of the areas where our interests overlap, I think.
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