Thanos5150 Wrote:
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> > I took world mythology classes in college and
> was
> > fascinated by the worlds these stories
> inhabited.
> > I was, and still am, convinced that in many
> myths
> > and legends there is a nugget of truth, some
> event
> > that actually happened to prompt those stories.
>
> Are there any in particular you are holding out
> hope for or have a special interest in?

Oh, where to start? LOL

I do believe that some disaster struck Earth around the end of the Ice Age, one that had far-reaching effects on our ancestors. A comet, a gamma ray burst, something that wiped out civilization, upset the climate and even topography, and spurred massive migrations as people did the best they could to survive. I think that many of the myths that have come down to us are truly ancient--but unfortunately we have no way to date or cross-date them as yet.

As the dates for civilization get pushed back further and further, my hope is that they someday turn up an Ice Age civilization from remote antiquity. IMO the roots of what we now consider the beginnings of civilization began there, long before archaeologists and anthropologists are willing to admit or even consider.

The end of the Ice Age was devastating to cultures around the world. If we're going to find evidence of their existence, we need to do some serious looking in the places that were above water 20,000 or more years ago. We also need to dispense with the fairy tale that the Americas were unpopulated prior to 13,000 or so years ago. (Clovis First is alive and well, unfortunately.) There is plenty of evidence that that's simply not true. I live 30 miles from Meadowcroft and I know it isn't. And if people were in this part of the world that early, there is a two pronged dilemma: at the rate archaeologists claim people move, there have been people in the Americas for many tens of thousands of years and/or they didn't ONLY walk across the Bering Strait. There were other points of entry and other means of travel.

Along with that, our ancestors were not dumb cavemen. It's past time we gave them credit for their intelligence and curiosity.

I have a difficult time believing that AMH didn't advance at all culturally for over 100,000 years. It defies reason. We're nothing if not curious and inventive. The ice sheets would limit their incursion into certain regions, but some places were quite pleasant and they could actually live near the glaciers comfortably. With so much water tied up in the ice sheets and so much more land exposed, there would have been places they could have settled year round.

A lot of our mythology and folklore reflects real events. Just because we don't have the proper context in which to place them doesn't mean they didn't happen or are just fanciful superstition.


> Same here. Graham took a turn I have no interest
> in.

Yep. I have always been fascinated by plants, but drug filled woo doesn't interest me.

I jumped back in with Magicians of the Gods,
> but found it "lackluster" to put it politely. It
> is a strange thing, but the alternative genre of
> writers are fading away with time and no new
> generation has stepped up to take their place.
> Instead it seems the void has been filled by
> fringe YouTubers. We are getting old my friend.

Either that or some of what was considered fringe 20 years ago is moving into the mainstream. Other than the idea that Antarctica was once the scene of a great civilization, I always thought GH's ideas weren't all that far from mainstream. At the time I thought he was asking questions that the archaeologists should have been asking. The hypothesis that there was an Ice Age civilization at least on par with Egypt and Mesopotamia is a reasonable one and doesn't deserve the scorn that's been heaped upon it.

I still haven't read Magicians but I do want to read America Before.