Brother John said:
From earlier higher cultures?
In an infinite regress? Or was some initial higher culture just created ex nihilo?
I don't know. Written human history only goes back about 6,000 years. And the earliest records of literate societies having a written history show those societies to be very sophisticated with mathematics, literature, laws, a knowledge of astronomy, etc. We can go back even further than that if we accept the "evidence" of old campfires, stone spear points, bit of bone, etc.
There's quite a lot of archaeological evidence that fills in the gap between stone spear points and campfires and literate societies like Early Dynastic Egypt or Uruk-period Mesopotamia. We can trace back urbanisation as far as at least 9000BC in Jericho. There is evidence for accounting systems stretching back in the Neolithic across the Middle East. There's evidence for the development of mining across tens of thousands of years. We can follow the development of stone tools way back into the Palaeolithic. Almost every type of technology that existed at the very beginning of written history in the fourth millennium BC has prehistory which has been studied in some detail. And the further back we look, the more primitive, on average, are the technological assemblages. This is not what we'd expect if there were earlier higher civilisations, as lower technology products would not be increasingly preferentially preserved over longer periods of time.
We don't even know if Neanderthal was driven to extinction by modern man or was intermarried with modern man to the point of extinction.
We do now know that if Neanderthals interbred with modern people, there are no traces of Neanderthal genes left in modern populations.
Rich _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
