Posted on 08/20/2004 9:10:09 AM PDT by blam
Prehistoric Desert Town Found in Western Sahara
Thu Aug 19, 2004 01:52 PM ET
RABAT (Reuters) - The remains of a prehistoric town believed to date back 15,000 years and belong to an ancient Berber civilization have been discovered in Western Sahara, Moroccan state media said on Thursday. A team of Moroccan scientists stumbled across the sand-covered ruins of the town Arghilas deep in the desert of the Morocco-administered territory.
The remains of a place of worship, houses and a necropolis, as well as columns and rock engravings depicting animals, were found at the site near the town of Aousserd in northeastern Western Sahara.
The isolated area is known to be rich in prehistoric rock engravings but experts said the discovery could be significant if proven that the ruins were of Berber origin as this civilization is believed to date back only some 9,000 years.
"It appears that scientists have come up with the 15,000-years estimate judging by the style of the engravings and the theme of the drawings," Mustapha Ouachi, a Rabat-based Berber historian, told Reuters.
Berbers are the original inhabitants of North Africa before Arabs came to spread Islam in the seventh century.
The population of Western Sahara, seized by Morocco in 1975 when former colonial power Spain pulled out, are mostly of Berber and Arab descent.
Good job defeating the arguments of about 5 evos. They are starting to shift to their favorite manuver when they are being challenged- personal insult in lieu of rational argument.
Makes sense to me.
One on one without tools, maybe. But it's safe to say that man has killed far more sharks, tigers and bears than they have killed man. And sharks can't even survive in our natural habitat. Man has to go swimming in the ocear or seafaring for them to be a threat.
"Secondly, unlike other species, we tend to kill others of our kind."
Certainly man is a threat. But I'm supposed to believe man had 300,000 years of constant war that kept his population from growing to a point beyond where records of his existence are almost impossible to find?
"you've still got the millions slaughtered by the Huns, the Mongols, the Saracens, the Crusaders. Then you have the tens of millions of Native Americans who didn't survive contact with the Europeans and their diseases."
Look at that site on population statistics. Reality is that human population kept growing despite all those things. We had all those things and we still grew.
I'm supposed to believe that in a much more sparsely populated earth, man was even more limited in growth by those things. I would think he would be less limited due to the lower population. And in no case would I think he would stagnate for 300,000 years.
2000 years of growth followed by a global flood reducing the population to 8 followed by 4000 years of growth is much more believable.
Thank You.
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This explanation for how the find was dated makes no sense. You can't scientifically date objects to 15,000 years ago based on style or theme--scientists do radiocarbon dating, they aren't art historians who analyze aesthetic style or theme trends, and neither do art historians have any way of dating a style to 15,000 years ago. Of course it's Reuters reporting this, so who knows what Ouachi or the scientists he's citing actually said. . .
You have to be careful with this one, as the Tasadays (the prototypical tribe of this kind) were discovered to be a hoax. A better example, familiar to all of us, would be the American Indian. The vast majority of tribes remained hunter-gatherers right up until...well, as long as we let them.
You can't make the assumption that a life of cities and agriculture is happier than a nomadic life. If there's enough land to sustain you, why would you want to settle in one spot? And that's the rub. Agriculture developed first where there wasn't enough land to sustain a nomadic existence for the population.
Of course, when the Magic Book tells people that the giant grownup in the sky created the earth a few thousand years ago, you aren't going to get anywhere with argument.
Even after agriculture was discovered, it wouldn't have been terribly attractive.
Thru some recent reading, I learned that at least one of the western Native American tribes actually abandoned a quasi agriculturally dependent lifestyle in favor of a hunter/ gatherer one when they got horses. Don't recall the name of the tribe, but the source is an old novel, Sacajawea by Anna Lee Waldo.
You are making the point that this is probably not a 15,000 yr old TOWN, per our current understanding of the term.
Hunter-gatherer tribes usually don't create "towns", nor do they have the time and resources to have carvers etc., except in the most rudimentary ways such as the flint knappers and basket weavers.
Agriculture allowed for the introduction of such divisions of labor. The rise of towns, villages and hamlets came after that.
I hope the story is true. It would be marvelously fascinating to know that at roughly the same time that there were folks blowing ochre over their hands onto cave walls, there were others living totally different lives.
I'm still wondering abou the "name" part. After 15000yrs, what did they do, ask the old timer down the road what the name of the place was?
They didn't give a name. They did say it was found near a modern town and gave that name.
Jared Diamond Guns, Germs, and Steel makes the point that the ancient Near East had a wonderful combination of factors, most of all a set of wild grasses which (although not nearly as productive as their modern descendant cultivars) had highly edible seeds.
There tends never to be "enough land" in a fertile valley in that it will either overpopulate or attract raiders by dint of its very fertility.
It helps tremendously that the "scientific establishment" believes civilization started 15,000 years ago.
Pick a date that is much older than that and you better have extremely good science to support it or the establishment will ridicule you as a quack and pull your funding.
Pick a date that is much younger than that and you might as well be digging up your grandmother's grave. Nobody wants to hear about it. It's not newsworthy, and there goes your funding.
But pick a date, say right at 15000 years that is what the establishment believes is the beginning of civilization and then you have the ear of the news, as well as the ear of the scientific establishment. If you introduce anything at all that's new, you better make sure that your work enables enough of the establishment to say "I told you so". And your funding's assured.
As I recall, it's more like a bit over 6000, for civilization as in "real cities." There are places like Jericho that may have been inhabited earlier than that but they weren't very big. The whole Neolithic Revolution from the earliest domestication of cereal grasses is generally placed in the last 10-12K years, so the find announced in this article seems to be pushing the envelope. I say "seems to" because it needs a better article.
Pick a date that is much older than that ...
Pick a date that is much younger than that ...
But pick a date, say right at 15000 years ...
There was no predisposition for the current consensus (whatever it is). It was arrived at by following a preponderance of evidence. It has changed over time as the evidence picture changed. Nineteenth-century writers on Egyptian Dynastic history used chronologies which yield older dates than those now given for things like the initial unification of Egypt, etc. This does not show creationist-style dogmatic inflexibility.
Do a google on "Civilization began 15,000" and you get a lot of hits. But it is still controversial, do a google on "Civilization began" and you get stuff all over the board including a lot of hits for 6000.
Of course, you already know what I think the first cities appearing 6000 years ago means.
They may have pushed the envelope a little, but it's not like there was noone else claiming 15,000 years ago to give them credence.
"This does not show creationist-style dogmatic inflexibility. "
No, but then since the scientific community doesn't have "the word of God", I wouldn't expect them to show complete inflexibility. Then again, this does show a tremendous amount of evolutionistic group think. That article presented no real evidence that the city was 15,000 years old. It's a date picked because of popular opinion, not hard evidence.
But the academic establishment currently believes civilization started 5,000+ years ago in Sumeria. 15,000 years ago doesn't fit into any current theory. The archaeologists promoting this dating of the find are going against the established theory.
Mexico 15,000
2003 Book "The Long Summer: How Climate changed Civilization" uses 15,000
Ethiopia 15,000 years
I think you're using Google too robotically.
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