SMF

Long ago there were cliff dwellers somewhere in the Southwestern part of the US. Anthropologists and historians have speculated as to who they were and how did their culture operate. No mystery - I imagine my own family (and everyone else's family) a wife and one or more infants, toddlers, adolescents, etc. How often do we come and go from our dwelling? Dozens and scores of times every day, certainly. OK, you have one room, no bathroom, no food because you already ate it. You have no doors or lights other than sunshine. You have this extremely tall ladder that each and every single living person has to navigate incessantly. I call BS! This is simply a practical impossibility. Hey, where's the kid? Oh, I guess he or she just fell 80 feet to the canyon floor while I wasn't looking. Yesterday when grandma fell I thought the ladder might have been a little loose on that first rung. We probably should make a new ladder. How can anyone sober and in their right mind imagine families living in caves that require tall ladders? How stupid! Just my opinion. You may form your own.

And yet it happened.

After extensive research into the origins of this phenomenon I have uncovered the missing link:
Note - this was how they got up there, and I am convinced they used giant pillows on the ground for those wishing to exit the caves.

Gary, I suspect a lot of what folks conjecture about what ancient civilizations did is just that. But in the end we really don't know.

I do notice, to your point, these folks aren't around living that supposed way anymore. Who knows why, maybe a failed experiment etc.

Chris

Yes, this may have been a prison of sorts. You don't like it up here, there's the door!!!

It didn't have to be safe--just less dangerous than the alternative.

Access and egress could have been ropes from above or rigid ladders or complex scaffolds from below, either of which would have successfully overcome gravity. This theory is limited by the unsupported and arrogant presumption that humans created and used the chambers. And/or that whomever or whatever made them did not have the ability to fly.

EL Alamein wrote: ↑Wed Jul 17, 2019 6:14 pm Gary, I suspect a lot of what folks conjecture about what ancient civilizations did is just that. But in the end we really don't know.

True enough.
We can't even reach a consensus on exactly how they used a vintage-style shaving scuttle back in the day.
It's such a mundane thing that nobody bothered to document it.

brothers wrote: ↑Sat Jul 13, 2019 6:22 pm Long ago there were cliff dwellers somewhere in the Southwestern part of the US. Anthropologists and historians have speculated as to who they were and how did their culture operate. No mystery - I imagine my own family (and everyone else's family) a wife and one or more infants, toddlers, adolescents, etc. How often do we come and go from our dwelling? Dozens and scores of times every day, certainly. OK, you have one room, no bathroom, no food because you already ate it. You have no doors or lights other than sunshine. You have this extremely tall ladder that each and every single living person has to navigate incessantly. I call BS! This is simply a practical impossibility. Hey, where's the kid? Oh, I guess he or she just fell 80 feet to the canyon floor while I wasn't looking. Yesterday when grandma fell I thought the ladder might have been a little loose on that first rung. We probably should make a new ladder. How can anyone sober and in their right mind imagine families living in caves that require tall ladders? How stupid! Just my opinion. You may form your own.

Once homo sapiens learned to cooperatively hunt with weapons their only natural predators were...each other. Living in such an environment makes sense when you realise that any contact with the people from the other side of the valley is likely to result in death - either violently or by the magical germ. There is strong evolutionary pressure for cooperation within a group - but not without. The emotion of disgust that characterises racism at its worst is a powerful survival mechnanism; THEIR way of eating, mating etc could in fact prove lethal for OUR bodies, with no resistance to the germs exchanged during such activities. Horror at other groups is the explanation for these dwellings; also note these appear in warmer climes - germs, bacteria etc are more abundant and varied the closer you approach the equator - as is ethnocentrism, proportionately.

Excellent points. Probably the most credible explanation.

To add to Louis' remark, if you haven't read Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, you should. Diamond has his faults and is susceptible to finding evidence that suits his arguments (as are we all), but I can't find much to criticise in GG&S. The books starts with the observation that societies/cultures around the world have developed at very different rates, yet even his Papuan translator could use a cellphone with ease despite having living ancestors who had grown up in a stone age culture. His thesis is that it takes large animals amenable to domestication for agriculture, and high value crops suitable for your climate than can be exploited by such agriculture. Such animals and crops are easily transferred across longitudes, where climates are similar, but not so much across latitudes where it will be colder or hotter. Extremes of climate will inhibit the availability of abundant food as a result. Germs play their part in that societies that domesticate animals acquire their diseases (TB is a bovine disease) and some immunity to them on the one hand, and that tropical diseases (and malaria in particular) prevent human flourishing where they are rampant. The book is a believable plea for considering the world's populations as having more in common than we might think, with peculiar combinations of circumstances being the important reasons why they have ended up in such varying degrees of development. It ignores the research that these populations have other intrinsic differences (some of which are unacceptable to mention in polite society or PC circles). No doubt the truth lies somewhere between the two. Nonetheless, an important book, and a surprisingly good read.

drmoss_ca wrote: ↑Wed Oct 02, 2019 5:10 am...The book is a believable plea for considering the world's populations as having more in common than we might think, ...

Sadly, I cannot cite the source, but I have read that in order to find an ancestor in common between any two individuals on Earth, you need to go back at most 50 generations, regardless of geographical separation.
For the majority of pairings it would be far fewer.

That's a fascinating concept (or fact). Thinking about it as a practical nerd, I want to check the common ancestors of the folks who were the first commonly related pair of the 50 generations, and then for the common relations who were the first of those 50 generations and so on to the beginning. I suppose we'd eventually have to dig up the remains of everybody. I am also wondering where would one locate the information required to check ancestors going back several hundred/thousand/ad infinitum years in all populations of the planet in order to identify the common origins. I'm sure Adam and Eve and Cain, etc. would have an easy job, but how would one identify the rapists and pillagers of the bygone eons who just stopped long enough to attack the settlement? Who was the daddy and the mommy? Impossible in fact but easily blown off by the experts who take credit for this information. Where is the DNA database? I should probably have posted this in Joke of the Day! Rest easy! It's a rhetorical question. John, of course I'm just joking with you, brother!

You don't even have to do that, Gary. You can figure it out by using the complex mathematics developed by evolutionary biologists. People imagine that since we have two parents, four grandparents and eight grandparents etc that we are related to more and more people as we look further back, but the fact is that our population has steadily grown with time and was much, much smaller in the past, and thus many past ancestors are shared with other descendants. Allowing for the fact that bloodlines, just like variations of a gene die out (genetic drift), those of us around today have even fewer ancestors to share out between us. Ultimately, this could mean we all sprang from one couple, NOT because there was only one couple, but because the other bloodlines have become extinct and thus they cannot have any descendants around today. Now I don't believe we all descended from one pair of humans, and the popular understanding that we may all be descendants of a mitochondrial Eve and a Y-Chromosomal Adam is likely wrong, but not impossible. They would not even have to have met or mated, nor even lived at the same time or in the same place. The peculiar thing about genetic drift is that as time goes by, this becomes more likely to be true as other bloodlines die out.

All of us not only have common human ancestors, but share a common ancestor with every other species on earth. There's an amusing iOS app called TimeTree 4 which will look it up for you. Humans and red oaks, for example, diverged from their last common ancestor 1495.8 million years ago, or about 2 billion years after life first appeared on earth. Isn't that a splendid thought? Another book recommendation on this topic - The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins.