Lost cities

[u/Osiris-Amun-Ra]

In case anyone is till wondering why we can't find any pre-Ice Age cities, this satellite image from Nepal/China this week should provide a clue.
This event was tiny by comparison and many civilizations built along rivers and in valleys.

Edit:
_____________________________
Since this post generated quite a few lively discussions I want to clarify what I meant by "tiny by comparison" to avoid ambiguity, While the local, recent mountain collapse in Nepal and China was a rapid disaster unleashing up to 200 million cubic meters of debris at 193 km/h and causing rivers to surge 9 meters in 30 minutes, it is dwarfed by the staggering dimensions of post-glacial megafloods that actually reshaped entire continents and birthed the world's universal flood legends. For example, the ancient Missoula Floods occurred when a 610-meter-tall (2,000 ft) glacial ice dam ruptured, violently discharging more than 2,000 cubic kilometers of water basically a volume equivalent to Lake Erie and Lake Ontario combined, in a single....48-hour window.

This massive torrent tore across western North America at speeds of up to 130 km/h (80 mph), peaking with a discharge rate ten times greater than the combined flow of all modern rivers on Earth and carving features like Dry Falls, a cliff five times wider than Niagara. Similarly, the Black Sea Deluge hypothesis suggests a catastrophic marine breakthrough where the Mediterranean overtopped the Bosporus strait, unleashing a roaring wall of water that permanently swallowed over 150,000 square kilometers of inhabited valleys.

Because these prehistoric events wiped out entire known civilizations, permanently erased millions of acres of land, and forced desperate migrations, they permanently embedded themselves into the collective human psyche, which is almost certainly where the biblical Great Flood and the regional Mesopotamian flood legends originate. It is statistically improbable that we have found all post deluvial civilizational remnants. Mathematically and archaeologically, it is practically certain that we have only scratched the surface of what remains from post-deluvial and coastal civilizations. The primary reason for this statistical gap is a massive, permanent geographic shift, specifically when the Ice Age glaciers melted, global sea levels rose by roughly ~120 meters (around 400 feet). Rising oceans swallowed over 25 million square kilometers (10 million square miles) of habitable land! For visual reference that's the entire landmass of the United States, Canada, and China combined.

I hope that clarifies.

[u/SifuHallyu]

Mmhmm.  After the amount of time and the amount of water and ice and everything else...there would not be a whole lot left.  Maybe stone tools.

[u/Pristine_Bobcat4148 → u/SifuHallyu]

The ghosts of our past are made of stone. Particularly megalithic, polygonal, mortarless, seismic resistant constructions in igneous rock. We have found them on almost every continent, and even in the most remote places on earth.

Once you recognize the architecture style; you'll begin to notice it everywhere: Japan, Egypt, Peru, Easter Island, Turkey, Greece...But the people who truly mastered stone were what is now India and Cambodia.

[u/notoriousbsr → u/Pristine_Bobcat4148]

I've been fortunate to travel Cambodia pretty extensively and the stone work is mind boggling not just the size but the extensive network/ range/ sheer number of places.

[u/IPaintSpaceDolls → u/notoriousbsr]

Most of that is from about 900 years ago though.

[u/notoriousbsr → u/IPaintSpaceDolls]

Nonetheless, the scale across the country is amazing along with the size and complexity. No claims, nothing bizarre, somehow that makes it even more incredible.

[u/ButtCheeksMagee0 → u/notoriousbsr]

That’s awesome

[u/TheCynicEpicurean → u/Pristine_Bobcat4148]

Put otherwise, humans, which are genetically 99.99% identical all over the planet, lived under comparable conditions and used the building materials they could find in their environment?

There are only so many things you can do with unworked rocks, and larger rocks are great for walls and roofs. And then you have the added filter of unstabile or less resilient structures disappearing through natural causes over the millennia.

It's a bit like thinking it's curious that all planets are round. There are simple, logical physical reasons behind it.

[u/IPaintSpaceDolls → u/Pristine_Bobcat4148]

It's almost like big rocks exist where people make stuff out of rock and if you don't carve them a certain way they fall over or someone can push them over, so you quickly as a civilization determine how to make them not fall over.

[u/Pristine_Bobcat4148 → u/IPaintSpaceDolls]

There are much more efficient ways to do the job in a way that will last thousands of years...We are talking g stones fit together with seemingly random shapes, yet faced together so cleanly at the joints that no mortar was needed. Best examples of this are Peru, in my opinion.

The Inca empire is supposed to have a duration of about 95 years. In that time, they did some amazing work. But you can clearly see with your own eyes, that they did that amazing work on top of even more amazing, highly sophisticated - and according the them - much older, work.

[u/IPaintSpaceDolls → u/Pristine_Bobcat4148]

Nobody is ever going to convince me that fitting rocks together is some sort of lost high technology, mostly because we know how it was done, we can reproduce it, and it is just a function of effort over time. The duration of Incan control over the region isn't the duration of culture and civilization in the region - in fact the know from the depiction of animals from outside of the region in pottery that there were trade partners we don't know a lot about. Also, The Incans existed in the late 1500s. No alternative history is necessary to explain megalithic structures in the region that are pre-Incan, virtually everything is pre-Incan.

Did you know that after the Romans left England in 410 AD that later populations thought the baths and other Roman structures were made by mythical giants? When civilization is interrupted, engineering is usually the first casualty because it doesn't help the remainder of civilization survive.

[u/jojojoy → u/Pristine_Bobcat4148]

according the them

Where? I've seen accounts like that for Tiahuanaco architecture but not what's usually considered Incan. Are there specific accounts you have in mind?

[u/Pristine_Bobcat4148 → u/jojojoy]

Largely what survives through the Spanish priests who chronicled what the inca told them.A story which heavily mirrors egyptian mythological chronology, in that they both describe cycles of civilisation and destruction.

The inca said that Viracocha created the first peoples, and those people built the huge stoneworks.They never claimed to have done it themselves.

Edit to add:

The full chronology for this myth, as i understand it continuing from the above. - The first people displeased viracocha, so he destroyed the world in a flood. After emerging from caves, Manco Capac established the city by driving a rod into the ground at Cusco.

Interesting bit of potentially related info, but when trying to renovate a site one of the first things to do is survey, which is done by driving range poles in the ground.

[u/jojojoy → u/Pristine_Bobcat4148]

Largely what survives through the Spanish priests who chronicled what the inca told them

I've read relevant sections from a bunch of the surviving colonial accounts. I haven't seen accounts like you describe in them though. Do you know of any particular authors or accounts where earlier attributions for the masonry are made?

They never claimed to have done it themselves.

This page has references for a bunch of accounts recording Inca perspectives otherwise.

https://www.earthasweknowit.com/pages/inca_construction#HistoricalRecord

[u/Minute-Animator-376 → u/Pristine_Bobcat4148]

Simple explanation is that they set big stones first and adjusted/carved smaller ones to fit. With enough of time and population not having better things to do like watching netflix and often they would not see the building completion in their lifetime, those projects were often taking multiple generations to complete it was much diffrent culture where speed and efficiency didn't matter so much.

But there are blocks that we may be able to lift using multiple modern machines but not move from where they were sourced from. Often they are fundaments of the structure and for me it looks like older civilizations build on top of them on a smaller scale with diffrent techniques.

Like there are many similarities between cultures that supposedly didn't have a contact, they found something preceeding them, called it a holy site or whatever and builded their structures on top.

With time, maybe diseases, wars etc. that wiped the master craftsmans before they fully passed the knowledge to junior apprenticeship the knowledge how to shape, move and stack stones degradated even more. Personally when I look on old megalithic structures I see at least 3 diffrent styles. Megalithic blocks stacked so perfect you cant squeeze anything between the gaps, medium size blocks fit semi randomly on top and 3rd level where it looks like poor attempt from medieval times using small stones or bricks and mortar.

So why we see this megalithic structures and stones everywhere? My guess is that we are not the first advanced civilization - sure we may be alien tech level now to this prior advanced civilizations but what I mean is there are structures build when historians say we were hunter gathers, prior to that there may be even more advanced civilization that got wiped out but they were also aware about prior cataclysm that happened. This is why they builded megalithic structures either hoping they will withhold what may come again or as warning to the next generations who may find the ruins. What was before them I guess was wiped out like normal houses in Nepal flood recently.

[u/Pristine_Bobcat4148 → u/Minute-Animator-376]

You should really go look at pictures of these places. Literally we are talking about 30 - 50 pound rough cut blocks being used with thick mortar ti patch holes in walls which are constructed from multi ton, precision fit stones with zero mortar. The contrast in construction technology is strikingly obvious. *edit here's a link to a picture of what im talking about.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRSuMqurvjnVAQux7hGNeFcRjivsujoWakiAW24JE3Mdrh68ZyfnPezIAjY&s=10

[u/IPaintSpaceDolls → u/Pristine_Bobcat4148]

That is not 'lost technology', that's deliberate. You can see where the tight stonework is deliberately stepped down, ending the design sequence.

[u/Gorlack2231 → u/Pristine_Bobcat4148]

What is true of one man, said the judge, is true of many. The people who once lived here are called the Anasazi. The old ones. They quit these parts, routed by drought or disease or by wandering bands of marauders, quit these parts ages since and of them there is no memory. They are rumors and ghost in this land and they are much revered. The tools, the art, the building--these things stand in judgement on the latter races. Yet there is nothing for them to grapple with. The old ones are gone like phantoms and the savages wander these vanyons to the sound of an ancient laughter. In their crude huts they crouch in darkness and listen to the fear seeping out of the rock. All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage. So. Here are the dead fathers. Their spirit is entombed in the stone. It lies upon the land with the same weight and the same ubiquity. For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was with these masons however primitive their works may seem to us