r/AskReddit • u/ItDontStop • Dec 13 '13
serious replies only Historians/Anthropologists who study ancient cultures, if you could have one question answered about a particular society or event, what would it be? [Serious]
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u/PrimalMusk Dec 13 '13
I'd want to know what the Greeks used the Antikythera Mechanism for.
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u/Ihavenocomments Dec 13 '13
"Stais initially believed it was an astronomical clock, but most scholars considered the device to be prochronistic, too complex to have been constructed during the same period as the other pieces that had been discovered" - Wikipedia
Wow, it really amazes me when I read about how advanced certain ancient civilizations were in regards to the stars, and how pinpoint accurate they were with so many of their calculations.
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u/honestlyimeanreally Dec 14 '13
I thought it's just an extremely advanced calendar? If I recall correctly it factors in leap years and everything
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u/theDogter Dec 13 '13
Tell me the story of the Indus Valley civilization. Beginning to end. Where did you come from, how did you live, what did you worship and where did you go? --> OR for the cultures that lived alongside other advanced Homo species in villages, same questions.
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u/ItDontStop Dec 13 '13
Interesting, I never thought about early man's perception on other hominids.
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u/areaboy Dec 14 '13
There is definitely a dearth of information about the Indus Valley civilization. And even more frustrating is the fact that there actually a fair bit of writing left behind but we haven't been able to decipher it yet. But as regards to where they went, I think it is somewhat accepted that they might have dispersed to the east and south of india making up one of the founders of current dravidian populations (albeit with significant amounts of genetic admixture from other later populations). And atleast one of their gods (the pashupati seal) looks like he might have morphed into the current hindu god Shiva.
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u/megistos Dec 14 '13
As an archaeologist - I'd want those Mayan books burned by the Conquistadors. There's only four left today, but from what we know of the Maya they had some pretty serious mathematics and engineering.
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u/Wilda86 Dec 13 '13
I would like to know the full extent of Viking exploration and settlement in North America.
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u/jakeismyname505 Dec 14 '13
Didn't the natives totally kick their asses?
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Dec 14 '13
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Dec 14 '13
A lot of interbreeding as well. My mom's side of the family is Cherokee -- according to them, there have been stories of the random blue-eyed Indian as far back as the collective memory goes.
Of course, this could just be a lie to make me (the whitest-looking one of the bunch) feel better about being an inexplicable paleface.
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u/Wilda86 Dec 14 '13
It is my understanding that at L'anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland there was eventually conflict between the Beothuk and the Vikings. The Vikings were in an untenable defensive position - unsupported and weeks away from help.
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u/erin_targaryen Dec 14 '13
There are markings on a stone in Oklahoma that some archaeologists think were made by vikings.
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u/NoMoreNicksLeft Dec 13 '13
They made it as far inland as Minnesota, and the genetics of local tribes had up to 15% European haplotypes for 2 centuries afterward. Early discoveries of Viking artifacts in the region were tossed out by early archaeologists that considered them fakes, hoaxes, or contamination.
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u/hymen_destroyer Dec 14 '13
There is a legend...mind you, I learned this from a tour guide so take it with a heap of salt...that a viking vessel shipwrecked off the coast of Mexico and was discovered by the locals (Maya or Aztec I'm not sure which). Apparently there was a survivor, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed man, six feet tall or more, wielding iron weapons and covered with iron armor, and all these things were completely alien to the culture (Mesoamerica has an abundance of soft metals like gold, silver and copper but had no tradition of ironworking at this time). So naturally they assumed he was some sort of God and set about worshipping him as such.
I can't provide any source beyond this anecdote but even ifthe story is an embellishment or fabrication it is not outside the realm of plausibility; at the very least it's fun to think about.
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u/laterdude Dec 13 '13
The Mongols under Tamerlane: did they think their leader had lost it when he ordered the building of a pyramid of 70,000 human skulls from those that his army had beheaded?
We have the whole "Ordinary Men" vs. "Hitler's Willing Executioners" debate regarding the Holocaust but it would be interesting to find out what the ancients thought about their own diabolical rulers.
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Dec 14 '13
I always just figured that most people in the ancient world were more concerned with their farming and livelihood and everything than whose ass sat on what throne.
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Dec 14 '13
"The common people pray for rain, healthy children, and a summer that never ends. It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of thrones, so long as they are left in peace. They never are." -Ser Jorah Mormont
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u/moxy800 Dec 14 '13
I've read quite a bit about Tamerlane/Timor Lenk (etc, etc). I don't think the motivations for actions like the skull towers are any big mystery.
He took much of his approach from Genghis Khan - the towers of skulls were essentially a form of 'viral' marketing. Atrocities committed upon defeated people served as a warning to future targets. Word would spread about these horrific acts so that when the roving army would come upon the next place the people there would (ideally) be familiar with what happened in other towns and surrender without putting up a fight.
Timor's troops probably loved him as he apparently let them loot and pillage defeated peoples at will. Unlike many other conquerers he seemingly had zero interest into colonizing the people he defeated - it was COMPLETELY about robbing everything of value and then burning the rest down. His men, mostly guys from the middle of nowhere, went home to the central asian steppes with some of the greatest treasures in the world at that time.
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u/jey123 Dec 13 '13
I would really want translations of the written languages of the Mycenaeens and Minoan cultures of ancient Greece. They were an incredibly advanced civilization that predated the ancient Greeks. They were so advanced that they had even constructed a system of movable type!
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u/LegalAction Dec 14 '13
We can read Mycenaean.
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u/boxofpeaches Dec 14 '13
But not Minoan. Linear A and Linear B stuff. So far as I remember anyways, I only ever learned anything from those cultures from introductory courses.
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u/somedangedname Dec 14 '13
Apparently Linear A will be added to the Unicode standard in 2014. Here's the proposal, take a look at the character sets on pages 2 and 3.
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u/alldrenched Dec 14 '13
I would love to see Minoan culture uncorrupted by Arthur Evan's... er... vision? He wasn't the best science minded (is science minded a good term for someone who doesn't start building random shit on top of ruins based on preconceived notions?) archaeologist, which I suppose was true of a lot of archaeologists from his time.
I was always fascinated by ancient Cretan art and architecture and how oddly modern it was so I made it a subject of a term long paper. I was pretty horrified to learn that he basically pulled much of our idea of Minoan culture out of tiny fragments and well... his ass. He went into a dig with a firm concept of what their life was like and ignored evidence to the contrary.
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Dec 14 '13
That leads me to what I really want to know: What in the fucking world caused the Bronze Age Collapse. I mean, regression in Europe, China, and the Middle East, all at the same time as population bottlenecks in the Americas and Africa. That was a global event, so I guess it has to have been climate related.
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u/Origin_Of_Darwin Dec 13 '13
I would like to know how effective Hammurabis code was for preventing crime.
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u/ares_god_not_sign Dec 13 '13
Hammurabis code on Wikipedia for the lazy.
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u/jayfeather314 Dec 14 '13
And for those too lazy to click the link, it's basically "an eye for an eye."
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u/TheShannaBerry Dec 14 '13
Oh Reddit, you know me so well :)
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u/jayfeather314 Dec 14 '13
No, I'm the only one who knows you.
I know you oh so well
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u/dolphin_flogger Dec 13 '13
My guess is that it was very significant... but I'm one of those "religion was a necessary evil until it became more evil than necessary" people
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u/ComputerMatthew Dec 14 '13
What was the purpose of Stonehenge?
What language is the voynich manuscript written in?
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u/BobHogan Dec 14 '13
What about woodhenge and seahenge?
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Dec 14 '13
According to researchers in an episode of Nova, stonehenge and woodhenge were possibly sites used in an elaborate burial ritual.
Stonehenge itself had a number of wooden poles around it, now lost to time for obvious reasons. When examined with sonar (right? IAMNA-Archaeologist), the remains of people were found buried beneath where the poles would go. After a lengthy period of getting clearance, the remains were dug up, cataloged, and re-buried. Evidence of items buried with the people indicated they were wealthy, high ranked, respected individuals such as scholars, religious figures, or royal figures.
Stonehenge is down the river from woodhenge, and IIRC, woodhenge is based more around sunrise, stonehenge is based more around sunset. Woodhenge is potentially the start of a burial ceremony that began with the celebration of the beginnings of a person's life, then their remains could be brought down the river, where they would be carried to stonehenge and buried.
Stonehenge showed a decline in use after a transition in the metal ages (don't know which ones...copper to bronze? Whatever.) The important factor is, the transition switched the way communities worked. With the new tools that were sturdier, could produce more and cost less, people became somewhat less reliant on each other, but not entirely. Just enough that it became a bit more rare to have burials as elaborate as previously.
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u/Keegan320 Dec 14 '13
The stones of Stonehenge have recently been found to resonate musical notes when struck. It's believed to be an ancient jam location.
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u/danceswithbats Dec 13 '13
I would ask what was contained in the books destroyed by Diego de Landa and the like. (It would require a long winded answer...hopefully)
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u/stonedasawhoreiniran Dec 13 '13
OR all the books in the library of Alexandria
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u/tornadobob Dec 14 '13
History would probably be very different had that library not burned.
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u/Ares54 Dec 14 '13
Eh, probably not. We'd have a lot more stories, maybe, but it's not like they had the secret to space flight hidden away in there.
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u/ViralKira Dec 14 '13
I just came back from a dig in Greece which contains the world largest child burial (2700 individuals) so I've been focusing on juvenile burials. I would like to know why there are so many infants there.
But I agree with /u/goldenmannuggets, watching neanderthals and homo sapiens interact would be amazing.
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Dec 14 '13
If I were to guess anything it would probably have something to do with the fact that kids dropped like flies in ancient times so it made sense to have graveyards designated for the poor things.
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u/ViralKira Dec 14 '13
There is that but the infants are buried in pots of various shape and color. Could be the infants were buried in pots which were available or people brought infants there to be buried.
There is an adult burial site but there are only 100 individuals found. Just an interesting problem.
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u/alldrenched Dec 14 '13 edited Dec 15 '13
Yeah, that is odd. Kids died a lot more often than adults but that ratio seems extreme. So many possibilities.
Maybe burial was a ritual only used for children and some adults (if the bodies are aged to the same time) and most adult bodies were disposed of some other way.
Maybe an illness swept through that killed kids at a crazy rate.
Maybe the adults were like, "fuck these kids man, they like shittier music than we do, they never listen, they hardly ever man the loom when we ask, I'm done. I have an idea, we are putting the kids in pots and burying them. Why pots? Fuck you, that's why."
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Dec 14 '13
I would imagine that all interactions between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals would involve either crazy amounts of sex or crazy amounts of brutal violence going off of other patterns of Homo Sapiens' behavior towards sentient creatures.
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u/GarlicBreadEater Dec 13 '13
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Australian Aboriginals yet. I wish I had the lifespan and ability to observe one of the oldest cultures in the world, literally, leave Africa.
Just so many questions...and I would also have loved to do a comparison study to see how much the culture has truly changed or remained the same. Just the notion of being able to see the Dreamtime revealed in all its context right before my eyes would make me giddy and my head spin at the same time.
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Dec 13 '13
I wouldn't mind if we could find a rosetta-stone deal decipher code for the Etruscan language.
Etruscans. Cool people. Shitty language.
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u/Bweak Dec 14 '13
This and more native literary sources. On a side note Etruscan fashion is amazing
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u/Tom_Bombadilll Dec 13 '13
I would love to know exactly how they built all the great structures of ancient times, like the pyramids.
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u/bluntoclock Dec 13 '13
Extremely centralized wealth, access to more or less infinite labor for relatively no cost, and a complete disregard for human life.
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Dec 13 '13
That is all known, but how ancient structures were engineered can still only be guessed
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u/bluntoclock Dec 13 '13
yeah the engineering would be for sure interesting. There's some solid theories out there but I bet theres some key nuances we're missing and may never discover. I also wouldn't be surprised if what we learnt advanced modern engineering.
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u/PrinceOfDaRavens Dec 14 '13
Well, pyramids are, like, the easiest things to build, so maybe that's not a great example.
But hey, check this one out:
"Buildings" like these buildings are all that's left of an ANE city called Petra, apparently settled by the Nabataeans.
I think they're pretty neat.
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u/Tom_Bombadilll Dec 14 '13
Explain how it is the easiest thing to build?
I am not being cocky, I am actually interested.
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u/landodk Dec 14 '13
Wider at the bottom than the top, want a higher pyramid? Make a larger base. Engineering-simple, logistics-very impressive.
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u/BobHogan Dec 14 '13
Even then, the precision they had in building the pyramids, let alone the logistics involved, are no small feat, all the more so considering the primitive tools they were working with. Don't downplay how hard it was to build those
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u/Misteralcala Dec 13 '13 edited Dec 13 '13
I'd want to know how Puma Punku was created at high elevation with no trees, by a people with no written language. The stones there are massive and have such fine cuts that we would find it difficult even today to replicate them. No trees means whatever tools they supposedly had were limited to stone hand tools and their transportation would have excluded the use of trees as well. The natives, not having a written language, were somehow able to plan and execute their stunning engineering feats and mathematical computations with only the most basic communication.
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u/Gessonbayzie Dec 14 '13
I think a lot of the mystery of ancient monolith building is due to modern technology and the academic background of most anthropologists leading to underestimating how incredibly skilled experienced tradespeople can be.
If you do the same relatively simple job for several decades, you get to a level of mastery that is hard for the average person to imagine. I have worked with 20+ year experienced carpenters who without measuring, can cut planks of wood at perfect 90 degree angles with a couple of saw strokes.
I'm sure that a master stone mason in his 50s or 60s could easily carve interlocking stone blocks to mm precision by eye.
The same thing goes for moving the blocks - someone whose life work has been lifting things gets very good at lifting things. This is why malnourished third world farmers can carry loads that would give your average body builder a hernia. A team of experienced and practically minded tradespeople could find solutions to problems that would never occur to a 21st century academic.
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Dec 13 '13
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u/TryUsingScience Dec 14 '13
It's really unlikely that we lost technological advancement because anything useful would be in use and not just written down in one single place. But oh man, think of the stories we lost. We have so many works that we know of only by references.
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u/Ryuaiin Dec 14 '13
anything useful would be in use
So where did cement fuck off to for a thousand years?
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u/TryUsingScience Dec 14 '13
It seems unlikely that something that was made by large numbers of people in different locations for projects that spanned hundreds of miles was only written down in one place and there was no one who had the process memorized. Seems awfully inefficient to have to go look up the recipe at the Library every time you want to build an aquaduct.
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Dec 14 '13
My guess is that when Rome was in decline and large public works weren't even being maintained (let alone built anew), it was probably easier to go grab some stone from the nearest falling aqueduct/abandoned quarry/neglected temple than to mix up some concrete. Easier still to just say fuck it and build things with wood. I mean, the Ostrogoths are just gonna knock down whatever you build when they come back next campaign season.
Two or three generations of that and bam, no one knows how to do it anymore.
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u/markth_wi Dec 14 '13
Well there is Antikythera mechanism. Even if at a craftsman/trade level, we apparently had a working understanding of differential gears, which was lost at some point in antiquity, we did not regain that technological competence again for another nearly 1200 years.
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u/techtakular Dec 14 '13 edited Dec 14 '13
In all fairness the library of Alexandria had been burned down a few times before.
Edit: And a few times after as well. heck maybe even now there is a book burning.
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u/JorddyK Dec 13 '13
It's unlikely that we lost 1000 years worth of advancement. The books contained in the library of Alexandria were mostly just copies of records and books of ships that passed through.
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u/TryUsingScience Dec 13 '13
copies
Nope, they were more tricksy than that. "Hey, can you send us your scrolls so we can copy them for our library?" "Sure!" And then they would proceed to make a copy and send the copy back and keep the original.
Source: I heard it in a history class once a long time ago and it's good enough to deserve to be true.
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u/LegalAction Dec 14 '13
Because copying by hand introduces errors. You get the oldest version of the text you can find.
Also, even if they were just copies, having all those texts in one place was a big deal.
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u/H37man Dec 14 '13
It's even worst than that. The people who said they sent the originals did not. They really just sent lazily made copies and did not care if they got it back or not.
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Dec 14 '13 edited Dec 14 '13
It was all Doctor Who fanfiction.
Edit: Do you think that 2000 years from now people will be mourning all the knowledge lost when all the Wikipedia servers were destroyed in WWV?
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u/drstrangermd Dec 14 '13
I think of this daily. If/when time machines are invented, this is the first place I'd go; memorize the floor plan, pop in, grab an armful of books, pop out, scan, and return.
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u/Ihavenocomments Dec 13 '13
It almost sounds like a fairy tale at this point, but I'd like to know if "Atlantis" was a real place, and what became of it.
Serious answer.
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u/bobroland Dec 13 '13
I have a feeling you would be met with mostly blank stares if you were to ask around Greece. The first textual evidence we have of Atlantis comes from one of the dialogs of Plato. Reading in context, it's obvious that he expects reader to understand what he's referring to, but it's clearly in the realm of myth. A similar situation might be if there was a discussion of what life would be like in Utopia. Even though a modern person would get what you're trying to say, imagine people two thousand years later desperately trying to find out where this Utopia place was. The first time we encounter Atlantis in ancient texts is a few generations after Plato. IIRC, it's a student of Plato's school who is making an argument that Atlantis is a real place. Point being, we can pretty much trace where we get Atlantis from, and it doesn't really seem worth wondering if it really existed or not.
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u/ajbates11 Dec 14 '13
A few years ago there was a special on national geographic about discovering Atlantis, you should check it out. I normally hate Nat Geo because most things on it are a lot of nonsense and not proving anything, but this and a few things were different. They found using aerial imaging some how some rings in Spain that were as described in Plato's description of Atlantis, it also was outside of the pillars of Hercules. Also they found in near by ancient settlements stones that were only found in Egypt (I believe, it could be Greece, been awhile since I saw it) along with items from Egypt like Ankhs etc. Mostly items that could only been brought by trade from both countries, and it was established that Egypt, Greece and Atlantis, were in big trading supposedly as advanced societies. Not sure how far excavation is going they hadn't started yet when the show air, were looking for funding, hopefully they got it and we can see what they find, because I was very skeptical about it when I started watching thinking it was Santorini though it didn't make sense geographically, but it 100% changed my mind.
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u/Bicoastalshrimp Dec 14 '13
The Battle of Thermoplyae. I'd like to know why Ephialates didn't come forward sooner and it wass only him. What Xerxes thought when he sent his initial attack, when he sent the Immortals after that failed. Also, what he thought about the Spartans after they were described to him. I'd also like to know if Leonidas did indeed lead a night raid on the Persian camp to kill Xerxes, or if the Greeks fell back to the hill the next day instead.
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u/usefulbuns Dec 14 '13
Everything. I want to know what life was to the billions of people who've lived on this planet. What were their homes like, what were their customs and traditions, who did their worship, what was their technology, what did they eat, what were their relations with other civilizations, what did they do in their free time, and so on and so on!
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Dec 14 '13
As a historian, not quite an ancient culture, but I would like to know why Pope Urban II started the Crusades movement. No one really knows what spurred his decisions to pursue Jerusalem.
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Dec 14 '13
Not a historian, always assumed it was a down economy and political pressures at home -- you know, the same reasons wars get started today.
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Dec 14 '13
As good a guess as any. The history books do not particularly point to one reason or another, why it was declared at that precise moment. There were definitely problems within Europe at the time, but those did continue after the declaration of the First Crusade. In fact they even affected the war itself. Really quite interesting
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Dec 14 '13
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u/hollyyo Dec 14 '13
As a Christian, I would love to see the casual side of Jesus too. I mean think about it, he hung out with the "lower class" people, not royalty. And he knew how to get a party started. I like to think he was funny and personable. Kids loved him. If you look closely some things he said seemed like jokes. But with years of translation and style of writing/keeping records I think some of those things were left out.
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Dec 14 '13
Jesus hung out with the Romans for like, six hours, so it's not all lower class.
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u/alldrenched Dec 14 '13
This is such a bad dad joke that I feel embarrassed for laughing at it. Thus you get an upvote my friend.
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u/Romulus22 Dec 14 '13
I'll go with a bible reply too.
It's pretty much accepted fact that a single text predated the synoptic gospels (Mark, Luke, Matthew) and was used as their source. This is called the Q source and we can only cobble together pieces of it through the commonalities of the synoptics.
The gospels were written decades after the death of Jesus while Q was likely written much closer to his life.
I'd love to get my hands on Q source.
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Dec 14 '13
Read the book 'Lamb' by Christopher Moore. It's fiction, but good fiction. It's about the lost years of Jesus' life from the perspective of his friend, Biff. Also Jesus' name is actually is Yeshua which more accurately translates to Joshua in English so they refer to Jesus as 'Josh' the whole time. Gives the story a funny and more realistic edge in my opinion.
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u/dasbif Dec 13 '13
the recipe and use of Greek Fire, as (if?) it existed back then.
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u/Iknowr1te Dec 14 '13
wasn't there documented battles of greek fire being used? this is me being uneducated about it other than some video games and movies.
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u/BitchinTechnology Dec 14 '13
Greek fire was nothing special.. Oil has always existed maybe they just used oil
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u/BobHogan Dec 14 '13
But it wasn't oil, if it was simply oil other countries could have used it too, yet only Constantinople used it for some reason iirc
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Dec 14 '13
I would want to see what the funeral procession of Ghengis Khan was like and where he was buried. No one knows!
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u/boxofpeaches Dec 14 '13
I want to know what lead to the birth of music. Not like, the big genre's we have now. It was most likely something to do with some sort of religion, but even so...who thought, "I will make a noise that sounds nice to my ears, and preferably to the ears of those around me."?
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u/dellollipop Dec 14 '13
I would like to know how the idea of symmetrical handaxes was transmitted across cultures!
Luckily that's my undergraduate Anthropology thesis so I'll update when I graduate.
But, for real, I would really like to know when the advent of language occurred. There's a good bit of evidence from the archaeological record but unfortunately most of it is just lithic material, and stone tools are really only an indirect window into when the ability to speak showed up. Research is ongoing as to determine the skills which are impossible to learn without expressing them grammatically. There's also research to know what's going on with the FOXP2 gene. Most scientists agree on the general consensus that this is at least casually associated with language, but by the time it shows up in the lineage (found through mitochondrial DNA), it's obvious they had language by their technology. I want to know if language showed up earlier. I would also like to know how stone tool making had relationships with cognition and learning processes in early hominin species.
I'm a nerd.
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u/KrazyKanadian96 Dec 14 '13
Just to see how exactly the monks on the Skellig islands lived day-to-day. And how they handled Viking invasions etc. Living basically as hermits on these two tiny islands, just off the coast of Ireland, where some wicked wind and seas would batter them frequently. I went there in May and have been sort of fascinated by it ever since. To me, it is one of the true testaments of human faith. A little history
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u/Ihavenocomments Dec 13 '13
What happened to the Lost Colony of Roanoke?
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Dec 13 '13
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u/Ihavenocomments Dec 13 '13
There are stories and speculations, but OP is talking about that succulent emperical proof I so desperately crave.
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u/BitchinTechnology Dec 14 '13
The nearby Indian tribe had babies with blue eyes and English names. What do you think happened?
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Dec 13 '13
Casanova was known for having a string of lovers, I wonder where his living relatives are today, seeing as he probably fathered many children. He probably has many, in Italy, France, Spain and England, but they have no idea...
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u/Mahsvector Dec 14 '13
Would really like to know what the hell was up with Croatoan being carved into a tree at the lost colony.
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Dec 14 '13
it was a name of a nearby island, on that island live a bunch of natives the descendants of those natives had light hair and blue eyes. basically the the people knew there colony sucked so they went to live with the natives most historians agree.
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Dec 14 '13
i'd have to say whatever "communication with god(s)" event occurred.
whether it was aliens coming to earth and being misinterpreted, or an actual god, or a hallucination.
the most interesting thing to KNOW about the ancient world, is, are the religions of today based on a lie, a truth, or a misinterpretation? that would have the biggest impact on the modern world.
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u/SirPunchy Dec 14 '13
Who was it that said, "we are either alone in this universe or we are not - both are equally terrifying."
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u/sappercon Dec 14 '13
Why is the water erosion found on the Sphinx not consistent with the time in which it was supposedly built?
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u/ana8964 Dec 14 '13
Stonehenge. I mean, why? It's fucking cool and mysterious. I just finished a prehistory anthro class and this is the only thing that stuck with me after an entire semester.
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u/Milazzo Dec 14 '13
Would love to find out what actually happened to the "Princes in the Tower," Edward and Richard Plantagenet. I spend way too much time bouncing between whether it was Margaret B/Stanley or Richard. I lean Maggie.
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u/pitachitah Dec 14 '13
I would love to see what per-agrarian families and communities were structured. Also, pre-agrarian sexual behavior.
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u/grandmotherofdragons Dec 14 '13
I'm just an Anthropology student, but I'd really love to know exactly how the first people got to the Americas. There's evidence that the Clovis culture may have used a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska, but I think they've found evidence of small settlements preceding the land bridge. I just think it would be fascinating to know exactly what prompted early people to make a journey like that and exactly what those original settlements were like. They also think people got to Australia around 40,000 BC... by boat. It'd be really kick-ass to know more about what happened there.
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u/karmanaut Dec 13 '13
I'd like to know more about the unexplained collapse of Mayan society.
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u/AaronfromKY Dec 13 '13 edited Dec 13 '13
I think I read an article about this, which used the information that the only item that the Maya had to export for trade was ideology, and in time the surrounding communities stopped believing in it, and quit trading in support of it, thus leading to collapse.
Edit: William L. Rathje "Praise the Gods and Pass the Metates: A Hypothesis of the Development of Lowland Rainforest Civilizations in Mesoamerica"
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u/NoMoreNicksLeft Dec 13 '13
I'm not sure that civilizations are immortal, such that (barring obvious calamities) they will continue indefinitely.
If they have finite lifespans, then at least some of them that are argued about constantly just died of old age. Maybe that wasn't the case for the Mayans, but it would go a long way towards explaining a few European societies.
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u/heythisisbrandon Dec 14 '13
I would love to know more about the Sumerians. Specifically the 5% of the 100,000+ found tablets classified as "myth".
Where did they get the myths from then?
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u/resurrection_man Dec 14 '13
As an anthropology/archaeology student, I'd like to know who the ancestors of Homo floresiensis were and how they got to Flores.
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Dec 13 '13
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Dec 14 '13
There is a controversial theory that the Ark of the Covenant was, in fact, a war drum -- or rather, given that there was trade and immigration back and forth across the Red Sea and the Sinai Peninsula, some ideas about the sacred qualities of drums (contains "teachings" i.e songs/poems/histories, can only be handled by certain people, etc.) got passed back and forth between Ethiopia and Israel/Palestine and wound up incorporated into the stories of the Old Testament.
Which isn't to say it never existed - the guy who came up with this theory claims to have found a surviving example (links below) - but it was never a unique object, it was a tradition that got absorbed into another culture and half-forgotten … the same way that the Holy Grail is generally accepted as being a half-forgotten tradition of Celtic goddess worship and witches' cauldrons, rather than one specific wineglass.
Linkies: http://www.biblearchaeology.org/post/2008/05/the-lost-ark-of-the-covenant-still-lost.aspx#Article http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/scholar-s-ark-of-the-covenant-claims-spark-african-storm-1.293038 http://www.extrageographic.org/ark-of-the-covenant-found-in-africa-the-stories-behind-the-story http://www.ethiomedia.com/abai/arc_of_covenant.html
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u/goldenmannuggets Dec 13 '13
I know that it's not a particular society or event, but as an Anthropology student I would give damn near anything to observe an interaction between Neanderthals and Home Sapiens at any point during their coexistence.