> For example, there is not a henge associated with the site and the individual stones are relatively small when compared to what most people think of as European standing stones. It should be clearly understood that this is not a megalith site like Stonehenge.
Why is the baseline assumption that early humans were not as intelligent as we are now? I've never understood that. It seems like levers and rolling logs would be pretty easy to figure out, or what am I missing?
That isn't the assumption. Modern archaeologists usually assume that ancient people were as intelligent as we are today, or even more so.
What's not assumed is that they had the same thought patterns. People don't derive ideas uniformly from the space of all possible ideas, they tend to think within the constraints and realities of past experiences. If you build a house, it's going to be similar to houses you've seen before. If you paint a painting, it's going to be a painting rather than some other means of expressing yourself with colored pigments.
In other words, ideas are subject to the same kinds of path dependence that technology is. When we see something that's severely anachronistic (outside of it's "normal" place in time), the initial priors are that things like the dating are wrong rather than ab initio invention of a whole suite of different ideas that just happened to be preserved for us.
There's also the assumption that humans in the Americas, prior to the mass arrival of Europeans, were primitive and did not form sophisticated societies like those found in the "Old World". I think this has been otherwise shown, but old assumptions die hard.
Probably the lack of similar structures in the area at the time makes this significant. If large arranged stones from 10,000 years ago were common around the great lakes then we'd assume everyone knew how to move large rocks back then.
I'd never heard of this, despite growing up in Chicago. It makes you wonder how many other archeological treasures are underwater and undiscovered, given how water levels used to be lower.
This is just further evidence to show that there’s some periodic reset of civilization. Perhaps sun forced(micro-novas triggered by the black hole at the center of our Milky Way flipping its magnetic field). The shedding of the sun’s outer convective layer throws a big disturbance to the earth’s tectonic plates causing plates to move(or poles to be perceived as moving if the tectonic plates were to be used as frame of reference). This is led by a period where earth doesn’t have a strong magnetic field(as it takes time to recover), and low solar output which sputters back up leading to an ice-age with intermittent blasts. This prolly forced humans to build large underground shelters(Gobekle Tepe, Cappadosia, etc) to live when there’s intense solar outbursts.
Our genome hasn’t evolved much since the last 150,000yrs meaning that all faculties have been the same for ancient man. What we’ve effectively achieved in 2000yrs must’ve been replicated a few times in history. Even if the silicon age never came, it is likely man had strong agriculture, pottery, understanding of nature, evolution of animals(wolves were effectively bred into dog companions 40,000yrs ago), etc that would’ve surely lead to vast amounts of knowledge being gathered. And with high CO2 concentrations, it is likely that agriculture produce and access to energy(coal, firewood, nutrition, etc) was abundant to support fairly complex civilization that could support occupational specializations.
There’s evidence across the world in anthropologic, natural history and other evidence left behind. However, the full interpretation lies behind a series of walls of resets where we can only guess, but not fully understand the context of how things were. Imagine a 10,000yrs from now, someone finds a portion of a fossilized city dump with no direct access or lineage from present day. There’s not much that can be gleaned of things there. And some of these events are so catastrophic that they move oceans/atmospheric currents at supersonic speeds and cover large swathes of land under miles of slurry.
and sure enough from the man himself.
https://holleyarchaeology.com/index.php/the-truth-about-the-...
> For example, there is not a henge associated with the site and the individual stones are relatively small when compared to what most people think of as European standing stones. It should be clearly understood that this is not a megalith site like Stonehenge.
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