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>you don't go from relatively simple cave paintings to insanely complex languages, forms of government and far-fetched empires just by snapping a finger twice See, thats the fascinating thing about crackpot archeology/anthropology/sociology/etc. Eventually, its just a bunch of words - an ontology - with which to describe a complex system. The idea that the root nature of the language is expressible in human-ideal objects, and that this ontology can persist across 10's of thousands of years of human activity (mostly destructive) as a cultural artifact with a message .. yes, this is difficult to conceive. Or, is it really? "Far-fetched empires": literally what it means to consider what such an empire, were it in existence 65,000 years ago, would have looked like. Like, literally, its a far-fetched idea to look at a piece of dirt, and then paint a deep picture of what happened to it. Without such imagination, speculation doesn't begin, and without speculation followed up by careful inspection, the relics would still just be out there, being ignored. |