[AlotOfReading]

Complete is greatly overstating it. I've personally found stuff from approximately that time period and in general we have a decent idea how people lived and many of their technologies. There are issues pinning down details on specific groups, cultures and political organization, but nothing so unknown as to hide a large industrial society.

[ncmncm]

How people maintained consistent culture--judging from cave paintings--across tens of millennia and thousands of miles, in and out of ice ages, is an enduring mystery.

There really is no shortage of mysteries, although archaeologists don't like to talk about them.

That Denisovan bracelet from tens of millennia ago, with a hole drilled by a method not reinvented until historical times, is a new mystery.

Miles and miles of undersea construction off India, on seabed last exposed more than 7000 years ago.

The very oldest known stone construction, in both Egypt and Peru, used the very biggest chunks of rock, often 50 tons and more, (apparently) before even pulleys. Blocks get progressively smaller and clunkier in later work.

Egyptian sculpture made of basalt and granite, smoothed to a satin finish. Basalt boxes, 50 tons and more, with perfectly right-angled and smooth interior cuts, without tool marks.

I'm not saying it's aliens, because... why the hell would aliens care about rocks? But people were doing things that we don't understand, and cannot reproduce with the tools they should have had.

There is a great deal more to learn about the prehistoric past than we have even begun to get a handle on.

[AlotOfReading]

My personal field experience is that cultures were not consistent across millennia and miles, but it can often be difficult to distinguish cultures purely from their material record, especially to modern eyes. In general, people tend to both underestimate what's possible and mistake natural landforms for human constructions. The Bosnian Pyramids and the Yonaguni Monument are prime examples.

Even experts sometimes screw this up. I've seen my share of cropmarks and straight "walls" on imagery that turn out to have perfectly natural explanations. My first field season was particularly memorable. I spent days sitting in a muddy trench, convinced I had found a posthole. A few feet below was the remains of a collapsed rabbit warren. Archaeology can be hard.

[ncmncm]

I refer to

https://www.ted.com/talks/genevieve_von_petzinger_why_are_th...

[blonde_ocean]

Can you link me some sources to your claims? Super fascinated and I wanna read more!

[ncmncm]

https://sci-hub.do/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aeae.2008.07.00...

"It is a common assumption that stone drilling originated during the Upper Paleolithic, but gained the features of a well-developed technology only during the Neolithic. The comparatively archaic method of two-handed drilling was replaced by the more efficient bow drill (Ibid.: 62). The process of stationary drilling, i.e., with the help of the bow drill, did not leave signs of drill vibration. These progressive features have been noted on the Denisova bracelet. It constitutes unique evidence on an unexpectedly early employment of two-sided fast stationary drilling during the Early Upper Paleolithic. All of the other known Paleolithic implements with signs of drilling bear features suggesting relatively slow drilling with a considerable drill vibration."

[blonde_ocean]

Incredible. Where should I look for the undersea building off India? Gives me huge Atlantis vibes, haha.

[smhost]

What about a small industrial society?

[AlotOfReading]

When we start getting into hypotheticals, it's useful to reframe the discussion in more concrete terms. What would it mean to have a "small industrial society"? I can think of a number of "things" that would fit that term:

1) Ancient Aliens: Essentially similar to what a human martian colony would look like. In this case, resources, population, and knowledge are brought from off-world and there's little to no local exploitation. The only way to detect something like this is direct material evidence, which also means it's practically unverifiable. Not really a useful hypothesis.

2) the dystopia: an anomalously advanced human society surrounded by hunter-gatherers in the wastelands outside. As a twist, the population is small and in-line with contemporaneous HG populations. One problem with this scenario is that it just doesn't look like any human society ever discovered. There's libraries worth of work on how technological development happens and the two big accelerators we see across most of history are high (effective) populations and communication "density". The lower either of these are, the more likely that the information network breaks down over time. At the population levels we're talking, simply having enough people to do all the various jobs that need doing in a high-tech society is a problem, let alone redundancy and exploration of new ones.

3) Non-human societies: Something incredibly old, non-human, and lost in the mists of time. This is where you get into the silurian hypothesis and given enough technology/magic/moved goalposts, it gets difficult to say anything concrete. There would probably still be evidence in some form or fashion, but ultimately you have to define some model of what the society looks like it to actually say anything about it.