1 Jun
2010
1 Jun
'10
12:53 p.m.
From: Liam Proven
Sent: Monday, May 31, 2010 6:22 AM
The Romans are quite recent, you know. Only a couple
of thousand years
ago. Human societies of people identical to us have been around for
about 40,000 years. The oldest buildings known so far are some 12,000
years ago - about 5 times longer before ancient Rome than Rome was
before us.
We have datable inscriptions in early forms of Latin dating into the
6th century BCE; the infamous 7th century BCE fibula from Praeneste is
apparently a 19th century CE forgery by university students. So push
the Romans and their cousins back at least another 1000, to be settled
and worrying about writing.
I'm sure you know my opinion of Wikipedia.
We have written records from Pharoaonic Egypt from
circa 7000-8000
years ago, which is just one of the more fun bits of evidence that the
young-Earth Creationists are a bunch of deranged loonies.
They would argue that (a) your dating is in error, or (b) God made it
look like things are that old--see (a).
The Phaistos Disk shows that there was *print* long
before ancient Rome.
Really? Print? Or simply engraved punches?
One or two hundred thousand years before the
Cro-Magnon, the ancestors
of the Europeans and most of the us, the Neanderthals had societies
right across the world, hunting mammoths and so on. They left little
trace other than fossils, so we know very little about them, but they
had a human society that spread across Eurasia about a hundred times
longer ago than ancient Rome.
Whether we dub early modern humans "Cro-Magnon" or not, it's pretty clear
that they are the ancestors (modulo some Neanderthal "borrowings") of
everyone of us.
And it's not at all clear that "a human society" existed in the time frame
that you posit. "Human societies", yes, but not a single society.
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104
mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.PDPplanet.org/
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/