2 Jun
2010
2 Jun
'10
8:18 a.m.
On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 8:53 PM, Rich Alderson <RichA at vulcan.com> wrote:
Yes, well, they are insane by any reasonable definition. It's why I
don't bother even playing at debating with them any more; I just mock
them.
Well, it's contentious, and not only does nobody know what it means
(if anything), without more examples, I doubt anyone ever will.
But it looks to my fairly uneducated eye, as well as that of many
domain experts, to be more like some kind of script than a decorative
pattern, and if so, then its makers had stamps or seals for 45
different symbols, which although circumstantial suggests that at
least the basic concept of movable type had been invented in 2000BC.
Fair enough. I am no anthropologist. Thanks for the clarification.
From: Liam Proven
Sent: Monday, May 31, 2010 6:22 AM
Fair enough.
(That led to an interesting half an hour on Google on its own.)
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.
Well, yes, OK, conceded, but it's a decent quick run-down on the site.
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.
Conceded. Poor wording of mine there.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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