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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (66247)	12/17/2004 8:24:55 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 71178

I am pointing out that we don't know what early man thought because it's been such a very long time that nothing survived, materially, except rocks and disturbances in the covering soil. Not all that different from my Great-Uncle Ed, who left nothing on the face of the earth when he died except for a cardboard box with some memorabilia that was put onto a shelf in my dad's garage until it got too mildewed and was thrown away. Uncle Ed was human but how can I prove that? If we examined his skeleton, we could guess that he was human because it's shaped exactly the same as the skeletons of people who created a human civilization. But it would be only an educated guess. We know more about what the Sumerians thought than the Egyptians, because the Sumerians wrote on baked clay, which lasts, while the Egyptians wrote on papyrus, which doesn't. But we make educated guesses that the Egyptian civilization was more advanced because they built out of granite stone, which outlasts rain and wind and freezing and unfreezing, while the Sumerians built out of limestone and bricks, which don't. But we just don't know. We know almost nothing about the history of the !Kung, the Kalihari Bushmen, who coincidentally live near where mankind first evolved, and look a lot like what early man looked like, and even have the earliest human DNA. They did not build from stone, they did not write on brick, nor even make stone tools, because there are no rocks nor stone in the Kalihari desert. So we might assume that they were not human. But their culture today is incredibly rich and complex, which suggests to me that they are human, and have been human for far longer than we may ever know. 1.5 million years of sun baking, wind blowing, rain washing, fire cracking and charring, soil freezing and unfreezing, glaciers pushing, oceans rising, doesn't leave much standing. What will be left of our civilization in 1.5 million years? We, who prefer to build next to rivers and oceans, which rise and fall.