Daniela D. Frost - The Lost Earth Civilizations (Extended Edition): The mysticism of ancient cultures

The Lost Earth Civilizations

(Extended Edition)

The mysticism of ancient cultures

Daniela D. Frost

All rights reserved

Daniela D. Frost , 2017

Camea Publish, 2018

Cover design by Dennis Duncan

Fotos by:

Gina Williams

Den Peck

Tim Sanderson

Hung Hwo

In the expanded edition, you will get acquainted with the ancient Maya Indians and go on a journey across unknown Cahokia, the city of the sun, and to the lost islands.

Ancient secrets always attracted curious people. In the book we will get to know some of them. This is a preliminary publication in which the author will tell you about the secrets of the Alexandria Library, the riddles of disappeared continents and aliens from the other world.

The book is intended for a wide audience.

Content:

Extended part:

Main Part:

Introduction. How did ancient civilizations come about?

The civilizations of Eurasia have come a long way from stone tools to nuclear power plants, while others continue to live in the Stone and Bronze Age. What's the matter? Geologist Ilya Fomin argues that the reason is simple: civilization can develop only where the earth's crust is thick - after all, only then can it contain deposits of metals that make technological progress possible.

An oyster shell can be broken with cobble, but people created hammers. The dishes can be sculpted from clay or hollowed out from pumpkin, but we chose ceramics and glass. Although in the ancient world people transmitted messages at a speed of hundreds and thousands of kilometers per day, we preferred the Internet in order to communicate with friends, read books and watch movies without delay - despite the fact that this requires the most sophisticated computing technology.

Why did people switch from collecting roots and hunting to farming, creating states and technologies? Why is technical and all other progress possible? One of the leading scientific points of view is beautifully stated in the book "Guns, Microbes and Steel": the initial heterogeneity of the distribution of resources on the Earth (climate, fertile land, suitable for domestication of plant and animal species) determined that it was Southwest Asia, and then Eurasia in in general (first - Asia, then - Europe) have become centers of innovation and rapid development in comparison with other continents.

Not everyone kept up with the times. One of the most significant events in the Russian-speaking space is the church schism of the 17th century. Persecution of the Old Believers forced them to migrate to Siberia and America. And if large communities of Old Believers exist and preserve their culture even in South America very successfully, actively trading with other local residents and mastering new technologies, then individual families within one or two generations gradually returned to the Stone Age and died out. If everyone is busy looking for food, there will be no free hands to maintain the level of technology (technical language, depreciation). Apparently, similar reasons, only on a much larger scale, coupled with an unfavorable environment for agriculture, led to the technological degradation of the aborigines of Australia: they not only did not increase, but also forgot what was already known, although, of course, they were not threatened by extinction from a lack of people....

It is not only the loss of technology that threatens small groups. For example, strict restrictions on marriages among the Amish, a religious minority in America, have led to an increase in the frequency of genetically determined diseases: in one of the counties, more than 50,000 people living now have only 80 ancestors.

It is interesting that, apparently, representatives of tiny non-contact peoples, whose numbers have remained at the level of hundreds of people for thousands of years, apparently do not suffer from these diseases; however, most likely, this is by no means connected with some special biology, but with a high infant mortality rate, rejecting all weak representatives.

It is not only religious persecution or geographical barriers that can isolate a group of people. Through the series of films "Happy People" the idea of how to live happily and calmly away from the hustle and bustle of big cities - and that this can be a conscious choice, runs like a red thread. But the heroes use modern guns, boat motors, chainsaws, factory clothes and many other equipment that they themselves cannot produce. Without belittling the severity of such a lifestyle, even with all these mechanisms, we must admit that even after moving away from "civilization", these people continue to depend on it.

No matter how many people move away from technological progress, the proportion of those who stay with it (or, in the case of technologically primitive tribes, come) is incomparably greater.

The very survival of an ethnos is determined in the long term by whether it will use new technologies or not. The history of all the well-documented world migrations of peoples and expansions, be they Russians in Siberia or Spaniards in America, proves the success of even small detachments, if they are better armed than the local population. The desire to seize territories is characteristic of almost all peoples, regardless of their race or religion: it is enough to recall the musket wars (or their modern counterpart in New Guinea) and the subsequent genocide of the Moriori in Oceania - and yes, it was the pacifism of the latter, raised to the level of a categorical imperative, became the cause of the death of almost the entire nation.

Formed only in the second half of the 20th century, the human rights movement, which includes the protection of religious and ethnic minorities, was the first attempt to build something on the politics, military capabilities and population of individual states. And, probably, those who like to speculate about their uselessness should take into account the closest neighbors of their own country.

Reason by the shelves and check marks

Suppose you are an alien who visited Earth several hundred thousand years ago. Intergalactic Intelligent Species Inspector. How to understand who is the most intelligent on this planet? Or who will become? And if you have only a leaf in your hands (tentacles, claws or pseudopodia), where do you need to check the boxes opposite certain items in order to recognize the species as reasonable? What should be the checkboxes?

Using tools? Even crows do it.

Using fire? And kites know how to do this, although they do not produce fire by friction or striking a spark.

Entering the Stone Age? When who deliberately took the first stone is a big question, but now there is already a fifth species to do so.

Agriculture? There are ants that grow mushrooms, and there are ants that grow plants. Everyone saw the buildings of ants and aphids, which they grow for food.

Ants have successfully transitioned from a hunter-gatherer to an agrarian society. Moreover, they have fully mastered such "human" inventions as the slave system, and even surpassed in some way, having built an intercontinental state (not without human help, however).

What distinguishes (or we still think, what distinguishes) humans from animals? The presence of culture. Not in the aesthetic sense - here people themselves cannot decide what is beautiful and what is not very good. And in the sense of transferring some genetically not embedded knowledge.

The most primitive, by our standards, tribes have mastered nothing but the simplest copies. But they all speak some languages, albeit the most unusual ones: devoid of the concepts of "left" and "right", using the cardinal directions to determine the course of time, or completely devoid of temporal and quantitative categories.

Do people know any language from birth? The first experiments on raising children without teaching languages were carried out back in Ancient Egypt, when the orders of the authorities were not discussed, and such lofty matters as ethics and humanism had not yet been invented.