Most of our school history books present a very simple picture of how we got here today.
What our school books tell us
The currently accepted model of human development over time is presented to us as linear. It was presented that around two million years ago, our ancestors got off their front feet and started to roam the earth as humanoid creatures. And that too if your school was the type to be okay with teaching Darwinian theories of evolution rather than forcing the myth of creationism down everyone’s throats (as most of the Pakistani curriculum currently does). But I digress.
That time is referred to as the “Stone Age”, or the Paleolithic Era; basically, since cavemen had only the use of rudimentary stone tools to do their hunting or gathering with. This time period is said to stretch from that time that cavemen existed two million years ago, to a mere ten thousand years ago. The evidence being used to point to this was the fact that older, megalithic structures were found that dated from about five to eight thousand years old.
Among these structures long held to be the first large scale man-made structures on the planet, was the infamous Stonehenge. It is estimated that the Stonehenge, a pretty simple and rudimentary placing of large rocks, is about five thousand years old.
The pyramids of Giza, on the other hand, are held to be about four thousand five hundred years old. So it took five centuries for humankind to move from quarrying and carrying large stones and erecting them to building huge pyramids that stood for millennia.
The current model
With these structures (and other archaeological finds like tools), historians were able to paint a picture of how human civilization came to be. According to them, the current, widely held model is that around ten thousand years ago, with the end of the Ice Age, humans began to evolve from their state as cavemen into farmers. Specifically, it is stated that humans ventured from hunting and gathering into farming about Twelve thousand years ago.
This then allowed them to not have to dedicate every waking moment of their lives to trying to find food and pursue other things. This is largely seen as when humans entered the early stages of civilizations and slowly began learning how to trade, work with stone, and build.
Eventually, human beings then grew in population and became more and more technologically advanced to reach the stage where they are right now.
This is a pretty linear model of human civilization and is the one widely accepted and taught in educational institutes.
Megalithic structures and their importance
As illustrated earlier, these large stone structures (megaliths) like the Stonehenge served as markers in time showing the capabilities of human beings around that time. This and other evidence has served to bolster the theory of linear human development and is the basis of the current model of human civilization.
Interestingly, however, there have been recent theories accompanied by archaeological and geological breakthroughs that have challenged our long-held views of our history and where we come from. For example, Author Graham Hancock theorized about the existence of ancient civilizations since the early 90s. He was largely criticized as a pseudoscientist and his work was controversial, to say the least.
His main theory stemmed from the idea that there were earlier human civilizations that were far more advanced than we thought them to be and that they were wiped out by global cataclysms and extinction-level events like meteoric impacts. Recently, however, there have been a couple finds that shockingly lend credence to his theories about our history.
The new model
The proposed model of the history of human civilization is much more interesting than the original one. It strives to fill the gap in between the two million and ten thousand years currently stated to be the “caveman” era of our civilization. It makes more logical sense to some because the stagnant state of humanity for close to two thousand millennia followed by a meteoric rise in population and technology in just ten millennia is a bit difficult to explain.
Instead, it might make more sense than humanity was on a zig-zag trajectory, that in the last few hundred thousand years human civilization developed and fell and did so again in a non-linear fashion. The dips are explained to be caused by a global cataclysm that left the survivors to start from scratch.
Where is the evidence?
There are two solid pieces of evidence that fly in the face of the current model of the development of human civilization-namely, evidence of meteoric impact, and Gobekli Tepe.
Gobekli Tepe
This was a structure discovered in Turkey quite in 1994. Carbon dating and analysis of the structure has confused most conventional historians because it puts the structure to be about twelve thousand years old. That means that a place of worship with intricate designs and construction material was built essentially by cavemen.
This is an incredibly unlikely event because it is not possible for individuals that have not yet discovered farming to both construct a structure whilst also searching for food. Furthermore, cavemen did not have the tools to be carving intricately designed patterns found at the site.
Furthermore, it was found that the construction seemed to have been abandoned and covered many, many years ago by its inhabitants, only to be discovered millennia later. This effectively pushes back our estimations of where human beings were in terms of tools and technology by no less than six thousand years.
Meteor Impact
In 2016, Kurt Kjaer, a danish geologist discovered a 31-kilometer wide crater in Greenland. This put immense winds in the sales of geologists and historians alike that were supporters of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. Basically, this hypothesis pointed towards a meteoric impact followed by an extinction event in 11,000 BCE. This also coincides with the supposed global flood timing (Noah’s flood) and evidence from cave paintings even depicts the event and can be found to this day in North America.
What does this mean?
The current global pandemic signifies how fragile human civilization truly is. A virus with a very low lethality rate has completely shut down the global economy and led to unrest and violence playing out across the planet. In the face of a larger cataclysm like solar flares, more lethal disease, or the meteoric impact it is not the work of a wild imagination to figure that human civilization could lie broken and tattered.
It would make sense that humanity rose to a certain level of technological advancement in the past multiple times, but certain cataclysms delayed the progress of civilization and sent us, quite literally, back into the stone age.
