It’s only a surprising observation if you never thought about the not so distant past, when each town had its own time. Even now, if you spend a week or a month hiking or living off the grid out in nature, although your watch or cell phone might have a clock on it, you learn quite soon that what really matters is when the sun goes up and goes down.
Sort of. There’s one coming up in 2038 where the number overflows a signed 32 bit integer. Anything using 32 bits for timestamps is going to get a wee bit confused.
This should be the last time that happens though as a 64 bit signed int can carry us to something like the year 290 billion
I could actually get behind this conspiracy theory if it wasn’t so easily debunked. Think about it, wouldn’t it be beneficial for some rulers to pretend that the glorious battle victory everyone has heard about happened relatively recently, as opposed to centuries ago?
There’s also a fun “lost time” theory were they rearrange Egyptian history to better align with the Bible. Interesting read on Wikipedia until you get to the debunking.
This is based on a cool, but ultimately incorrect historical theory called “phantom time.” The general premise being that European history (and world history) was mostly fabricated as propaganda by royalty. It wouldn’t be so crazy except, a) archeology exist and validates certain medieval records and b) non European Nations exist, and record their own interactions with Western Nations.
Right. And even leaving radiocarbon dating aside, you can’t really cheat dendrochronology unless you make a gargantuan effort with the specific point of doing so.
it has been approximately 12000 years since our ancestors constructed what are now the ruins at Gobekli Tepe. But saying it’s been exactly 12,000 years would be silly, so let’s toss in some variation and call it the present 12,024 years since then. I like this because it puts the history we presently call “ancient” into perspective. By this measure, the bronze age began around the year 6,800 and its collapse happened around the year 8,800. Two thousand years, our species toiled at working bronze. Yes, a lot of explosive progress (some of it literal) happened in the 11,900s, but it took us over eleven thousand years to get there in the first place. We’re really not so far from the 11,500s when we were just getting used to connecting the whole globe with transoceanic trade. It seriously stunts our achievements to write off everything that happened prior to year 10,000 as if it were irrelevant.
Just the fact that we’ve pushed back the point where early hominids were controlling and cooking with fire to some 2 million years in the past. Burying dead to 250,000 years.
I’m totally willing to believe there are much earlier signs of what we would call complex societal behavior like those temples and the infrastructure required to build them. We’re just going to get better at detecting and dating it as time passes imo.
It’s sad that we will likely never know why they did any of this stuff. It’s probably all very familiar to us even now, but wouldn’t it be fascinating to know how far back our “modern” behaviors go.
oh yes! Anatomically modern humans have been around for like 200,000 years before we developed agriculture and started to develop permanent settlements!
I think the number is 600,000 years for how long we’ve been around in total.
I completely agree with you. If you actually think about it seriously our history as a species is amazing. Things like the discovery channel with the “Aliens” guy piss me off. It’s a fundamental disrespect of what real people have done, and what we’re capable of.
The long ramp up to what we have right now today is fascinating. No other animal has ever done anything like we have. From loin clothes to fire to farming is mind blowing. Hell, just one of those things is already way past every other species to ever live.
They kinda seem like jerks. My 𝘏𝘰𝘮𝘰s tended to get along best in groups of a dozen dozen, enjoyed gossip, killing Neanderthals, and their fave: magical thinking.
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