Civilization Timelines Keep Getting Earlier

Anyone studying the origins of human civilization on earth is aware of the earlier, earlier, earlier start-dates archaeologists are citing. The reasons are basically the discovery of previously unexplored sites and the enhanced technology enabling more precise dating of artifacts.

Here’s a wrap-up of some newer findings, especially the Gunung Padang site in Indonesia, first thought to be a natural hill but now revealed as a 300-foot step pyramid. According to The Mind Unleashed website:

The hill was actually not a natural hill but a 300-ft high step-pyramid. And what’s even more controversial is that the structure was much older than anyone imagined . . . Radiocarbon dated the terrace structures at around 500 to 1,500 BC, similar to previous estimates. 

. . . As the drills dug deeper, Natawidjaja continued to discover that the columnar basalt structures extended far beneath the surface and yielded much older dates. At depths of 90 feet and more, the material was found to be 20,000 BC to 22,000 BC years old. Using radiocarbon dating, he and his team proved that man-made megalithic structures and hence a prehistoric human civilization existed well into the Ice Age.

Gunung Padang is a recent addition to the growing list of archaeological sites proving that our history books regarding early civilizations are now hopelessly out of date.

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Birth of China Culture May Have Been Fragmented

Stretch of the Yellow River in early evening.

New research casts serious doubt about China’s founding dynasty, dispelling the concept that the civilization arose as a single national culture along the Yellow River.

Since 2004, archeologists headed by Wang Wei of the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing have begun tying together a broader picture of China's origins.

“Most of us accepted that the Yellow River was the origin of Chinese civilization. But as we’ve done more research, we have found other cultural areas," Wei says.

In particular, the Xia dynasty ~ written about as the founder of the Chinese state by Confucius around 600 B.C. ~ seems suspect.

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Did One Small African Tribe Populate the World?

New genetic research is leading a group of geneticists and archaeologists to speculate that a small African tribe that crossed the Red Sea some 70,000 years ago is responsible for the spread of human beings around the globe.

“What you can see from the DNA of all non-Africans is that they all belong to one tiny African branch that came across the Red Sea,” says Oxford University geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer. “If it was easy to get out of Africa we would have seen multiple African lineages in the DNA of non-Africans but that there was only one successful exit suggests it must have been very tough to get out.”

The recent genetic research indicates that it was not until around 70,000 years ago that humans were able to take advantage of falling sea levels to cross into Arabia at the mouth of the Red Sea, and from there to spread along the Arabian coast as a prelude to colonizing the rest of the world.

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