My sister’s favorite western cartoon is Avatar. She recognizes the themes of war, racism, and colonialism.

My brother’s favorite movie is Avatar (James Cameron)

They’re both racist conservatives lol. My brother is even a Reaganite even though he never lived through his presidency. ( I feel like it’s one thing to be a fan of historical figures you’ve never lived under like :lenin-sure: but Reagan is a modern figure lol).

  • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    A person I know is adamant that there have been civilizations at the level of modern technology and organization multiple times. As in, there have been multiple rises and falls where people fell back into a paleolithic state. He's made specific claims like iron veins in mountains are the remnants of ancient skyscrapers, and that Earth's ambient background radiation is evidence of ancient nuclear bombs. He claims that most things humans produce would leave no evidence after a few hundred thousand years, which is true to an extent but I don't think his claims hold water.

    What that what your supervisor was claiming?

    I don't know enough about archaeology or anything to dispute what my coworker was saying, but it doesn't seem right. If there were ancient highly advanced societies it seems like they would have left shit all over the place we could have found by now.

    • DialecticalShaman [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      A few hundred thousand years humans hadn't left africa, a few more and there aren't any modern humans at all. That doesn't leave a lot of room for these civs in the historical record.

      • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Yeah, that's what I tried telling him. Modern humans didn't leave Africa until 60,000 to 90,000 years ago and that's well established in the fossil record. Earlier types of humans had left Africa, like homo erectus had a range all the way from Europe to Indonesia about 2 million years ago. Neanderthals were in central Asia 400,000 years ago. So this guy would have to believe ancient technological civilizations were built by earlier types of humans, or these ancient civilizations weren't human at all. He might be confused about the time frame of human evolution.

        • DialecticalShaman [none/use name]
          ·
          2 years ago

          He might be confused about the time frame of human evolution.

          In my experience this is the case for a huge amount of people.

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I always wonder how advanced a civilization that predate humans would have to be before we can have definite evidence that they existed. Presumably, a hunter-and-gatherer dinosaur civilization would leave almost no surviving trace after 65 million years. But what about a bronze age dinosaur civilization or an iron age dinosaur civilization? Maybe there's some advanced therapsid civilization that didn't survive the Permian–Triassic extinction and we have almost no traces of this society because not many things are build to last 250 million years.