What is left behind...

I mentioned previously, regarding antediluvian/ice-age/post-ice-age civilizations that if they did exist, they most probably did not get as technically advanced as many seem to believe.  That is, they probably didn't have electric lights, plastic, stainless steel, and snacks like the ice-cream sandwiches from Wal-Mart.

I say this mainly because those things do not decay, ever.  Styrofoam will break up, but never deteriorate.  At least not in the time frame (10-15 thousand years) we're talking about.  I saw one of those "After Man" shows recently that said that while iron would rust and deteriorate, stainless steel would not (they showed a kitchen sink in a stream bed).  The Eiffel Tower, if not kept up, would be gone in a few hundred years as its mostly iron.  However, stainless steel would still be around.

An argument that the prior civilization(s) had to be industrial or even post-industrial (using our terminology) is that there seem to have been world wide trading networks.  Goods have seemed to get shunted around all over the place in the ancient world.

However, as a show about the Anglo-Saxons that I watched recently revealed, such trading networks can occur with non-literate agricultural groups.  The Anglo-Saxons had ivory and amber in some of their ornamentation.  But this does not mean that ships were going direct from Africa to Britain in 400AD (at least not Roman ones).  The trading networks were point to point.  The ivory found in pre-literate Anglo-Saxon digs would have been passed merchant to merchant, hand to hand, until finally getting to Britain. 

On the other hand, this shows that pretty complex and centralized civilizations can exist without being literate, an argument against such antediluvian civilizations as people assume they would have to have writing to be complex.

I'm bringing this all up because there's an argument that industrial or even post-industrial evidence could have been lost by a world-wide flood or catastrophe.  Of course, anything is possible, something like this could have happened.  We have to remember that at the end of the last ice age, the sea levels rose something like 300 feet.  If that happened today, most of the world's largest cities would be gone and under hundreds of feet of water.   If the waters rose higher, and then receded, perhaps this past culture's plastic and steel got covered under hundreds of feet of mud and rock.

I know of an instance where this happened in living memory.  The eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1981 buried Spirit Lake under hundreds of feet of ash and mud, along with a recluse named Harry Truman, his cats, vehicles, and modern equipment.  A huge world wide disaster could have done this to a technological civilization.  Some finds have claimed to find metal screws and nails embedded in ancient lava and rock formations, anomalous finds in ancient mines. 

But I'm still not totally convinced.  I just think that if they were industrial or more advanced, we'd find more anomalous remains than we have so far.

However, I do think that something was going on before us.  For decades, mainstream archaeology and anthropology have told us, as a matter of rock-hard fact, that the Sumerians were the first culture and that nothing and nobody was around before them.   Earlier sites in Jordan and Turkey kept cropping up irritatingly but then Gobeckli Tepe happened.   This site is 12,000 years old!  That's like 10,000 years before Sumer, 7,000 years before the pyramids.   And no, it wasn't a one-off isolated site which is how the mainstream scientists are trying to fob it off as. 

Oh sure, those carvings at Gobeckli Tepe look crude but you go out right now and try to chisel a bas-relief alligator out of a big block of stone.  The stonemasons that did that had experience and teaching, and that came from somewhere.  They just didn't haul off one day and make that site then bury it.

I just wish that this prior civilization had buried a library of theirs like they did to Gobeckli Tepe to show more of what they were up to.  Of course, maybe they did.  One day some shepherd might fall through a hole and find himself in a vault of stone tablets from 12,000 years ago.  That will be enough of a find!  No need for pictures of aliens or electric light bulbs handing from the ceiling to spice it up... although I must admit that would be a cool touch!