From: freon96@gmail.com

There's site in Indonesia called Gunung Padang that may be
the oldest structure on the planet. If the dates are ever
confirmed it's older even that Gobekli Tepe in Turkey and
completely revises the current accounts of human history.

Anatomically modern humans have been around for about
200,000 years. Human civilization (cities, agriculture,
etc) began about 6 or 7 thousand years ago. This hints at a
mystery: what were humans doing for 194,000 years before
civilization began?

The mystery deepens: modern science and technology didn't
develop until about 200 years ago. That means it wasn't
until 5800 years after the beginning of civilization that
humans became modern.

During this period there was no recognizable science and
technology was primitive. Invention and innovation just
didn't seem worthwhile to most people most of the time. It
was enough to accept what was inherited from the preceding
generation pretty much unchanged.

This stagnation continued for thousands of years and,
apparently, it was good enough. We see civilizations come
and go, each slightly different from the other and call
these differences evidence of progress. But that's from our
perspective of viewing these changes over 6000 years.

This suggests, to me, that the default human attitude about
change is an extreme conservatism and a fear of innovation;
people don't want change they and fear progress. This fits
the trajectory of human history and debunks the optimistic
humanism of the Enlightenment and the euphoric claims of
the present.

There seems to be a new future for archaeology.

Bill

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