Cybertechnology pg. 74 refers to "guys in loincloth" performing cybermantic magic. The "pre-babylonian, pre-sumerian, pre-everything" part of that reference has been pushed back in time in real life, as archeologists have found a text that is 3000 years old: CNN News

Shall we tell them about the past age?

"An Israeli archaeologist has discovered what he says is the earliest-known Hebrew text, [...]"

bold mine

Well there are some support for super old civilizations, of course alot of it is crackpot. But things such as the sphinx being much much older then the pyramids makes you think. (If not earthdawn then atleast Howard's Conan!)

Aren't people want to dive the north sea as they now think it sunk and could have been home to early civilizations. I'm sorry to say I don't have the archaeology magazine I read this from and its owner is currently doing field work some place.

I remember hearing about that on the Discovery Channel (Or maybe it was the Science Channel.).

From what i read in some books is that there are lots of ancient stories about a large flood or wave that swallowed the land in the north sea area. Lots of the ancient stories of France, Germany, and England talks about people who were run out of their homes on the shores of the north sea to more inland and to England. I think even some early Greek writers who claimed to have visited that area spoke of the flooding of the area and the fact that it was hard to sail the muddy waters. Since the ocean levels have risen since the last iceage, alot of sites of ancient peoples who settled near the shores of lakes, seas, and oceans are gone forever.

Yeah the area has a name that has slipped me and IIRC had better conditions than the other centers of civilization. Weather any where built there is currently imposable to tell but not beyond the realms of possibility. I've read a fair number of articles on it but they where all at my friends house (he happens to be an archeologist)

Writing goes back over 5000 years in the Middle East, with Sumerians being credited with inventing it. Oral histories go back much farther, and in several locations in North America oral histories have been found to correlate well with geological events way older than the onset of writing. As a side note, native oral histories are being recognized by law in some jurisdictions in Canada as equivalent to written documents.

Flood stories appear in mythologies all over the world. It makes sense to think that rising water levels from the end of the last glaciation gave rise to this common trope, but we don't have any proof. However...

Britain (but not Ireland) -was- connected to the mainland until about 6500 BCE. The Persian Gulf was dry land about 12000 years ago (15000?), and rising sea waters rushed up the gulf on the order of about 100 metres a year. That's gotta be impressive, and that's a lot of submerged prime land, considering that's where the combined Tigris and Euphrates would have flowed.

Peter

Don't forget the submerged ruins on India's coasts, many of which are over five thousand years old. Some believe that yoga and the martial arts were invented by the Indians (actual Indians not NA) during (and immediately before) the last ice age making them over sixteen thousand years old. But, that's still conjecture at this point.

Those traditions did indeed develop in India, and the martial arts travelled with monks over the mountains to China and elsewhere. Near as I can tell, that travelling happened within the last 5,000 years. The invasion of the Indian subcontinent by Aryans occurred some 3500 to 4000 years ago, and I suspect (and suspicion is all I have at the moment) it was during the mingling of peoples and opening up of communication routes that such knowledge started to spread.

Peter

IIRC legend has Bodidharma credited with bringing the Indian fighting arts over to Chinese land.

The Aborigines of Australia have an oral history that stretches about ~ 40-50,000 years. Don't forget, the more we know the more we understand how little we truly know.

Yonaguni

Also, not quite as old but interesting:
Antikythera mechanism

Ph' nglui mglw'naft Cthulhu R'lyeh wagh'nagl fthtagn

Seriously though we keep finding out how little we know about early people's on this planet.

Flood myths are common throughout the world. One part of that I find most interesting-the Semetic story of the flood says that the first animal Noah sent out to search for dry land was the Raven, who did not come back. The salish of the North West of north America in their flood story say that Raven found man in a shell/ark and coaxed them out into the world.

Yonaguni is actually around where I'm stationed right now (Ryukyu=Okinawa Prefecture). I recently saw a Japanese documentary about it and from what I could tell the jury is fairly split over what it is.

The argument that made the most sense to me is that it's a combination of natural structures that were adapted to human use a long time ago. There's a legend here about a castle that fell into the ocean and this structure is in the general vicinity of that legend.

Looking at the formations alone it seems undeniably man made but if you get out of the water and take a look around the surrounding areas there's a number of similar naturally occurring structures above water.

Supposedly to be a difficult but awesome dive site. /Okinawa Tourist Authority

Glacial dams are kind of scary.

Huge amounts of water can be dumped very, very quickly, eradicating everything in its path. The theory about the Lake Missoula area is one of the more impressive examples that I've found.

More reading:
Lake Missoula
Southern Patagonia Icefield
Tibetan plateau

So, yeah. No wonder so many ancient cultures have flood stories.

-paws

A good site that i use to keep an eye on this kind of stuff is

http://dailygrail.com/

a great source of information on many alternative theories, such as Göbekli Tepe

http://dailygrail.com/news/gobekli-tepe-the-garden-of-eden

I'm surprised no one mentioned the Black Sea deluge, which is the best explanation for the region's flood stories. "Ten cubic miles of water poured through each day" is impressive.

Notably for Shadowrun/Earthdawn the Black Sea deluge happened circa 5600 BC, which is the the center point of the Fourth World (8238 BC – 3113 BC). the height of the Scourge that preceded Earthdawn.

Jungian archetypal theory would have something to say about this.

I only took Philosophy 101 and 201, not Physcology. Therefore, what would "Jungian archetypal theory" have to say?

You are asking 'Sir Psycho"

That's what I assumed, too. I'm waiting for him to answer.

Peter

I always found the Norse creation myths to be pretty telling. According to Norse myth, the beginning of life was fire and ice, with the existence of only two worlds: Muspelheim and Niflheim. When the warm air of Muspelheim hit the cold ice of Niflheim, the jötunn Ymir and the icy cow Audhumla were created. Sounds kind of like a memory of the end of the Ice Age to me.

Norse myth courtesy of wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norse_myth

The contents of the collective unconscious are called archetypes. Jung also called them dominants, imagos, mythological or primordial images, and a few other names, but archetypes seems to have won out over these. An archetype is an unlearned tendency to experience things in a certain way.

The archetype has no form of its own, but it acts as an "organizing principle" on the things we see or do. It works the way that instincts work in Freud's theory: At first, the baby just wants something to eat, without knowing what it wants. It has a rather indefinite yearning which, nevertheless, can be satisfied by some things and not by others. Later, with experience, the child begins to yearn for something more specific when it is hungry -- a bottle, a cookie, a broiled lobster, a slice of New York style pizza.

The archetype is like a black hole in space: You only know its there by how it draws matter and light to itself. Jung said that there is no fixed number of archetypes which we could simply list and memorize. They overlap and easily melt into each other as needed, and their logic is not the usual kind.

That's the best description of them I've ever heard, thank you.

Douglas Adams from the Hitchhikers Guide:

'The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases.
"For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question How can we eat? the second by the question Why do we eat? and the third by the question Where shall we have lunch?"

I know it's off topic, but what was being posted reminded me of it.

Adams missed at least one phase of every Civilization: the Who? phase.

"Who are those barbarians at the gates?"

Alternatively, in the eating analogy, it's the "Oh, we're lunch" phase.

Peter

Sounds kinda like where western civ is now.