ichthyoid

They say that those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it. Actually, it's such a famous quote, that it's a bit difficult to find whom to attribute the original idea. But whatever the case may be, especially with riots and protests today that parallel many in history (including, in my opinion, the French Revolution, Russian Revolution, and Civil Rights Movement in the United States), it seems this idiom is just as relevant as ever.

But what if some of that history is missing? What if the knowledge we have of our own history is really incomplete? If the above idiom is true, and if there are parts of our history that we don't know about, then isn't our doom inevitable?

Well before we get to that, let's examine our typical model of human history.

Our Current Template for Early Human History

[Image from Pixabay.](https://pixabay.com/photos/stonehenge-monument-prehistoric-2326750/)

The current history of humanity begins around 300,000 years ago, when anatomically modern humans (basically people that look like us) began to spread around the world, beginning in Africa. By the time that the most recent Ice Age ended (around 12,000 years ago), humans had gone all around the world. During this time, human beings were mostly hunter-gatherer societies, until around 10,000 years ago, in what we now call the Neolithic Revolution, in which agriculture and farming arose, first near and around the Middle East, and then through the Indus Valley, China, Europe, and eventually the Americas.

As food became more prevalent, human beings began to have more time for things like art, pottery, writing, and even specific skills like metal working. Thus, civilizations, not just cultures, were established in areas like Mesopotamia, China, India, and Mesoamerica. By the time we get to around 3000 BCE, we have the arrival of the Bronze Age, in which large civilizations that moreso reflect today's various racial and ethnic groups begin to flourish. These civilizations include the likes of the Egyptians, Mycenaeans (early Greeks), Sumerians (Middle East), Shang dynasty (Chinese), and others. From there, because the different cultures were so far-spread geographically, and isolated from one another as well, it's difficult to follow a single trajectory that can encompass everyone. For example, the collapse of the Bronze Age capitulated Mediterranean and Mesopotamian civilizations into a dark age, but no such similar event occurred in Mesoamerica or Indus River cultures at the same time.

Template Interrupted

In 1994, a man named Klaus Schmidt began excavating a site in a south-eastern area of Turkey. The site had previously been thought to be a gravesite, but as Schmidt dug deeper, they found something extraordinary.

They discovered what we now call Gobekli Tepe.

[Image taken from TourismNewsLive.](http://www.tourismnewslive.com/2018/12/26/2019-declared-the-year-of-gobekli-tepe-for-turkey-tourism/)

Spanning around 300 meters across (at least, what has currently been uncovered), Gobekli Tepe is a large complex filled with megalithic T-shaped pillars, totems, and other artifacts, built on a mound (called a tell). Many of pillars, in addition to being as tall as 20 feet (6 meters), have figures of animals carved onto them, and there are sculptures littered about as well. They are absolutely huge and impressive structures.

[Image taken from wikipedia.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe#/media/File:G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe_Pillar.JPG)

Now deemed a UNESCO World Heritage Site, its excavation has continued since its discovery, but some estimate that only 5% of it has been discovered so far. This is because Gobekli Tepe seems to have been deliberately buried some time after its construction and use, though we don't really know why.

However, what's more fascinating is its age. The dating of various artifacts has led archeologists and scientists to conclude that the site was built around the 10th millennium BCE.

Why is that so interesting? Because that would mean this ancient site, a complex array of pillars and totems and walls which would have required massive organization, labor, food quantities, and artistic intent, was built at a time that we estimate in our current template to be when people were just moving into an agrarian lifestyle, and thousands of years before building something like Stonehenge.

None of this seems to make sense, unless there is a piece of human history that we have missed.

[An aerial shot from TourismNewsLive.](http://www.tourismnewslive.com/2018/12/26/2019-declared-the-year-of-gobekli-tepe-for-turkey-tourism/)

Now, I'm not really one to be conspiratorial. However, this evidence to me does seem to point to a missing page of history. There is a great Youtube debate featuring Michael Shermer of the Skeptics Society and Graham Hancock on Joe Rogan's podcast, where they go back and forth on the meaning of this amazing find.

But it's not just this singular site which begs the question of missing human history.

Atlantis is a Myth...or is it?

For the most part, even today, the story of Atlantis is regarded as a myth or legend that has no historical merit by most historians and scientists (though one certainly could argue it has a lot of literary value).

However, (relatively) recent findings have piqued many people's interests about this supposedly mythical society once again, the most convincing of which I will talk about now.

[Artistic rendition from a blog.](https://ancientstartech.blogspot.com/2017/11/atlantis-large-scale-power-plant.html)

The first thing we need to look at is how Atlantis was first formulated. In his works, Plato talks about the island of Atlantis as the antithesis of Athens (the supposed perfect society). In it, he describes Atlantis as having been an island located near the Atlantic Ocean with mountains on its northern parts, stretching in an oblong shape of about 555 kilometers by 370 kilometers. The entire island was enclosed by three moat rings, and within each ring was land where the people of Atlantis settled, and the three moat rings were walls and gates to built to guard them.

As we know from popular myth, Atlantis completely destroyed by earthquakes and floods, due to judgment from the gods in Plato's story. But what many people don't realize is that Plato actually said that what remained of it was a mud shoal that prevented people from passing through it to the Atlantic Ocean.

So, if we were to look for the lost city of Atlantis, we shouldn't be looking for something sunk in the middle of an ocean. Rather, we would be looking for something that has been reduced to mud (or dirt, considering the time difference between then and now), with geographical markers of mountains on its northern parts. We may even find three rings that may be somewhat leftover from the described destruction of the island.

So, have we found anything like this?

I present to you, the Eye of the Sahara, also known as the Richat Structure.

[Image from wikipedia.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ASTER_Richat.jpg)

Located on the western fringes of the African Sahara, the Richat Structure was discovered in the early 20th century and thought to be a crater of some kind. But subsequent research has revealed that it is not an impact of any kind, and may even have been a lake in the early days of our template for human history.

More importantly, at least for us, is the fact that it almost perfectly encapsulates Plato's description. Mountains to the north. Concentric rings. As well as being covered in sand and mud, blocking the way to the Atlantic Ocean. Here is a reconstruction from satellite images (again from wikipedia) of what the area around the Richat Structure looks like.

Now compare that to the description above (summarizing Plato) as well as the artist rendition of Atlantis from before. The similarity seems a bit uncanny.

What's even more fascinating is that the destruction of Atlantis supposedly occurred around 9,000 years before the lifetime of Critias, the narrator in Platos' work describing Atlantis. He credits this knowledge to his great-grandfather named Solon, who supposedly went down to Egypt to obtain this information. Given that Plato probably lived and wrote around the 5th century BCE, it is probable that the time span being explored is around the 10th century BCE, which would make it around the same time that Gobekli Tepe was constructed, then buried. And around the Richat Structure, archaeologists have actually found freshwater fossils that are around the date of the 10th century BCE (as well as before).

Given the stories around Atlantis, it's quite clear that it was quite an advanced civilization. What kind of advanced civilization, we certainly don't know, yet. But surely, there is evidence that it was not simply on the cusp of discovering agriculture.

To give credit where it is heavily due, most of these ideas about Atlantis I found watching Bright Insight, a Youtube channel dedicated to alternative theories about history. He has far better (and more detailed) videos than the short description of things written here. You can find his Atlantis videos here, here, and here.

Additionally, someone has gone to the Richat Structure and recorded his findings here and here.

Other Discoveries

[Another one from Pixabay.](https://pixabay.com/photos/egypt-desert-egyptian-temple-giza-1179193/)

The two findings above offer pretty convincing evidence (in my mind, anyway) that our normal template for human history is missing something. But there are others as well.

In July (of 2020!), National Geographic reported finding an underwater cave with evidence of mining. This mining is estimated to have been occurring around 11,000 years ago.

Around the famous Great Sphinx of Giza, there is evidence for water erosion that had to have happened far earlier our current dating of its construction.

There's even evidence that older civilizations may have had some knowledge of electricity, with the finding of a battery recipe from a book in the early 13th century CE (which clearly points to an earlier date). Not to mention Nikola Tesla's theory that the Great Pyramids of Giza may have been used for electricity generation.

There's so much more, like the mysteries behind the Angkor Wat to the strange statues of Easter Island, and even current mainstream ideas about human migration patterns, when we take a look into early history, there seems to be so much that we don't know, and run counter to what we typically learn growing up.

Final Thoughts

So what of our missing history? Does my original question hold? If we don't know these missing pieces of history, are we doomed to repeat something we don't know?

The funny thing about human history is that it is often cyclical. The story of Atlantis is the idea that the hubris of these people is what ultimately caused their own destruction. The fact that they thought they were so great, that they could rule the rest of humanity, brought them into the anger and judgment of the gods.

But we don't often have to look far back in history to find similar lessons. From the Fall of the Roman Empire to World War II to the fall of the Soviet Union, it seems like the lessons of history are almost constantly dogging us with our own pride and brutality. And so, while these evidentially missing parts of history absolutely fascinating to learn and explore, the lessons of history are quite recent and intimate. And we don't need to wander far to learn what it is we need to know to, at the very least, avoid disaster.

A lot of these ideas about ancient civilizations, especially ancient and advanced civilizations, are so far rejected by mainstream academics and historians. The idea that our current template of history is definitive is very much etched into dogma of current culture. But, in a way, it's to be expected. This is the way I see it:

The mainstream often becomes a centralized body that has its particular philosophies and ideologies. The knowledge that was once fresh and new can often become the immovable pillars which bind ideas in a strait-jacket, until the next evidentially overwhelming idea comes and inevitably beats out the old. The issue is how violent that mainstream culture is in suppressing new ideas before it cracks under the undeniable tide of good progress.

And thus, decentralization is an essential key to the beneficial progress of humanity. The empowerment of the individual, rather than the collective, is the fight that we often have to make. Human beings are easily persuaded to build the Tower of Babel, so that we can see our collective greatness. But in the end, what we achieve as groups often result in oppression, violence, and nasty, brutally short lives. But when individuals are given the capacity to be themselves in all circumstances, then the uniqueness that each individual can bring rises to make all of us better, tested only by time and endurance. And so we must remember:

We were all geocentrists once.

Header Image credit to Pixabay.