It's Always Older Than You Think

I pity the poor archaeologist, whose job it is to reconstruct a 5 million piece puzzles with 995,000 of the pieces missing. That said, I'm always confident that whatever the timeline they have built for society, it's wrong.

Severely.

Physicists may have the events right, but they're always making the universe older, too. But archaeologists have to ignore things like super-accurate pre-Columbian maps of South America, chemical batteries found in the ancient world, etc. Our view of the world is still dominated by an old Judeo-Christian model (that Judeo-Christians probably seldom subscribed to).

This is one of those things that's tough to ignore.

10,000 years ago--long before Western civilization crawled out of the muck--an empire on the Indian subcontinent ruled the world.

And yet it's all but forgotten.

I remember reading Durant's Story of Civilization, "Our Ancient Chinese Heritage" and being amused at a paragraph spent on an empire that ruled the ancient world for 200 years--that we know virtually nothing about, other than it existed and dominated.

We know a lot less than we don't know.