Induce or deduce the existing object. Two men argue about far back human history, one uses inductive reasoning, the other deductive, both are wrong and correct at the same time. Person one observes the objects made by man and concludes that these are the products of civilisations during the Holocene, the other sees the same objects and says that they are older and indications of a civilisation that existed during the Pleistocene. I think the mistake of the first guy is to think that the term ‘civilisation’ denotes a development that must necessarily coincide with agriculture rather than organisation, like if there is evidence of agriculture then dating that dates the objects. I think the second guy makes the mistake of extrapolating much more from the evidence than can be rightly presumed, he is the man of the gaps.

Is it possible that societies existed before agriculture, and that they did more than hunt and gather? I think yes they maybe did, they certainly made art in caves at least 40,000 years ago, but the oldest structure that can be called a man made home we know of is in Syria and dates to circa 10,000 BCE. The people of the 140,000 or so years before the Holocene had the same brain as we do now, they must have been able to figure things out, like how to put a rock on top of another rock to make a dwelling, it’s just that when a 1000 years of ice and hundreds of years of flooding arrive then a lot of this must have been either crushed or washed away into the seas, certainly a lot of organic material would.

They must have known how to catch a fish using a sharp stick or how to make fire, or they must have noticed that a tree trunk floats and that using this material could be useful, and they likely witnessed the beaver make a dam. It is simply inconceivable to me that this problem solving animal, which we are, simply spent most of the time before the Holocene eating and hunting and having sex and little else that did not involve survival. Yes we have found no complexity that we recognise as technology, yes there is an abundance of evidence for this complexity within the Holocene, and yes science has not found any reason to suggest that a civilisation existed in the Pleistocene, but no, that is not all there can be to it.

I propose that science has got it right, that they are looking in the right places for sure. Computers allow us to track back since, during, and before the last ice age and to know where the shores would have been and where the fertile land was, and that is important because we cannot look everywhere simply because of resources. But if that looking accounts for only 5% of the potential space, and if that account is based on the greatest likeness of that being the correct place to look, then that’s not enough really. I would never think a 1 in 20 shot was a sure thing if I were to bet on anything. The other thing is that the method is flawed, yes there may be agriculture in the sites they have discovered to be man made, but that doesn’t mean that the structures they have discovered there were made by the people who first farmed there or made pottery. The cuckoo does not build it’s own nest, it occupies a nest built by another bird, if we didn’t know his then we might think the cuckoo built the nest and we would have no reason to suspect it hadn’t.

The gaps in the knowledge are as important as the knowledge itself, but to go too far in speculating is also a mistake. Thinking, when there is no reason to think, that there were ancient civilisations, is just another way of closing off from what can become known. It’s important to form theories and then to test them, this is a part of doing study, but to hold on to what has been disproved by emerging evidence is the mechanism of dogmatic thinking. If new evidence arises that indicates something that can be nearly certainly proved, then that evidence must change what has been speculated. It’s still important to form theories and investigate though, so the existence of persons who have wild theories, concerning the gaps in what is known, should not be a buzzing fly to the professional archaeologists.

Theories are all very well but they are inductive, and inductive reasoning is flawed. Deducing what must be is a much more sure fire method of getting close to knowing, but it is flawed also in that it does not leave room for speculation and gut feeling. If we take the lines across Malta and the stone structures as examples, we know that they are the product of humans, they must be, but we have no idea of their purpose. And we have reason to suspect that they are older than proposed if we accept, as is proposed by some explorers, that they extend out into the Mediterranean to a depth lower than than encountered as dry land in the Holocene.

We know that the island was inhabited from 5900 BCE by an agrarian people. We also know that it is impossible to radiocarbon date stone things to when they were constructed because the stone already exists at the time of construction, the construction itself does not start a clock ticking. So is it fair to speculate that these structures maybe pre-existed the culture that farmed, that they found them when they arrived? Where the ground around the site can be dated there is an indicator that leads people to believe it then dates the site, but the ground around my house I put there when landscaping, my house is 200 years older than it, and the ground under my house I had dug up to install underfloor heating. This may also be the case the world over where things happen at places, and they keep happening. It is important to keep an open mind and to realise that we have made mistakes before now, we attributed a lot of innovation to the Romans that we know now they simply assimilated through conquest rather than invented. Our idea of history needs, and should welcome, constant revision.

Let’s have a go at eliminating what must be by examining theories of what could be. Firstly, it is plausible that the original builders ate fish and cheese and other materials that would not leave a trace behind, so the lack of agrarian evidence can be explained that way, we are on an island here. Secondly they may not have had the practice of burying their dead, they might have been cremated, eaten, or put to sea, who knows. Thirdly they may have never dug into the ground, Malta is mostly rocky, the tools they used may have been other rocks, and they would not need to quarry. The soil that was there may have been taken away by a mass flood as the ice age receded, the evidence may have been there but be gone now.

I have been to Malta, there are rocks everywhere that are not man made they are the result of geology. What I am saying is that it is in what a civilisation leaves behind that we know them, what if they just didn’t leave much behind? The north American indigenous people didn’t farm, didn’t grow anything, didn’t build temples and structures to leave behind, and I suspect that most of their history of religious practice and culture is actually lost to us in a way the Roman stuff isn’t. We know the Romans much better than we know the Native American. A lot of the history of Britain has been ploughed into the soil, it is just luck that the holes that indicated the original, now rotted away, Woodhenge remained for thousands of years, how many more were lost?

Archaeologists look at artefacts, but what if pottery is modern but the wide flat leaf was the plate of the pre-Holocene era? We have gotten the Neanderthal so wrong so often and will again no doubt, that certainty is not a position one can take. The speculator may be right or wrong, the scientist may be sceptical of the speculator, but until more is know this is merely a conversation about the time before the Holocene, it is not a full stop. Add in the fact that we know the aboriginal peoples of Australia predate the Europeans that came there eventually by more than 40000 years, yet we do not call these people a civilisation because they didn’t build anything or farm. We may have to rethink what we are calling a civilization in that we only seem to think that they can be if they leave things behind that we can understand or touch. It is inconceivable to think that there is a sort of stupid simplicity to these people, they had language and learning and techniques to thrive and survive in harsh circumstances, they were not simple. They believed something, they left an oral tradition behind that allows their ancestors to know what they knew of conservation by burning, how to hunt, how to communicate, how to celebrate and dance, what can be eaten and what can not.

Interestingly I visited Stonehenge this year and while there I found out that a farmer who owned the land moved all the stones around, making the task of dating the site much more difficult and inaccurate. Never have I heard this mentioned on any of the many TV spots I’ve watched on the place.

We can also assume that in some places, regardless of the ice age coming and going, the most optimal places to exist, that give the best chances of survival, would be the same in both eras (before and after). Therefore we may be looking at Holocene civilisations arising and spanning the areas that were occupied by those persons of the Pleistocene, hiding the evidence of them being there by building on them or even out of the same materials. We have seen this many times, that a continual thread of usage and occupation by various cultures modifies and sometimes eradicates the previous structures that were there.

I have been to churches that were Mosques, before that churches, and before that pagan temples, and before that sites of worship and ritual. Under the town of Rabat in Malta there is another older town, and under that there are catacombs. Is much of the evidence of how humans live in the pre-ice age buried under modernity, lost through geological activity, lost in a freeze and thaw, or are the only signs they left behind the structures that we have maybe attributed in error to more modern cuckoo like people? If Malta was not always rocky and it once had soil, then was the pre-Holocene evidence of agrarianism swept away with the soil? Seeds and poo evidence does not last millennia on rocks.

I am only speculating, I have nothing but curiosity, no expertise whatsoever on this subject, I’m not even well read on it. Interesting to think about though…

Paul S Wilson