Josh writes:
Here's a thing: Reading through the December feedback at the consistently enlightening www.talkorigins.org, I was introduced to the Ica stones. Supposedly these Peruvian artifacts depict an ancient civilization that used telescopes for astronomy, performed heart surgery and brain transplants and hunted (and possibly domesticated) dinosaurs. The significance of these wonders is mitigated by the fact that the story of their origin gives the business with Joseph Smith and his gold plates a run for its money in the credulity-stretching stakes. Supposedly they were found in caves and river beds, but no-one will say where. Some of the people who claimed to have found them later claimed they were hoaxes, then claimed that they weren't, and then claimed that they were again, and so on. The question of why a civilization with such advanced technology made records by scratching them on rocks has yet to be addressed as far as I can tell.
The interesting thing is that the Ica stones are seized upon by both crazy lefty hippies and crazy righty fundamentalists as proof of their views (either that the world is only a few thousand years old and humans and dinosaurs co-existed or that ancient civilisations knew stuff, maaan). This is not unheard of -- see for instance other searches for "ooparts" (Out of Place Artifacts) such as the Coso Artifact -- and frankly not very surprising; at a fundamental level the two groups are more similar than they are different.
Both the hippies and the fundies reveal a general underlying distrust of or outright contempt for science, which consistently undermines their wacky theories. There are appeals to higher powers (be they deity or extra-terrestrial), belief in lost civilizations (Atlantis, Lemuira et al.), belief in the end of the world (be it environmental catastrophy or biblical Armageddon with the burning of the skies and the two-headed calves and the hamster lying down with the hamster-eating snake) -- all giving rise to the notion that in spite of the superficial differences these groups are no more than different ways of spelling "crazy".
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I don't really have a punchline for this post -- how about this?
2 comments:
It seems clear that this frighteningly-advanced ancient civilisation that left no trace of itself apart from some pictures scratched on rocks is simply taking the piss out of us - or rather, out of smelly hippies and fundie Christians. Presumably, when they got to the point of colonising other solar systems, they decided to remove all trace of their culture from Earth, but leave the rock pictures behind as a joke. I sincerely hope that if our civilisation ever reaches the point of colonising space, we'll think up some similarly classy prank to play on future bozos.
Hell, the creator of Teh Universe left his records in the form of the contradictory scribblings of a bunch of Arabic beards from way back when, and a sarc astic post-it note adhering to the cover saying "Have faith". A few stone scratchings would look like more concrete evidence than that...
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