>My Thursday LA Times says the that Feb 27 Nature reports someone found
>"perfectly preserved 400,000 year old wooden spears"! If true, this
>suggests there is a bigger gap than we thought beteen creatures able
>to make advanced tools and us, highlighting the mystery: Just what
>*did* happen to humans in the last 50,000 years?
>
>Robin D. Hanson hanson@hss.caltech.edu http://hss.caltech.edu/~hanson/
>
What about Graham Hancock's theories? Anybody have any opinions on that?
(He wrote a best seller recently, I forget the title, which propounded a
theory that some pretty advanced - not ridiculously advanced, but quite
civilised and medium tech - civilisations arose in the past and were
destroyed by some sort of geomagnetic phenomenon, and that it has
happened not just once but several times. He reckons that the Cheops
pyramid and the Sphinx, and a few other monuments scattered over the
world, are much older than has been thought up till now, and are kind of
encoded warnings about this fairly regular catastrophic cycle. Some of
it's a bit von Danikenish, but a lot of it seems quite coherent.)
Guru George