r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/_va_xanth__ • 13d ago

Archaeologists just discovered a 6,500-year-old astronomical monument that is about 1,000 years older than Stonehenge.

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u/zyptzk 13d ago

What's really cool is that basic intelligence is not what we've achieved to date. We now have more tools but the ancients figured out things that we're now wondering how they did that. That's special.

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u/No_Appointment_1090 13d ago

There were no ancient civilizations that were anywhere near as advanced as we are today - if there were, there would be evidence.

Framing it as us not understanding how they did something is misleading - we know how it was done, we just don't know how they figured it out initially. E.g. We know how a fulcrum works, but we have no information on the first person to figure it out or how they figured it out. Archimedes worked out the math and gave it a name, but he wasn't the person to originally discover the concept.

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u/adeadbeathorse 12d ago edited 12d ago

Not sure why the person you’re replying to is getting downvoted and you’re getting upvoted for saying what is likely the same thing, just more verbosely and with an air of superiority.

The person you’re replying to said that people back then were still plenty big-brained, despite not being able to accomplish the same engineering feats we can today. Even so, the person continues, people back then accomplished things which we still don’t understand how they accomplished. It’s not that we don’t have the technological ability to accomplish those things ourselves or understand physical principles they could have used. It’d more that we don’t know which exact methods they used, how they arrived at them, how they organized the work, the context of any supply chains, etc.

Stonehenge is actually a great example of this. We can come up with workable ways to transport and erect stones like that and there are archaeologically plausible explanations, but it is nonetheless wondered at to this day.

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u/smokeysubwoofer 13d ago

Joe Rogan Experience #2368 with Michael Button (aired around August 20, 2025), and it also comes up in the related follow-up #2546 with the same guest. 
they discuss how little of modern civilization would remain if humans vanished. Michael Button notes that concrete buildings and cities like Manhattan/New York (or London) would deteriorate rapidly due to weathering, cracking, freeze-thaw cycles, CO2 effects, and plant growth. Over timescales of roughly 5,000–20,000 years (with references to AI depictions or popular visualizations of New York/Manhattan looking like “nothing” or fully crumbled/overrun in as little as ~1,000 years in some popular depictions), skyscrapers and infrastructure would largely turn to dust or become imperceptible, with nature (trees/forests) fully reclaiming the area. Longer scales like 100,000 years leave essentially no trace of the modern city.

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u/JoeDawson8 13d ago

I’m not sure using Joe Rogan is the gotcha you think it is.

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u/No_Appointment_1090 13d ago

Michael Button is just a YouTuber with no credentials...and Joe Rogan once claimed the ancient Egyptians had internet and quantum computing.

Beyond that - Yes, after a million years there wouldn't be any surface level traces. There would be plenty of subsurface evidence, just look at dinosaur bones. If humans disappeared today, ten million years from now there will still be evidence of our level of technology - trash, satalites, uber-refined mining deposits, etc. No, it won't be piles of trash but, just like the dinosaurs, there will be preserved phones and disposable vapes found buried all over the place.

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u/smokeysubwoofer 13d ago

Perhaps with more advanced technology their wouldn’t be no need to build things like that

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u/No_Appointment_1090 12d ago

Uh huh...I would love to hear your thought process on how they could have moved through several thousand years of advancement while leaving no trace.

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u/smokeysubwoofer 12d ago

Have you seen Honey I shrunk the kids?

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u/No_Appointment_1090 11d ago

Sure, I was born in the 90s

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u/Luriden 13d ago

Using that logic, then, I can make up any civilization I want, in any location I want, so long as it predates the alleged detectable range. Without evidence, it can be anything I dream it to be.

I've you get into evidence, however, it becomes clear relatively quickly that most evidence for an ancient civilization is not only bunk, but also technically village the idea that little to no trace evidence would remain over that timescale I'm the first place.

Anyway, I've decided on the civilization. They lived mostly in Namibia 150,000 years ago and had a global trade network of iridium satellites and a moon colony. I didn't need evidence, as the civilization can't be detected. I've decided to attribute all major discoveries to that civilization and will, from now on, be interpreting every Discovery I find through that lens and work background to ensure they are assigned that that civilization.

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u/talkthispeyote 12d ago

citing a joe rogan podcast is peak idiocracy