GHOSTS OF THE FIRST CIVILIZATION
We live within humanity’s Second Civilization, one that we have been taught is the very first on the planet and has its earliest roots in ancient Egypt, Sumer (Southern Iraq), and the Indus Valley of Pakistan and India; it is everywhere in evidence around the entire world today. Although it seems heretical to say so, there had to be, then, a First Civilization on this orb, a true forerunner. And there was. It existed during the closing centuries of the last Ice Age, but it is all but unknown to us. It vanished almost completely from the historical record.
Today, however, researchers are painstakingly sifting through haunting ancient clues and uncovering striking new evidence teased from the rocks and sediments that are revealing something of the First Civilization’s nature, its possible global extent, and its sudden cataclysmic last days.
And there will be a Third Civilization, too. For traces from the First Civilization and the excesses of the Second Civilization provide hints to the Third Civilization’s inevitable arrival.
On a potbelly hill in Turkey, known as Gobekli Tepe, is a 40-acre excavation that has revealed in less than two-decade’s time a monumental megalithic work, a series of large compounds where massive yet graceful T-shaped carved stones stand in circles. The stunning architecture on this low hill was created at a time when agriculture and domesticated animal husbandry were not quite yet stowed in humanity’s tool kit. According to archeologists working Gobekli Tepe, a sophisticated hunter/gather culture built this marvel.
Presently, five compounds have been unearth, but ground-penetrating radar has revealed that there are a dozen more and that the site may be as large as 100 acres in scope. This remarkable ruin is not 4,000 or 5,000 years old. It is no less than 12,000 years old, at least 7,000 years older than the magnificent pyramids on the Giza plateau of Egypt. Why it exists is a mystery. And why it was actually buried by hand by the people of the region a thousand years after it was built is utterly baffling.
What is certain is that Gobekli Tepe was crafted by an advanced people who had developed sophisticated skills and an elaborate social structure that most present-day researchers believed would not become widely employed by humanity for another seven millennia.
Half a world away, on the most isolated outpost in the Pacific, on a spot of volcanic land known as Easter Island, stand dozens of huge basalt and volcanic tuff statues known as Moai. All exhibit elongated faces and torsos but no legs. Some sport a heavy stone cap on the head. A geologist studying the landscape around the statues noted that when the Moai were first discovered by European sailors in 1722, most were buried to their chins in undisturbed sediment eroded from the hills in the surrounding area. Although most researchers pegged the quarrying date of these immense Moai busts to some 1,500 years ago, the geologist understood that the dozen and more feet of layers of erosion sediments had to have accumulated over many many thousands of years. He speculated that the Easter Island statues had to be at least 10,000 years old and perhaps much older. The great Moai heads had to have been carved by First Civilization people.
That same scientist flipped Egyptology on its head at the dawn of this century. Studying the Sphinx, that human-headed lion at the foot of the pyramids at Giza outside of Cairo, he revealed that the immense statue and the walled compound it sits in had been heavily eroded by heavy rainfall. Rainfall? In the desert?
In the closing days of the Ice Age 13,000 to 11,000 years ago, Egypt, the Sahara desert, and much of the Middle East were blessed with abundant rainfall. After all, the Garden of Eden of biblical fame is said have been located between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in present-day Iraq. The region was a natural paradise at the time because there was copious rainfall, abundant enough to heavily erode the sandstone rock that comprises the Sphinx.
So rather than having been carved during the construction of the great pyramids, the Sphinx had to be much older, insisted the geologist. It had to be a monument of the First Civilization. Other researchers have posited that the monument had originally been fashioned with the head of a lion facing due east directly toward (at the time it was carved) the constellation Leo (lion) in the heavens. The lion Sphinx gazed directly on the stars of Leo nearly 12,000 years ago.
As remarkable and ancient as these megalithic monuments are, seafaring maps have survived from great antiquity. Known as the Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, some of these documents actually show the continents of Antarctic and South America, the Caribbean, and coastal North America thousands of years before the 18th century when Europeans began sailing the world in great wooden sailing vessels. No Second Civilization culture ever documented the existence of Antarctica and South America until a few centuries ago. So the Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings must have been drafted by First Civilization seafarers who possessed excellent ocean-sailing craft and intimate knowledge of latitude and longitude, and who circled the entire globe in the deep past.
All of this and more was lost to human memory. Some catastrophic cosmic events that profoundly altered the biosphere brought down the First Civilization essentially overnight. It became, for all intents and purposes, extinct, as dead as the mammoths, mastodons, sabertooth cats and countless other large animal species that vanished along with the human inhabitants of that earliest civilization. Today, a race is on in earnest to uncover the causes of the extinctions at the end of the Ice Age. As archeologists, paleontologists, geologists, astrophysicists and others scramble to unearth evidence, they are digging up the clues that are just beginning to reveal to us in the Second Civilization an enlightened First Civilization culture or cultures that were highly adept at astronomy, monumental architecture, globe spanning navigation, and social organization.
Survivors of the First Civilization collapse left behind traces of something bewildering. They left narrow, sprawling webs of underground tunnel networks and earthworks that appear to be something akin to above-ground bomb shelters. They fabricated astronomical “machines” designed to track the seasons, the 26,000-year precession of the constellations through the night sky, the eight-year transit of Venus (think of the shape of the Star of David traced by our bright neighboring planet), and clues to the arrival of the cosmic horrors – comet debris storms and massive and deadly solar prominences (flares) – that had laid low the First Civilization and essentially wiped away almost all physical traces of it via continent-size firestorms, catastrophic floods, and unfathomably large tsunami waves.
The surviving First Civilization ancients were preparing, some think, for the arrival of conditions that would destroy the fledgling Second Civilization and bring about the rise of a Third Civilization. They wanted to be certain to protect themselves against the tribulations of a second End of Days so they might step out into the sunshine as survivors into yet another world wholly remade.
We existing humans in the later stages of the Second Civilization are living inside an expanding perfect storm of environmental and societal anomalies. You know the drill: exploding human population, resource squander and depletion, water scarcity in many regions of the world, lose of topsoils and soil fertility, pollution in myriad forms, acidification of the oceans, rising sea level, increasing heat and therefore severe drought in many quarters, the rise of super hurricanes and hyper-typhoons, massive forest fires and lengthening fire seasons, mass human migrations, unending hot conflicts, and on and on.
Humans will survive our present Second Civilization excesses, no doubt, just as lucky small bands of our ancestors succeeded in scraping by in the aftermath of the annihilation of the First Civilization populations. Those survivors restocked the planet and cobbled together the world we live in today. Who among our kind will carry on to give birth to a Third Civilization, when the technological bubble we live inside of bursts in a geological eye blink and casts us out screaming into an impoverished ecosystem suddenly red in tooth and claw once again?
