I had an odd day yesterday. I was hunting for new podcasts when I hit a website called Thothweb.com. The site contained an article about the vagaries of the distant past (10,000 years +) and the many weird anomalies that don’t mesh with the accepted, scientific view that our civilization sprang up about 10,000 years ago. The descriptions of odd archeological finds were interesting, but the article harped a little too much on the possibility that a nuclear war had wiped out a previous, advanced civilization, leading to the rise of our current, heavily-armed civilization. I was more intrigued by the idea that we could be the second (or fifth, or thousandth) civilization to exist on this planet, and that comets, ice ages and God knows what else could have destroyed them all.
This article appears in Nov 15-21, 2006.