Pre Historic Puzzles: Rocking The Cradle of Civilization

Pre Historic Puzzles: Rocking the Cradle of Civilization

By Mr Ghaz, November 24, 2009

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Pre Historic Puzzles: Rocking the Cradle of Civilization

For more than a century, archeologists were convincing that the cradle of civilization lay in Greece, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. The learning of the advanced peoples of this region, it was thought, gradually moved west into Europe.

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But in the last few decades these theories have been overturned, thanks to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Willard F. Libby and a substance knows as carbon 14.

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Carbon 14 is a radioactive substance that exists in minute quantities. In the late 1940’s Libby discovered that all plants and animals absorb it. When they die, the carbon-like all radioactive substances-begins to decay at a regular rate. Libby was able to measure this rate and could thus use carbon 14 as an archeological calendar. Today it is known that half of the carbon 14 in living organism disappears in 5,730 years, half of what remains in an additional 5,730 years, and so on.

How old is old?

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Many of the items found at prehistoric sites are made of organic material. By measuring the amount of carbon 14 remaining in the shaft of an old ax or a piece of pottery, for example, scientists can accurately determine its age.

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Radiocarbon dating has proved to be phenomenally accurate: it can date to within 100 years going back to 50,000 B.C. It is particularly useful on wood because it can be checked against Dendron-chronology, dating by tree rings. A new ring forms every year in the trunk of a tree as it grows: counting the number of rings enables one to determine the age of any tree.

Where did civilization begin?

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Before radiocarbon dating, written records were the historian’s only clue to the age of the civilized world. Prior to written records, different events could be dated relative to one another, but not absolutely. The earliest surviving written records come from Egypt; they date events fairly accurately back to 3100 B.C. Other ancient events had to be slotted into these knows chronologies.

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The huge stone temple at Tarxien, in Malta, has decorations that resemble some at Mycenae, in Greece. Since the ones at Mycenae are knows to date from around 1600 B.C., historians thought that the Maltese temples, deriving from the Greek, could not have been built any earlier.

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Similarly, Stonehenge, in southern England, has been given the same “latest possible” date, while the stone tombs at Carnac, in Brittany, France, have been dated earlier, at around 2200B.C.

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But radiocarbon dating, checked against Dendron-chronology, now proves that the Maltese temples were built in 3100 B.C. – 1,500 years before the Mycenaean structures that were supposed to have inspired them. Stonehenge was created long before the first Egyptian pyramid, which was constructed about 2650 B.C.; and the tombs at Carnac are now believed to date from around 4000 B.C.-the oldest monuments in the world.

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The theory that culture began in the Near East and gradually spread west seems to be in error. European culture came first. So historians today are asking whether Europe was perhaps the true cradle of civilization.