There are so many ancient civilizations that seemed to have things in common, even though they were on opposite sides of the world, or thousands of miles away from each other. In very ancient times, it was thought that humans didn't travel very far from home. This was believed right up until several years ago. People are not so sure of this anymore and many suspect that it wasn't true at all. Before I get into this part of the article, I would like to say that the cursory evidence seems to indicate that either civilizations did know about each other or there were some huge coincidences that had taken place. An example of this would be finding pyramids in Egypt and in South and Central America. We all know how far apart these places are. Some would argue that even though both areas have pyramids, they are not of the same type or same construction. While the pyramids in Egypt are constructed from solid blocks of stone, the ones in South and Central America are more or less hollow and filled with rubble.

Could man have conceived of pyramid building, in more than one part of the world without independent knowledge of pyramids that were already built? There are so many people that credit some of the more spectacular building accomplishments of the ancients to aliens and such. It is far too hard for people to give credit to ancients, they just can't absorb the fact that maybe the ancients were in possession of secret building techniques that we still don't understand today. We should have learned our lesson when we rediscovered Damascus steel. It turned out that the metal alloy in turbo jet engines was too brittle and required a lot of maintenance. During experiments in metallurgy the ancient secret of this steel that was much stronger than anything we had that was cost effective, was rediscovered. When the secret was rediscovered, we realized that while it was labor intensive, it was not all that complicated. It was a matter of folding the metal far more times than we previously had. Will we find the same thing out about how huge stone blocks were moved, will it turn out to be some simple method that will cause us to wonder why we couldn't discover this now?

We have a tendency to think that the civilizations that were in North and South America are fairly young and that there was no one here when civilizations were starting up in other places. Well guess what, it turns out that we had civilizations here a lot further back in time than was ever suspected a few years ago. During an archaeological dig in Monte Verde, Chile, scientists were astounded to find evidence of early man that dated so far back, that they thought it was impossible. They found evidence that man had occupied this spot as far back as 14,000 years ago. To put this is in a proper time frame, it dates back about 10,000 years before the Egyptian pyramids. The very oldest cites only date back to about 8,000 years, making this settlement truly ancient. Here is a question for you, but I don't expect an answer. If we were able to find a settlement this old, is it possible that even older ones exist? As I said this is a rhetorical question, but it does lead to at least the suspicion that there could be older settlements in this part of the world. One distinctive thing we get from this is that this settlement was near the water back then, even though it is about ten miles from the sea today. Part of the diet of these people turned out to be seaweed. These people had hearths and evidence of their diets was found in them and dated.

Some genetic scientists believe that all humans can be traced back to a human female that lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago. Some even call her Eve. I have a problem with this, because if it is true, where did she come from? Could our Genetic tests be flawed in some manner that we can't conceive of yet? If it isn't, how can we account for this, except for God stepping in and setting this up? I always wondered if we are the first humans to develop on this planet? If not, could there be lost evidence of even more ancient settlements that might be millions of years old. I would love to know what evidence of humankind has been discovered that has been tossed on the side , because the archaeologist didn't want to look foolish. We seem to just keep finding evidence of older and older human settlements in places that we least suspect.

We tend to believe that certain procedures are only from modern times. One of these is embalming. It was long thought that embalming was only a recent discovery. A new, unexpected discovery shows that embalming was not a recent discovery at all. No one knows yet, when it was discovered by the ancient Greeks, but a new discovery shows that they had it during the Roman occupation, around 300 A.D. A mummy of a middle aged woman was found in a lead coffin inside of a marble sarcophagus. It was the first indication that embalming was used in Greece. The body which became mummified, was that of a wealthy woman. This fact may be very important, because embalming may have only been available to the rich. This could be a wrong assumption however. If we look at mummification in Egypt, it seems to have been available to many people. So many mummies were found in Egypt, that in the 18^th century, they were used for fuel in steam engines. That was the main fuel that the railroad used. I guess this is a disgusting thought to us, but at the time it seemed a natural thing to do in a country that had a lack of wood. Some mummies were even ground up into powder and people ingested them, thinking that this made them healthy.

One archaeologist has stated that he found evidence of ancient Europeans and Asians in Oklahoma. Ancients Celtics have also left their mark there. It turned out the the ancient Celtics used hand signals. When they wanted to write things down, they wrote down the hand signals. They did this by drawing a line and drawing symbols above and below the line that represented their hand signals. It was quite ingenious really. Back to the original question, how old are we really as a race? I don't believe that we will be able to answer this question for many years. Living on a dynamic planet doesn't help with any answers either. The earth has a way of destroying evidence. It is either being covered and moved deeper and deeper, being dissolved by hot magma, or being destroyed by erosion. If evidence gets too old, it could easily disappear. That is one of the reasons that I said that we may never really know the age of the human race.