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Plato's Atlantis My Theory

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Author Topic: Plato's Atlantis My Theory  (Read 102120 times)
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Qoais
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« Reply #2010 on: April 25, 2010, 07:10:12 pm »

One interesting observation about inventions that are not toys but become part of the way of life of a human society, is that every new development needs to be founded on an old one, because too dramatic a development throws the operation of that way of life into chaos.. Early automobilies for example had to be concieved of as carriages without horses. That would not disrupt society's operation (other than putting liveries out of work, but then, the liveries turned into automobile repair facilities.) If someone had produced an automobile that looked like a modern automobile right away, the public would not have been able to relate to it. The horseless carriage was wonderful. It was still the familiar carriage, but it did not need a horse to pull it.
     The evolution of the boat had to proceed in a similar way. It had to slightly improve something already being done. If someone produced the skin-covered frame boat right away, people would not have been able to understand it.
       The boat probably began with men straddling logs. Then someone cut a hole in it so that the man did not have to dangle feet in the water. Then the hole was made more comfortable, and larger, to hold more than one man. Then someone discovered that making the outside more streamlined allowed it to travel faster.
      It may have taken several generations of someone instituting a change and then many people testing whether the change was beneficial. Eventually the log turned into a dugout with a streamlined shape and thin walls (to be light enought to carry). Such sleek dugouts are still made and used by the Khanti of the Ob River in Siberia, althought they can only make small single-man versions on account there are no large trees in their northern environment.
       People who travelled into the sea, such as the Baltic sea, to harvest fish there, learned that they needed large dugouts to withstand the large waves of a sea (or large lake). Archeology reveals that early dugouts in forested regions were large ones, many meters in length, and typically holding up to seven men -  three pairs of rowers and one helmsman. Indeed this is permanently recorded in the Estonian and Finnish languages, where the word for "7" is similar to the word for "pertaining to riding" (Est. sőiduse > seitse), and the word for "5" is similar to the word for "pertaining to carrying" (the center two rowers replaced by goods.)


       The original dugout boat peoples did not venture into the sea, since going out on the open sea was in itself unnatural. However, once they had developed institutions of hunting sea animals that sometimes lingered away from shore, those animals drew them out. The culture that emerged out of the earliest "Maglemose" dugout boat peoples, to harvest the sea, is called the "Kunda" culture. It was located up the east Baltic coast. Archeology has found an abundance of large harpoons, indicating that these people hunted major sea animals, probably seals.
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An open-minded view of the past allows for an unprejudiced glimpse into the future.

Logic rules.

"Intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong."
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