Before you put me in the same category as Von Daniken, hear me out.
When the ice spread across Europe, it basically annihilated everything and changed the landscape. New valleys and fjords later emerged where there had been none.
My reason for asking such a speculative question is partly related to the extraordinary age of the Göbekli Tepe site in Turkey, and the fact that in order to raise such structures skills are needed which presuppose organized learning of some sort.
Today archaeology has moved down at almost a molecular level. And I thought this might make it possible to search for clues of what preceded the ice-age in a new way. So, the question is does the evidence exist, and is any search feasible?
Há algumas especulações positivas à respeito, mas como não sou especialista no assunto não posso afirmar com certesa.
I like the "Von Daniken" preface. I have not seen compelling evidence of pre-iceage peoples that I would call urban.
In regard to the deeper question about what you might find of such a culture if it existed but was not directly found or was not preserved in the sedimentary record, I guess one might speculate that an urban or sedentary culture would require some form of agriculture. This could mean evidence of domestic animals or plants. Specifically for plants, pollen is relatively hardy and there are plenty of examples where paleo-ecologists interpret cultural phases or human land use from the sediment-polen record.
Example of a more recent site where these records were used to interpret 1000 years of human land use.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00334-010-0241-7
I don't know that you would find evidence of anything that early, but if you are looking for an area of study, polen studies for that time period are great for seeing how the climate changed, so it can serve a dual useful purpose with at least a possibility of discovery.
The inexplicable rise in temperature which characterized both the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum 56 million years ago and the Middle Eocene Climatic Optimum 16 million years later has been cited as possible evidence of prehistoric industrial societies. However, both events were more gradual than what would normally be expected from industrialization-induced climate change.
Archaeological evidence is open to interpretation. There are pre glacial sites that could be interpreted as urban. I would look at the “Indigenous paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere” by Paulette Steeves. She provides very compelling evidence of significant populations in the pre glacial era in North America.
Thank you for responding. Of course, I am not talking about industrial societies, but rather something that would be more like a precursor to Göbekli Tepe, or perhaps slightly larger and similar to something a little later. My idea is simply that something that is called "a revolution" in fact is conditioned by a huge natural disaster, and that may mask a more gradual development or even a decline. And then there is the question of what new technology may or may not allow us to know these days.
Along the coast of France, during the last ice age when the Cosquer cave was inhabited by a prehistoric society, the level of the sea was 120 meters lower than it is today. If the oceans were that much lower than today, because of Glacial formation isn't it possible for the The Yonaguni Monument to have been carved out of rock by human hands?
Is the Göbekli Tepe site in Turkey a one off, did it just appeared out of no where. The Sahara desert hasn't given up any of it's secrets, nor the Jungles of Africa or the southern Americas nor the ice covered polar poles. Any pre-glacial civil structures found along the western coast of North America has been pulled under the earth's crust and turned into metamorphic rock.
Didn't the World's space program use satellite penetrating radar to map the world surface and they found buried structural signs of human construction everywhere?
A 25,000-year-old Ice Age structure made from the bones of 60 wooly mammoths has been unearthed in Russia. Any wooden structures found in jungle settings have probably rotted away, long ago. But prehistoric caves are found all over the world, showing signs of human occupation.
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