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najing_ftw t1_j91nsma wrote

Is there ANYTHING that could be considered an out of place artifact, lost knowledge, non-human creation or any non-traditionally accepted bits of history?

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jezreelite t1_j91wxb1 wrote

Plenty of knowledge has been lost; it's just not of the type that Ancient Aliens and the like imagine. Rather, it's of smaller things, like great works of literature or things that could have given us greater knowledge of the past.

For instance, the biggest reason why we know so little of the ancient Minoans is because their scripts, Cretan hieroglyphs and Linear A, are still undeciphered.

There are also numerous lost works of literature, like most of Sappho's poetry, the other six works of the Trojan Cycle, Cleitarchus' History of Alexander, Cato the Elder's Origines, Claudius' history of the Etruscans, the memoirs of Agrippina the Younger, the hypothesized Q document that served as a source for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and countless others.

None of these are likely to have contained instructions on how to build a nuclear fusion reactor or whatever, but it's still lost knowledge.

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GSilky t1_j93jqcg wrote

Not really, when something is found that contradicts the record they weigh the evidence (it almost always turns out to be sloppy site work or just fraud) and withhold judgement on that artifact. One potsherd against thousands and all of that.

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tatramatra t1_j926y48 wrote

>lost knowledge

Roman concrete. Greek fire.

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AngryBlitzcrankMain t1_j932jlc wrote

Roman concrete is no lost knowledge. Its just million times repeated pop history myth.

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GSilky t1_j93jdo5 wrote

Greek fire was figured out, however we don't have any Byzantine recipes for it. We do have the versions used at the time by other armies, and it's probably the same thing. Without the Byzantine recipe we will never know for certain what precise ingredients were used.

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