Lab Notes
Ten Thousand Inaccuracies, But Cute

When a young man meets a woman, he's likely to say something foolish like "I think I know you." What he means is that her symmetrical face, smooth skin and large eyes have set off dozens of recognition circuits in his brain, telling him this is the sort of person he ought to know, ought to like, ought to mate with and produce copious healthy offspring. He hasn't met her before, but he's carried an image of her face inside him all his life, which produces much the same feeling in his fluttering heart. And yet, the moment he opens his mouth any illusion of foreknowledge is obliterated; he has no idea what to say.

In a very similar way, Roland Emmerich's new movie 10,000 B.C. is like a blue-eyed cave woman I've never seen before, but always wanted to. She interests me, but I'm not sure quite how—ahem!—to break the ice.

"Know, O prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of..."

Seventy-six years ago, these words were penned by Robert E. Howard in his fictional essay, "The Hyborian Age"—a document that today would be called the "story bible" for the fantasy world of Conan the Barbarian. Today, Emmerich appears to hold a similar view: that civilization is much older than our established histories are willing to admit. I certainly agree with the principle here, if not necessarily with the details; the people of yesteryear were at least as intelligent as the people of today, and the only reason we call their time the "Stone Age" is because all the wood and leather and rope and cloth has rotted away. Ninety percent of their technology is lost to us, but scattered and extremely spotty evidence suggests that permanent villages, grain harvesting, pottery and woven textiles could be found in Europe—at least in isolated pockets—going as far back as 30,000 years!

Think about that. As of this writing, the United States of America was founded 232 years ago. The Roman empire collapsed less than 1,400 years before that, and our oldest written records—clay tablets from ancient Iraq—go back barely 7,000 years. Flood legends from around the world imply that the threads of cultural memory—the imperfect passage of oral history from one generation to the next—may reach all the way back to the end of the last great ice age, the Würm glaciation, whose sudden end about 10,000 years ago produced catastrophic glacial melting that raised sea levels and rewrote coastlines from Finland to Tierra del Fuego. But that's all we've got. Even counting distortions of distortions of distortions, that's absolutely as far back as we can remember.

And yet, while the durable architecture of stone-cut buildings and monuments is a relatively recent addition, the basic underpinnings of civilization have been around for at least three times that long. All forgotten. An age undreamed of, indeed.

Going for the gold

Now, in the movie Roland Emmerich would have us believe there was a proto-Egyptian civilization in place during the last centuries of the ice age. This, too, is believable, because when the Egyptian civilization officially began in 3100 B.C. with the installation of Menes, the first Pharaoh, the Egyptians were building on an agrarian culture that had already been occupying the Nile valley for almost 2,000 years, and that had an unusual penchant for carving things out of stone. That doesn't get us all the way back to the ice age, but who says proto-Egypt was necessarily located in Egypt?

Again the evidence is very spotty, but there are flooded megaliths off the coast of India, Malta and the Japanese island of Yonaguni that consist of carefully cut and fitted stones—thousands of them—forming intricate structures whose original purpose we can only guess at. But there's the thing: These sites have been underwater for 12,000 years. In other words, in 10,000 B.C. there really were at least three separate civilizations capable of building large stone monuments. Even today, the vast majority of civilized people live within a day's travel of the ocean. If this was equally true during the ice age, then the flooding at its end, when sea levels rose by as much as 130 meters (roughly 400 feet), the devastation must have been unimaginable. Archaeology has little to say about that period, possibly because archaeologists are looking on dry land when they should be looking miles offshore! Still, I feel very confident in saying that no one, anywhere on Earth, was building anything as large as the pyramids and temples in this movie. If those existed, they would still be visible today, sticking up out of the water.

Without actually saying so, the movie suggests that the pyramids under construction are in fact the ones we see today on the Giza plateau in Egypt. I'm going to call bullpuckey on this one, because the Egyptians left behind detailed historical records that tell us exactly when the pyramids were built—the first beginning in 2630 B.C. under the architect Imhotep, and the last completed in 1814 B.C.—and attempts to establish earlier dates for them are almost always founded on mysticism rather than science. Don't be fooled.

Also, the idea that anyone, at any time, would build a huge capstone out of solid gold is ridiculous. In the first place, such an object would be 10 times heavier than the largest stone blocks beneath it, hence nearly impossible to move. Anyway, where would the Egyptians (or proto-Egyptians) have found that much gold? With today's industrial mining techniques, a capstone that size would consume an entire year's worth of global production, and for a tiny kingdom in the ancient world it would take centuries, maybe even millennia, to claw that same amount of metal from the ground.

However, I'm a lot less skeptical of the idea that proto-civilized peoples—especially the monument builders—would have gold jewelry in 10,000 BC. In fact, I'd be very surprised if they didn't; the science of metallurgy was far in their Paleolithic futures, but gold doesn't rust or oxidize, and at that time veins and nuggets of it could be found at the surface and cold-hammered into shape. People have been making beads and other jewelry for at least 38,000 years (quite possibly more than 100,000), so why should they overlook the shiniest pebble in their world?

Olde tyme teknologee

OK, so what about those warriors on horseback? Many of today's European languages, and many Middle Eastern ones, are descendants of a language called Proto-Indo-European, which may have been spoken as early as 10,000 B.C. but was certainly in use by 4,000 B.C. This is important, because the vocabulary of this language provides insight into how people were living at that time. There is a word for "horse," yes, but not for "saddle" or "stirrup"—two critical technologies for fighting from horseback, not invented until 800 B.C. and 500 B.C., respectively. For many thousands of years, horsemen rode bareback or used a simple blanket for padding, and would have fallen off in any sort of serious battle.

And did humans ever share the planet with giant, flightless, fiercely carnivorous birds? Well, maybe. The phorusrhacids or "terror birds" were more than 2 meters tall and easily powerful enough to bite a man in half. Unfortunately, according to the fossil record they went extinct about 1.8 million years ago, before Homo sapiens was even a glimmer in the eye of Homo habilis, the dominant human species of that time. Also, they were found only in South America, which held no humans back then. Still, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine pockets of misplaced survivors here and there, or else some species unknown to science, that lived in a habitat where fossils don't easily form, or where flooding has since covered them up with ocean.

Emmerich is on better footing with the woolly mammoth, which survived in large numbers until about a thousand years after the period of his movie. In fact, on Alaska's Saint Paul Island the last of the mammoths clung to life until about 6,000 B.C., and on the nearby Wrangle Island a species of dwarf mammoth lasted until 2,700 B.C.—very nearly the time when the pyramids were actually built. It's not even ridiculous to suggest that mammoths could have been domesticated as work animals. African elephants are too belligerent to live with humans, but DNA studies have shown that the mammoth's closest living relative is the smaller and more docile Asian elephant, which has been working and fighting alongside us for at least 4,000 years.

Sailboats? Definitely. The archaeological record is rife with evidence that our ancestors have been sailing the open seas for a million years or more. It's how Homo erectus got to Flores, for example, to become Homo floresiensis—the so-called "hobbit" species of dwarf humans. Sailing may also have played a role in the settlement of the Americas (see "Kennewick Man," November 2000). By comparison, sailing up and down a river is child's play.

Only the geography in this movie is truly problematic: starting among the glaciers of Europe, our heroes cross a jagged mountain range on foot in a couple of days, emerging into a jungle that gives way to savanna, and eventually to a sea of dunes through which a winding river roams. The whole journey seems to take a few weeks at the very most, covering a distance of less than 600 kilometers. It's hard to imagine where so many different environments could be found in such close proximity; the best guess I have is a starting point in modern-day Bulgaria, with passage across the Rhodope Mountains to the Straits of Bosporus, which at that time were dry land, well away from the Aegean Sea and the basin that would later become the Black Sea. From there, southeast across Turkey and into Syria, where the Euphrates river snakes through the desert. I'm not suggesting that's what Roland Emmerich had in mind—he's a sloppy writer at the best of times, and not inclined to think through such details—but it's a reality that could, at least in principle, be retrofitted to his story.

Still, for the second month in a row I find myself in sharp disagreement with the Tomatometer. Eight percent? Honestly, this movie was fun to watch, and the worst I can say about it is that it's a kind of alternate history; we know for a fact that these events did not take place. Not in our world, not ever. But they really could have—the world is a strange enough place—and that by itself is a story worth telling.


Sources:
The Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com): "10,000 B.C."
www.rottentomatoes.com: "10,000 B.C."
Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org): "Conan the Barbarian", "Writing", "Ancient Egypt", "Homo floresiensis"
Encyclopedia Britannica 2008 Ultimate Reference Suite: "Stirrup", "Saddle"
Encyclopedia Britannica Atlas
Perkins, Sid: "Big bird terrorized South America", Science News, 12 Nov. 2005
Perkins, Sid: " Mammoth Findings: Asian elephant is closest living kin", Science News, 24 Dec. 2005
Schirber, Michael: "Surviving Extinction: Where Woolly Mammoths Endured", LiveScience, 19 Oct. 2004
money.howstuffworks.com/question213.htm
www.thebeadsite.com/REC-OLD.html
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/317381
Watkins, Calvert: "Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans", The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1980
Hancock, Graham: "Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age", The Science Channel, Feb. 2004