Page 110 - A Historical Lie: The Stone Age

A HISTORICAL LIE: THE STONE AGE

backward societies existed in other parts of the world. The Mayans,
who built highly developed cities, and who from the traces they left
behind can be seen to have possessed a clearly advanced technology,
calculated the orbit of the planet Venus and discovered the moons of
the planet Jupiter. At the same time, people in many regions of
Europe believed that the Earth was the center of the Solar System.
While the Egyptians were successfully performing brain surgery, in
other regions people believed that disease was caused by supposed

evil spirits. With their legal system, literature, understanding of art
and astronomical knowledge, the Sumerians built a deep-rooted civ-
ilization in Mesopotamia, while another corner of the world held so-
cieties that were still illiterate. Therefore, in the same way that
today's civilizations are not all advanced, so in the past there was
never a time when the only societies were backward ones.
So far, we have examined evidence belonging to different peri-

ods of history and reviewed examples of the cultures of tens or hun-
dreds of thousands years ago. Looking at more recent history, again
we encounter evidence that human beings have always been human:
Here we are dealing not with "primitive" people who have only re-
cently parted ways with apes, but civilized human beings who can
be seen to have inherited yet another civilization that had persisted
for thousands of years before them.
As technology advanced in the 20th century, archaeological re-
search accelerated enormously, and began to unearth more and more

evidence regarding the true history of mankind. Thus it emerged
that life in Egypt, Central America, Mesopotamia and other regions
thousands of years ago was in many ways parallel to how we live
today.

108