What are some prehistoric places that no longer exist you wish you could have seen? I’m thinking like Pangea, Lake Bonneville etc…
I run a small business making nature t-shirts and I have this idea for a shirt…
What are some prehistoric places that no longer exist you wish you could have seen?
QuestionI want to hear English before the great vowel shift!
Wouldn't be much different from Frisian though
Frisian is close to Old English, pre-1066.
The Great Vowel Shift was Early Modern English. It took a while, but most of it occurred in the century before Shakespeare, so a much more recognizable vocabulary.
The only reason I compared them is because that's the most known closest related language to Old English. The Modern English relative language is Scots, which diverged from Middle English, just right at the time we are speaking of. However I'm not sure if people do know of this, or if this had the exact same vowels without the vowel shift.
Yes. It’s just Old English is almost completely unrecognizable from Modern English because of all the French words that introduced after 1066. Old English is untranslated Beowulf. Very hard to decipher.
Saying the same words but with different vowels sounds fun.
Exactly why Auld Lang Syne would sound so nice.
Fuck. Yes. Linguistics. Nerds.
Bro just go to the shore. If you go here bring back living dinosaurs and insects and marine creatures on your way back please.
The Appalachians at full height before millions of years of erosion.
And before they got torn apart from Scotland, and rotated! Such interesting history
Do you think there mightve been mountains taller than Everest?
IIRC it is theoretically possible for mountains to be taller than Everest, but not by much.
What’s the limiting contributor here? How/why would mountains have a cap on height?
Gravity.
There's a point where mountains literally gets too heavy for the earth's mantle to support it, so they start to sink back down.
There are several examples of bodies in our solar system that have less gravitational attraction than ours, and have correspondingly taller mountains.
The rigidity of the substrate also matters, I guess; if the mantle were colder …
The Appalachians were pretty much all chopped down during the 1800s.
Old growth Appalachian forests even two hundred years ago were said to be incredibly spooky, with entire homes made from hollowed out tree trunks. Parakeets, and other strange birds and complete darkness under the canopy.
The trees yes, but the mountains themselves rivaled the Himalayan range in height when the Appalachians first formed. The range is just extremely old, with the original plate collisions that created them happening about 1 billion years ago.
True. I’m just saying that applachains of the George Washington era would look very different from today and was impressive in and of itself.
Greenland during the medieval warm period with Norse settlements
Wait so it was actually green?
Kinda. There was Little Ice Age from ~1300 to ~1800 and Greenland was much warmer and greener before it. The ice age made the Norse colonies on Greenland disappear. Also before it there were decently developed winemaking in England
Ancient Babylon, the green Sahara, India like 100,000 years ago before homo sapiens arrived, Chicago in 1500, Lake Lahontan, the Roman Colosseum, Stonehenge when it was finished, the Tamanrasset River, the Wadi-al Rummah when it was a full river, the eye of Africa when it was full of water, I could go on
Specifically I want to know why you want to see Chicago in 1500. There must be something I don’t know
The midwest would be fascinating before everyone died. Same with all of the Americas prior to complete destruction, death, and collapsing empires. There is really nobody that knows what life was like before 90% of the population died.
Are they thinking of Cahokia, near St Louis maybe? From a quick peek online, nothing huge and obvious is popping out to me.
In the research I did Chicago was flooded at that time. Not sure if that is accurate
india was uninhabited my humans at that time
Gibraltar waterfall
The Zanclean flood would've been a sight to see. The rushing waters from the Atlantic Ocean were estimated to be a thousand times faster than the Amazon River and would've filled the western Mediterranean fairly quickly by geological standards. Later, an intense flood across the Malta Escarpment led to the reconnection across the Straits of Sicily filing the Eastern Mediterranean.
The Columbian Glacial lake would've also been a sight to see. It was formed on the ice-dammed Columbian river. It took up a large portion of the Spokane are of eastern Washington, northern Idaho and Missoula, Montana. The ice dam would break every 50 years approximately and cause a massive flood, which helped create the Willamette Valley of Oregon.
I live on top of a 75 meter high gravel bar that was deposited by those floods. The soil quality in my yard sucks, but it at least drains quickly.
The Library of Alexandria and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon are what comes to mind first.
I'd love to have weeks to go through all the scrolls one by one and snap away with my cellphone camera to find what has been lost to history.
Seeing the pyramids with their original limestone casing, the colossus of Rhodes or the lighthouse of Alexandria would be amazing as well.
Those were also my first thoughts but like I feel like they’ve been mythologized so much that the OG’s would just be kind of underwhelming.
But they’re still “some prehistoric places that no longer exist” that I wish I could see. Not exuding other places 🤷♀️
Set up a printing shop in Alexandria.
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30d
Doggerland!
There was no landbridge from Asia to Australia tho? I thought that was the main mystery of the australian aborigine arrival
I think they are confusing things slightly. There was a landbridge between Australia and New Guinea but nothing to Asia, and I don't believe there's any consensus on whether that was used to reach Australia itself.
There's a few different transition lines identified (Wallace line, Weber line being two) that mark out the difference in terms of species etc., which also have in common deep water between different landmasses.
He probably means when Indonesia was one land mass during the last ice age https://images.app.goo.gl/uQxQz9JRv2ANzamJA
Beringia for sure. Massive glaciers far enough back from the sea for plenty of spectacular land; mammoths and other great mammals, the farthest east extent of humanity that opened into the discovery of the Americas
The Americas before European contact.
Also New Zealand before human contact.
Earth before human contact.
It was likely a very dangerous place (excluding locations like New Zealand, Hawaii, Galapagos, etc.)
Why were these places safe?
No poisonous animals or big predators there while having a good climate
However, New Zealand had some very large birds (both flying and non-flying) before humans (Polynesians, from the central Pacific) arrived (in the 1200s). Those birds could have messed you up if you weren't careful.
Unfortunately the largest birds were hunted to extinction shortly afterwards.
The biggest difference would probably be trees everywhere
The Chesapeake Bay and the East Coast old growth forests must have been breathtaking.
The Bay used to have crystal clear water, top to bottom as recently as 1900
Sundaland and pre-glaciation Greenland and Antarctica
Sundaland is quite diappointing tbh, and their football team sucks
or even when Antarctica and Australia were still connected.
Cahokia in its prime, or any major North American settlements.
Or pre-human, I’d love to see the inland sea that once covered North America, and all the extinct megafauna.
The beginning of the Zanclean Flood.
Colossus of Rhodes
Doggerland
Not really ancient but I would have loved to see the pink and white terraces of New Zealand, they were destroyed by a volcano in 1886
Any large Indus Valley city with people proficient in Indus Valley script.
Also, Nalanda University.
The Sahara when it was green.
Lake Lahontan. Nevada must have been incredible back then.
as an indian surely during Gondwana period where indian landmass situated in south pole and i would like to time travel that period and experience temperate climate
Lake Bonneville for sure. I live close to the ancient shoreline, my house would be under several hundred feet of water. I would love to see the Woolley mammoth and saber tooth cats. I would really like to see how much snowfall the mountains received in order to fill the lake as deep and large as it was.
The (probably) cove / cave where some chemical soup gave birth to the first ever life on this planet.
Lake Missoula
Tropical Antarctica
Mt. Mazama, before the haircut. Alao the volcanoes that led to the Taal and Toba calderas.
The Pink and White Terraces of Tarawera, NZ.
Tenochtitlan
Viking Age Uppsala
New Amsterdam at the time of its foundation
I guess you could argue whether or not they are "prehistoric", but still
Minoan Palaces
To watch the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs in the days/hours just before impact. It would have been an amazing sight in the sky.
Pompeii.
The Niobrara Sea (interior North American seaway during the Cretaceous)
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29d
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Though not prehistoric, I'd love to see the non conflagrated Library of Alexandria
The Tethys Sea
I'd love to see the Po Valley in the north of Italy (where I live), which was covered by the Adriatic Sea until 3 million years ago. Lots of sea creature fossils are found here.
Florissant
I grew up right on the farthest advance line of one of the more recent Ice Age glaciers in PA. It's interesting how in just a few hundred yards or so how the gentle rolling farmland hills transition to steep rugged forested ones.
Atlantis
How is this not the best answer?
I just wanna visit the lake that once was where Hungary is today. I even heared Hungarians say that "this would massively improve Hungary".
Also in my area (around the city of Cologne, Germany) is a lot of brown coal which supports the theory that my area was once a low-level sea with tropical islands, beaches and swamps and I would love to visit that as well
The edge of the Pleistocene ice sheet in the Midwest.
Watch the connection of the Atlantic to what is now the Mediterranean. Biggest waterfall ever!
This might be really basic, but I would love to see a Mayan city in full swing. It’s so intriguing that there are so many untouched sites just sitting out there, buried in by the jungle itself. I would have loved to see their architecture, clothing and jewelry in brilliant color. I think there is so much pre Columbian history of the Americas that is untold, and great societies that just vanished, and I would have loved to see any of it
The American Great Plains before basically all of the megafauna went extinct. Also, Cahokia. And Eridu in Mesopotamia
Sundaland, the Laurentide Ice Sheet, etc.
The Hercynian forest.
Yeah, like all of them.
Doggerland. Imagine being able to walk from London to Antwerp.
Florida
The Calypso Deep during the Messinian Salinity Crisis. It was likely a very salty lake ( and the atmospheric pressure around it would have been extremely high ), but i assume it would be a very deep valley that could probably be seen from the mountains ( now islands ) around it.
I wish I could see the south coastline of Beringia in the era when the First Peoples crossed the Pacific
Jurassic Pork
Head Smashed in Buffalo Jump. But just because of the name. ;)
Beleriand.
The Mediterranean loses more water to evaporation than it receives from rivers; thus the flow at Gibraltar is generally eastward.
In the ice ages, water was tied up as ice on land, and the ocean dropped below the Gibraltar sill. The Med largely dried up (I believe this is called the salinity crisis).
So I'd go see the beginning of the refill.
Wherever in the world the first person(s) decided to devise and transcribe a system of symbols onto physical medium to convey words/ideas as written language.
Written language is the most important and disruptive technology ever created in my book.
Doggerland
I just wanna go back to first century BC Rome and find out which group of passionate Latin geeks online is right about Latin vowels.
But that's more history and linguistics than geography.
As a geologist, I want to see the Western Interior Seaway from the Cretaceous of the Great Plains.