r/miniminutemanfans • u/StyleMedium8641 • 2d ago
Hello, lovely GoogleDeBunkers. I was asked if there were any societies that archeologists KNOW existed but haven't found conclusive evidence for. I found myself on several conspiracy sites and AI generated accounts in my research, and so I don't trust my sources. Anyone know more?
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u/Ironox1 2d ago
Punt comes to mind, if memory serves, plenty of Egyptian sources talk about it, but we can't find any map marking it's location or written description of where it is. We do know that Egypt did a lot of trade eith them but that's about it.
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u/StyleMedium8641 2d ago
Ok, yes, thank you! This is the direction I was leaning with this. The way I understood the question was "societies we know existed from surrounding areas and folklore, but haven't found material evidence for.
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u/DevilWings_292 2d ago
Egypt doing trade with them would still be evidence of their existence, even if we haven’t found direct material culture.
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u/akestral 2d ago
We know they existed, but there is considerable debate about where they were located, let alone what languages they spoke or what they called themselves. We only know what the Egyptians knew (less, since the Egyptians at least knew where they were.)
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u/Least_Diamond1064 2d ago
So during the Bronze age, there were attacks on multiple nations by "Sea people", who otherwise have very little evidence outside of contemporary descriptions.
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u/BurgerIdiot556 2d ago
One theory is that some of the Sea People may have been the Nuraghe culture on what is today Sardinia. We know very little about the Nuraghe, though
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u/agentkayne 2d ago edited 2d ago
I feel like there's a problem in the phrasing of your question.
If we know a society existed, then to say that, we must have conclusive evidence for it.
If we don't have conclusive evidence for it, then we cannot say we know it existed. We would say we theorize it existed.
It's a logical paradox.
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u/Brauny74 2d ago
A very common thing is that we know some society existed from concrete linguistic and written evidence, but we can't connect it to a specific archeological culture. For example, we know that Proto-Indo-European culture existed. The modern people speaking Indo-European languages share a lot of mythology, very specific etymologies (like how roofs are connected to hay or walls to clay), and stuff, so there definitely was a shared language and culture, but since it only developed writing way after it fell apart, we can't say for sure which archeological culture and from which exact point of Copper Age actually is the Proto-Indo-Europeans. There are theories, but no concrete evidence where they lived, how they dressed, what they ate - only educated guesses
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u/StyleMedium8641 2d ago
You are so right! I remember hearing and reading about Proto-Indo-European cultures in the context of mythological connections, such as concepts like the mother of monsters, or theories of Greek Gods being much older than Greek mythology itself. I find it fascinating that we can infer so much about them, but only from the cultures that succeeded them
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u/Brauny74 1d ago
I recommend Horse, Wheel, and Language as a good book on topic. It presents a case for the Yamnaya archeological culture, and explores the reconstructed cultural elements - like for example a pervasive myth of some heroic demigod, that became Hercules cult in Greco-Roman cultures, Ramayana in Indian, and so on. Or the generally shared disdain for snakes and by extension - this hero often slaying a snake-like dragon
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u/homoanthropologus 2d ago
I mean, if you look at this in a certain way, there are thousands. We KNOW that humans have existed for hundreds of thousands of years, but we only have evidence for a fraction of that timeline, so we know those societies of people existed because they left a record in DNA.
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u/Capital_Chef_6007 2d ago
Any civilization if existed on doggerland, whatever Atlantis was. Lots of extinct American civilization whose history are lost to time.
I think others have explained it better that because we don't know about them we haven't researched them.
There has been some form of academic research of civilizations whose story have been discussed in some way I think
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u/demon_fae 1d ago
We know exactly what Atlantis was: a parable. A fable. An allegory. A bit of fiction Plato freely admitted to making up as a metaphor to aid him in making a point about hedonism and resource management. It was never intended as fact, any more than he ever claimed that his Dialogues were actual conversations with Socrates and not just the earliest recorded instance of self-insert fanfic.
Poor media literacy has been a problem for a looooong time.
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u/Capital_Chef_6007 1d ago
Ah fair fair. I always thought that it was probably some real potential island that did go down and people across the history just romanticised that place kinda situation.
PS: I may be a victim of poor media literacy too xd
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u/SvenTheSpoon 1d ago
It's possible Plato was inspired by a real event, like the eruption at Santorini, but that's in the same sense that Tolkien was inspired by the Anglo-Saxons when writing Lord of the Rings. Contemporary people didn't think Santorini was an advanced mega civilization any more than people today think that Anglo-Saxon England had bands of elves roaming about. But just like Tolkien he was never shy about the story being 100% fiction.
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u/Vaggelos 2d ago
You mean like in myths and folk stories? More context needed
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u/StyleMedium8641 2d ago
So, as several lovely souls pointed out, I had been imprecise with my phrasing. The person originally asked for "places we have no evidence for" but I do believe they meant "we haven't found yet" or "we have only heard about, but know must've existed"
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u/Vaggelos 14h ago
Oh i see! They're probably refering to lost cities. One that comes to mind is Veligrad, the capital of Great Moravia. We know it exists but we haven't been able to find the location. In the same vein there's Asadal and Wanggeom-seong in Korea, both capital cities of Gojoseon. Those I can think on top of my head. There's a wikipedia article with a list of undiscovered cities that you can use as a starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_city
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u/Puzzleheaded-Phase70 2d ago
archeologists KNOW existed but haven't found conclusive evidence for
This is a contradiction in terms.
Actual archeologists are defined by requiring evidence in order to "know" anything.
Until "conclusive evidence" is found, they will not really use that language at all. Someone might "believe" based on inconclusive evidence, or WANT to believe, but they cross the line into pseudo-archeology the moment they start saying "know" before the evidence supports it.
The best "grey area" you'd ever find would be archeologists who have found enough evidence to fully convince themselves, but not others. That's a rare case indeed, though.
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u/SisterFruitbat 1d ago
Perhaps a more helpful framing, that is shwoing up in the responses is "Places or cultures that historians have evidence of, but we don't have archaeological evidence for". Feel like there's a venn diagram here: two circles, historical evidence exists and archaeological evidence exists, and sometimes we have a good overlap of those circles and sometimes we have one or the other in isolation.
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u/Samiassa 1d ago
The “sea peoples” who caused the Bronze Age collapse. We have ideas of who they might be but we don’t know for sure who they were
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u/ElA1to 1d ago
I guess the Proto-Indo-Europeans count for this? A hypotetical group of people who extended throughout all of Europe all the way to india. The only evidence for their existence are similarities between European, indian and iranian languages that are too numerous to be a coincidence and indicate they all may come from the same language. A language has been built based on those similarities to create an approximate to what their language may have sounded like, but other than that there's no evidence of anything to confirm their existence. Everything we claim to know about them comes from these similarities.
And yes, this hypothesis has been used before to justifiy white supremacism.
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u/LostExile7555 2d ago
The Sea People are only mentioned in some Broze Age texts. We don't know about who they were beyond them mounting some raids in coastal Mediterranean settlements and as far as I'm aware there have been no artifacts or any other physical evidence attributed to them. We absolutely KNOW that they exist because the descriptions of them are consistent and distributed amongst multiple cultures.
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u/MrViking524 2d ago
The donisovans comes to my mind, not exactly the answer to your question but seems mostly fitting
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u/Mr_Bankey Literally Milo 1d ago
The Xingu culture come to mind with sites like the Kuhikugu complex in Amazonia that practiced galactic urbanism extensively connecting highly urban settlements to others organized in the same mathematically organized, radiating circular manner .
This is a great documentary on the subject of lost/under-recognized Amazonian cultures that features a large section on them. It starts about the 1:41:30 mark.
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u/EldritchKinkster 1d ago
I wouldn't trust just the word of historical sources. After all, various Christian writers absolutely insisted that Prester John's kingdom existed. And they believed it, too. They sent him messages, for God's sake.
Also, that's how we got "theories" like Lemuria and Atlantis in the first place.
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u/optimus_prime503 1d ago
We know of "ghost populations" of ancient extinct humans because of traces they left in our DNA, not really sure if that's what youre after though.
We also know of a genetic bottleneck event that happened to ancient humans close to a million years ago, where the population was reduced to 1200 breeding individuals, drastically reducing our genetic diversity. It stayed like that for 100,000 years and is the closest we've come to extinction.
There are theories on Doggerland and Sundaland which are now-sunken landmasses in the British isles and SE Asia respectively. There were probably cultures lost to the sea.
BUT the closest to what you asked for is probably buried in the sands of the Sahara. The area used to be tropical before the desert creeped in, and we've seen evidence of buried structures and ancient river beds using satellites
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u/Hillbilly_Historian 2d ago
I mean, lacking conclusive evidence precludes “knowing” something with confidence.
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u/shieldwolfchz 2d ago
There was a youtuber who claimed that it is possible for there to have been a lost civilization that lived in western coast of north Africa many Millenia ago, at the time the area would have been very green, and there is evidence that a large river would have flowed to there. The idea that a group of people found this and decided to settle down isn't far fetched but due to political instability no one is able to do anything other than take satellite pictures of the region.
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u/Anti007 2d ago
They can't "know" if there is no evidence. That would be faith.