{{These thoughts are a follow up to a comment I made on Jack Heart's blog post here}}

We all of us lean heavily on what we can research about any given subject.   Written tomes, messages in stone, word of mouth stories passed down through tribal generations.   But we forget that any research materials are largely subjective.   Even word of mouth is subject to personal interpretation and the imperfection of language, with tales about places, things and events from decades or even centuries ago that might not even exist any longer.   We find artifacts (etc) and determine what we can scientifically (a field that isn't as concrete in it's results as we like to believe ;) and thereafter try to build theories around what we found - but can only do this by comparison to what we actually know about our own world and how we think and react to what we know or might happen.   Humans are basically human of course, yet there are enough cultural differences as to make some of us scratch our heads in complete puzzlement when confronted by the beliefs and actions of some others - and this is all here within our 'modern' world.   Still, we do our due research and formulate our positions on what information we've found, and then we propose this research as a history and it gets written into a book, and so passes on to the future for new generations to base their own theories or knowledge upon.   It's pretty much all we have so we've got to go with it.   And it will be accepted as correct ; until the next spate of study updates - or overturns - it with newfound research, tests and theories.

But let's look at this process for a moment.   Just suppose...   Perhaps five hundred years in the future, and after some catastrophe has wiped out most human life for say two hundred and fifty of those years, we have a basic agrarian society with a few hunter/gatherers scattered amongst them.   They live in small villages near natural water sources, their transportation, the feet at the ends of their legs, small two-wheeled carts, and maybe some few hollowed out logs, or plant material bound together into rafts that can be poled about on the closest river or lake.   They have no concept of machinery or access to anything electronic so that records of that sort are unavailable (they probably doubt that such stuff ever existed, there are rumors of course but no one really believes the rumors are true) and all recordings of the paper and parchment variety are long since dust.   So these future people are starting their learning of the past from scratch.   They only have the physical artifacts that remain, mostly items that are completely unfamiliar to them.   There are places in their world where structures of (rumored) man-made stone and metal, and bits of a curious transparent smooth-surfaced substance, stand in various degrees of ruin and in enormous variety.   Some very small and some very tall, some with a handful of rooms and others with row upon row of little tiny rooms, sometimes stacked over one another ; some sprawling over a great lot of ground surrounded by that same strange man-made stone substance, only it's lying flat on the ground rather than standing upright, and some of it even has a different texture and color, and runs in long narrow lines hither and yon.   There will be strange metal contraptions, some of various sizes, boxy with small metal wheel-like appendages, others much larger, resembling tree trunks with long narrow and flat pieces that stick out on either side in the middle - some of them huge.   No one will know what these things did.   What were those who made such things like?   How did they live, interact, think or believe?  

There will be numerous instances of human burials found ; old stone carvings that have been found now and then look like themselves, wearing odd costumes ; the skeletal remains in these sites will be similar enough that these future people will assume rightly that they're their ancestors.   But there will be some confusion still, since some of these burials will be what we back in this time know are actual cemeteries, others will be of the memorial type, with similar engravings and plaques but without remains - these future folk don't understand the reason for the difference because there are no records explaining it.   Then there will be the ones in some places that are different yet again, nearly all placed above ground in tiny man-made stone structures - but these future folk won't understand it was because of the high water tables.   All sites for burying dead humans - why so many different ways of doing so?   Why have places where no remains were buried at all?   Why did some groups of them get stone buildings?

And what are those strange little lines that are scratched into so many stone and metal surfaces?   Pictures?   Some kind of communication?

And then.. a small group of researching future folks stumble across a few patches of ground in a few different places, ranging from as small as a foot to as large as hundreds of feet square in size.   Within these patches of ground they find from one to many skeletons, none of them human, some of them just bones, others with strange sometimes colorful items along side of them that are just degraded bits and pieces of substances that don't resemble any thing or use that these future people are familiar with.   Most of the skeletons in the smaller patches are four legged, tailed and toothed, and resemble somewhat the wild animals that come near the villages occasionally, skulking after the cast offs from meals cooked.   Small ones that yowl and larger ones that growl, often with nasty dispositions and always suspicious of being approached.   In some of the larger patches there are skeletons of larger creatures, like the hooved ones that roam in herds on the grasslands, some with horns, others with hair on the backs of their necks and long hairy tails.   These future people haven't discovered yet that domesticated animals are possible, let alone companionable and helpful.

They only know that when you can kill one of them they make a good meal.

Yet here in these patches are these creatures buried much in the same manner in which the humans were buried.   What can that mean?

Of course this little scenario has a few holes in it, assuming a great deal about just what kinds of knowledge might be lost through catastrophe or how it might end up twisted out of meaning and context through generations of story telling.   But my point is that today we don't really know, exactly, the meanings, whys and wherefores of many of the antiquities and artifacts that we've found from the times back long before any of us today lived.   We can make guesses, and we're probably right, or close to it, a lot of the time.   Humans are human, probably not so different from era to era.   But it's the culture of a group, and an era, that can make the difference between what we today think something represents, and what it actually was then.

We don't really know why the early peoples practiced human sacrifice, why or if they might have been cannibals, or the religious significance of the stone beings scattered about through their architecture.   Or if there even is actually a religious significance.   We have writing purported to be from some few eye witnesses in some few cases, but given the difference in cultures and languages how much of what the writer heard did they really understand?   And did perhaps the teller resort to examples that were only 'like' rather than actual (which could easily lead to misunderstanding) because there was no common ground?   We can speculate, make comparisons, good guesses, but we can't know.   We weren't there.

Like the future people in my little 'what if' can't know that that single animal buried with the colorful bits and pieces was someone's pet, not a shrine.

Or that the bigger burial place with different kinds of non-human remains doesn't really have any religious significance, no matter it's appearance.   It's just a pet cemetery.   They can't know what we believed or why we practiced the actions we did because there's no longer any common ground between our cultures.

They weren't here.