Pre-history (before the year zero) is difficult to even consider “history” in that we don’t have much means of verification. Very little is preserved. We dig up old stuff and tell stories about it, and we try to align those stories with the earliest stories humans kept about the world they lived in.
The academic world knows this and has come up with an interesting approach. Since not much can be verified by the methods available to later history they tend to leave existing academic consensus unchanged, even though that consensus is not built from the rigor they expect changes to it. It’s a very conservative stance, and as we dig up more and learn more about pre-history in the process the academic consensus starts looking more and more absurd. This is why you have shows like Ancient Apacalypse challenging that consensus, and many people are convinced because at least shows like this are acknowledging what is obvious about what we’ve dug up from pre-history. Before moving on, I should say that I find the actual thesis of that show uncompelling. It asserts that there is an ancient civilization that died out and was highly advanced, I don’t think this is the case, as I’ll say here, I think that at least one, potentially more, early and advanced societies existed but their ideas and knowledge spread and eventually merged into the rest of human culture. The places they used to live were either consumed by rising tides (because they were all island based societies) or they integrated into the rest of the cultures that came into contact with them.
Here we go.
Around 20,000BC a lot of ice starts melting. Over the next 15K years this results in the submertion of many islands and the “closing” of many land bridges.
The period between 20,000BC and 15,000BC is the most dramatic. In India (then referred to as the “continent” of Jampudvipa) where the earliest spiritual traditions are formed, the mountains in the north were un-passable due to the ice. As that melts, it floods the plains below and displaces people is waves over thousands of years.
Many early religions record stories of historic floods that seek to encapsulate the devastation and movement of people. While the story of King Mandhātṛ is not a flood story, I believe it is a story driven by these floods.
I’m not sure the source, but I’ve read in multiple places that his reign is dated ~15,000BC. Many consider him to be a fictional person but early Veda’s suggest he was a historical person.
In India, the earliest stories are called the “Vedas”. These stories arekept as oral tradition so early that they may be the earliest known use of narrative/story as a technology.
Since they are transmitted as oral tradition for so long different traditions end up with different Vedas. By the time they are recorded the recordings contain many of the same stories but are each quite different, often due to hundreds of years between them being written down, and some are more like manuals for early medicine and rituals.
In the various Hindu texts, there are mentions of a “King Mandhātṛ.”
King Mandhātṛ sought true “soverignty” (more on this later). In order to realize this he sets about conquering the world. First Jampudvipa and then the other continents, until landing at a final continent.
He ends up not being able to conquer these people, even though they are a smaller island than his previous conquests. Stories differ, but in being unable to conquer them he has a spiritual awakening. One recording then goes on to say that he brings back many “Uttakuru” and he gives them the lands in the north, the mountains that are becoming passable, the forests below that are now becoming passable, and the “island” beyond which is called “Uttakuru.” You can see how, over time, the mythology of Uttakuru being “given” this island and this being noted as the place his journey ends get mixed up and Lanka is probably more accurate.
Which island this is changes as Indian understanding of their geography changes, and this gets very mixed up.
In the early tales, he lands in “Uttakuru”, which in Indian Cosmology is “an island beyond the norther mountains.” Of course, China is beyond the northen mountains, but if you were in India looking up at un-passable mountains you’d probably figure that beyond them is something like what you see in the south, water and more islands.
In later tales he is in Lanka (now called Sri Lanka), and this makes the most sense, as the region in and near the mountains is at one time referred to as “Uttakuru” after this story takes place and that land is “given” to them.
The Vedda are the native people of Sri Lanka, who arrive there 40,000–35,000 years ago.
What may have happened with these people and other people who inhabit islands pre-20,000BC is perhaps best explainable with Conway’s Game of life. This simulation shows the expansion and eventual conflict of “cells” multiply. As they run out of space to live, they die off. Human conflict is typically about such conflicts over space, but as we know from our own history times of violence are often followed by times of peace if you’re forced to all live in the same place.
What I think happened in Sri Lanka, and other islands that may have been inhabited in this period, is that they eventually stopped all that violence and learned to live together. Along the way, they would have had to create a lot of new things in order to take advantage of all the space in the island and avoid conflict, The “lost culture” so many are looking for is probably a bunch a cultures from islands like this, because elsewhere the moment there is conflict you just start walking until you find somewhere uninhabited that looks like you can live there in roughly the same way you had before.
Historically, the Vedda are three distinct people that live in concentric circles around the island of Sri Lanka.
The Vedda’s native belief system is a form of what academics call animism which is what we’ve come to identify with early native peoples in nearly all the islands in the indian ocean and the native people’s of the Americas. As Buddhism, Hinduism, and other religions come in from other places the Vedda’s native belief systems merge with them to some degree.
The main body of reseach I have yet to complete, is tracing how/why/when early peoples settled in the other islands of the Indian Ocean and the Americas. While we have a well established mythology that the migration of native peoples to the Americas was primarily by land bridge, we have evidence of incredibly early native peoples in many islands of the Indian ocean and also know of many waves of violence in the mainland that drive mainlanders into the islands, often displacing the native peoples. If they had arrive by boat, they would likely flee by boat, and if you aren’t lucky enough to arrive at another small island the ocean will take you all the way to the Americas, if you survive. Most wouldn’t survive, but many people were displaced over the course of thousands of years and as my friend Dominic Tarr once noted on a solo homemade sailing trip to the most remote island in the territory of New Zealand, if he missed the island he’d end up in South America.
But even without going all the way to the Americas, there are incredible similarities between these people and the native peoples of other islands to the extent that we have any record of them at all. The native people of Japan are called the “Ainu” and are said to have descended from the indigenous Japanese hunter-gatherers who lived in Japan during the Jōmon period (c. 14,000 to 300 BCE)..
Native peoples often do not have recorded history and western scholars don’t consider most of their oral tradition to be sufficient to establish truth, so they leave truth to the stories of the victors that record their history of conquest.
King Mandhātṛ, like all “good kings,” protected his people as he would his own body.
As the ice melted in the mountains and floods displaced many people, the kingdoms surrounding his turned to violence. As Mandhātṛ defeated these kingdoms he continued to take the role of protectorate of their people as well, but the larger his kingdom grew the more difficult it became to protect.
Mandhātṛ realized that the only way to be truly soverign as a protectorate was to extend his kingdom to all people and all places, so he did just that. He conquered the known world a continent at a time, leaving the smallest for last.
When Mandhātṛ arrived on this island he did not face an army. Mandhātṛ marched his army through the towns of these people and told them that he was now their king, their protectorate, their soverign. And the people of this island stared at him in confusion.
The people of this island needed no King, no protectorate, as their beliefs had already made each one of them sovereign. At this, King Mandhātṛ had an awakening and learned what true soverignty meant.
King Mandhātṛ returned to Jampudvipa (India) and gave the people of this island what he considered the future:
For thousands of years these people, and the lands in the north of Jampudvipa, were called “Uttakuru” which translates to “Northern Doer” as these people, and not the people of Jampudvipa, were most suited to do something with these lands.
The mountain peoples are nomads, and I believe they spread all over the known world.