More and more, human habitations are being found underwater. Before 8,000 BCE the sea level was hundreds of feet lower than today, and some now believe that ancient Sumer was established by refugees from the Black Sea, which reached its current level around 6,000 BCE. I think it is reasonable to say that civilization, and living in cities, is much older than places like Brak.

Also, post-flood cultures may very well be suffering from the shock of losing a civilization to rising waters. The earliest skeletons found in California show short lives and violent deaths in a material culture of scarcity; later skeletons show material improvements. But people didn’t spring forth from the earth of California, and there are probably traces of human civilization under the water along the California coast (I think the region between Santa Barbara and the Channel Islands is a good place to look).

Even more intriguing, there is now evidence that a comet hit North America about 9,000 BCE, causing the extinction of large animals in North America, including elephants, camels, lions and humans. Who knows what went up in smoke in the firestorm of that event?

When Europeans discovered the “New World” and the egalitarian aboriginal cultures there, the European imaginations were inspired to come up with democracy. We are now discovering a much older world, and we are reinterpreting our history in light of various calamities we now know to have occurred. Once again, we are free to imagine new forms of social organization, based upon what we can glean from the really old ways.