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Evidence record

Ocean of Time: the ocean and its routes

Everything the ocean’s page says outside its questions, claim by claim. A route’s description stands on the questions it links.

If something here is wrong, misquoted or unfair, write to support@unknownoceans.com and give the claim number, which does not change.

The ocean

Claim: What happened before anyone was writing it down?

Kind
Framing. Signposting. It asserts nothing a source could check.

Claim: Human origins, lost civilisations, vanished knowledge, deep history, and the futures ahead of us.

Kind
Framing. Signposting. It asserts nothing a source could check.

The routes

Claim: Before anyone wrote anything down

Kind
Framing. Signposting. It asserts nothing a source could check.

Claim: The human past before writing,

Kind
This page’s reading. A judgement the page makes from the evidence. Others read it differently.
Review
A judgement, not a fact. Reviewed for whether it is fairly put and follows from the checked claims. No source can confirm it.

A description of the route’s span: its seven stops are human origins, the first speech, the first clothes, the peopling of the Americas, the loss of the large animals, the start of farming and the monuments built before it. The last stop also has a passage on the Antikythera mechanism, which is later than writing.

Corrected

24 September 2026. Previously: “The human past in the order it happened, from a species that left no records to one that started keeping them.” The stops are not in the order things happened, and their own pages say so: the speech page runs its estimates from fifty thousand to more than twenty million years ago, older than the species the first stop dates to about 300,000 years; and the last stop, placed after farming, is about monuments its page says predate farming. No stop is about starting to keep records. The new line names the route’s two ends by what their pages establish and claims no sequence.

Claim 4 · checked 24 September 2026 · AI-assisted audit

Claim: from a time when there were several kinds of human

Kind
Historical claim. A statement about the past that historical evidence can test.
Review
Source checked. The cited passage was read, and it says this.

What this does not establish

When each of the other kinds disappeared is an estimate with its own uncertainty, as the human-origins page reports.

Later work looked for

Relies on the human-origins page’s search (Crossref, 2016 on, Homo floresiensis chronology): nothing that removes the other kinds of human.

Claim 5 · checked 24 September 2026 · AI-assisted audit

Claim: to the first farmers

Kind
Historical claim. A statement about the past that historical evidence can test.
Review
Source checked. The cited passage was read, and it says this.

  • Supports

    Current perspectives and the future of domestication studies"Spatial and Temporal Patterns of Domestication"

    Cited · Link answered, 19 October 2026 · Read in full, 24 September 2026 · Artefacts and sites · Review of the field

    The source reads: At least 11 regions of the Old and New World were involved as independent centers of origin

What this does not establish

Farming began separately in many places at different times; the phrase names the subject of the stop, not a single first farming people.

Later work looked for

Relies on the farming page’s search, which moved its count of centres from Diamond’s nine to this review’s eleven.

Claim 6 · checked 24 September 2026 · AI-assisted audit

Claim: and the monuments built by people who did not yet farm.

Kind
Historical claim. A statement about the past that historical evidence can test.
Review
Source checked. The cited passage was read, and it says this.

  • Supports

    The role of cult and feasting in the emergence of Neolithic communities. New evidence from Göbekli Tepe, south-eastern TurkeyThe role of cult and feasting in the emergence of Neolithic communities

    Cited · Link answered, 19 October 2026 · Read in full, 24 September 2026 · Artefacts and sites · Observational study: associations, not causes

    The source reads: Since neither domesticated plants nor animals are known from the site, it is clear that the people who erected this monumental sanctuary were still hunter-gatherers

  • Supports

    Göbekli TepeBrief synthesis

    Cited · Link answered, 19 October 2026 · The cited passage was read, 24 September 2026 · Reference work

    The source reads: Monumental structures, interpreted as monumental communal buildings (enclosures), were erected by groups of hunter-gatherers in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period (10th-9th millennia BC).

What this does not establish

The monuments are at Göbekli Tepe and related sites in south-eastern Anatolia and northern Syria. What they were for, temple or settlement, is argued on the page; that their builders were not farming is not.

Later work looked for

Relies on the before-cities page’s search, which found houses on the mound since 2012 (Clare 2020); they revise what the site was for, not whether its builders farmed.

Claim 7 · checked 24 September 2026 · AI-assisted audit

Claim: Things that ended

Kind
Framing. Signposting. It asserts nothing a source could check.

Claim: Palaces that fell,

Kind
Historical claim. A statement about the past that historical evidence can test.
Review
Source checked. The cited passage was read, and it says this.

What this does not establish

How many of the destructions around 1200 BC happened as proposed is itself argued, as the Bronze Age page reports; the end of the palace states of Greece is not.

Later work looked for

Relies on the Bronze Age page’s search, which reports Millek’s 2023 reassessment of the destructions; it does not dispute the fall of the Greek palaces.

Corrected

24 September 2026. Previously: “Four societies that stopped, what the evidence says about why, and what any of it leaves behind.” The route has six stops and none of them counts four societies: three are endings (the Bronze Age palaces, the Indus cities, Rapa Nui) and three are about what survives (lost scripts, lost history, what we will leave). And Rapa Nui is the page that says the society did not stop of its own accord: population grew until European contact, and the decline came with disease and the slave raids of the 1860s. The new line names each ending by what its page establishes.

Claim 9 · checked 24 September 2026 · AI-assisted audit

Claim: cities that emptied,

Kind
Historical claim. A statement about the past that historical evidence can test.
Review
Source checked. The cited passage was read, and it says this.

  • Supports

    Fluvial landscapes of the Harappan civilizationabstract

    Cited · Link answered, 19 October 2026 · Read in full, 24 September 2026 · Artefacts and sites · Observational study: associations, not causes

    The source reads: since approximately 3,900 y ago, the total settled area and settlement sizes declined, many sites were abandoned, and a significant shift in site numbers and density towards the east is recorded

What this does not establish

Emptied over centuries rather than at once, and not everywhere: the study says many settlements continued at a smaller size. Why is the argued part of the Indus page.

Later work looked for

Relies on the Indus page’s search, which added Singh and others (2017) and Solanki and others (2025) on the rivers; both concern the cause, not the decline itself.

Claim 10 · checked 24 September 2026 · AI-assisted audit

Claim: an island whose decline came from outside,

Kind
Historical claim. A statement about the past that historical evidence can test.
Review
Source checked. The cited passage was read, and it says this.

What this does not establish

That there was no collapse before contact is the finding of a radiocarbon model and, independently, of ancient genomes. Whether the island went through smaller strains of its own, in a Little Ice Age drought, is still argued on the page.

Later work looked for

Relies on the Rapa Nui page’s search, which added the 2024 genomes and Rull’s 2024 review of the drought; neither restores a pre-contact collapse.

Claim 11 · checked 24 September 2026 · AI-assisted audit

Claim: and what any of it leaves behind.

Kind
Framing. Signposting. It asserts nothing a source could check.