Cosmic coincidences

So I recently went to the site of a once-mighty Mesoamerican capital, complete with massive pyramids, arenas and ridiculous amounts of staircases. This empire, it turns out, started as a small village in about 600BC, rising to become an important city by about 200BC, reaching its zenith as an Empire in about 400AD, eventually falling into ruin in about 700BC, largely as a result of corruption and invasion. Remind you of anyone? This timeline is almost identical, give or take a few centuries, to that of the Romans, several thousand miles away, two empires that were massively important and basically contemporaries, that didn't even know of each other's continents.....

It's got me thinking about central american ancient civilisations. For example, why does no one point out that it's a miracle that they even exist? For there to have been people in America before the European discovery, humans must have crossed over from Russia. Now, forgive me for thinking this, but even if this was physically possible because the two continents were connected by ice during the last ice age, what the hell were people doing in the remotest regions of Russia in the first place? Why would anyone ever think it was a good idea to cross hundreds of miles of barren ice? How could they even have survived this? Before the ancient civilisations arose, people didn't even come in groups of more than 30. How could such a tiny number of people have made it into America? It's the same in Africa: humans originated in the tropics of middle-Africa, so in order for them to have populated the rest of the world, they must have at some point crossed the Sahara desert. How did they know how do survive in such conditions? What are the chances that DNA was ever created in the first place?

Anyways, back to Mesoamerica. It strikes me that European civilisations have some of the least developed scientific cultures in the pantheon of ancient civilisations. Look at the Mayans, the Persians, the Chinese - all of them were fascinated with cosmic occurrences, with the greater significance of life, with interesting images and motifs that are subconsciously at the heart of everything important for humans. Whereas in Europe, all anyone cared about was wealth and machines. Artwork is for aesthetic sake only, it doesn't attempt to put humanity in perspective or challenge our imagination in any way.

Perhaps this is why European-based art (and music and literature etc etc) is probably the best in the world....but it's probably also why we're so damned greedy and capitalistic. There you go.