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Alex_Altair comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 9 - Less Wrong
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I have a hypothesis about the origin of magic.
Obviously it was a long time ago, presumably prehistoric. Could the creaters have been neanderthals? They died out comparatively recently, the soonest possible time being 30,000 years ago. Is this long enough for all traces of their civiliation to disappear? There is also strong evidence that many humans have some remains of neaderthal DNA (to fit with the Atlantis DNA hypothesis). They were physically dominant to Homo sapiens, which would make it easier for them to dominate technically as well. (In real life, their larger size required a larger calorie intake, which may have contributed to their extinction.) Whoever it was, somebody apparently reprogrammed the AI with pseudo-latin commands.
For the curious: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal
Or the Latin language was partially based on a the AI's command language.
No.
If this hypothesis were true, we would expect to see no wizards among people of recent African stock, who do not have Neanderthal DNA, and this is not the case in the original canon, but that aside, the idea that a powerful AI was created by a species with markedly less cranial capacity and signs of advanced tool use than our own sounds highly implausible right off the bat.
Another possibility consistent with AA's idea is that the AI was created for the use of, rather than created by, the Neanderthals. Admittedly I'm now going down the AI-Designer-Of-The-Gaps rabbit hole, which suggests this line of reasoning is best discarded quickly.
Note that Dumbledore says something like “erased Atlantis from time”, which suggests more than just the passage of 30 k years is involved in hiding the traces.
Cranial capacity is about the same (reference wikipedia in my original comment). Also, our knowledge of their tool use is somewhat moot if we don't even know anything about a super advanced civilization. As in, what else are we missing about the past? The point about Africans is the strongest.
As to the second point (archaeological evidence):
What's worse than nukes? Balefire.
There's a decent chance you already know this, but that bit is probably a reference to Harry Potter and the Wastelands of Time. I don't think that fic describes what did its Atlantis in in any great detail (though it's been a year or two since I read it), but whatever it was, it was probably an apocalypse of subtype dug too deep and awakened an ancient evil. All the absurdly lethal skeletal guardians left lying around seem to point in that direction, at least.
On the other hand, there's enough references to D&D magic floating around that balefire wouldn't be too outré.
Balefire's not even that bad, unless you're the Dragon Reborn and can balefire back more than a couple minutes.
That's not really fair. Balefire didn't get its bad reputation from Rand wiping out cities with it until the universe destabilized.
My point was that you have to be a ridiculously powerful wielder of the One Power before being able to weave balefire stronger than a nuke. There's probably only a handful of people in the series that can do it, now that the Choedan Kal is broken.
But there's no shortage of people who could accomplish it cooperatively, if you get male and female channelers working together.
I'm sure that in Wheel of Time there were plenty of ways to obliterate a city with the One Power back in the Age of Legends. The issue isn't that it can obliterate cities, but that if you use it for wholesale destruction like that, unlike, say, explosions, it fucks up the very fabric of reality.
Just get a circle of men and women...
No evidence that circle can weave balefire. But haven't read books after Crossroads, so maybe it appears later.
Is there any evidence that there are things which can be woven individually which can't be woven by circles? I don't remember any.
I'd say you're looking at the wrong canon, but that's never stopped Eliezer before.