Thursday, February 25, 2010

Gobekli Tepe: Rewriting the Fairy Tale of Human Evolution



"All our theories were wrong." -- Ian Hodder, archaeologist, February 19th 2010

Symmes, P., History in the Remaking: A Temple Complex in Turkey that Predates Even the Pyramids is Rewriting the Story of Human Evolution, Newsweek, Feb 2010

The site isn't just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape.
11,500 years ago redefines old? Mmmkay. Except that it doesn't. Plato was talking about the exact same time period in 360 B.C.

The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.
Hunter-gatherers? LMAO.

All the circles feature massive T-shaped pillars that evoke the monoliths of Easter Island.
I.e. Atlantean.

Though not as large as Stonehenge—the biggest circle is 30 yards across, the tallest pillars 17 feet high—the ruins are astonishing in number. Last year Schmidt found his third and fourth examples of the temples. Ground-penetrating radar indicates that another 15 to 20 such monumental ruins lie under the surface. Schmidt's German-Turkish team has also uncovered some 50 of the huge pillars, including two found in his most recent dig season that are not just the biggest yet, but, according to carbon dating, are the oldest monumental artworks in the world.

The new discoveries are finally beginning to reshape the slow-moving consensus of archeology. Göbekli Tepe is "unbelievably big and amazing, at a ridiculously early date," according to Ian Hodder, director of Stanford's archeology program. Enthusing over the "huge great stones and fantastic, highly refined art" at Göbekli, Hodder—who has spent decades on rival Neolithic sites—says: "Many people think that it changes everything…It overturns the whole apple cart. All our theories were wrong."

Schmidt's thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city.

This theory reverses a standard chronology of human origins, in which primitive man went through a "Neolithic revolution" 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. In the old model, shepherds and farmers appeared first, and then created pottery, villages, cities, specialized labor, kings, writing, art, and—somewhere on the way to the airplane—organized religion. As far back as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, thinkers have argued that the social compact of cities came first, and only then the "high" religions with their great temples, a paradigm still taught in American high schools.

Religion now appears so early in civilized life—earlier than civilized life, if Schmidt is correct—that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it, less a revelation than a genetic inheritance. The archeologist Jacques Cauvin once posited that "the beginning of the gods was the beginning of agriculture," and Göbekli may prove his case.

14 comments:

Jeffery Keown said...

Again... no trouble for evolution. Please explain how this contradicts our proven descent from apes?

KV said...

OIM,

This only proves that man knew how to lay a stone before the wimps came here!

Did you read The Jew by Burton?

OilIsMastery said...

Jeffery,

"Again... no trouble for evolution."

If this article is "no trouble for evolution" then why does the title of the article claim the exact opposite?

Jeffery Keown said...

"Rewriting" not "Destroying"

Additionally, not "Fairy Tale" but "Fundamental Truth."

Learn.

OilIsMastery said...

So you still believe that boats evolved in 5000 B.C.?

Jeffery Keown said...

Nope... pending further investigation, it looks like boats have been around a lot longer than we thought.

Nothing about this contradicts the fact that we are apes, we sprang from ape-like ancestors, and are related to all other life via this concept of common descent.

It's a fact you choose to ignore because of your faith in crackpots.

Baron said...

"Schmidt's thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city."

After reading about the electric universe theory and saturn hypothesis, this is exactly the conclusion I came to.

Our ancestors had the brains to build cities and raise crops, but for a long time they didn't. Why? Supposedly they didn't know that seeds sprout into plants (even though they lived their entire lives around nature...), or didn't have the brains to come up with irrigation, or whatever the mainstream theorists say.

But they had basically the same brains we do, for at least 40k years. They knew how to plant crops, but didn't bother--because farming is a pain in the ass. If wild food is abundant, its easier to just move on to another spot.

But if a plasma column or hyperactive aurora appeared towards the end of the ice age as the EU proponents suggest, then that would explain the sudden appearance of elaborate rituals and obsessive skywatching. You look up in the sky one day, and you're awestruck by the gods, so you stop what you're doing and stare in amazement. Perhaps you think they're trying to communicate with you, and you start building structures that mimic the heavens above (a recurring theme--see Graham Hancock's "Heaven's Mirror"). By building stationary structures, you now have a need to start the hard work of planting and irrigating, building fences for livestock, etc.

Fungus the Photo! said...

Current scientific fashion is to believe that those native in Australia, before Europeans invaded in the 18th century, have left signs of their presence from over 40,000 years ago, based upon the known unreliable carbon dating method.
They could only have arrived on rafts or boats as there is a deep water chasm that prevents access along the land bridge that would have existed if sea levels were 400 feet less than now.
This is therefore an extension of time. As you read my comment about Timaeus, know that the wanderers included those trading and pirating on ships. They would be 99% free of tsunami threats and thunderbolts due to their presence on water of sufficient depth.
All these dating methods rely on false assumptions concerning placid evolution and the absence of catastrophe.

Making assumptions is not necessarily invalid as an approach to the truth! Proving an hypothesis wrong is actually progress. Something those who are partial to worship, forget. Those of us who say that the truth is always capable of refinement or of being over turned are therefore more suited to the pursuiit of "science". Worshippers of stability are suited to be civil servants etc.

Fungus the Photo! said...

Baron
Agreed! Simple logic can overcome the big lie!

OilIsMastery said...

Baron and Fitz,

Good comments.

Jeffery Keown said...

I love how this blog posts updates to mainstream theories, showing the daily overturning of thought and the progress of research... and then goes on to crow about stagnation and stability.

You folks amaze me. My irony meter runneth over.

Jeffery Keown said...

Oh.. and Fungus...
There is very little evolution without disaster, catastrophe and environmental change.

Without changing conditions, lifeforms could theoretically reach equilibrium with the environment. When disruption does come along (in the form of meteor impacts, plate movements, vulcanism and climate change), you get mass extinctions, rapid adaptation and opportunistic evolution of forms to fill new ecological niches.

Its all over the fossil record, every few dozens of millions of years, most of the life on the planet dies off and is replaced.

Oxygen breathers replaced "methanogens," Dinosaurs and birds replaced the reptiles and most of the early synapsids, mammals replaced dinosaurs.

Without catastrophe, nothing happens. This concept is mainstream science, one of the foundations of evolutionary theory.

Jade said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Jade said...

Does the quote at the beginning make you feel more confident that you can persuade as many people as possible to believe you with this dreadful little article? L O L

*former post deleted due to spelling error - oops!