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Nat'l Geographic: The Birth of Religion

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Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus5/22/2011 9:25:41 pm PDT

re: #2 yasharki

Though you’re likely inebriated the objections you raise are still needing addressing.

Note that Gobekli Tepe has been an archeological hot spot for a couple of years now, and the NGM article is just the latest to cover it. Earlier articles about it have showed up at LGF.

Stone pillars cannot be carbon dated unless there are pieces of wood embedded in them, which our illustrious author doesn’t mention, neither does he mention any evidence supporting this his claim to the age of Gobeki Tepe. Smells like BS.

As others have pointed out there are many different dating techniques. Also, remember that they are digging into mounds, and obviously the lower levels were put there before the upper levels. The mounds are filled in, so one can also try to date the lowest level deposits, the ground upon which the monuments were placed.

“Eleven millennia ago nobody had digital imaging equipment, of course”. No shit, we didn’t have it 30 years ago, thanks for enlightening us…

Not true. The CCD came from the 1960’s and by the 1970’s there were early digital imaging machines around.


“… Eghm, shouldn’t those chips be covered by meters thick layer of soil after 11+ thousand years? Egyptian sphynx had to be dug up, and it’s supposedly half as old, how could “flint chips” be laying around still? Scores, or hundreds I guess… (BS smell is getting stronger)

The flint chips simply indicated that the area had people running around it in the neolithic times. And, as far as Egypt is concerned the problem is Saharan winds blowing sand and dust, which tends to obscure structures very quickly.

….Gee, it must have been them darn aliens, no human can work 40 minutes away from a water source…

You obviously live in the time of automobiles to make a statement like that.

Anyway, going onward… Gobekli Tepe is very interesting because it is such an obviously large effort. Why is that important? Because 11,000 years ago people were not permanently living there. The operating theory (in a very general sense) about pre-agricultural human society is that humans as hunter-gatherers would move with the animals and fruiting seasons of plants - only when we learned to cultivate plants did we settle permanently in one place.

If Gobekli Tepe supports that idea - that there were not permanent settlements here but only seasonal habitation, then that supports the previous held belief but now the question becomes why would humans expend such effort on construction if they weren’t going to live there.

Thus it is proposed that the only significant driver of humans to do Gobekli Tepe would have to do with religion. Note that 11,000 years ago “religion” would not just encompass existential beliefs but be practical, integrated with the legal system (such as it was) and politics (such as they were.) I.e., “culture”.

Therefore, Gobekli Tepe seems to be telling us that we developed a (relatively) sophisticated culture before we permanently settled and practiced agriculture.

At least that is my take of the whole thing, and why Gobekli Tepe is important.