Sunday, May 22, 2011

Megaliths


every year more information comes out by archeologists about the past.

so this weeks' Nat Geo has an article asking the big question: Who built the temple or building at Gobekli? and why?

and another question: Did religion predate agriculture? Because the temple dates back to 10000 BC.

Yes, Çatalhöyük dates to 7500 bc and may have been settled by hunter gatherers, not farmers, (maybe they exchanged the local volcanic glass which could be used as knives to import grain).
But a new structure in Turkey questions if maybe the hunter gatherers...

in Europe, barrows, tombs and megaliths are all over the place, almost as if someone in 3000 bc told the people to do this. and not only Europe, but there are equivalent structures here in Asia...and recognition of similar structures are rewriting the history of the new world: Most are much later than the old world, but some in Louisiana dates to 3000 BC also.


In many of these areas, people were still neolithic (stone age farmers) but some, like Stonehendge, date before agriculture started.

The modern theory is that people started planting, began living in villages, and then decided to placate the gods so they sent good weather (hence so many storm gods like Thor or Zeus). But the Nat Geo article speculates that pilgrimages and ceremonies encouraged people to settle down, so religion might have inspired agriculture, not vice versa.

But now again the history books will need to be rewritten.

Discovering that hunter-gatherers had constructed Göbekli Tepe was like finding that someone had built a 747 in a basement with an X-Acto knife. "I, my colleagues, we all thought, What? How?" Schmidt said. Paradoxically, Göbekli Tepe appeared to be both a harbinger of the civilized world that was to come and the last, greatest emblem of a nomadic past that was already disappearing. The accomplishment was astonishing, but it was hard to understand how it had been done or what it meant.

as Drudge would say: Developing....

headsup SigmundCarl&AlbertBlog.

No comments: