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11,000-Year-Old Temple Found In Turkey
Ralph Spoilsport writes "In Southeast Turkey, the archaeologist Klaus Schmidt has discovered an 11,000-year-old temple. Established civilization theory suggests that agriculture created cities, and cities created monuments. This discovery suggests just the opposite — people got together to build a huge monument to their religion, and in order to sustain it, communities were formed and agriculture (already in development) quickly followed on to sustain the population. Truly a startling find with significant implications."
...turkey found in 11,000-year-old temple sounds much more delicious.
The bible says the earth is 6000 years old so it CANT be 11,000 years old! Simple math people!
16th holiest temple!
I for one welcome our cloned 500 year old Jurassic overlords.
PS. I suggest you ask him what Dinosaur DNA looks like, and when his first test subject is due to hatch.
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
"Trying to pick out symbolism from prehistoric context is an exercise in futility."
We've known about the rings at Stonehenge for how long? What do we know about them? Not much.
The simple fact is that we are still discovering evidence of what man did before inventing writing of any sort. I'm continually amazed at the apparent opinion of many that what science knows now is all there is to know, or that it is not possible that it is not quite right.
Alluding to an earlier post, massive drastic evolutionary changes just don't make sense to me. There has to be more history in the dirt than we know about. Chances of us finding it... meh!
I don't think that the curve of knowledge acquisition of the last 500 years is a linear projection of the millions of years before them. I think this whole gain in knowledge is rather logarithmic in nature. Meaning that the first several thousand centuries passed without writing, without lasting evidence to show we had been there. Stonehenge, the Sphinx... how many others? They all stand there with no written account of who or why they were erected. We are still arguing about how the great pyramids at Giza were built. (they made them of concrete).
Point is, this should not be surprising. What should be is that it has taken this long to find it, never mind any other corroborating evidence of early man's efforts to create. What the temple could mean in terms of sociology or religion is pittance compared to what it means to evolution IMO. The technology and effort used to create it means a lot. Guesses about agriculture and social groupings are just that. I have a sneaking suspicion that socially, mankind evolved from pack/clan culture early on. There are so many similarities to that, but we just don't see it in modern society, or ignore it. sheeple anyone? They need a pack leader, right?
Anyway, I hope that further study/excavation shows us something more meaningful than what has been found. We, as a species, need it to fully recognize where we came from, for that is how you understand what direction to go. Just an opinion.
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I guess discovering a 11,000-year-old temple in Turkey is better than discovering it in Uranus.
How do you jump from finding one very old temple to deciding that the motivation for all civilization starting and people getting together being religion?
Sounds to me like someone with religion is trying to justify their bad habit.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
The Predators showed the early tribes how to build it structures, thats' common knowledge.....
Wikipedia entry on the subject is more clear and concise. Also it's not exactly a news - wiki entry dates from four years ago.
Bah!! Everyone knows that Jeebus' daddy made this to trick the stupid scientists!
Since large communities and cities are not possible without agriculture, I highly doubt that agriculture sprang up after communities and cities.
Asserting that it did work that way (as the OP does), is like asserting that gasoline was developed to fuel all those gasoline engines that were already lying around.
Religion and science are not mutually exclusive. In fact they attempt explanations at very similar subjects...most obviously the origin and future of the universe. They might very well combine to more fully answer them. Further more, I think that in many ways science has become a religion.
One thing everyone I talk to agrees with me about is that over the next fifty years we will continue to make amazing new discoveries that will rewrite our science. That implies that some of todays theories are wrong! So it is a good idea to remain a bit humble when arguing about science. This also implies that we are acting with a good deal of faith in scientific theories which are not yet proven. Can anyone throw out some good examples of previous scientific theories proven wrong ...or possibly proven wrong. Lol. Remember that the bunk theories of the earth being the center of the universe and then the sun were scientific before they were associated with religious zealots.
I read that and promptly wondered how an 11,000 year old temple could possibly have been found inside a turkey. Must have been tiny...
This one looks more advanced to me
http://members.toast.net/rjspina/images/yonaguni1-12.jpg
It's about 10ky too
when i play the aztecs, i can usually get my obelisk built before my starting worker even finishes his first few roads, nevermind that i haven't even discovered agriculture yet. of course, this is because the aztecs have mysticism as a starting tech, and assumes i'm not cranking out warriors to combat barbarian threats so...
wait, we're talking reality?
sorry
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So Germans found some cooper wires deep in the ground near Berlin and concluded that their ancestors used electricity way before anyone else, circa 1,000 years ago. Later on, the British found near London some glass way deeper than previous German team and concluded than optical cable was used on British 2,000 years ago. Turkish people kept digging and digging and found nothing. They concluded that their ancestors from 11,000 years ago have used wireless.
The summary seems to make it a lot more revolutionary than I think it is. It's not like the temple represents definite evidence that the current way of thinking is /wrong/. I'm not an anthropologist, but it seems to me like you could make a monument and then a city to support it as well as the other way around; there's no reason it has to be one way or another.
I'm sure that for every Stonehenge in the middle of nowhere, there's a Colosseum in the middle of a city.
http://www.tenjou.net/
sounds more probable
both for reasons of its greater chance of being left alone and untouched, in regards to the original inhabitants and later tomb raiders, and also for its greater chance of surviving physically, intact and inert for millenia
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Jesus did. With falsely pre-aged faith testing blocks.
I record my sleeptalking
you've been to my grandma's house at thanksgiving...
The tower of Babel. Moved when the continents split up during the days of Peleg.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
They Might Be Giants indeed.
All politics aside this --> http://www.usatoday.com/news/science/archaeology/2001-03-22-afghan-buddhas.htm -- is why I hate the Taliban... that and their abuse of women.
Had this discovery occurred in a land where the Taliban had influence, it likely would not have lasted very long after discovery.
Why do archaeologists always declare that old buildings are temples? It could have been a Sandwich Shop or a Greasy Spoon for all we know.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Should put an end to that long lasting debate!
Science and faith are not mutually exclusive, if you delimit their domains: faith for things metaphysical, un(dis)provable either way ; science for all the mundane, observable / measurable things. That's the Discordian way.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Still science posts are often the hallmark of how this system doens't work. News on science, people only talk about religion. How the bible this and that....
Does anyone has recommendations of better science news forums? Where you know, people actually focus on Science?
Actually, if you think about it, it doesn't even f-ing make any sense:
1. You can't have a city _before_ you have a stable source of food that doesn't move around.
2. Agriculture depended on a mutation in a species of grass, that made it have bigger grains. It first started with wild Rye, actually, but the mutation of emmer wheat was what really kicked things into gear. It's a tetraploid plant, meaning that at some point it acquired _two_ sets of chromosomes, and that mutation survived.
You can't cause a mutation by simply building a city or a temple.
3. The only major invention that happened in that time for agriculture was irrigation. At some point some guys in Egypt for example discovered that if you plant your seeds in the wet earth after the Nile's flood is over, you get a lot of grain to eat. I don't know how it happened in Messopotamia, and it could have been independent, but that's literally what they did: imitate a flood. They'd literally flood their fields with water from a river, later from a canal bringing water farther from a river, then close the gates and let the water dry, then plant grain.
That's it. That's the only change that happened to agriculture in thousands of years.
So how did cities and monuments drive it? It's not like any change happened to agriculture because of those cities. People still sowed and reaped in the exact same way as their ancestors did, and the only change was needing more and more land to feed more and more people. That's it.
4. By contrast it's easier to see the effects of agriculture on the cities. E.g., the rise to power and importance of priesthood in Egypt because they could tell you when the next flood starts, or of those who controlled the canals in Messopotamia, is a direct effect of agriculture. Or on religion? Well, Egypt had some half a dozen deities connected in some way with agriculture, and that's just off the top of my head.
Heck, even the fact that those cities grew walls and codes of laws and standing armies, is an effect of not being able to move freely in response to threats and invasions. You _had_ to stay there near the river you irrigated your crops with, no matter what, and you had to live with each other because there was nowhere else to go if half the tribe doesn't like the other half.
If you look at the tribes which didn't practice agriculture (e.g., northern Europe until very late), they were a lot more inclined to just pack their shit and move when they overpopulated. While we tend to draw an age of migrations around the age when the Roman Empire started getting shafted by them, they moved around a lot before that too. E.g., Caesar's eventual conquest of Gaul started when the Helvetii just packed their shit and wanted to pass through and plunder the territory of the Allobroges which were clients of Rome. E.g., the Teutons and Cimbri migrated through the whole f-ing Europe, before being stopped by the Romans in 101 BC and 102 BC. E.g., while everyone remembers the spanking that the Goths gave to the Byzantines, how do you think the Goths ended up in Dacia when starting from Scandinavia in the first place?
It's only when they got into agriculture that they started trying to build stone forts and defend their plots of land. Sure, some had to migrate later anyway, when someone else displaced them, but you can see the abrupt change in attitude before and after agriculture anyway. After agriculture it's no longer about some space to live in, but about the land itself. The very place you're in becomes worth defending.
Again, it's damn impossible to see an effect the other way around. Building a stone fort or a temple doesn't make your fields suddenly grow grain, or anything. Discovering a plant you can grow, or a plough that can work on your type of soil does. (The latter was what changed the situation in Europe, btw.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Come on, guys, how is something that has gone up and down all the documentation channels for years now be new?
Infrastructure has always been behind population.
Nope. Stonehenge was built approx 5000 years ago. At the time, farming was more or less established in England, and hunter-gatherers pretty much gone. The Druids, if there were any, lived about 2,000 years ago, by which time Stonehenge had been abandoned for over 500 years.
I say "If there were any" because the only evidence for Druids is Julius Caesar's writings, which were there to justify his invasion of England, and are probably no more accurate than reports of "Weapons of Mass Destruction". We know perfectly well that the religion of the time involved people having personal shrines in their homes, and collective worship was not practiced until the Romans (ie Julius Caesar) imported the idea. However, a bunch of wierdos resurrected the Druid concept in Victorian times, shortly after the popular press made a connection between Druids and Stonehenge. There were no documented cases of Druids between approx 70AD and approx 1850AD.
The people who built stonehenge are genetically the same as the people who live in the area now.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Ask Sid where my Civilization patch is, then?!
i don't ever play the aztecs, and i don't ever build obelisks ;-)
i usuing play mali, and if my capital city is particularly high in production early, after a few warriors/ workers and a settler, i'll start stonehenge
this is actually more often than not, since as mali i already have mining and mysticism to start, so i probably have a mine or two already going in hills nearby, which means my production is usually pretty good if my population is up
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
A myth is not a false fact, it is a metaphor - a metaphor open to transcendence, to use Joseph Campbell's definition. A true myth is truer than a true fact, because it explains that which goes beyond the facts, allows you to relate to it. If you think the Truth is not a larger notion than the facts, you should check with Godel, Heisenberg, Bohr, Einstein, etc...
Just look at the consequences of using a time-machine.
First of all, Pascal's wager is in regards to the existence of god, not religion. Moreover, the biggest problem with his wager is that it is all about how believing in god benefits you as an individual, whereas, there is no discussion as to people making decisions that affect more than themselves. Furthermore, the wager only matters if you believe that the gambit is for eternal life in the first place. If you believe in god, but not heaven (or whatever flavour of that you like), there is no difference in the wager to not believing in god and not believing in heaven. He's essentially trying to convince himself that he's not an idiot for believing without reason (whereas most people feel no need to justify it). As for groupthink in science, there is at least a possibility of evidence arising to sway opinion. Good luck with that in religion, it's an all or nothing gamble. Also, there isn't faith in peers in the scientific community. Some people are trusted more than others, but any reputable scientist will publish the results of their theory and everyone else interested in that field worth their salt will attempt to find flaws in the findings.
Everybody seems to think I'm lazy I don't mind, I think they're crazy
Just because it isn't reported for you to read, doesn't make Turkey any better protector of history. I was born and raised in the Diyarbakir a neighboring city of Urfa where the discovery was made. If it's history you seek, there is plenty in the region. I remember digging as a child while on picnic with the fam in the countryside and finding a small statue. As a Kurd, we love and cherish this history. It's part of our heritage. There is so much more. Unfortunately, it is continually destroyed by Turkish government. At times for installation of huge dams, at other times to marginalize the Kurdish heritage and people in the southeast. The only hope of prevention lies in the "discovery" of these marvels by Western scholars and the attention of the Western media.
1. Well, if you aim that low with "city" and "temple", then it really doesn't say much.
There are hunter-gatherer tribes with more members than that, and they do have some huts/tents/etc somewhere. It doesn't really make it a city, but ok. They all have some totem pole, or sacred heap o' rocks, or some sacred tree or grove somewhere. You can probably find such tribal villages all the way to the first homo sapiens, 200,000 years ago, and the Neanderthals before built them too.
Humans were _never_ lone individuals, like, say, tigers are. There'd always be groups of 10-15 (or for that matter 100-200) clustered together for mutual protection.
If those are the "cities" we're talking about, you simply can't draw a line and say "they appeared 11,000 years ago." Humans always lived in groups like that.
The cities we're usually talking about are larger things.
2. Can you correlate those groups of 10-15 humans with starting agriculture? I don't see how, beyond basically "well, they needed food." But humans and such groups of humans already needed food anyway. The need for a larger and more stable food source was there for 200,000 years, and in fact for the Neanderthals before them too. There is evidence that there were episodes of chronic stavation all along the way, so the drive would be there already.
So basically if you found a sorce of food, you'd _use_ it, with or without a temple and city. If you're a 15 people tribe and you find some plentiful berries, you settle there and start eating them. And if you find some nice grass which produces lots of edible seeds, you start using it one way or another. Just because you need food.
The growth of the city or tribe then comes from having that source of food, not the other way around. You can't make the right type of grass or berries or whatever appear just because you placed a city there. It's not Civilization.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
What a well thought-out analysis of a very complex subject. Was that your PhD thesis? Your pathetic dogma is as tired as that of people who cling to young-Earth Creationism, or to Sharia Law. If religion is just fantasy, then by extension your existence is purely coincidental. Your life, with all of its successes and failures, amounts to nothing, and you might as well just kill yourself now because ultimately the result will be the same. After all, no one asks the question, "I wonder what the significance of this pile of leaves blowing in the wind is?" Why bother wondering about completely random, inconsequential events like your life?
Actually, the Hebrew version lost some meaning when translated from the original Klingon.
Read it a long time ago so don't remember all the details, but Jane Jacobs made a similar argument about settlement driving agriculture (not vice versa) 30 years ago in "The Economy of Cities."
If memory serves, she built much of her case around the then-recently discovered Catalhoyuk, a large Neolithic settlement in Turkey that was (maybe still is?) thought to be a thriving trading centre before significant development of agriculture.
It's depressing to find out.
I am also an archaeologist, so I'd like to think I know a little about such things. What I don't get is why Americans, and it generally is the Americans, who have to bring God and the bible into every frigging discussion about history. I've never heard Germans, French or Brits rant and rave about their silly little book. Not even in countries like Italy or Poland, about as devoutly Catholic as nations get, do we hit the brick wall of blind ignorance. But Americans? Sadly there's always one (or more often more than one) who has to bring that piece of trash fiction into the frigging equation and brandish like it were the centre of the world and the only truth. Shit, I studied in England, at one of the better archaeological departments in Europe and in the 5 years it took me to complete a masters the bible didn't come up once in discussion. There's barely a shred of archaeological truth in any of it. Radio carbon dating, fission track, lithium argon, vole clocks, carbon 14, volcanic ash and a million other scientific methods will tell you the truth, the bible most certainly will not. It has no more place in the scientific world than Harry Potter. I'd say less, nobody's killed because of Harry Potter.
The fact that Americans drum the frigging bible down my throat more than most concerns me. Firstly I am amazed that the fundies have a such a strangle hold over there. Secondly, the fact that the bible-bashers have only become so vocal in the 30 years or so shows they are scared that people are going to wake up and smell the roses. Lastly, it shows more than anything how cultural religion is. Americans are brought up to believe this filth because the loonies have squeezed their way into schools and government and filled people's heads with lies and remain in power to perpetuate them. It's sad and America seems to be on the slippery slope to fundamentalist theocracy faster than I care to think about. The last election was terrifying. People voting for the person with the same beliefs? WTF? Questioning Obama's ability to be president because of his father's (abandoned) faith? Jesus Christ! This is not how a 21st century, democratic nation should function.
And this is so off topic. I don't care. I am so fucking irate that the bible is here being brandished as some sort of codex to the past. No one here, a place where intelligent people are supposed to congregate, is asking how the ruins were dated, how they were found, what this tells us about our theories of civilization's emergence and whether it validates them or not. No, nothing like that. No science, just more loonies ranting about their book every time the real truth emerges from the mists of the past.
Americans, whenever the bible bashers turn up at your universities tell them to shut the fuck up or show them the door. Enough is enough.
So some silver-tongued geezer persuades a bunch of nubile young lovelies that they'll suffer eternal damnation unless they polish his wood. After he finally croaks in the middle of his ninth threesome of the week, a bunch of less-talented pick-up artists find that no amount of funeral preparation can wipe the grin off the old goat's face. They assume this is proof that he's still getting his wand waxed in the afterlife, and build a monument to a god they now regard as eminently worthy of worship.
And it all goes from there. I gotta write me a prayer book.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Well, it actually gets me thinking. If all civilization started in that strip starting from Turkey to the southern tip of Messopotamia, and it was all because of religion, man, they must have had some good religion. Why are we worshipping this wus who got nailed by a couple of Romans, then? Let's go back to a religion so strong that it singlehandedly created agriculture and started humanity on the road to civilization.
E.g., Innana, daughter of Sin. Has a nice ring to it, and her cult was in the general area where it all started.
Goddess of war, wanton sex, and ritual prostitution. At least you got more than a receipt for your tithe, ya know what I mean?
Plus a bit into genocide and the like, if you read Enheduanna's (best known high priestess of Innana) writings. I guess a girl can have her hobbies, even if they involve turning major rivers red with the blood of the innocents ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Actually, sad to say, what you do there isn't "science in support of faith", it's "bullshit fallacies in support of faith."
E.g.,
E.g., at some point the majority believed that the Earth is flat. It didn't make it so. It didn't even make it a safer bet. That belief is completely orthogonal to how reality actually is.
Plus, "the majority of humans alive today are religious" is mis-leading right there. Those people believe wildly different and mutually-incompatible religions. Which of those religions do you believe? Hinduism can't be true at the same time as Christianity, for example. So painting it all with a "they're religious" brush creates a false majority there.
Taking Christianity for example, it claims some 2 billion adherents worldwide, though that's got more to do with what you've been baptized to, than whether you're actually a devout christian. Well, that's less than a third of the world's population. A majority of the world isn't christian, so by your reasoning, it stands to reason that it's more likely that Christianity is false.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This begs the question: Was agriculture a product of maintaining religion? Perhaps religion is the reason we have hierarchy.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I read this article in the Times a year ago and it still makes me hungry to think of it: A Fruitcake Soaked in Tropical Sun, covering the tradition of "black cake, a spicy, fragrant fruitcake steeped in dark rum and tradition that is a Christmas classic throughout the English-speaking Caribbean." I foresee a trip over to brooklyn sometime in my near future. ;)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
6000 years old!
I have often theorized that it religion is the driving force for all actions of early people.
Religion as a driving force was replaced by greed and war.
I am rather excited.
-- A computer without Windoze is like a choclate cake without mustard
Your rings are showing
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=37.223242,38.922458&spn=0.002127,0.004828&t=h&z=18
Nothing can be 11,000 years old. According to the Fundies, the entire universe is only about 6000 years old.
Actually, no. Not even close.
1. Pascal's wager, the way Pascal used it, is basically this:
- if you believe and you're right, there's an infinite reward
- if you don't believe and are right, well, whatever rewards you can possibly get are finite.
Ditto for penalties when you're wrong, could be added.
So basically it says _nothing_ about which is more probable to be right, and it has _nothing_ to do with . It just says that infinite is bigger than anything else. Even if the probability for christianity to be right were 0.00001% and the probability to be wrong were 99.99999%, infinite*0.00001% > anything_finite*99.99999%. So rewards times probabilities says that for an infinite jackpot, the best course of action is to bet on the jackpot.
2. Yes, the GP did claim that science supports faith. Re-read the message. It's right in there.
3. Even Pascal's use is, essentially, still a formalized way to use another classic fallacy: appeal to consequences.
4. The same infinite rewards and infinite penalties spiel can be used against it, because there is more than one religion, and virtually all promise that you only get the reward if you believe that one religion and nothing else.
E.g., what if judaism is right and christianity wrong? They do have several commandments against stuff ranging from worshipping other gods (prayed to Jesus lately?), to worshipping icons, to eating pork. On the other hand, most Christian denominations say (or used to, before we chose not to believe that any more) that you can _only_ be saved through Jesus. You have an incompatibility right there. So which of them do you choose? Both options A and B promise infinite rewards if you're right, and infinite penalties if you're wrong. Pascal's fancy maths stops working right there and then.
E.g., Norse religion promised you a place in Valhalla if you die attacking someone, or in Freya's halls if you die defending against an attack. Note that it doesn't say you have to be a good person. Pirates and mercenaries dead while assaulting some city to plunder it, would go to Valhalla just as well. Gangsters dead while having a shootout with the cops, would go to one of the two places too, just like the cops who died in the same shootout. The only criterion and goal there was proving to Odin that you're worthy of being a soldier in his Einherjar army, by having already fought to death once and not surrendering to save your life. On the other hand being a nice person and a peaceful death in your own bed, earns you a trip to the domain Loki's daughter. (Yep, you go to Hel;)
They had stuff like the Battle Of Bravalla, a monumental waste of human life, just so a king could go to Valhalla by getting an honourable death in battle... against his loyal vassal.
How do you reconcile that with Christianity? If the Norse were right, you should go die in a firefight, guns blazing, to get your reward. Go try to rob a police station if you're out of other ideas. If Christianity is right, you should be peaceful and love thy neighbour. Which do you choose? Again, Pascal's maths doesn't help you much there, because the consequences for choosing right or wrong are disproportionate for both choices.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I'll point you again at the alternative being starving to death. That's how the Neanderthals went extinct. A long painful starvation into extinction. And even for Homo Sapiens, there are plenty of severely malnourished skeletons around. The world used to constantly over-populate, and shed its excess population through starvation and warfare.
Basically methinks that you think it through modern day perspective, where there are better ways to earn your bread anyway. Nowadays, even if all else fails, what's the worst that can happen? Welfare? Losing a bit of face in the community for that?
Back then the alternative was literally that you and your children will starve to death. Ok, or you could also go kill the buggers from the next tribe for their food. And risk death or severe injury yourself. So basically imagine that you have the following choices, pretty literally. And yes they are the only choices:
A) well, get to doing that hard work in agriculture
B) you and your family starve to death,
C) you go raid the next tribe for their food, and you'll probably get killed sooner or later. The violent death rate in some tribes was as high as 80% at the extreme end, and still higher than the siege of Leningrad at the _lower_ end.
If you tell me that even then you couldn't be arsed to start agriculture because it's too hard, just how freaking lazy _are_ you? :P
It seems to me like it's a much more motivational thing than religion. Do you genuinely think that they just sat around and went "naah, it's too much work" after discovering agriculture, until they had to build a temple? :P
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Hey, and not all Christians (defined for my purposes as persons appreciating and following the ethical insights and teachings of Jesus), feel the need to believe a load of extraneous stories that were added decades after his death, or a bunch of mythology that was part of the culture Jesus happened to be born into, but is otherwise also just stories.
After all, the man said seek for the truth. To my mind that implies that the unconditional intellectual honesty of science is consistent with his teachings, even if it leads you to reject those stories.
I know my personal faith in a loving God is not completely rational, but then (a) at least I don't pretend I know what God is or wants, and (2) even if I became convinced that the universe was Godless, I'd still be a Christian by the definition given above.
-- What do you need?
-- Gnus. Lots of Gnus.
My Grandmother's secret Thanksgiving stuffing recipe always included a pinch of 11,000-Year-Old Temple.
I was immediately reminded of this article: "This Place Is Not A Place of Honor." If this ancient Turkish civilization were trying to give us a warning for some reason, we're not heeding it. Yet we think a future civilization will heed ours? As Gary Rollefson says in the article, "Trying to pick out symbolism from prehistoric context is an exercise in futility."
Jane Jacobs made this point in her books on cities, that cities came first before agriculture. From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs
""
The Economy of Cities
The thesis of this book is that cities are the primary drivers of economic development.
Jacobs' main argument is that all economic growth derives from urban import replacement. Import replacement is when a city starts producing locally goods that it formerly imported, e.g., Tokyo bicycle factories replacing Tokyo bicycle importers in the 1800s. Jacobs claims that import replacement builds up local infrastructure, skills, and production. Jacobs also claims that the increased produce is exported to other cities, giving those other cities a new opportunity to engage in import replacement, thus producing a positive cycle of growth.
In an interview with Bill Steigerwald in Reason Magazine (06/01), Jacobs said that if she is remembered for being a great intellectual she will be remembered not for her work concerning city planning, but for the discovery of import replacement. However, her ideas are similar to those that had begun to be advanced earlier about import substitution by scholars such as Andre Gunder Frank.
The book also advances a new argument that cities preceded agriculture, rather than the reverse, which was archaeologists' previous belief. Archaeologists believed that cities required a food surplus to support specialist workers, thus requiring an existing agricultural economy. Jacobs claims that instead, cities already existed as permanent trading centers, and discovered agriculture through trade in wild animals and grains, and then disseminated agriculture to rural areas.
"""
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
So I ask you, why is science without religion lame?
Well because religion is, like, totally righteous - so as radical as science is, without religion it's just totally lame.
Bow-ties are cool.
I was going to reply to the GP's fascinating post, but the AC pretty much said it all. I'll just add some other stuff...
In Olden Times, knowledge was transmitted orally, from one generation to the next. Once people started writing stuff down, that left them with less time to teach orally. Later on, once people started putting knowledge online, and maintaining the infrastructure to keep it balanced precariously there (power distribution, computer industry, cheap labour force, etc.), there was even less time. This was especially compounded by the fact that nowadays with all this superabundance of information, we're all reading so much more (well I am at least). Add to that the meta-information that goes along with it, and we're documenting the documentation, blogging about blogging, not just our lives/technology. Not to mention the new opportunities the tech now gives us to waste time.
Eventually we end up bringing up children with lots of awesomely intricate high-level knowledge, but less in the way of low-level skills they'd never use in this ultra-modern world where everything is done for them (at least at the moment, while stocks last...). For example, many computer courses nowadays teach how to use a particular brand of office suite/compiler/IDE, rather than the actual principles involved a programming language. Applied knowledge is too often favoured over pure knowledge, sadly.
In the event of a failure of our vast knowledge system (new MS Office data format, massive planet-wide electricity blackout/economic crash, war, etc.) lots of data goes dark, plus with it goes the knowledge to rebuild it. The kidz just can't hack it any more, and so reluctantly revert to barbarianism.
Seems like common sense to me.
Maybe some of the olde knowledge has not been passed on orally, and so has gone extinct. "Primitive" mankind may have developed capabilities we no longer know much about, simply because being, say, a Dowser/Alchemist/Ostrich-Racer was no longer a sexy enough career for a young man once the printing press was the hottest new tech, and everyone was getting into journalism; so Little Johnny didn't care to learn his father's skills (forgive me if I mixed up dates in that example).
Indeed. There is still a lot we can learn from "Primitive" societies. Who's to say that just because a skill fell out of favour during a time of war/hardship, and then was lost, that it might never be needed later in the future?
One of my interests lies in traditional (African) music. The best stuff gets remembered and becomes popular, renowned for its quality, and therefore survives as it is taught to others. This has been going on for centuries before us Westerners started notating it. The old rhythms really are the best, as they've been refined and perfected over time. Like Linux ;-)
Co-operation beats competition
In literature (and in the vernacular), a day is simply some more-or-less arbitrary unit of time:
"In my day, ... ." and so forth.
The question is whether you accept scripture as being written (and translated) as literature or as, shoot, I don't know, maybe as God's scientific experimental log or something.
I don't particularly find any benefit in the infallibility argument. God may be infallible, but if He is going to communicate with us, He has to communicate with particularly fallible humans. That necessitates (in the scriptural criticism sense, as well is in the logical senses) written scriptures that will be interpreted incorrectly by some sincere interpreters. Which, if I accept the existence of God as fact leads me to either declare God is the devil, or to decide I have to ask God what he meant. (Thus, prayer.)
The devil, of course, wants me to believe He is God.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I'd say the same is true of English.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I sort of agree with you, except for a few things.
I have other my own reasons to doubt the dating systems in use in science more than I doubt the dates in the Bible.
There are a number of internal inconsistencies in the Bible, as well, so I don't take either system as absolute fact. Two separate hypotheses for two separate contexts, and I hope, someday, probably after I've died and been resurrected, to find out the real story. For now, when I'm doing science, I work within the framework of the group of scientists I'm working with, and when I do religion, I work within the framework of the religions of the people I'm working with, as much as possible. Creates less confusion.
I am sure that all races of humans must be included as children of Adam. That would seem to make Adam the first man, but I'm not going to get too hung up on that issue.
Simians, I'm not sure how they fit in, we have to treat all living things with more respect. Us vs. them just doesn't work.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Your definition of religion, I suppose, requires blind faith.
Mine requires sighted faith. By definition.
I guess we define religion differently.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.