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."

Comments

Wikipedia entry

[S3D]

Wikipedia entry on the subject is more clear and concise. Also it's not exactly a news - wiki entry dates from four years ago.

Re:dont be silly

[meringuoid]

That implies that some of todays theories are wrong! ... This also implies that we are acting with a good deal of faith in scientific theories which are not yet proven.

Pretty much all of today's theories are wrong, in the sense that they are inaccurate and incomplete. General relativity fails us at the beginning of the Universe and at the centre of a black hole. Quantum mechanics gives us no description at all of gravitational effects. In cases where we need to use both theories together we end up with infinities and singularities and contradictions all over the place.

A new theory will dramatically change our description of these exotic systems. But in order to work, such a theory must agree with the current theories in domains where those theories are known to be valid. General relativity replaced Newtonian gravity, but it could only do so because it made nearly the same predictions in conditions where Newtonian gravity worked. Newton's theory is still used for interplanetary navigation, because the calculations are so much simpler and the error is small - but if you had to do a gravitational slingshot round a neutron star you'd go to Einstein.

I'd just add that no scientific theory is ever proved. You want proof, the mathematics department is next door. You want certainty, there's a church down the road. In science we accumulate evidence, and the more evidence agrees with our predictions, the more confident in the theory we become - but you can never test every possible case.