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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!
"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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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
Wikipedia entry on the subject is more clear and concise. Also it's not exactly a news - wiki entry dates from four years ago.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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!
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.
Does anyone has recommendations of better science news forums? Where you know, people actually focus on Science?
Academic journals.
I'm very much afraid that other than in costly peer-reviewed forums like those, the discourse doesn't get a great deal better than Slashdot. Even in academic journals the discourse is often poorly focussed and off-topic. Even discipline-specific mailing lists aren't noticeably better: I'm not even subscribed to the most important one for my field because it's just full of US-centric political rants.
(I speak as someone who studies ancient cultures professionally, and who is keenly aware that this story is not remotely "science" in a sense that most people here would tolerate ... unless you're one of the rare birds who accept that the natural sciences and human sciences -- humanities -- have anything in common.)
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.
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.
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.
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. ;)
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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 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."
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.