Around 7000 years before Christ (BC) we're told that mankind, which had been living a jolly hunter-gather sort of life, suddenly domesticated wheat, became farmers and settled down. Nuts, berries and the odd Mastodon steak, so delicious, didn't cut it for them anymore. No, they wanted to farm.
With that, the whole edifice of civilization began, Pyramids, temples, Emperors, armies, philosophers, the FBI, lying, venal, slick, aggressive mainstream media, all of what we know today as civilization came into being. Thanks to wheat at 7000 BC.
Then a German archeologist discovered Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, a temple complex of monumental masonry that dates back to 10,000 BC or 12,000 years before now.
There they were, the Flintsones, scavenging about for roots, bark, the occasionally unfortunate saber tooth tiger and, as a side hobby, building huge stone temples with sophisticated lithic art. And then, waiting some three thousand years to start farming.
Something doesn't seem right with this picture but there it is. An obviously civilized, stonebuilding, aesthetically skilled culture putting up temples(?) when they should have been foraging about for nuts and wondering why their uncured animal skin clothes smelled so bad. And then, three millennia later, getting it together to grow wheat.
Weird, right? Some speculate that a comet or fragments of one, smashed into or burst above the North American ice sheet around 13,000 years ago, causing massive flooding and an influx of cold, glacial water into the Atlantic. Hence the Younger Dryas cooling and mega fauna extinctions.
Long story short, it would have been a cataclysmic event, characterized by huge flooding, a rise in sea level, die-off level conflagration and global cooling.
This, some believe, was the Deluge and from it emerged rare survivors from an Ice Age civilization who started afresh, with the seeds, literally, of a previous world. They did so in places such as Gobekli Tepe.
But then, just as civilization began to flourish again, the earth passed through the orbital train of cometary debris from the previous disaster, shutting down sites like Gobekli Tepe, notoriously backfilled around 9,500 BC for no apparent reason. Were they attempting to save their temples from the coming catastrophe?
Who knows, but thanks to intrepid Germans, we can see the mute testimony of their culture today and wonder at the tenacity of the people, the Adamites?, who made it through earthquake, fire and flood to domesticate wheat and build the pyramids.
The rest, of course, is history.
Your Friend,
LSP
6 comments:
There are many theories. William James had an interesting take on theories. According to James's pragmatism, the value of an idea is dependent upon its usefulness in the practical world rather than its absolute truth. He wrote, "Act as if what you do makes a difference."
He also wrote that, "A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." This seems to be the case when we cast back into time for clues and find them - but the puzzle is incomplete. Half of the pieces are missing. And there are the people who wish to promote the idea that man descended from ape, and are willing to manufacture pieces to a puzzle and try and force them to snap into place. But they don't do it easily because more pieces to the puzzle are found and those visions manufactured by ambitious scientists no longer fit.
There are other theories such as the Aquatic Ape Theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquatic_ape_hypothesis) where scientists worked to posit their theories as facts, and that's always problematic.
You might be interested in a book titled 'Ragnarok' by Ignatius Donnelly. It was published in 1883 and is still in print. He argued that an ancient comet caused the Ice Age and that prehistoric man was the remnant of a more advanced civilization. It's a very well-researched thesis based in both geology and anthropology.
I've always enjoyed the aquatic ape theory, LL, and something seems to ring true about the Dryas Impact theory -- but the scientific world's mostly against it.
Mind you, they were deeply against dinosaur killing comet theory too. And now it's "settled science."
Regardless, it seems strange that H. Sap should've existed for several hundred thousand years and not have risen above flint chipping and bark eating, ok, with the odd steak, until 7000 BC.
Perhaps as time and archeology go by more pieces will emerge and fall into place.
Good James quotes.
Thanks, Nightwind, I'll check it out.
I enjoyed his Atlantis book, btw.
Also, you might like Velikovsky (sp?) -- another cometery catastrophist. Interesting stuff.
We do learn more in our march forward about the march backward - birds are the descendants of dinosaurs, and reptiles didn't play a significant role on the land when dinos ruled the place in the Jurassic, etc. When I was a kid, the notion that dinosaurs were reptiles was settled science. And in the day of Galileo, they were convinced that Earth was the center of the universe. That was settled science then.
Today we understand that so long as we pay more tax, the likes of Barack, Al Gore and even Rev. Al Sharpton will protect us from global warming/cooling, which is settled science.
Today if you listen to Democrats who revel in the blood of the unborn, killing your child in utero is one of the coolest things you can do, and they'll sell the body of your dead baby to "research/science" so that they can afford executive jets, sports cars and yachts. It's considered to be very progressive. Ultra modern. Sort of like fat lesbians (wearing comfortable shoes) doing an interpretive liturgical dance.
LSP: 'Ragnarok' was his follow-up to the Atlantis book.
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