The Shigur Idol

 

The Shigur Idol was found in a Russian peat bog in the 1890s and is the world's oldest wooden statue, dated to around 9000 BC, making it roughly contemporary with Gobekli Tepe. The idol or totem originally stood over 17 feet high but is now shorter, 9.2 feet, thanks to pieces lost during the Red Terror.

What a remarkable relic of prehistory and as with Gobekli Tepe, proof that 9000 BC humans were rather more than bark scraping nut gatherers. Were they the successors of of a previous civilization, one that had been destroyed by cataclysm and flood? Possibly, and all you Younger Dryas experts can chime in.

In the meanwhile, behold the face of the idol and ask, what were they thinking? We don't know but I tell you this, it wasn't Christian.

Your Ante-Deluvian Pal,

LSP

Karahan Tepe

 

Everyone's familiar with Gobekli Tepe, the astonishingly ancient megalithic temple in Turkey originally excavated by Klaus Schmidt from 1995-2014. But we're less familiar with Karahan Tepe, 46 km south east of Gobekli Tepe and equally ancient, being some 11,500 years old, maybe older.

Both sites are remarkable for their extreme age, being built at the end end of the Younger Dryas and the dawning of the Holocene Age, at a time archeologists assumed humans were hunter gatherers and incapable of monumental architecture.

It's a fair assumption. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, what were humans doing beyond drawing pictograms on cave walls, gnawing bark, collecting roots, berries and, if they were lucky, driving the odd bison off a cliff. They were like, so the theory went, North American Indians or their equivalents in Africa.

Gobekli Tepe and now Karahan Tepe change all that. These prehistoric humans were well capable of monumental architecture and art, to say nothing of astronomy. They were clearly much more advanced than supposed. For that matter, were they, in fact, hunter gatherers who came together to build and then settled in one place with agriculture and civic life rising in the wake, or the other way around or both?

We don't know, but we do know this. The larger sculpted stones of the "T-Builders" at Gobleki Tepe weighed around 15 tons and these are the earliest, dating to approximately 9,500 BC, apparently the same holds true for Karahan Tepe. Later structures at both sites are smaller, with older construction being back-filled and replaced by lesser architecture. What does this suggest?

Shockingly, that the earlier builders were more advanced as a civilization than their descendants. They initiated the building and did so massively, later generations didn't. This implies a civilization in decline, for whatever reason, and begs the question, who were the original builders and what did they come from?

It's tempting to imagine an architectural people, and all that goes with it, somehow surviving the Younger Dryas glacial period and emerging in diminished form in what we now call Turkey as the climate mercifully warmed.

But again, we don't know, and with apologies to Graham Hancock, there's precious little evidence. That said, wouldn't it be strange if humanity, whose origins keep getting pushed back into the mists of prehistory, weren't able in hundreds and thousands of years to move beyond rock chucking and grubbing for roots to something better? An antedeluvian megalithic civilization of which little if anything remains, except their heirs in Anatolia around 11,500 BC.

Well, that's as maybe. Perhaps there's a parable in Gobekli Tepe and its twin at Karahan. Viz. They devolved.

Antedeluvia Forever,

LSP

Joe Biden Urfa Man

 

Did you watch last night's presidential debate? If so, you may have noticed the Grim Creeper's uncanny resemblance to Urfa Man. It was the eyes, staring out at you like dark, soulless obsidian. 

Never mind the insults, interruptions and outright deceit, look at the eyes set in a face of skin-stretched plastic surgery. The face is fake, the message is fake, a collection of media endorsed talking points, but the eyes are real, a window into the soul.

And what do they reveal? A void. A hollow candidate with nothing to say beyond worn out agitprop, Racist! Virus! Nazi! And all from what was once a man who used to boost segregationalist klansmen Senators. Back to Urfa Man. Trump's not fake, he is who is, good or ill.

Biden's something else again, unreal and inhuman, a career politician who's made millions from inside-the-beltway graft. Seriously, like a wicked game show host he's grown rich off the fat of the land. 

And as with the obsidian-eyed statue, he has no soul, he's hollow, his essence has been sold to the highest bidder, and what looks out at you is an ersatz facsimile of what used to be human.

To put it another way, he's a demonstrably corrupt, lying, phony, evil career politician, who's made millions of dollars through plying his faked-up trade. He's at it still, in his wired 78 year old dotage.

I ask you, what shall it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?

Good question, eh?

LSP

Fishing & Antedeluvia

It was an overcast Spring morning in rural Texas and Soldiers Bluff looked beckoning, "Come on down and fish," it seemed to say. Which is what I did, but the fish weren't having any of it, they were lying low and didn't want the juicy, tempting, delicious worms I was throwing in. 

Still, there were a few fossils, rocky remains of ancient crustaceans embedded in the limestone and clay bluff above the lake. To be honest, there's fossils everywhere here, a tangled  mix of roots, branches, shells, and who knows what else, the set in stone remains of ancient cataclysm. I always hope I'll spot something useful, like a T Rex tooth, but not today, just a couple of shells.

Now, some who read this lighthearted mind blog believe fossils like these are at most 6000 years old. If that's the case, what about structures like Gobekli Tepe, which date back to at least 9000 BC? Remarkably ancient and advanced to boot, all at a time when humans were supposed to be grubbing about for nuts, berries and the occasional bit of unfortunate wildlife. 

Two things don't add up here. Firstly, the Word of God in Scripture isn't supposed to be read with a kind of boneheaded, blank-faced literalism. Read it for its truth, for sure, but know this involves poetry, symbol and metaphor as well as literal reckoning. Note, to think this doesn't make you a useless, pathetic, scornworthy, lib heretic. 

Secondly, mankind is very old, with Homo Sapiens appearing earlier and earlier in the fossil record as new discoveries are found. All this in our own century, to say nothing of ignored and anomalous finds in the last two hundred years or so, and the witness of ancient records.

It would be odd, don't you think, if people as intelligent as us remained at the hunter gather stage for several hundreds of thousands of years. Which is exactly what orthodox archeo-anthropology teaches; finds like Gobekli, water erosion on the Sphinx, and on, challenge the narrative. 

That in mind, I decided to challenge the piscine narrative of "no catching" by moving over to the other side of the dam. At first nothing, so I changed rigs in hope of having some sport with the Gar, who were gliding about the pool like deadly, prehistoric submarines.

Good call, LSP, but no Gar. Instead, a fierce  Crappie followed by a ferocious Bass, and a large Bluegill. Result. Then it began to rain and it was time to head for home, mission accomplished.

Fish on,

LSP

The Adamites?

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

Sit in the Sun, on the Porch

Thanks to Global Warming, which has made everything colder, I was able to enjoy the sun on the front porch with Blue Somnolence today.

Note Flint Scraper

I read a book, The Lost Civilization Enigma, by Philip Coppens, which presents anomalous evidence for prehistoric culture. Coppens isn't an ancient alien theorist, not having been to General Synod, but proposes an earlier and cyclical timeline for human civilization than is conventionally accepted.

Ole Rascal and Mischief

Part of the problem, of course, is that they keep finding things like Gobekli Tepe, which are strangely old.

Cheers,

LSP