Joe Rogan & Guests on Ancient Civilizations, Sciences' Intolerant Side

Started by Shiranu, October 15, 2018, 05:27:19 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

Shiranu

If anyone is actually interesting in discussing the topic, then I want to start from the "earliest" and work my way back. I feel starting at Gobekli Tepe seems like a good of place as any, since it is something overwhelmingly agreed upon by the scientific community as a legitimate location yet causes problems with the human history of civilization model.



These are what remains of Gobekli Tepe, a 10th millennium BC temple complex in southern Turkey. At it's sister site, Nevali Cori (500 years younger), the oldest domesticated wheat remains were found. Besides the 50-ton pillars found at Gobekli Tepe were pottery remains and some absolutely beautiful sculptures.









Now then, all of this was built about 5000 years or more before human civilization using the current model.

Does that make sense to you?

Look at the amount of work that went into creating a structure this large; there are quarries hundreds of feet, a thousand plus at times, away where 50-ton pillars were moved. There is intricate carvings in the stone (look at the heads and the giant statues sitting behind them). This was something that required hundreds of people to build, that required well-trained craftsmen, miners, organizers, and someone powerful enough to oversee all this... while also requiring a steady influx of resources that you just don't get from hunter-gatherer societies. And then there is the fact that there is domesticated wheat located at it's sister site, which means that agriculture was not something foreign to these people.

The current model says this was built by hunter-gatherers 5000+ years before people discovered how to settle down and form civilization. That in itself proves there is a fundamental flaw in our system, and that is only one site out of several that predate civilization and yet require a civilization to even be possible.

I am going to bed, but if anyone is interested... feel more than free to address any bit you disagree with, I am more than happy to research it more and have an open dialog, hopefully starting with the most recent and working my way back.

This is what I am actually studying to possibly do for a living, and either way to have a degree in, so the experience is never a bad thing.
"A little science distances you from God, but a lot of science brings you nearer to Him." - Louis Pasteur

Baruch

Pre-Fertile Cresent anthropology is a completely open subject (for new empirical evidence).  The proper study of man is ... man.  Psychology and anthropology are key to what is interesting about the human world.  Of course if one despises humankind or despises history, this wouldn't be a field to get into.  University of Pennsylvania has a long series of lectures on anthropology, as does the University of Chicago.

On the N American event ... there are tiny fragments of meteorite found in the tusks of mammoths/mastodons.
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

Gawdzilla Sama

Shiranu, I hope you get your degree. I have a Masters in History from Purdue.
We 'new atheists' have a reputation for being militant, but make no mistake  we didn't start this war. If you want to place blame put it on the the religious zealots who have been poisoning the minds of the  young for a long long time."
PZ Myers

Hakurei Reimu

Quote from: Shiranu on October 15, 2018, 07:55:15 PM
The Sphinx is believed to predate the Pyramids by many years, perhaps by thousands, which puts it's construction possibly before the Mesopotamian civilizations.
That is not a majority opinion. The majority opinion is that the Sphinx is a construction of Pharaoh Khafre (c. 2558-2532 BCE), which given that Khafre was Pharaoh Khufu's son, and the Great Pyramids are thought to be Khufu's, it kinda can't be built earier than that.

Yes, there's some anomalies for the Sphinx, but not the "thousands of years before" anomalies that are required. The majority of (non-crank) opinions all center around the Old Kingdom, forth dynasty.

Quote
There is evidence that the British isles had a full on civilization before the Romans, that they had independently developed farming and simple societies thousands of years ago, but this is largely ignored because it doesn't fit the barbarian stereotype of British history.
Just about nobody fits the barbarian stereotype. Just about everyone had culture of some kind.

And that's really the sticking point. What counts as the beginning of civilization? Yes, there are settlements and structures around the world â€"some quite impressiveâ€" that predate the conventional start of civilization, but do they count as civilization beginning earlier than we thought, or are they pre-civilization settlements and structures? It's like deciding what counts as a planet â€" it's mostly a matter of what you want to call a planet. There's going to be a continuum between the small tribal bands and the full-on civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt.

Egypt is a civilization because it was a spread-out affair where there is quite definitely one overarching culture stretching down the Nile flood plane, and it was a society that could definitely project its power across not only the Nile valley but also to other nations. We know that the casing stones for the Great Pyramids came from the limestone quarries at Tura, indicating a civilization, with the ability to organize large groups of people towards a single end.

Now, the Great Pyramids differ from the Gobekli Tepe temple and Dwarka in one important respect: the Great Pyramids were single tombs. They were built to be the final resting place for a single pharaoh, and as such you do kinda have to get them finished within the reign of that single pharaoh, otherwise you're going to be perpetually slipping behind laying to rest all your dead pharaohs. The Gobekli Tepe temple is small compared to the Great Pyramid; it's maybe the size of the Khufu pyramid's funerary temple. It also need not be completed within the lifetime of any individual person, but piece by piece over the course of generations or centuries. Same with Dwarka â€" being a city, it mostly likely was built piece by piece over the course of centuries, as it grew from settlement to village to town to city. This a quite different logistical challenge compared to the Great Pyramids.

Again, whether Gobekli Tepe and Dwarka can be counted as civilizations is an argument about whether or not they count as works of civilizations or if it doesn't cross the threshold of civilization. It's not that we are denying that such things exist, but rather whether they were built by societies that count as civilizations. That is, whether it suits some rather admittedly arbitrary definition of the word "civilization."

If the societies that built Gobekli Tepe or Dwarka can be shown to cross some arbitrary threshold for "civilization," great; if not, then it's not really a slight against them. They're still impressive achievements. You gotta start somewhere.

Quote from: Shiranu on October 15, 2018, 09:15:30 PM
The current model says this was built by hunter-gatherers 5000+ years before people discovered how to settle down and form civilization. That in itself proves there is a fundamental flaw in our system, and that is only one site out of several that predate civilization and yet require a civilization to even be possible.
No, people were settling down prior to 5000 years ago, and it's no great revelation. There is a continuum between hunter-gatherer tribes and civilizations. There are in-between states that a society can go through that makes them not quite civilizations, but more sophisticated than hunter-gatherers.

5000 years ago is taken to be the start of civilization because that's when writing was clearly invented. When writing was invented, that when history can actually start in ernest because at that point we can read things in people's own words â€" anything prior to that point is mere archeology. Once writing is invented, knowledge becomes much harder to destroy, and you can maintain history and technology across generations. You also get what you deserve: bureaucrats â€" you can also maintain a bureaucracy across generations. It suddenly becomes possible to have this large scale and long lived organization that lasts beyond the rule of a single cheiftain. While exceptions occur, writing does tend to be the norm in civilizations.
Warning: Don't Tease The Miko!
(she bites!)
Spinny Miko Avatar shamelessly ripped off from Iosys' Neko Miko Reimu

Gawdzilla Sama

The Sphinx silliness is based on erroneous assumptions about erosion rates of various layers of stone on the Plateau.
We 'new atheists' have a reputation for being militant, but make no mistake  we didn't start this war. If you want to place blame put it on the the religious zealots who have been poisoning the minds of the  young for a long long time."
PZ Myers

Baruch

Quote from: Gawdzilla Sama on October 16, 2018, 03:56:10 PM
The Sphinx silliness is based on erroneous assumptions about erosion rates of various layers of stone on the Plateau.

There is a chamber under the Sphinx, filled with rubble and water, unexplored.  What it might show nobody can tell in advance.  Proponents of X theory or Y theory are just that ... special pleadings.  For the known unknowns ... we don't know.  And we can't even imagine the unknown unknowns.  Meanwhile our narrative is distorted by the unknown knowns.
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

trdsf

"My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total, and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution." -- Barbara Jordan

Baruch

Quote from: trdsf on October 17, 2018, 12:09:24 AM
I'll still wait for the weight of professional consensus to come around.  As it might be over the dating of the eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii.

The proper way of dating, from that time forward, is by "Julian Days".  But we don't have a complete Julian day count from the reign of Julius Caesar's last year (he brought the solar calendar from Egypt to Rome, thanks to Cleopatra).  This is why even by 725 CE, the Venerable Bede, using the calendar of Dionysius Exiguus from 525 CE, got the year count off by 4 years or more.

The prior Roman calendar was terrible.  The solar calendar was a great improvement.  And a pure day count is accurate, apart from the Julian year vs Gregorian year correction.
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

Gawdzilla Sama

Quote from: trdsf on October 17, 2018, 12:09:24 AM
I'll still wait for the weight of professional consensus to come around.  As it might be over the dating of the eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii.
That, indeed, is the rational position. Lay people tend to get excited about "new evidence!" but don't have the discipline to wait for confirmation and contextualization of the material.
We 'new atheists' have a reputation for being militant, but make no mistake  we didn't start this war. If you want to place blame put it on the the religious zealots who have been poisoning the minds of the  young for a long long time."
PZ Myers

drunkenshoe

I'm rusty, haven't used English for ages, so bear with me. I'll throw a few random thoughts. Hakurei pretty much nailed it. I get Shiranu's point, but yeah as traditional definition of 'civilisation' goes, they are all going to get filed under the most influential and long lasting ones. In this case, unless there is a very distinct, hard evidence about the culture that built Göbeklitepe, it won't be named under a new civilisation. 

It seems that there is this idea, actually a strong feeling, most modern people have when they look at these monuments. In a nutshell, 'how the fuck they managed to do that thousands of years ago'. I don't know if it would make any sense to you, but the thing is they managed to do that because it was thousands of years ago. Building religious monuments of these scale, tombs is the result of not being 'advanced'. Because this is about religion. All these monuments are for/about faith-belief which makes the life itself in a nutshell. If it is the technical scale, to me after humans discovered to put one stone on another, rest is imagination and planning. I don't see anything 'mind boggling' or 'impossible'. (And an architect who lived in 19th century had a very good explanation about how architecture actually was born, which he was strongly persecuted for it, but that's another subject of course.) 

You are talking about Ancient Egyptians. Ancient Egyptian culture is based on a funeral cult. Everything is for the after life. It's a closed society. For example, they have an idea of human anatomy, but they never depicted it or sculpted it in a natural looking way. They have refused to imitate nature. When I look at the three pyramids the only thing I see is challenging time; endurance. Well every civilisation have a problem with time; we humans have  big issues with time. But look at the pyramids. It's the best, refined, economic form of saying 'this must survive!'. When I say economic, I mean if you want to build something huge and want it to last for thousands of years, don't you think pyramid is a very good solution to go?           

But on the other hand, look at the Greek and Roman civilisations. Their life is based on religion too. But their culture produced the best imitations of nature in terms of architecture and sculpture.

There is a very famous cliché example given to underline the differences between these two 'opposite' cultures. There is this Greek bas relief depicting Aphrodite's birth. It's something like this:

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-PG3vr1IoObc/UnaeIko8o-I/AAAAAAAAX-U/W9aY5KxxbOE/s640/1121O%2520P8077.jpg

Look at it. There this half naked female body emerging from somwhere. It could be a woman getting out of a bath. Of course nudity is important but the most important part is goddess or not, the relief is showing a momentary action. yes there are countless formal, iconographic, dull, motionless scenes in Greek or later Roman art, but this manner of depiction only found in these cultures.

You can't find anything resembling this in Ancient Egyptian art or the art of the cultures it influenced. Can't they technically do that? Of course they can. But the point is they didn't. Because it didn't make sense to them. 

I'm not making this comparison to praise one of them or to imply one is superior to the other. I am making it because these are not just two different form of expressions, they are two different forms of interpretation of a world vision; life. And that is what makes a civilisation, civilisation. Also consistency. And evidence to prove that consistency. We use the term 'civilisation' very loosely, but if you take it in this sense there has actually been a few civilisation in human history. 





"science is not about building a body of known 'facts'. ıt is a method for asking awkward questions and subjecting them to a reality-check, thus avoiding the human tendency to believe whatever makes us feel good." - tp

trdsf

Quote from: Gawdzilla Sama on October 17, 2018, 08:07:06 AM
That, indeed, is the rational position. Lay people tend to get excited about "new evidence!" but don't have the discipline to wait for confirmation and contextualization of the material.
If there's a better pathway to knowledge than the scientific method, I don't know what it is.  Also, I am perfectly aware that I am not especially well read with regard to ancient civilizations, so I'm not in a position to properly judge new findings relative to current models â€" all the more reason to leave it to the professionals to sort it out.
"My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total, and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution." -- Barbara Jordan

Baruch

Quote from: trdsf on October 24, 2018, 06:06:36 AM
If there's a better pathway to knowledge than the scientific method, I don't know what it is.  Also, I am perfectly aware that I am not especially well read with regard to ancient civilizations, so I'm not in a position to properly judge new findings relative to current models â€" all the more reason to leave it to the professionals to sort it out.

This is why we can't judge the present.  You need the perspective of 100 years after you are gone, to assess it.
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.