121–130 of 199 posts
That's impossible, the mirror wasn't invented until millennia later, so there's no way the sculptor would have known what a human face looked like. They must think we're stupid.
The Tepe sites are really fascinating. Every discovery leads to so many more questions - how did they construct these sites, what were they using some of the structures for, and so on. At Karahan Tepe is the pit full of pillars, with the human-face head on the outer rim .. whenever I see this pit, I get a picture in my mind that the entire site was green and fertile, and this pit was filled with water. It would be th…
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How are we so certain that they had no social hierarchy at all? I thought that that was the main theory but that very little is certain at this point.
The idea of no social hierarchy is completely absurd. There is even a small amount of hierarchy at our 15 person Thanksgiving family dinner.
The Tepe sites are really fascinating. Every discovery leads to so many more questions - how did they construct these sites, what were they using some of the structures for, and so on. At Karahan Tepe is the pit full of pillars, with the human-face head on the outer rim .. whenever I see this pit, I get a picture in my mind that the entire site was green and fertile, and this pit was filled with water. It would be th…
My favorite thought experiment is what will they think when they dig up bodies and find silicon implants. What cultural significance will they attribute too it.
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Sure that's part of it. A lot of the delays in modern construction are due to labor cost optimization and supplier delays. A lot of the time parts of construction sites are idle because some specialized group of skilled workers is at another site or they're waiting for a delivery. I saw a video where as a stunt a residential construction crew went from a vacant lot to a complete single-family house ready to occupy in…
In about 2004, height of the Florida housing bubble. I stayed with my cousins in a housing development and I watched over the course of a week as this construction company built an entire street of homes. I was wildly impressed because I never see that in the north. They basically had the the foundations poured and then each lot like an assembly line each stage of the crew working. The framers working, then the guys…
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This guy has a whole netflix show if you're so inclined https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMHiLvirCb0
I only watched a little bit of his stuff before I realized people thought he is a kook. But in small doses some of this stuff can sound like sense. The one that got me was a supposed foundation legend from Sumer that a handful of strangers came and taught them civilization. The idea of a remnant people floating down a river to escape some sort of societal collapse and then being adopted into a new tribe for their use…
The one that got me was a supposed foundation legend from Sumer that a handful of strangers came and taught them civilization.
Sumerians essentially saw themselves as the first civilization. When they reference a prior civilization, what they're referring to is literally the gods themselves because being civilized is very literally the spark of divinity inside humans that separates us from animals. It's the gods who taught humans to be civilized, sending their representatives the seven apkallu (basically everything related to the heavens comes in sevens) to raise humanity from the among the beasts to serve the gods, as we were designed to do when the gods imbued us with their blood. This is referenced again in the epic of Gilgamesh when enkidu is made like a god by a prostitute who teaches him how to be civilized. Other near Eastern religious traditions carried this on as well. You're probably familiar with Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, when they eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and become like gods themselves, i.e. are raised from among the animals and are cast out from the garden where the animals reside. This all gets a bit mixed up with the Sumerians having a bunch of ancestor cults going on as various human god-kings tie themselves to powerful lineages and so the gods/apkallu are seen as the ancestors of humanity.
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I only watched a little bit of his stuff before I realized people thought he is a kook. But in small doses some of this stuff can sound like sense. The one that got me was a supposed foundation legend from Sumer that a handful of strangers came and taught them civilization. The idea of a remnant people floating down a river to escape some sort of societal collapse and then being adopted into a new tribe for their use…
> before I realized people thought he is a kook But what is your own opinion?
The Tepe sites are really fascinating. Every discovery leads to so many more questions - how did they construct these sites, what were they using some of the structures for, and so on. At Karahan Tepe is the pit full of pillars, with the human-face head on the outer rim .. whenever I see this pit, I get a picture in my mind that the entire site was green and fertile, and this pit was filled with water. It would be th…
To me, it looks like a festival ground, so I imagine people coming from all directions and multiple nomad tents etc. around it. What makes me wonder is that why did these hills survive, and why are we not finding similar things in north Africa and other civilization cradles. Maybe these were one off sites with limited use and were later just left alone, while anything in Egypt had continuous settlements so things jus…
So if you look at Africa it stayed for the longest times with hunter & gatherer cultures until neolithic settlers came back into Africa from modern Turkey.
Moreover Africa in large parts is either moist or desert/savannah, both of which do not help preservation. And there are simply much fewer archaeologists going around Africa.