(August 31, 2012 at 1:25 am)Chuck Wrote: Looks like the role played by the agriculture revolution in human social and biological evolution need some revision.
Another really remarkable ruin of pre-agricultural stone building, this time on a monumental scale, is Gabekli Tepe in Turkey. It's at least 12000 years old. It's the earliest known monumental religious building in the world by 3000 years.
The tantalizing thing about Gabekli Tepe site is not just stone work and relief sculpture, but hints that some elements of religious iconography prevalent in early Iron age Hittite culture 3000 years ago and continued down through to Kingdom of Pergamon during Greco Roman time, such as the leopard goddess, may have had descended directly from the Gabekli Tepe culture, indicating a continuous native cult or religious tradition in Anatolia that stretched 10,000 years.
Let those fundies who bleat so bitter about how miraculously long (2000 year) christianity have survive chew on this. The leopard goddess cult is 10,000 years old when some one knocked up "virgin" mary to give Jesus birth.
Or....agriculture started and stopped numerous times as conditions changed.
C. 1976, Wendorff and Schild found evidence of agriculture in the Nile Valley c 11,000 BC. It's not rocket science.
