#stay tuned more of this bullshit after i walk the bitey puppy

[rhysintherain]

Episode 5: where we get Plato hopelessly wrong, probably

We're back to pyramids I guess?

No wait, Gobekli tepe!

(I knew he'd get there eventually)

"according to archaeologists, it shouldn't exist!" But it does, and if you talked to us you'd know we love it. ask my grandmother, I never shut up about Gobekli tepe.

Ah, he's on about door angles again.

"you don't just wake up in the morning and decide to build a grand structure like this" why not? I woke up one morning and decided to build a camper (no it's still not done yet). Maybe hunting and gathering got repetitive after a while and somebody said "you know what would be cool? If we had a really awesome place to have feasts and pray. We should build a really cool place to hang out with gods and spirits, I bet it would be fun." Can you imagine, if you'd lived in huts and gathered for a living your whole life, how amazing it would be to stand in Gobekli tepe, look around and think "yeah, we did this. We made this place, and carved all the animals who live around us into the walls. It took years, but now we can spend time here, and people from all over come to see it and spend time here". They definitely could have just woken up one day, had a good idea, and built Gobekli tepe. It was a hell of a cool idea.

(I warned you. You kept reading anyway)

Why does he assume this was a "first try"? We haven't dug up every inch of Turkey yet.

And just because it wasn't doesn't mean there were some geniuses telling them to do it.

Come on, Graham. They were not filling this swimming pool with blood. Blood is hard to come by, especially for hunter-gatherers. And very valuable.

I swear to god Graham, if you start with the satanic panic bullshit I will shut you off.

Settlement before agriculture isn't a revolutionary idea in archaeology. It's been a thing in the Pacific Northwest since forever. Go on, tell me a 60-meter pit house, or a pole-front plank house doesn't count as monumental architecture just because they're wood instead of stone.

I don't have the background on this mythology to call his bullshit, but I have faith the bullshit is there anyway.

"temples open to the sky" roofs are hard to make out of stone. When they are, they tend to collapse. Roofs aren't absent, they're far less likely to survive to present day. Trust me, if you live mostly outside, your most important gathering places will have a roof before anything else.

If I had to bet money, I'd say even Stonehenge had a roof originally.

Now we're correlating pictures on the pillars to stars in the sky. Stars are just dots! You can line them up to anything you like if you try hard enough! This is nothing!!

How do you see the constellations if the sun is in the sky??? You don't! This is the stone age, Graham!

... and the fake date in the fabricated constellations doesn't match when it was built. Surprise!

Now he's describing the younger dryas in a (dramatic and inaccurate) way that makes it seem like the tribulations.

We also knew Gobekli tepe was buried. This is not news.

Final thoughts:

Up next: I make a monumental discovery Graham doesn't want you to know about when I connect the images on Gobekli tepe's pillars to the rock chips on my truck's windshield. Could these ancient hunter-gatherers have actually predicted the distribution of gravel on modern-day BC roads? Obviously I don't ACTUALLY believe in premonitions of the future's least significant minutiae, but when the official narrative doesn't line up, these questions must be asked!

I mean ... We don't actually know most of the things about Gobekli tepe. It's hugely confusing to archaeologists. That's part of why we love it so much, because it raises a whole new set of questions and shakes up the established story.

That said, I'm pretty sure these guys don't have the answers we're looking for.

Okay, y'all know I can't resist a hack having a go at archaeology.

So I'm gonna watch Ancient Apocalypse so I'm prepared to rant about everything that's wrong with it when somebody inevitably tries to talk to me about it.

So here we go.

What's wrong with Ancient Apocalypse, episode by episode:

Episode 1

Gunung Padang

7200 year-old cultural layer is 4 meters doen, but the basalt column architecture is on the surface.

These are not the same culture! The more recent (2300 ish BP) culture built the basalt structures on top of the older settlement.

This guy is intentionally misrepresenting the nature of the site and ignoring the first rule of archaeology.

At the lowest levels they tested they're not even proving people lived there, just that they could carbon date a hill.

Chances are, this was a hill, people lived on it for several thousand years, and in the last 2-3 thousand they built it up into the structure we can now see the ruins of.

It's a cool site, but not disproving the archaeological record. If people 7200+ years ago built the structures, why are they on the surface while the cultural layer for these people is 4 meters down? That's not how stratigraphy works.

Nan Madol

Very different architecture than Gunung Padang. They stacked basalt columns like Lincoln logs while Gunung Padang stacked them all in the same direction.

The underwater footage here is laughably bad. Are those even structures? They're much narrower than the ones on land.

Those pillars could be natural, there's no way to tell without scraping some of the muck off and taking a closer look.

Even if they are constructed, they could have been used for breakwaters or piers. There's no proof whatsoever that these were built on land and then submerged.

Nobody is claiming that flood myths can't be remembered stories from the ice age. That isn't something archaeologists reject.

The real question is why he thinks they needed to have a vast, advanced civilisation to remember stories, when we've demonstrated again and again that stories hold a huge amount of cultural and historical memory.

And some final thoughts:

He doesn't seem to think humans are capable of very much? Why is "advanced civilisation" required for humans to have constructed megalithic sites or tell stories?

The research at Gunung Padang is extremely controversial. In a quick google I found a bunch of stuff about how the president at the time was throwing them a lot of funding to "prove" that it was the oldest pyramid in the world and put Java on the map. The dude who did the coring work seems to be pretty unpopular with reputable archaeologists.

Love the way the host goes "archaeologists don't seem to like me!?!" While also yelling "I can't believe you people are so dumb! You never even looked here!" About fairly well-studied archaeological sites.

He doesn't understand the most basic principles of archaeology. For instance, stratigraphy.

"archaeologists won't talk about flood mythologies!" That's right I noticed that in the ENTIRE CLASS we spent talking about flood mythologies in our northwest archaeology course. Spot on.