The article is fascinating. What's really odd about it, though, is that the author (and presumably the scholars who work the site) insist that the folks who built it must have been hunter-gatherers who got together occasionally to set up a stone, and only settled down later.
That makes very little sense: the stones are very well-dressed and carefully assembled. The artwork is very sophisticated. It implies tools, transport, and culture far beyond what we have typically observed among hunter-gatherers. In short, the existence of this site suggests a that some folks had already been living a settled lifestyle.
This site probably stands to change a lot of theories about how societies formed in the distant past.
What baffled me was, I read the article and was totally enthralled and then when I returned to the thread to read the comments I saw one sentence long expressions of white hot anger.
I just assumed that an article like that would draw a lot of archaeology fans that would discuss the find and from whom I could learn something from, unfortunately there was little of that, instead the mention of the Garden of Eden set off a lot of unrelated frothing and outraged anti religious outbursts.
The anger at the hunter gatherer speculation was almost the same, it seemed to be angry and personal.
To me this site was unique, and some here agreed with that and some didn’t and they expressed their reasons, but many also just seemed to explode in outrage that the site might be different than any other site, such as the speculation that hunter gatherers might have been driven to build the site and then started farming to feed that drive rather than the usual assumed pattern, after all that is why this site is so intriguing, it doesn’t fit the patterns.
As someone that doesn’t see many of these threads I was disappointed to see how insignificant and baggage laden the follow up discussion on this thread was.
I would love to see a new thread where just you and the few other serious guys had a deeper discussion about the site.