This is an odd thread, it is such a great article and the link down thread to the national geographic article about this find was very good also, unfortunately I get the impression that only a few people read either article.
> This is an odd thread, it is such a great article and the link down thread to the national geographic article about this find was very good also, unfortunately I get the impression that only a few people read either article.
As articles go, I thought they were amazingly cool. It is seldom that archaeologists find artifacts such as these that tip on its head our idea of what Civilization was, and when and how it formed.
I have long thought that Civilization is older and more marvelous than we have yet conceived. Robert E Howard may have come closest with his “Conan” fictions...
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.