[NYer]

[NYer]

Catholic Ping - Please freepmail me if you want on/off this list

[edcoil]

Since Eden only had Adam and Eve, I don't think its Eden.

[Sybeck1]

Eden's in Iraq. Noah's Ark is in Turkey.

[NYer]

Read more here.

[Alouette]

Paved paradise, put up a parking lot.

[redgolum]

Very interesting.

[DBrow]

Farming is a much more secure and easy way to get sustenance.

If you ever do extended survival training, you'll find that it takes a lot of work to get food by finding it here and there throughout the year. Plus, it is not assured that you'll find enough in any one place.

The story of King David is about switching from a nomadic life to one of agriculture- of finding a spot and settling there, growing food there, and flourishing.

I'll have to think about Adam and Eve as being an allegory for moving from a hunter-gather setup to farming.

The pictures of the carvings are stunning- if they are as old as they are supposed to be, they are revolutionary.

[Pride in the USA]

Whatever its significance, it is a remarkable and very ancient discovery.

[Teófilo]

The Discovery Channel had a similar search in one of its documentaries, called In Search of Eden, which showed a location I thought more plausible. The location is near the headwaters not only of the Tigris and Euphrates, but also the Gishon and Pishon rivers, near the border of Iran and Turkey and close to the Plain of Urartu--which we know as "Ararat." It is a place with a lot of resonance. Today, there's a lot of red dirt and an Iranian city built on the place. -Theo

[pepsi_junkie]

This site proves that hunter-gatherers were capable of complex art and organised religion, something no-one imagined before."

Hold on a minute. Hunter-gatherers are inherently nomadic. They go where the food is. How could they build a temple of stone anywhere, and what good would it be since they couldnt expect to be in proximity to it much of the time? Perhaps we should question some assumptions about the behavior of people 10,000 years ago rather than viewing them through the prism of conventional wisdom. For instance this find indicates a culture which was rooted to a specific geographical location for generations. How did they do that? Did they already have agriculture back then? Was the cresent so fertile that generations of people could live in one spot, gathering and hunting with no effort to replenish and not pick it clean?

I begin to wonder about some of those people who claim ancient egypt is way older than anyone imagines and get laughed at by scholars because it's simply a ludicrous proposition. In other words, conventional wisdom precludes it, so any evidence presented must have some other explanation even if one cannot be identified. Perhaps there is some credibility to those arguments after all.

[GOP Poet]

bookmark

[From many - one.]

A few concerns:

1. The reptile looks like a mammal to me. There's a difference in the way the legs are set.

2. The Tigris and Euphrates are two rivers and I didn't see a desrciption of a third riverbed.

3. Although we like to see grain agriculture as a good thing, I doubt it was seen that way back then. More a way of shifting to an efficient way of preventing starvation when the good stuff (fruits, meat) became hard to find in an increasingly overcrowded world.

[JamesP81]

Has anyone considered that if we did find Eden that the explorers might want to be careful of that big flaming sword God left there? Seems like that could cause some unpleasantness...

[From many - one.]

ping

looks like your kind of thing

[Pharmboy]

I learned way back in Hebrew school that the Garden of Eden was where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers met in the south (I know--they both go to the sea).

[blam]

GGG Ping.

Ancient Stamp Dating To 5,600 BC Unearthed At Harran (Turkey)

[JimSEA]

Very interesting article and great photos!!! For a slightly different interpretation of this and other contemporary sites, I might suggest David Lewis-Williams and David Pierce "Inside the Neolithic Mind", a recent publication and sequel to "The Mind in The Cave". I am not sure just what I think about it but it is thought provoking. It's basic premise is that hallucination caused by near death experiences, meditation, trances and possibly hallucinogenic plants led to religion in early man. They use this site as being illustrative of the possibility that people by their mental processes are hard wired for religion of some sort.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks NYer for the topic and ping, and Blam et al for the contributions to this thread.

To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. Thanks.

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[SunkenCiv]

Coincidentally, the temple of Gobekli Tepe was deliberately covered with earth around this time.

That's an (ahem) interesting claim. The earliest known sign of agriculture (and it's from the Near East) is RC 14,000 year old multirow barley, a bred variety which requires irrigation, and that's 4,000 years before this site. So I think the interpretation is the offspring of a fertile imagination and/or a case of conclusions fitting the assumptions.

[RightWhale]

GoE was in Afghanistan. They all know this. An Afghani told me.