Psychology And The Origin Of Civilization By D Shepard
What are the secrets of Gobekli that archeologists have missed? Psychology blends with archeology to investigate the purpose of Gobekli, the origin of it as a center of trade, the secret of how “wild” animals are tamed, and the evidence of the earliest and longest-lasting religion in history.
Gobekli Tepe was built six thousand years before Stonehenge. Organic matter, found in the mud plaster of the walls, was radio-carbon dated at 11,500 years ago. It quickly became the greatest mystery of modern archeology. When archeologist Klaus Schmidt did his great work unearthing Gobekli Tepe, he declared it to be a complex of stone temples built by Hunter-Gathers.
Did “Hunter-Gatherers” really take time-out from surviving to come to Gobekli to build a complex of more than 20 temples? If this many people lived as Hunter-Gathers they would have exhausted their food base very quickly. It might make for a very bad episode of Naked and Afraid, with all of them starting to die off from starvation after 21 days.
What really happened at the world’s oldest historical site?
When archeologists see the great temples of Egypt and elsewhere, they see only the end product of many hundreds of years of development. All of this could only have come after an earlier period of trade at sites such as Gobekli Tepe.
Any zoologist or psychologist will tell you that if you take in a very young duck, puppy, rabbit, piglet, goat or sheep, they will quickly “imprint” to humans, instead of their own species. Konrad Lorenz won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of imprinting in wild graylag geese. The goslings followed him everywhere as if he were their real mother. These wild geese remained tame, even when they grew up.
Taming wild animals is easy, if you catch them as babies. Changing their genes to make them look like “domesticated” animals would have taken hundreds of years of herding in corrals to select the cute ones into such a dramatic genetic change
It is a mistake to assume that the domestication of animals had to wait until the large aurochs had been artificially selected by humans into becoming the smaller modern “domesticated” cows before our ancestors made use of them. More likely, they had been herding wild animals for hundreds of years before any genetic changes were selected that would lead to what we call “domesticated”.
I: GOBEKLI TEPE: WORLD'S OLDEST CIVILIZATION?
II: ANIMAL HUSBANDRY AS THE BASIS OF CIVILIZATION.
III: NEW EVIDENCE AT GOBEKLI
IV: 11,500 YEARS FROM NOW: AN ARCHEOLOGIST DISCOVERS AMERICA
V: THE CENTRAL PILLARS AND THE "BURIAL" OF GOBEKLI
VI: THE EVIDENCE FOR RELIGION AT GOBEKLI
VII: WHOEVER CONTROLLED THE TRADE, CONTROLLED THE FUTURE
EPILOGUE: THE VALUE OF MELDING PSYCHOLOGY WITH ARCHEOLOGY