Proof that it is the Cult that births Culture

A German archeologist, working on a hunch and notes from an American archeologist almost 50 years old, uncovered a temple complex in Turkey that is over 11,500 years old, which he named "Gobekli Tepe".

What is the significance of this site? This site is older than Stonehenge, older than the Pyramids, and older than the Sumerians. As one archeologist puts it, there is more time past between this civilization and the Sumerians than there is between the Sumerians and us. Furthermore, this site is turning the socio-archeological timeline of human history upside down.

The common assumption, still taught in practically every school today, is that man first discovered agriculture, then settled in communities, then built cities, and then began organized religion. This site alters that sequence in a significant way that even the anti-religious "News"week could not fail to notice. The thesis of Klaus Schmidt, the archeologist who uncovered the site, is that the world's first complex society was born there, around the temple complex. Therefore, agriculture, the settlement, the city, all these were discovered after man began organized religion. Schmidt goes further and says that it is because of organized religion that man took to agriculture, and built the first settlement, and then the first city. Human culture began with the cult. The first human-built holy place gave birth to the first human settlement.

Where Man first reached for God's finger....

The true "Neolithic Revolution" began, not when man first began to plant his own crops (the world's first domesticated wheat, traced with genetic mapping, was put to ground in that area), but when man first reached for the hand of God. All else followed. As the "News"week writer put it:

Religion now appears so early in civilized life—earlier than civilized life, if Schmidt is correct—that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it, less a revelation than a genetic inheritance. The archeologist Jacques Cauvin once posited that "the beginning of the gods was the beginning of agriculture," and Göbekli may prove his case.

It would be such sweet irony that man's progress to modernity began with what Dawkins and his malformed ilk dismiss as superstition. Life beyond the visible is something man has always instinctively grasped, even when he was nothing more than a roaming, cave-dwelling hunter-gatherer. True enough, in the Smithsonian article, Schmidt is quoted as indicating that the site may have been a funereal complex as well, where the dead hunters could look up onto heaven. (The prominence of vulture carvings suggest that they believe it is these creatures that carried them heavenward.)

Perhaps, Schmidt says, the site was a burial ground or the center of a death cult, the dead laid out on the hillside among the stylized gods and spirits of the afterlife. If so, Gobekli Tepe's location was no accident. "From here the dead are looking out at the ideal view," Schmidt says as the sun casts long shadows over the half-buried pillars. "They're looking out over a hunter's dream."

I wonder how these ancient men would have found Paradise, as some of the first men since Adam to glimpse it...

One more proof that Rousseau was wrong. The social contract did not come first.