What is Truth - Part 2

            We were children and saw with the eyes of children. Now, there is a wonderful aspect to children, their openness and thrill as they discover their world but, like it or not, children grow up. Yes, it is easy to lose that excitement and energy of youth, but, when we look back at those days, it is all too easy to forget the anxiety and fear that are present in then. Children are terrified by ordinary experiences such as thunderstorms and have no way of protecting themselves from sudden disasters and no way of caring for themselves. Mommy and Daddy cannot, and should not be there forever, feeding and nursing them.                  

 So, as children grow, so grew the human race, and we began thinking and observing and trying to put two and two together. We began to reason. At first, the attempts were feeble, but, with time, we grew stronger and we began questioning. The tribes from what is now Turkey, Iran, and the steppes of southern Russia spread. These folks seemed to have a serious talent for three things, conquest, reasoning, and invention, and, it seems, wherever they went, they sowed the seeds of civilization.                                                                             

Or so it seems. This was not always the thought and it is still not what is taught in schools. Many mainstream historians are aghast at such concepts, but, too bad, because the facts are slowly being discovered. The oft told story is that civilization began in Egypt. Well, that was the tale for years, until, after much digging, and much gnashing of teeth, it was decided that, no, Sumer was the place. Actually both spots were suspect, or should have been, right from the beginning.                                                                                                                                        

Egypt is a dessert, hardly the most advantageous spot to build the cornerstone of civilized humanity. Yes, it is farmable, but only because they built irrigation ditches from the Nile. Otherwise, it was a dreadful place, hot, dry, subject to unpredictably vicious flooding by the Nile, and home to a whole lot of nasty creatures.       

Sumer was worse. This city, in what is now Iraq, was a fetid, malaria filled, swamp, yet we were to believe that an advanced civilization sprang full blown, practicing advanced agriculture, almost overnight. How? Because a bunch of gods decided to make it home, created man to be their servants, and settled in. Let me ask this. If you were a powerful god, why would you settle in such a miserable hellhole, when you could be in any of thousands of beautiful, lush, friendly, fertile spots on this Earth?    

Modern humans have dug and dived and thought and measured and some facts are now in front of us. Underwater, off the shores of India and Japan, we have found temples, underwater, and after much distraught hemming and hawing, geologist and archeologist are being forced to concede that these structures were once on shorelines; that the sea rose and swamped them thousands of years before Sumer.          

 As if that were not enough to make the case, in Turkey, at Gobleki Tepi, a vast temple site is being dug up, dating back to 10000 BCE or so. This was long thought impossible. See, historians and anthropologists were convinced that until agriculture was firmly entrenched, societies would not have the time and would not be stable and centralized enough to do a whole lot of building and in 10000BCE, we are told, agriculture was just starting. So, even though Gobleki cannot be there, it is, and there seems to be no sign that anyone there was doing any farming.                     

Now you see the problem. The historians, anthropologists, and archeologists made the very reasonable assumption that people had to be settled to start building large structures and that they had to be farming to be settled. This was a perfectly reasonable assumption accept for one small thing. It was wrong, and this is a problem we will see again and again. A theory built on an invalid assumption, no matter how logical, is utterly useless.      

Where did the people of Gobleki Tepi go? We have no idea, nor do we know why they left. Speculation is ridiculous because we do not have any vague clues to work with. Possibly, the ancestors of those people retained some knowledge of their kinfolk's culture that gave them an advantage as they swept across the world, but that is simple speculation. Makes sense, but, really, who knows?      

We do know, as much as we know anything, that the Earth has suffered many catastrophes, freezes, floods, volcanos, earthquakes, meteor strikes and others cataclysms whose nature we do not know. Historians long taught that history proceeded in a fairly orderly and predictable way from point A to point B to point C. This idea of uniformity was always nonsense. Look at your own life, if it is that orderly you must be very bored. Life is constantly disrupted by unforeseen problems and occasionally they are catastrophic. Scholars may not like it but that is just the way this world works. All cultures have stories of various disasters and it is most likely that at least some of them are true and that Man's tale has often been interrupted by Nature's whims.