The Oldest Religious Structures & Ancient Aliens?

[Vortigern99]

[Responding to post #139:]

Captain Swoop, the gist is that technical knowledge of how to draw and paint realistically was lost over time, then rediscovered beginning in the proto-Renaissance. A similar arc of loss of technique and know-how appears to have occurred at Gobekli-Tepe over the course of several centuries.

I don't intend this as a slight against Byzantine or Gothic artists, but their technical skill in drawing. painting and sculpting was less proficient, less sophisticated and less developed than those of Hellenistic, late Roman or later, Renaissance-era times.

You're welcome to disagree.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Hey, whaddya know, he is still around peddling much the same stuff
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread370173/pg1

Here is some of his old stuff
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/egipto/abydos/abyhelic.htm

Jiri Mruzek

 

[Andy_Ross]

[Responding to post #139:]

Captain Swoop, the gist is that technical knowledge of how to draw and paint realistically was lost over time, then rediscovered beginning in the proto-Renaissance. A similar arc of loss of technique and know-how appears to have occurred at Gobekli-Tepe over the course of several centuries.

I don't intend this as a slight against Byzantine or Gothic artists, but their technical skill in drawing. painting and sculpting was less proficient, less sophisticated and less developed than those of Hellenistic, late Roman or later, Renaissance-era times.

You're welcome to disagree.

I certainly do disagree, that their techniques and skills were different doesn't mean they were less sophisticated or proficient, it just means they were different, they had different intentions and aims. like all aspects of any society and civilisation.

 

[Foster Zygote]

Giants so far separated from the Middle East, from your link?

I found this also.
http://www.accuracyingenesis.com/adam.html

Edge, it was common for illustrators to draw images like that up until the Renaissance when perspective techniques were perfected. Many old illustrations were intended to tell a story or relay information to a largely illiterate audience rather than present a realistic visual representation. Often, the more important the person in the illustration, the larger their images were relative to those of others. This was common practice among Egyptian artists as well.

 

[Vortigern99]

...they were different, they had different intentions and aims. like all aspects of any society and civilisation.

I see that, and in addition to that statement, their technical skill was less proficient too.

I am an artist, an illustrator and an art teacher. In my education in art history I was taught this, but I can also see see it with my own eyes and sense of artistic judgment. Most importantly, I personally find it easier -- ie it takes less manual skill and hand-eye coordination-- to draw flat, symbolic forms than it does to correctly and accurately record what I see before my eyes in three-dimensional space.

Your mileage may, and evidently does, vary.

 

[Cainkane1]

But they are discribing the Gods as coming from the heavens.
We would call them aliens today.

And you say:

The evedience is what it is, and maybe they were only permited to do what they did and this is only coming to light at this time for a certain reason.

There were factions described as benevolent and malevolent.
Who knows where they would have went if not stopped.

Yes Edge the evidence is what it is. You seem to be suggesting aliens would refrain from using outer space tech to build these structures but why would they do that? I say if aliens built buildings they would have used exotic mixtures of metals and plastic type materials. The buildings you show are good examples of what even primitive humans are capable of doing.

Why is there no artwork that shows these aliens? Don't show me some two legged two armed humans dancing around in what looks like a space helmet. Aliens wouldn't look like that. Don't show me a human sitting in what looks like a rocket ship. Aliens wouldn't be using rockets or airplanes or anything like that. Even if you can display a figurine that looks like that.

Humans did all of it. There is no evidence to indicate otherwise and tons of evidence prove conclusively that they did.

Start using science and cease and desist from using wishful thinking and woo thinking.

Please don't feel insulted. I like you. I'd love to share a beer with you. I'm sure that after a lengthy discussion with you I'd definitely have more to drink than I usually do.

 

[!Kaggen]

Edge brings up interesting artifacts and then ignores them.

Others explain them whilst ignoring the interesting artifacts.

Interesting that.....

 

[Cainkane1]

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ancientatomicwar/esp_ancient_atomic_12.htm

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/22284e0c72ce7f104.jpg[/qimg]

This could be the aftermath of a volcanic explosion or a lake with poison on the bottom. I seem to recall seeing this somewhere. In Africa a lake with poisonous gases on the bottom was shaken in a minor earthquake which released the poison and killed several hundred humans and animals.

I'm sure there is an explanation and I reject an atom bomb doing this.

 

[Foster Zygote]

...they were different, they had different intentions and aims. like all aspects of any society and civilisation.

I see that, and in addition to that statement, their technical skill was less proficient too.

I am an artist, an illustrator and an art teacher. In my education in art history I was taught this, but I can also see see it with my own eyes and sense of artistic judgment. Most importantly, I personally find it easier -- ie it takes less manual skill and hand-eye coordination-- to draw flat, symbolic forms than it does to correctly and accurately record what I see before my eyes in three-dimensional space.

Your mileage may, and evidently does, vary.

It took a long time for artists to learn how to do this.

 

[Cainkane1]

http://mhalb.pagesperso-orange.fr/nyos/nyos.htm

Heres where a similar disaster happened in Africa.

 

[Cainkane1]

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ancientatomicwar/esp_ancient_atomic_12.htm

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/22284e0c72ce7f104.jpg[/qimg]

http://mhalb.pagesperso-orange.fr/nyos/nyos.htm

 

[Foster Zygote]

This could be the aftermath of a volcanic explosion or a lake with poison on the bottom. I seem to recall seeing this somewhere. In Africa a lake with poisonous gases on the bottom was shaken in a minor earthquake which released the poison and killed several hundred humans and animals.

I'm sure there is an explanation and I reject an atom bomb doing this.

The article Edge quotes gives the impression that the streets were littered with thousands of bodies. This is not he case. At Mohenjo-Daro, 37 skeletons were found, and they were at different levels, indicating that they were buried at different times in the city's history. The "bomb crater" has been shown by geological evidence to be an ancient impact crater. As for the claimed radiation: not a single archaeological source confirms this claim.

 

[Dinwar]

Edge brings up interesting artifacts and then ignores them.

Others explain them whilst ignoring the interesting artifacts.

Interesting that.....

Part of the issue is that this is an on-going discussion, and you apparently missed the first few parts--ALL of the "evidence" edge has provided has been adequately explained via standard archaeological techniques. No aliens are necessary, and 9 times out of 10 the only "interesting" part of the whole exercise is how edge can be so willfully ignorant in the Information Age.

The argument's always the same: either "Some guy says this is unexplained!" or "I can't explain it!" In either case, the conclusion is "Therefore aliens", without even the slightest bit of research (as evidenced by his current argument that art from the Middle Ages depicts giants, and his steadfast refusal to accept that diorite can be cut by other materials, even after it was demonstrated).

Don't show me some two legged two armed humans dancing around in what looks like a space helmet. Aliens wouldn't look like that.

This is an extremely valid point--we DON'T KNOW what an alien would be like. We can't even really define life. Earth-like life is DNA based--but there is non-DNA based life around today (RNA-based viruses, prions, etc). There have been multiple cases where biologists didn't know they were looking at an organism when they first encountered it, and that WAS Earth-like life. We don't know what to make of many of the Burgess Shale Fauna, and those are (mostly, we think) arthropods. An alien would be just that--alien, bizzar, completely outside our experiences. Simply put, the mere fact that you can point to something and say "This looks like an alien" is proof that 1) you don't get what "alien" means, and 2) the picture you're pointing to isn't an alien.

Stop watching Star Treck/Star Wars and thinking they're documentaries.

 

[Marduk]

This could be the aftermath of a volcanic explosion or a lake with poison on the bottom. I seem to recall seeing this somewhere. In Africa a lake with poisonous gases on the bottom was shaken in a minor earthquake which released the poison and killed several hundred humans and animals.

I'm sure there is an explanation and I reject an atom bomb doing this.

the skeletons were found under the remains of a building which had collapsed because of a fire. They were not as claimed "the inhabitants littering the streets", that part was invented by David Hatcher Childress. There are 6 skeletons in the photo, not thousands. Further the city was not destroyed but abandoned because the river on who's banks it was established had changed course. Where are the Aliens ?

As for the claimed radiation: not a single archaeological source confirms this claim.

There wasn't a machine on earth capable of registering that kind of radiation until 8 years after the excavation, most of these alienesque details are from

Vimana Aircraft of Ancient India and Atlantis (Lost Science Series), David Hatcher Childress, Ivan T. Sanderson, January 1992

 

[!Kaggen]

@ Dinwar

I am just wondering if we got the explanations wrong sometimes by not studying the evidence with new ideas on mind. After all what we know now about the affect of chemicals on the brain could easily supply a different insight into what could have been going on with the Neolithic mind. After all, drugs are common in the plant and animal kingdoms and these would have been known by farmers whose ancestors originally were hunter gatherers. There is good reason to believe these farmers built structures and decorated them to correlate to the visions under the affect of hallucinogens.

The San bushman have documented their visions on Rock art and the creatures they have drawn are seriously alien. Modern neurological science has given us insight into visions under the influence of drugs and the correlation with bushman rock art is astounding.

 

[Vortigern99]

!Kaggen has an interesting point, that's at least worth considering. Religious historian Karen Armstrong, in her excellent book A History of God, asserts that early temples and cities were claimed (in what documents I'm uncertain) by their builders to be earthly representations of celestial structures and palaces.

The idea that early architects got their plans from hallucinogenic drugs presents an intriguing possibility.

Meanwhile, not to (intentionally) muddy the waters, but I want to point out that the hypothesis that the people who built Gobekli-Tepe were early farmers, and not settled hunter-gatherers, has not been conclusively shown. That is merely one possibility, supported by evidence for agriculture found on a nearby mountain-top, believed to belong to the same period. There is as yet no conclusive evidence that either one came before the other.

In short, the builders of Gobekli-Tepe may have been permanently-settled hunter-gatherers, or they may have been early agriculturalists. It is unknown which.

 

[Dinwar]

I am just wondering if we got the explanations wrong sometimes by not studying the evidence with new ideas on mind.

Of course we do. Just look at geology prior to plate tectonics taking hold. However, it's FAR better to be wrong for the right reasons than right for the wrong reasons. If your reasoning is correct, you will eventually discover your error. If your reasoning is wrong, you never will. edge's reasoning is wrong.

Modern neurological science has given us insight into visions under the influence of drugs and the correlation with bushman rock art is astounding.

The problem is, edge is ignoring what science already knows. For example, he's ignoring how hard diorite is (he ignored for a long time WHAT diorite was). He's ignoring the fact that tools made of the same alloys as those metal clips have been found in the region and from about the same time (a bit before and a bit after, if memory serves). He's ignoring the fact that researchers HAVE looked at his "sunken cities", and either there's a perfectly terrestrial explanation (ie, an earthquake) or there's simply nothing to explain (biases, odd but perfectly natural formations, that kind of thing). Now he's ignoring his own evidence--the city where "thousands of bodies litter the streets" turns out to be a time-averaged sequence of burrials.

In some cases, yeah, there's something interesting that needs to be explained. However, edge has yet to demonstrate there's something to explain. Not letting that stop him, he's lept to "GodAliensdidit". This is typical Creationist/CTist "logic".

There wasn't a machine on earth capable of registering that kind of radiation until 8 years after the excavation,

Thermoluminescence takes about 6 months and costs about a grand per sample (the time is universal--EVERYONE has 6 months of backlog--and the price is about average for labs in the USA). If there's extreme radiation it'll re-set the quartz crystals in the area, giving an anomolously low age. I'm not saying it's worth doing the analysis--I certainly can't see wasting the time or money on it--but if the paranormal crowd really wants to test this idea (ie, if they want to move from the realm of "let's pretend" and into serious science) that's what it'll take.

 

[Jon.]

In short, the builders of Gobekli-Tepe may have been permanently-settled hunter-gatherers, or they may have been early agriculturalists. It is unknown which.

Or they may have been at some transitional stage - after all, it is unlikely that the two modes of life were completely discrete at the margins.

 

[Vortigern99]

Or they may have been at some transitional stage - after all, it is unlikely that the two modes of life were completely discrete at the margins.

Yes, exactly. They may have been guarding fields of wild rye, for example, and even planting it, but the heads would still have been unharvestable (aside from clipping off individual stems) because they had not mutated yet to remain intact when cut.

Evidently this grain mutation is a decisive factor in calling a people "farmers" because farming implies reaping mass quantities.

 

[Marduk]

Thermoluminescence takes about 6 months and costs about a grand per sample (the time is universal--EVERYONE has 6 months of backlog--and the price is about average for labs in the USA). If there's extreme radiation it'll re-set the quartz crystals in the area, giving an anomolously low age. I'm not saying it's worth doing the analysis--I certainly can't see wasting the time or money on it--but if the paranormal crowd really wants to test this idea (ie, if they want to move from the realm of "let's pretend" and into serious science) that's what it'll take.

You missed the point there, Edge links to a page where details of an excavation which took place 91 years ago are supposedly listed, the claim that radiation present was 50 x background at that time was untestable until 8 years after the excavation. Even today archaeologists don't carry a geiger counter, why would they be carrying one 8 years before it was invented ?