Vortigern99
Sorcerer Supreme
I said that God is an unfalsifiable premise. Do you disagree? If so, please offer some evidence that falsifies God; I'm certain theists and atheists alike would love to see it.
The evidence that Gobekli Tepe was deliberately buried under 300 to 500 cubic metres (390 to 650 cu yd) of soil is in the following scientific paper: K. Schmidt: Göbekli Tepe, Southeastern Turkey. A preliminary Report on the 1995–1999 Excavations, p.46.
"... once the stone rings were finished, the ancient builders covered them over with dirt. Eventually, they placed another ring nearby or on top of the old one. Over centuries, these layers created the hilltop."
Source. The conclusive evidence is that the dirt has been deposited in layers, with each layer having a new ring of stones erected upon it, before being buried again.
Pay close attention to the bolded portion. "Nature" did not bury the site; humans did. Is it your opinion, Edge, that multiple "flood" events occurred over a period of hundreds of years, after each of which the builders of Gobekli Tepe put up another ring of stones? If not, what are you suggesting that explains and is consistent with the material evidence at the site?
If you can give us some reason to reject the conclusions of the team of scientists that has been excavating the site for more than a decade -- I mean apart from personal incredulity based on your ignorance of archeology, geology and paleontology -- please offer it. Otherwise I am accepting the conclusions of Schmidt et al. as the default position, and rejecting your uninformed contradiction of their findings as unscientific, biased and logically fallacious.
17 years and they are still only half way to the bottom, how many years did it take to bury it with out a shovel on site?
"[Schmidt] has mapped the entire summit using ground-penetrating radar and geomagnetic surveys, charting where at least 16 other megalith rings remain buried across 22 acres. The one-acre excavation covers less than 5 percent of the site. He says archaeologists could dig here for another 50 years and barely scratch the surface.
He typically excavates at the site for two months in the spring and two in the fall. (Summer temperatures reach 115 degrees, too hot to dig; in the winter the area is deluged by rain.)
'The first year, we went through 15,000 pieces of animal bone, all of them wild.'"
This is why it has taken 17 years to excavate the site. They're methodically investigating the area, not withdrawing dirt as quickly as they can. You may wish in the future to examine the evidence before you make unsupportable claims and offer up your uninformed opinion as though it were fact.
See Marduk's posts regarding the earlier date of the Akkadian account of a river flood, which shares story elements with the later Genesis account and from which the Genesis "global flood" story has clearly been drawn according to certain literary clues which scholars can detect but you, being uneducated in this area, cannot.
In short, the Flood event was a local river flood that was already a legendary story when the Akkadians attributed it to the earlier Sumerian culture which they displaced. The Genesis authors expanded on this core text and added still more fantastical elements to it, aggrandizing a previously local river flood into a global deluge that destroyed all life in the world except the boatmaker and his family.
There is not a shred of scientific evidence supporting that ancient folk tale, as has been demonstrated in any number of Noah's Ark threads in this forum.
Have you even read the articles at Nat Geo or the Smithsonian, or perused the wiki article on Gobekli Tepe? The reason the stones have lasted so long is that they have been buried under human-deposited debris for c. 10000 years. Had they been exposed to the elements and/or human demolition during that time, hey would have disappeared long ago. Indeed, the tops of the upmost ring of stones have been hammered at by local farmers trying to break them up. Please do try to read up on the subject we're discussing before chiming in with your ignorant appeals to the paranormal and the extraterrestrial.
I 'believe" anything that can be shown to be evidentially certain.
Consider the following excerpt from the Smithsonian site:
Prehistoric people would have gazed upon herds of gazelle and other wild animals; gently flowing rivers, which attracted migrating geese and ducks; fruit and nut trees; and rippling fields of wild barley and wild wheat varieties such as emmer and einkorn. "This area was like a paradise," says Schmidt, a member of the German Archaeological Institute. Indeed, Gobekli Tepe sits at the northern edge of the Fertile Crescent—an arc of mild climate and arable land from the Persian Gulf to present-day Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and Egypt—and would have attracted hunter-gatherers from Africa and the Levant.
The climate of the area was wetter owing to the recent Ice Age from which the Fertile Crescent was emerging. It became drier in a brief Ice Age that followed, and the soil was exhausted by continuous farming in the area over thousands of years.
This does not mean the locals seeded, planted and reaped from the same patch of ground for 10000 years, as you appear to believe I am stating. That would be a straw man argument you are all too eager to knock down.
No, what I mean is this: Over the course of 1000s of years, local farmers went from plot to plot, exhausting each strip of land in turn of its nutrients before moving on to another, then another strip, and so on until the entire region was depleted of the organic material requisite to farming.
This phenomenon, which is known to have occurred based on scientific methods of which you have no understanding, was accelerated by the gradual drying of the region over time. If you have some evidence to the contrary, please provide it; otherwise I am once again compelled to accept the results of the application of the scientific method over your arguments from ignorance and incredulity.
[snip the rest as irrelevant woo screed]
