Scientist Creates Cold Fusion For the First Time In Decades

1:00 PM on Sat May 24 2008
By Elaine Chow


















Cold fusion, the act of producing a nuclear reaction at room temperature, has long been relegated to science fiction after researchers were unable to recreate the experiment that first "discovered" the phenomenon. But a Japanese scientist was supposedly able to start a cold fusion reaction earlier this week, which—if the results are real—could revolutionize the way we gather energy.

Yoshiaki Arata, a highly respected physicist in Japan, demonstrated a low-energy nuclear reaction at Osaka University on Thursday. In front of a live audience, including reporters from six major newspapers and two tv studios, Arata and a co-professor Yue-Chang Zhang, produced excess heat and helium atoms from deuterium gas.

Arata used pressure to force deuterium gas into an evacuated cell that contained a palladium and zirconium oxide mix(ZrO2-Pd). Arata said that the mix caused the deuterium's nuclei to fuse, raising the temperature in the cell and keeping the center of the cell warm for 50 hours.

Arata's experiment would mark the first time anyone has witnessed cold fusion since 1989, when Martin Fleishmann and Stanely Pons supposedly observed excess heat during electrolysis of heavy water with palladium electrodes. When they and other researchers were unable to make it work again, cold fusion became synonymous with bad science.

But the method Arata showed was "highly reproducible," according to eye witnesses of the event. If nobody calls this demonstration out as a sham, Arata might have finally found the holy grail of cheap and abundant energy—nuclear power, without its destructive heat.
Read the original article and comments: here.

Sinister secrets of the dustbin Nazis

Last updated at 9:24 PM on 19th May 2008

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After Labour's mauling in the local elections, Gordon Brown announced that the hated plans for pay-as-you-throw rubbish taxes would be scrapped.

That was a blatant lie and he knew it. Within days it became clear that 'trials' would still be going ahead. Why bother piloting something which you have no intention of introducing?

Far from dropping the scheme, Labour is ploughing on despite the trivial matter of what the electorate thinks.

That's because ministers are obediently implementing orders from our real
government in Brussels. Gordon couldn't stop pay-as-you-throw taxes even if he wanted to, which he doesn't.

He was the one who cranked up landfill taxes in his last 'green' budget to meet EU recycling targets, which is why councils are cutting back on collections in the first place.

All is revealed in European directive 75/442/EEC on waste disposal. In answer to a parliamentary question from the Tories, ministers have been forced to admit that they are following rules laid down in an EU handbook entitled 'Variable Rate Pricing based on Pay As You Throw as a Tool of Urban Waste Management'.

This 'toolkit' lays down the blueprint for charging every household for the amount of rubbish it generates.

It has been produced by the Dresden University of Technology, which was commissioned by the EU under the 'Fifth European Commission Framework Programme'.

Rubbish! Gordon Brown said plans for pay-as-you-throw taxes would be scrapped. But now pilots are going ahead

The Eurocrats admit bin charges are a ' politically sensitive issue', and warn of 'uncertain and perhaps uncontrollable citizens' response'. But the handbook stresses 'this lack of consensus should not be allowed to intimidate us into avoiding innovation'.

They acknowledge that higher charges, tougher rules and fortnightly collections will be unpopular and will lead to an increase in littering, fly-tipping and dumping of waste in other people's bins and recycling containers.

To combat this, it urges the 'disciplining of citizens' by 'intensive observation of illegal waste disposal through patrol and special task forces'.

Councils should set up a 'police department' to sift through rubbish to search for the addresses of 'offenders' in discarded mail, and issue fines of up to £400.

All those stories about people being punished for leaving the lid of their bin open, putting out the 'wrong' kind of rubbish or dropping an old gas bill in a public litter bin can be traced back to this sinister document.

They weren't isolated incidents, or the result of over-zealous enforcement by bloody-minded local officials - they were part of the great masterplan.

black South Africa vents its anger on immigrants

Published Date: 19 May 2008

By Fred Bridgland

in Johannesburg

IT BEGAN just over a week ago at a discussion in a poor township about crime. By yesterday, it had become a black-on-black ethnic-cleansing frenzy that engulfed central Johannesburg, taking more than a dozen lives and leaving hundreds injured, thousands homeless and many raped.

The assaults by poor black South Africans on poor, terrified refugees, most of them Zimbabwean, is a crisis that has been waiting to happen for months and seems likely to escalate.

Reports yesterday said the attacks had spread to Cape Town, Durban, Port Elizabeth and Pretoria.

Some three million Zimbabweans have fled to South Africa from the political and economic terror waged by president Robert Mugabe. They have been joined by an estimated one to two million economic migrants from Mozambique and Malawi. In a country with 40 per cent unemployment, ordinary black South Africans have accused the foreigners of stealing their jobs, houses and women. And they have been growing increasingly angry with their own head of state, President Thabo Mbeki, accusing him of being more concerned with appeasing Mr Mugabe than recognising the scale of the problem caused by the flood of Zimbabweans into South Africa.

Eight days ago, in Alexandra, a poor township in the shadow of Johannesburg's business district and the richest square mile of earth in Africa, Jacob Ntuli, 67, a community leader and former security guard, called a meeting of residents to discuss the rape of four women and a girl.

Somehow, what began as a discussion about crime ended in people seething with anger about foreigners. They decided it was time to act, and soon, with cries of "Let's go and kill foreigners", a mob armed with guns, steel bars and whips was descending on non-South African homes.

The first to die was Sipho Madondo, a 41-year-old South African who refused the mob's demand that he join the planned killing spree. He was shot dead in front of his wife, Pretty.

Soon afterwards the first Zimbabwean died. Lungile Mtweni, 31, had just arrived jobless from his own country and was due to begin work the next day as a gardener for a white South African in the hope of providing for his wife and two children. He had borrowed the equivalent of 65p from a neighbour so he could travel to his job and was walking home when he was overwhelmed by the mob. After hearing his accent, they beat and stoned him to death, before moving on to loot and burn the homes of other foreigners.

Hundreds of foreigners fled Alexandra as they were attacked and their homes set alight. Some deadly genie had been let out of the bottle. Copycat attacks began in other townships and settlements – Tembisa, Katlehong, Reiger Park, Thokoza, Jeppestown, parts of the giant township of Soweto, names familiar from the violence that marked the 1989-1994 transition from apartheid to democracy.

Yesterday at least seven foreigners were burned or hacked to death in Johannesburg and mobs besieged the Central Methodist Church, which Bishop Paul Verryn has turned into a shelter for hundreds of Zimbabwean exiles. With violence erupting in so many places, police were struggling to maintain control.

The victims of the violence are dishevelled and dirty, sleeping in their thousands, huddled together in police compounds, the car parks of hospitals where their loved ones lie wounded, in churches and on waste ground.

One Zimbabwean said he didn't know what to do – return to unbearable poverty in his homeland or stay in South Africa, where it was beginning to look like he faced certain death.

Poor blacks pay the price for Mbeki's dithering over Zimbabwe

Fred Bridgland reports on the refugee crisis that is pitting black against black in South Africa's townships

I HOPE my gardener, George, has survived Johannesburg's pogroms unscathed. George is a Malawian, but I confess I don't know enough about him because he is actually employed and paid by my landlady. He is precisely the kind of person being targeted by black South African mobs, who accuse migrants from Zimbabwe, in particular, and from Malawi and Mozambique, of taking their jobs because they are willing to accept lower wages.

Read the rest of the story Here

May 10th 1940

The Sitzkrieg is ended.


"All quiet on the Western Front" no more.

Sitzkrieg: "The Phony War" was the term derisively applied by many in the English speaking countries to the period after the invasion of Poland had resulted in chaos in the East with the dictator's ravaged victim partitioned and occupied while leaving the French and the English waiting.

Spring 1940, Adolph Hitler visits the troops

May 10th 1940 was my brother-in-law's birthday, he was born in Eindhoven which city is located about 100 KM west of Dusseldorf and is about 55 KM to the West of the German border with The Kingdom of the Netherlands.

On that Spring morning Adolph Hitler sent eighty-nine divisions of Germany's young men to attack The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. The Luft-waffe's Stuka-Flugel (dive-bombers) screamed from the sky dropping bombs to terrorize the unprepared Dutch, Belgians and Luxemburgers, while armored columns advanced across nearly undefended borders.









German parachute troops outside Rotterdam 5-10-1940








A Stuka Dive-bomber releases its bomb








At the same time, in the pre-dawn hours the Luftwaffe carried out a series of raids on aerodromes in the North of France. Pontoise, Lille, Lyon, Metz, Amiens and Annemasse were all bombed in the early morning hours so that there was no mistaking the fact that the war in the West had begun.

After only two days of Blitzkrieg (lightning-war) the German war machine had reached the northern French border and was in position to bypass the major French border defenses. Conquest of Belgium and The Netherlands was continuing and within three weeks, vastly outgunned by their larger neighbor, both countries had been forced to surrender to German occupation. With Holland and Belgium neutralized German armored columns, over a hundred miles long, poured across the border into France and crushed the opposing forces.

It would be five long years and tens of millions of lives lost and hundreds of cities and towns bombed into rubble before peace would be restored in Western Europe.

Apocalypse threatens to engulf Burma but junta seizes aid

Published Date: 10 May 2008
By Stephen McGinty
BURMA is facing a disease epidemic of "apocalyptic proportions" after the military dictatorship blocked aid efforts and seized vital supplies forcing the United Nations' World Food Programme to temporarily halt mercy flights.


As the death toll from Cyclone Nargis climbed towards 100,000, with a further 1.5 million people left homeless and starving, the Disasters Emergency Committee yesterday warned of a catastrophic humanitarian disaster to follow unless the Burmese government accepted assistance from world aid agencies.

Last night the United Nations World Food Programme agreed to send in two further plane-loads of aid scheduled to arrive today, after initially calling a halt to its aid programme when two planes were impounded by the government on Friday. The WFP had sent some aid on a scheduled Thai Airways cargo flight on Thursday which went through without problems, however a bureaucratic mix-up led to the seizure of cargo from the next two flights. Instead of immediately whisking the consignment, which included 38 tonnes of high-energy biscuits and relief equipment, to the disaster zone in the Irrawaddy Delta it was immediately confiscated.

"All of the food aid and equipment that we managed to get in has been confiscated," said Paul Risley, spokesman for the UN's World Food Programme in Bangkok. He said: "It is being held by the government. It is sitting in a warehouse. It is not in trucks heading to Irrawaddy Delta where it is critically needed. The frustration caused by what appears to be a paperwork delay is unprecedented in modern humanitarian relief efforts. It's astonishing."

The United Nations also last night launched an international appeal for $187 million and urged the Burmese government to permit humanitarians into the country. Sir John Holmes, the UN secretary-general for Humanitarian Affairs and the UN's emergency relief co-ordinator said: "Every hour that passes more lives are lost."

Despite the plight of its people, the Burmese government, who for over forty years have viewed the West with deep suspicion and hostility, is adamant that while aid is welcome, aid workers are not.

Yesterday, members of the Disasters Emergency Committee said "they could do more" without opposition from the military junta. Tim Costello, chief executive of World Vision Australia, said suspicion of foreign aid workers was hampering their work. He warned of an epidemic of "apocalyptic proportions" if aid does not get through. But he urged donors to continue giving, saying the charities were making a difference.

The DEC appeal, which is supported by The Scotsman, is run by British aid agencies and charities has raised £4 million in two days. Mr Costello said the Burmese government did not have the capacity to run the relief effort required, adding that the impact of Cyclone Nargis could be worse than the affect of the Asian tsunami on Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Speaking from Burma to a press conference in central London, he said: "The frustration is we know we could do more. We know what the potential is but actually we are getting to people and making a difference. He said the affected area contains 19 million people and around two-thirds of them are children.

He continued: "We certainly know that once an epidemic starts it's difficult to stop and becomes of apocalyptic proportions. The potential for this epidemic is extremely probable." He said the relief effort faced a "race against time" to prevent diseases such as diphtheria, cholera and malaria spreading. He said: "The size of this is simply extraordinary and in terms of its impact much greater than the tsunami impact in Sri Lanka or Indonesia. The capacity to absorb this level of suffering, dislocation and chaos doesn't exist (in Burma]. It really requires international aid, it cannot be done in-country."

Meanwhile a Red Cross official Anders Ladekarl, who is in Burma, revealed the magnitude of the task facing rescuers. He said: "We are simply lacking transportation. There are almost no boats and no helicopters. This is really a nightmare to make this operation run."

Entire villages have been submerged in the Irrawaddy delta. Yesterday the British ambassador to Burma, Mark Canning, estimated that the death toll was between 60-100,000. Mr Canning said just five of the 17 Britons unaccounted for following the cyclone have been tracked down so far.

Last night Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, chief executive of the Scottish multi-faith charity Mary's Meals, said they were determined not to walk away from their newly-opened food centres in Burma and on the Burma/Thai border. Mr MacFarlane-Barrow said: "My worry is that when the public sees such a respected body as the UN World Food Programme threaten to suspend aid flights into Burma it sends a message that the door has been slammed closed. We could have over 50,000 people dead and over a million suffering; politics will not bury the dead, feed the starving or get water to the thirsty.

"I hope that people continue to give and we can end the squabbling and get aid to those suffering. We at Mary's Meals are determined to rebuild our school feeding stations that have been destroyed ."

Last night the aid group Action Against Hunger noted that the delta region is known as the country's granary, and the cyclone hit before the harvest. A statement released by the group said: "If the harvest has been destroyed this will have a devastating impact on food security in Burma."

The effects were already being felt in Rangoon, where the price of increasingly scarce water shot up by more than 500 per cent, and rice and oil jumped by 60 per cent over the last three days.

Last night there was evidence of a change in direction as the Burmese government agreed to a single US military C-130 in the country on Monday, in what the White House hopes will be the beginning of a steady flow of aid to the stricken nation.

'Please help us, we are facing difficulty for our daily survival'

ONE week ago, the old life of Ma Khine was swept away in a tide of wind, waves and rain. Today, she and her family huddle together in a monastery, along with 500 other villagers from the township of Kyauktan, another victim of Cyclone Nargis.

Last Saturday, Nargis blasted the southern coastal area of Burma at 190kph, the worst natural disaster the country has experienced. Along with the ensuing tidal wave, measuring up to 12m high, the destruction left up to 100,000 people dead or missing.

As night approached and the flood waters rose on Saturday, many villagers crowded into the Sasana Beikman monastery with Ma Khine's family. Others held to vain refuge in their houses, until they collapsed. Some families clung to plastic containers to keep from drowning. Ma Khine said: "It was frightening. I was worried that my family members would be separated. Our faces went blue from cold and I thought we were going to die."

Huddling with her family in one of the hardest-hit areas in Rangoon division, Ma Khine talked briefly about a tough life made worse by the disaster. Economic conditions were so strained in the Irrawaddy Delta village where her family's simple house used to stand, that she had left school to work in a garment factory near the country's capital. She barely earned 200 kyat (£16) a month, she said.

The first reports of fatalities in Kyauktan township put the number of deaths at 16 of the 15,000 affected population and a number of authorities speculate it will grow considerably once they can access more of the 44 affected villages in the township.

In the temporary camp, children younger than five sit in their mother's arms, a shocked expression frozen on their faces. They don't want to return to their village, but their parents are anxious to start picking up the pieces of their shattered world.

As one mother said: "Please help us to rebuild our village. We are facing difficulty for our daily survival as our houses are now lying flat in the water; some are crushed by trees. We do not even have cooking utensils or clothes to wear."

According to a UNICEF team assessing the Kyauktan township situation, food is scarce among the 66 shelters there. Many villagers with houses remaining have been cooking and donating what they can.
Read the rest of the story and comments here.

America is being invaded and colonized by aliens

It is undeniable, I've seen them with my own eyes!

Like many people I was a skeptic: after all, I reasoned, why would they leave an environment in which they had evolved successfully and found their every need met?

Why would they come here to live in a place where they are so different that they stand out from the native population and where they have to adapt to strange weather and unfamiliar foods?

And if those issues aren't enough to persuade them to stay away some local jurisdictions have taken, and are currently taking, steps intended to make them leave or even to eradicate them should they fail to leave!

And yet... They're still out there flying around our cities, lurking near power lines, scavenging everywhere for sustenance.

Hard to believe?

read more here

and here

and here too!

and here

Even in England...

What elevators can teach us about superstition

Submitted by Massimo Pigliucci on 26 April 2008 - 9:23am




Maybe I’ve had elevators on my mind because the one in our building has gone through endless repairs of late, none of which apparently improved its speed or reliability. Or perhaps you simply cannot live in New York City without taking into account elevators as a major component of your life. But then my wife pointed out to me this snippet from an article published recently in The New Yorker (every self-respecting newyorker reads The New Yorker while in the subway):
“In the old system—board elevator, press button—you have an illusion of control; elevator manufacturers have sought to trick the passengers into thinking they’re driving the conveyance. In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer. Elevator design is rooted in deception—to disguise not only the bare fact of the box hanging by ropes but also the tethering of tenants to a system over which they have no command.”

Talk about fooling most of the people most of the time! Of course, superstition is actually a well-known phenomenon in the animal world. Experiments with rats have shown that if you give them a reward (say, food), shortly after they accidentally bumped their shoulder against a wall of their cage, they will start purposely bumping against the wall, expecting a new reward. This is no different from human beings associating a win by their favorite team to them wearing a “lucky” shirt or hat. Both are examples of a widespread logical fallacy, post hoc ergo propter hoc (after that, therefore because of that), where a causal link between two events is inferred on the basis of an observed correlation.

The difference between rats and humans is that the former give up their illogical behavior much sooner than the latter, if no further reward is coming. (Of course, what makes the elevator such a Machiavellian device is that the reward does keep coming!)

More generally, superstition (and therefore religious belief, which is a form of superstition) can likely be traced back to two factors, one of which seems to apply only to humans and perhaps other closely related primates.

The first factor is exemplified in the widespread use of observational correlations in the animal kingdom: it simply makes sense for natural selection to favor the ability to uncover potentially significant patterns in the environment, so that the organism can take advantage of them. However, one would also expect selection to favor the quick abandonment of pattern-based behavior if the pattern turns out not to be a reliable clue for action -- exactly what happens with rats.

Read the rest of the article and a lot more here.

Gobekli Tepe - Paradise Regained?

One of the most important archæological digs in the world, Gobekli Tepe in Turkey has revolutionised our understanding of hunter-gatherer culture. But could it also be the site of the Garden of Eden?
Text: Sean Thomas / Images: Sean Thomas
March 2007

Gobekli Tepe is so stupefyingly old that it actually predates settled human life

I am in a rusty Turkish taxi. Ahead of me, the brown hills roll endlessly towards Syria; from my car I can see a little village of mud houses and open drains.
It’s not the most auspicious of places. Yet, if reports are correct, I am heading for the most amazing archæological dig in the world. Even more remarkable, this site might be intimately connected with the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden.

Finally, my swearing cabbie scrapes us round another corner, and I see a solitary mulberry tree, stark against the cloudless sky. As we park, I notice dozens of workers and archæologists, all across the hillside. They are hefting buckets of rock, and digging away at the soil. The sense of exalted archæological effort, in this hot and intense remoteness, reminds me of the opening scenes of The Exorcist.
















I climb out of the car, and a genial, 50-something German man approaches. His name is Klaus Schmidt. He is the chief archæologist here at Gobekli Tepe.

Shaking my hand, Schmidt leads me away from the main dig. In the shade of a tented area, we drink sweet Turkish tea from tulip-shaped glasses. Mopping his brow, Schmidt tells me the story of his dig.

Klaus Schmidt

The modern history of Gobekli Tepe (the second word is pronounced tepp-ay; the phrase means “the hill of the navel” in Turkish) begins in 1964, when a team of American archæologists was combing this remote province of southeast Turkey. The archæologists noted that several odd-looking hills were blanketed with thousands of broken flints, a sure sign of ancient human activity. Despite this, the US scientists drifted away and did no excavating. Today, they must feel like the publisher who rejected the first Harry Potter manuscript.

Three decades after the Americans’ near miss, a local shepherd was tending his flock when he spotted something odd: a bunch of strangely shaped stones, peeping out of the sunlit dust.

The ‘rediscovery’ of the site reached the ears of the museum curators in the city of Sanliurfa, 50km (30 miles) away. The museum authorities contacted the relevant government ministry, who in turn got in touch with the German Archæological Institute in Istanbul.

And so, in 1994, Klaus Schmidt came here, to begin excavations. “I was intrigued. The site already had emotional significance for the villagers,” he smiles. “The solitary tree on the highest hill is sacred. I thought we might be onto something”.

Then Schmidt got out of the cab and had a closer look. “Within the first minute, I knew that if I didn’t walk away immediately, I would be here the rest of my life.”

He stayed. What he has since uncovered is quite extraordinary.

Temple of the Hunt

The eerie stones turned out to be the flat oblong tops of awesome megaliths. These T-shaped ochre stones loom abruptly from the exhausted earth. Most of them are carved with bizarre and delicate images – mainly of animals and birds. One image is a sexualised representation of a woman. Sinuous serpents are another common motif. The stones themselves seem to represent men – some have stylised ‘arms’, which angle down their sides.


So far, 43 stones have been dug out. They are arranged in circles from 5–10m (16–32ft) across. Around the circles are benches of rock, smallish niches, and walls of mud brick. The unearthed megaliths stand 1–4m (3.3–13ft) high.


There are indications that more is to come. A few years ago, Schmidt and his team found a very weathered, half-quarried, T-shaped stone lying in a limestone bed, 1km (0.6 miles) from the main site. This enormous stone is 9m (30ft) long, and was, it seems, designed to join the other pillars at Gobekli. “The stone is cracked, so it must have broken,” Schmidt explains. “When this happened the builders probably left it and started on another.”


All of which means there may be other stones of similar size as yet undiscovered; indeed, geomagnetic surveys of the various artificial hills at Gobekli Tepe imply that there are at least 250 more standing stones waiting to be excavated.

So far, so remarkable – and if this were all there was to Gobekli Tepe, it would already be a dazzling site: a Turkish Stonehenge, or a Kurdish Carnac.

But Gobekli Tepe isn’t just this. One unique factor puts it in the archæological stratosphere.

Gobekli Tepe is staggeringly ancient.










Carbon dating of organic matter adhering to the megaliths shows that the complex is 12,000 years old.





That is to say, it was built around 10,000–9,000 BC. By comparison, Stonehenge was built around 2,000–2,500 BC.
Prior to the discovery and dating of Gobekli Tepe, the most ancient megalithic complex was thought to be in Malta, dated around 3,500BC.









Gobekli Tepe is thus the oldest known such site in the world, and by a considerable margin. In fact, it’s so stupefyingly old that it actually predates settled human life.




It is also pre-pottery. Gobekli Tepe hails from a part of human history that is unimaginably distant, right back in our hunter-gatherer past.

So how did ‘cavemen’ manage to build something so ambitious? Klaus Schmidt speculates that bands of hunters would have gathered sporadically at the site, through the decades of construction. During the building season, the hunters may have lived in animal-skin tents, slaughtering the local game for sustenance. The many flint arrowheads found around Gobekli support this thesis; they also support the dating of the site.

This revelation – that early Neolithic hunter-gatherers could have built something like Gobekli – is world-changing. Hitherto, it was presumed that agriculture necessarily preceded civilisation, and that complex art, society and architecture depended on the reliable food supplies derived from farming. Gobekli Tepe shows that the old hunter-gatherer life, at least in this region of Turkey, was far more advanced than was ever conceived.

Nonetheless, even for the most resourceful and organised of pre-farming societies, constructing something as refined as Gobekli must have been a powerful challenge, and a serious drain on manpower. They must have had a very good reason to build Gobekli. But what was it?

Schmidt thinks he knows. “Gobekli Tepe is not a house or a domestic building. Evidence of any domestic use is entirely lacking. No remains of settled human habitation have been found nearby. That leaves one purpose: religion. Gobekli Tepe is the oldest temple in the world. And it isn’t just a temple; I think it is probably a funerary complex.”

Schmidt’s thesis has supporting data. In the latest season of digging, his team have found human bones in soils that once filled the niches behind the megaliths. “I believe the ancient hunters brought the corpses of relatives here, and installed them in the open niches by the stones. The corpses were then excarnated: picked clean by wild animals.”

There is more evidence that Gobekli had a religious purpose: the circular arrangement of the stones echoes much later Neolithic temples, like Stonehenge and Avebury. The many rock carvings on the stones also appear much more ritualistic than domestic.

Sipping his tea, Schmidt elaborates: “So many of the carvings seem to celebrate the chase – we have found many images of prey, of boars, foxes and gazelles; also images of ducks being hunted with nets. Gobekli Tepe was probably a site for funerals, but it was also a place to celebrate the life of the hunter, and the hunt itself.”









After the Fall

Our tea-glasses are empty. We leave the calm of the open tents, and return to the dust and hubbub of the dig. Looking at the circles of enigmatic stones, and their exquisite carvings of lions and boars, it is easy to believe the theory that Gobekli Tepe is a temple dedicated to the hunting lifestyle. What is less easy to believe is the idea that this region of Turkey, these dusty brown hills all around us, once supported a large ‘civilisation’ of hunter-gatherers. Indeed, it is hard to believe that this semi-desert once supported enough animals to justify any hunting at all.


Gobekli Tepe carved stone

Gazing across the arid hilltops, Klaus Schmidt explains: “It wasn’t always like this. We know from remains of animals and plants that this was once a rich region, ecologically speaking. There were dozens of mammal species, green meadows and woods. The climate was wetter and lusher, but still warm. The herds of game were enormous. A paradisical place.”

His eyes are twinkling as he says this. We are approaching the extraordinary connection with the Eden story.

But before we get there, an obvious question is posed. What happened to the landscape? Why is the region now so eroded and barren, if it was once so lush and Edenic?

Schmidt picks up a knapped piece of flint from the weary earth. There are thousands of flint pieces – man-made – littering these hills. He says: “To build such a place as this, the hunters must have joined together, in great numbers. After they finished building, they probably congregated for worship, and for funerals. But then they found that they couldn’t feed so many people with the game. So I think they began cultivating the grasses on the hills. Einkorn wheat, a forerunner of domestic wheat, grows wild here. So they domesticated it.” Schmidt looks at the solitary mulberry tree on the hill. “In other words, they began farming to support their religious community. But it was the farming that maybe caused their downfall.”

According to Schmidt, it seems that agriculture began here, in the province immediately surrounding Gobekli, sometime around 8,000BC.

This indeed was one of the very first places in the world where people farmed. We know roughly when and where farming began, because of the archæological evidence: domestication is a shock to the physiology of man and beast. The skeletons of people change, they temporarily grow smaller and less healthy, as the human body adapts to a protein-poorer diet and a more arduous lifestyle. Likewise, newly domesticated animals get scrawnier at first.

But 8,000BC, it seems, was also the time when the local landscape began to alter. As the trees were chopped down, and the soil leached away, the area became arid and bare. What was once a glorious pastoral region of forests and meadows, rich with game and wild grasses, became a toilsome place that had to be worked ever harder.

Schmidt and I descend a ladder to the floor of the dig, where the ancient dust is banked against the T-stones. He continues: “The really strange thing is that in 8,000BC, during the shift to agriculture, Gobekli Tepe was buried. I mean deliberately – not in a mudslide. For some reason the hunters, or the ex-hunters, decided to entomb the entire site in soil. The earth we are removing from the stones was put here by man himself: all these hills are artificial.”


















The link is becoming irresistible: a lost paradise, a forsaken lifestyle, a terrible ‘mistake’, even a solitary tree. Could there really be a connection between Gobekli Tepe and the Garden of Eden story?

I have more investigation to do, before I reach a conclusion. Promising Klaus that I will return in a day or so, I climb back in the cab, and head off down the dusty road.

Putting the Ur into Sanliurfa

On the way, I consult my notes. The idea that the Eden narrative in the Bible is an allegory for the transition from a hunter-gather lifestyle to agriculture is not a new one. Several writers and thinkers, like Hugh Brody, have canvassed the idea in the past. What is new is the accumulation of data that locates this allegory precisely in the Gobekli Tepe region.

One strand of evidence relates to early farming. Finds in neighbouring Turkish digs show that all Eurasian agriculture might have started around here. For instance, the very first pigs were domesticated at Cayonu, 90 km (56 miles) away. Likewise, wheat species worldwide seem to descend from einkorn wheat, first cultivated on these same brown hills.

The taxi accelerates, as the road flattens out. We are heading through cotton fields, irrigated by water from the Euphrates. On the distant horizon I can see the blue Taurus Mountains.

In the Bible, it is said that Eden is situated at a point where four rivers descend. Believers have long taken this to mean the Fertile Crescent between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. Similarly, the Book of Genesis claims that Eden is ringed by mountains.

And there are further links. Forty minutes’ drive brings me to the large and vibrant Kurdish city of Sanliurfa. The place seems relatively modern, but it has, according to reports, an extraordinary lineage.

My first port of call in Sanliurfa is the local museum. A few pence buys me entrance: a small price to pay for what I am about to see.

Tucked inside the first gallery, under the stairs and hard by the fire extinguisher, is a weird, life-size, creamy-grey limestone statue of a man. This statue was exhumed in the ancient heart of Sanliurfa, when foundations were being laid for a bank.













Recent carbon dating of the Neolithic temple, wherein the statue was found, confirms that this bizarre effigy dates from 10,000–9000BC. This makes it probably the oldest life-size statue of a man ever discovered: the earliest human carving in stone. The stare of its obsidian eyes is shockingly sad: it seems to be looking across the æons with anguished regret, as if foreseeing the tragic mistakes of mankind.
















2 meter tall statue of a man found at Sanliurfa

Another quick car ride brings me to the site of the statue’s discovery. It is a local beauty spot known as Balikli Gol, a long and limpid fishpond, surrounded by golden-stoned mosques, teahouses and even a converted Crusader church. Tourists like to feed the fat and excitable fish in the ponds; the legend is that the fish were put here by the Prophet Abraham. The locals also believe that Sanliurfa is the Ur of the first books of the Bible.

These are just legends, of course. Yet we now know, if only because of the strange statue in the museum, that Sanliurfa is incredibly old. There has been human activity here for 12,000 years, perhaps continuously. Is it so unlikely that the Book of Genesis would refer to this ancient region, this fons et origo of civilisation? In fact, it’s not unlikely at all – because we know that some places near Sanliurfa are definitely mentioned in Genesis.

Next morning, I take a longer cab ride, across the brown flatlands, into the desert wastes further south. The fields are being tilled by Kurdish women in their typical lavender-coloured headscarves. They look weary from the intense heat. This region is so sultry that people sleep outside their houses on raised metal platforms.

Eventually we reach Harran, where a ruined tower rises from the roadside. This was once the oldest Islamic University in the world. It dates from the 9th century AD. But Harran’s ancestry is even nobler than that. This is the same Harran mentioned – and twice at that – in the Book of Genesis. This is where Abraham once lived, according to the Bible.

Something old, something new

Back in the taxi, I make my final journey to Gobekli. On the way, I put all the jigsaw pieces together. Taking into account the Biblical links, the history and topography of the region, the evidence of very early domestication hereabouts, and the data from the site itself, Gobekli Tepe is arguably a temple located within the “Garden of Eden”.

Or, let’s put it another way: the story of Eden is a folk-memory, and an allegory, and it tells us of our glorious hunter-gatherer past in this once-fertile corner of Anatolia, before our own activities cast us into a harsher world. Gobekli Tepe celebrates and remembers a wonderful time of plenty, when we had leisure enough to learn the arts, and to cultivate a complex religion, even if we didn’t know how to make pots. And then we fell into farming.

As God says to Adam: “Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life.”

Of course, all this is speculation, and highly debatable. What is unquestionable is that Gobekli Tepe is one of the greatest archæological discoveries since World War II. Every day, Klaus Schmidt and his team find something new, something never seen before, something marvellous. As I am about to discover.

When my cab stops, and I walk towards the dig, I sense a drama in the air. Excitement is mounting. Some Turkish workmen are uncovering a new stone relief, on a just-unearthed megalith: it shows birds, scorpions and water life; it is exquisitely carved, as fresh and delicate as the day it was chiselled. A group of us gather around to have a closer look. I suddenly realise that we are the first people to see this remarkable artwork in 10,000 years.

Klaus Schmidt nods thoughtfully at the new relief. Then he says: “You think that is amazing? Komm!” He strides across the dig and points downwards: “We found this yesterday.” At the foot of another megalith is a perfect sculpture of an animal, actually attached to the standing stone. It is like nothing anyone has ever seen before. It was carved long before the wheel was invented, and it was found yesterday.







“What is it?” I ask.

Klaus Schmidt shakes his head.

“Maybe it is a crocodile, or maybe a cat. But the claws, the paws – they look perhaps like a wolf.”

We are done. My heart is actually pounding. Together, Klaus Schmidt and I retreat to the tents for a final cup of tea. We discuss the Eden idea. He is adamant that it is just a theory, albeit a very intriguing one. As he says: “Gobekli Tepe is important enough without any speculations.”

I have just one question left. Why did the hunter-gatherers of Gobekli deliberately entomb the complex? It seems a bizarre act, as well as a vastly laborious one. Again Klaus Schmidt shrugs.

“We don’t know.”

Sometimes those three simple words can be the most exciting of all.

ARTICLE SOURCES FOR FORTEAN TIMES ARTICLE:

* Michael Balter, The Goddess and the Bull, Catalhoyuk: An Archæological Journey to the Dawn of Civilisation, Simon ' Schuster, 2005.
* Hugh Brody, The Other Side of Eden: Hunter-gatherers, Farmers and the Shaping of the World, Faber ' Faber, 2002.
* Steven Mithen, After The Ice: A Global Human History 50,000–20,000BC, Phoenix Press, 2004
* Klaus Schmidt, Sie Bauten Die Ersten Temple (“You Built The First Temple”), CH Beck, 2006.
* Visit www.dainst.org, the website of the German Archæological Institute, for updates on the Gobekli Tepe dig
See original article

GOBEKLI TEPE: EARLIEST KNOWN HUMAN ARCHITECTURE

Göbekli Tepe

Angelica Portagnuolo Archaeology | | News | * | English


2008/04/08
An extraordinary discovery of a place of worship dating back to 9000 B.C. has been made in Turkey.

In the south of Turkey, in Göbekli Tepe, in an area well-known as "Mount of belly button", a giant and mysterious work of architecture has been brought to light by an equipe of researchers from Dai (German Archeological Institute of Istanbul) and from the museum of Urfa, under the direction of Klaus Schmidt, a German archaeologist.

Image - 1 - Dr. Klaus Schmidt

The excavation campaign, which started in 1994, has soon revealed the presence of finds, which are outstanding and unique in their genre: a templar structure made of 240 pilasters which are around 4 meters high and form a range of concentric circles.

These circles appear to date back to around 9000 B.C. and are completely buried underground. Most of the pilasters have engravings on the surface referring to either the religious sphere or the daily life of those who used to go to the site of worship.

For example, one of the engraving represents a pig and two ducks flying in the net.

The discoverer says: "I believe that Göbekli Tepe celebrates the catch, the lifestyle of hunters-pickers". "Why should it not be?"

"It was such a rich and easy life that offered them enough spare time to devote themselves to sculpture".

The hunters of Göbekli decided to leave the temple in around 8000 B.C., probably because the need to feed more people that used to meet in this place for religious purposes, caused a change of the ecosystem of the territory itself

It might have happened that lots of trees were chopped down and many animals which were "easy prey of these hunters" were chased away. By looking at the top of brownish and dry hills, you can deduct that the heavenly earth had become indeed an uncultivated and bare plain.

It is a surprise to discover how these Neolithic semi nomad hunters had managed to build such a work of architecture by assembling both the religious and the social aspects in a refined and complex way.

This is something even more ancient than the so well-known anatolic sanctuaries of Çatal Hűyűk dating back to 6500 B.C. Following a first research on the findings, Schmidt sustains that the temple might have been linked to the story of Eden, as told in the Bible.

According to the Muslims, Sanliurfa, a city close to Göbekli, should be the city called Ur, as mentioned in the Bible; the rivers that flow down from Heaven could be, instead, Tigris and Euphrates which wet the half-moon shaped fertile area where Göbekli Tepe is located; in the Bible it is told that some mountains surround Eden and that by looking at the top of Göbekli hills you can see the mountainous chain of Taurus.

More from the original site

Point "A" = Göbekli Tepe - Click for enlarge map

It still a mystery how a population, apparently not civilized yet, could have built such a big place of worship with pilasters of fifty tons weight, in such a historical and ancient period; it is important to remember, indeed, that the only place comparable to this one, which has been discovered, is Stonehenge in Great Britain which dates back to 3100 B.C.

Bibliography:

Mellaart J., The Neolitic of the Near East, New York, 1976, pp. 114-135

Sitography:

Cultural News
www.culturalnews.it

Home Page PD Dr. Klaus Schmidt
www.uf.uni-erlangen.de/ufginstitut/kschmidt.html

La Voce di Fiore
www.lavocedifiore.org

The First Post - the online daily magazine
"Digging for history in Turkey"
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/?menuID=2&subID=1007

Stonehenge From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge

Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (DAI)
www.dainst.org