alt Hacker NewsOn a related note, since the Paleolithic rarely comes up on HN, something that seems to rarely come up in English language content; Menhir [1] (Long stone) or standing stones, which are spread all across Europe, some very elaborately decorated, others with sight holes cut in them, others extremely large, i.e., 30-40 feet tall before they were knocked over by the invasive meme, Christianity.
They are found from Portugal all the way to Siberia, but very little is known about them following the Christian meme eradicating the indigenous cultures through the many purges and programs from 300CE on.
There are some references that imply at least in some places they were a kind of connection to the afterlife and ancestors that would turn into birds that would perch on top of the standing stone, something that is still part of indigenous beliefs and practices in parts of Asia. It's basically the indigenous culture of the Native Europeans that middle eastern Christianity destroyed and eradicated like it destroyed and eradicated the Native Americans and so many other native people and cultures around the world.
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I wonder sometimes if the people of Gobleki Tepe were just oddly prophetic or if cultural erasure has been going on a hell of a lot longer than we think it has.
Something I only learned well into my adulthood is that one of the reasons you can dig down and find the foundations of one, sometimes two different cultures below the feet of cities is that they used a lot of mud bricks, and when the house started to molder and fail they would pound it flat and start over, not haul the whole thing away. So a couple times a generation a neighborhood would be higher than it was before.
And the center of the city would be on a hill, and keep getting higher (even if expansion kept the slope roughly the same). Over time it would become more and more work to get to the middle of a city from the plains surrounding it.
Maybe you also heard about an erdstall[0] which are old tunnel systems around Europe, often the entry is accompanied by an standing stone with a hole in it. Christianity did the same here. There is one case where they filled up the tunnel and build an monastery over it. Excavations and carbon dating revealed quite old objects dating between many thousand years. Some stones especially the ones in the entry area are big and heavy cut outs, the tunnels are often cut into stone. It’s still an unsolved mystery.
Heinrich Kusch[1] and his wife have done very interesting work regarding this.
0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdstall 1. https://www.unterwelt-kusch.com/forschung/erdstallforschung/
What about the indigenous people the guys with the menhirs killed? Why are menhir guys indigenous, but whoever killed them, not indigenous?
I think you are seeing this a little too 2d. The reason the Christian meme spread so well is more complex than that. A codified belief system written down, the thought of a God that loves and cares about you, a path to redemption and forgiveness for sin or mistakes, these are just some of the reasons that it has been so successful. It wasn’t always just forced on people although there was that too. It’s just a really good meme and great story when you get to the heart of it. The people meeting in secret when Christianity started and risking their life to do so weren’t forced into it at all. Like capitalism, Christianity fits a lot of human needs and desires that are hard coded in humans.
The Wikipedia article suggest that they could have been erected as far back as 6000-7000 years ago - so older than Stonehenge, and therefor also older than Celtic culture. The Wikipedia article suggest that early Christians defaced and destroyed some of the stones, but knowledge about the people who erected those stones was lost way earlier than 300CE.