12,000 year old temple found

TURKEY: DISCOVERY OF 12,000-YEAR- OLD TEMPLE COMPLEX COULD ALTER THEORY
OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
* Nicholas Birch 4/17/08
As a child, Klaus Schmidt used to grub around in caves in his native Germany in the hope of finding prehistoric paintings. Thirty years later, representing the German Archaeological Institute, he found something infinitely more important -- a temple complex almost twice as old as anything comparable on the planet."This place is a supernova", says Schmidt, standing under a lone tree on a windswept hilltop 35 miles north of Turkey’s border with Syria. "Within a minute of first seeing it I knew I had two choices: go away and tell nobody, or spend the rest of my life working here."
Behind him are the first folds of the Anatolian plateau. Ahead, the Mesopotamian plain, like a dust-colored sea, stretches south hundreds of miles to Baghdad and beyond. The stone circles of Gobekli Tepe are just in front, hidden under the brow of the hill. Compared to Stonehenge, Britain’s most famous prehistoric site, they are
humble affairs. None of the circles excavated (four out of an estimated 20) are more than 30 meters across. What makes the discovery remarkable are the carvings of boars, foxes, lions, birds, snakes and scorpions, and their age. Dated at around 9,500 BC, these stones are 5,500 years older than the first cities of Mesopotamia, and 7,000 years older than Stonehenge. Never mind circular patterns or the stone-etchings, the people who erected this site did not even have pottery or cultivate wheat. They
lived in villages. But they were hunters, not farmers. "Everybody used to think only complex, hierarchical civilizations could build such monumental sites, and that they only came about with the invention of agriculture" , says Ian Hodder, a Stanford University Professor of Anthropology, who, since 1993, has directed digs at Catalhoyuk, Turkey’s most famous Neolithic site. "Gobekli changes everything. It’s elaborate, it’s complex and it is pre-agricultural. That fact alone makes the site one of the most important archaeological finds in a very long time." With only a fraction of the site opened up after a decade of excavations, Gobekli Tepe’s significance to the people who built it remains unclear. Some think the site was the center of a fertility rite, with the two tall stones at the center of each circle representing a man and woman. It’s a theory the tourist board in the nearby city of Urfa has taken up with alacrity. Visit the Garden of Eden, its brochures trumpet, see Adam and Eve. Schmidt is skeptical about the fertility theory. He agrees Gobekli Tepe
may well be "the last flowering of a semi-nomadic world that farming was just about to destroy," and points out that if it is in near perfect condition today, it is because those who built it buried it soon after under tons of soil, as though its wild animal-rich world had lost all meaning. But the site is devoid of the fertility symbols that have been found at other Neolithic sites, and the T-shaped columns, while clearly semi-human, are sexless. "I think here we are face to face with the
earliest representation of gods", says Schmidt, patting one of the biggest stones. "They have no eyes, no mouths, no faces. But they have arms and they have hands. They are makers." "In my opinion, the people who carved them were asking themselves the
biggest questions of all," Schmidt continued. "What is this universe? Why are we here?" With no evidence of houses or graves near the stones, Schmidt believes
the hill top was a site of pilgrimage for communities within a radius of roughly a hundred miles. He notes how the tallest stones all face southeast, as if scanning plains that are scattered with archeological sites in many ways no less remarkable than Gobekli Tepe. Last year, for instance, French archaeologists working at Djade
al-Mughara in northern Syria uncovered the oldest mural ever found. "Two square meters of geometric shapes, in red, black and white - a bit like a Paul Klee painting," explains Eric Coqueugniot, the University of Lyon archaeologist who is leading the excavation.Coqueugniot describes Schmidt’s hypothesis that Gobekli Tepe was meeting point for feasts, rituals and sharing ideas as "tempting," given the
site’s spectacular position. But he emphasizes that surveys of the region are still in their infancy. "Tomorrow, somebody might find somewhere even more dramatic."
Director of a dig at Korpiktepe, on the Tigris River about 120 miles east of Urfa, Vecihi Ozkaya doubts the thousands of stone pots he has found since 2001 in hundreds of 11,500 year-old graves quite qualify as that. But his excitement fills his austere office at Dicle University in Diyarbakir. "Look at this", he says, pointing at a photo of an exquisitely carved sculpture showing an animal, half-human, half-lion. "It’s a sphinx, thousands of years before Egypt. Southeastern Turkey, northern Syria - this region saw the wedding night of our civilization. "

*Editor’s Note*: Nicolas Birch specializes in Turkey, Iran and the
Middle East.

*Posted April 17, 2008 © Eurasianet*
http://www.eurasian et.org

Just a little more information

Rare 5.4mag quake that has hit the New Madrid fault line seems to have caught people by surprise. What makes this moderate quake unique is area of which it occurred. It hit at the northern end of the "New Madrid Fault".Geographic coordinates: 38.520N, 87.872W. Magnitude: 5.4 Mw. Depth: 5 km. Universal Time (UTC): 18 Apr 2008 09:36:56.
A turn of the century earthquake, the New Madrid fault system was responsible for the 1812 New Madrid Earthquake and has the potential to produce damaging earthquakes on an average of every 300 to 500 years. On February 7, 1812, the New Madrid Earthquake measured a 7.9 magnitude; epicenter near New Madrid, Missouri. The area of New Madrid was destroyed. Near by St. Louis, Missouri, many houses were damaged severely, and their chimneys were thrown down. The meizoseismal area was characterized by general ground warping, ejections, fissuring, severe landslides, and caving of stream banks.
Large areas sank into the Earth, fissures opened, lakes permanently drained, new lakes were formed, and forests were destroyed over an area of 150,000 acres (600 km). Many houses at New Madrid were thrown down. "Houses, gardens, and fields were swallowed up" one source notes. But fatalities and damage were low, because the area was sparsely settled.The earthquakes were felt as far away as New York City and Boston, Massachusetts, where church-bells rang. It has been recorded this earthquake was so powerful; people witnessed the mighty Mississippi River rolled back on itself, then literally changed course. Because of the change in the course of the Mississippi River, land was cut off from counties by the river and wound up on the other side of the new riverbed, on the other side of the Mississippi. The settlement of Reverie, Tennessee, in Tipton County was cut off and placed on the western bank of the Mississippi River on the Arkansas side.
This happened in 1812. The next one is overdue. What will happen this time?

Something big's a foot

Earth Changes Media has been reporting a swarm of quakes since February which has increased along the Alaska Aleutian Chain. It is unusual to see such high magnitudes ranging in the 4's and 5's as it relates to 'swarms'. Usually they remain in the 2's and 3's. But there appears to be more to this story----
The earthquake swarm at Baja California continues as reported since February, along with the more recent swarm which occurred off the Oregon Coast. When you put this puzzle together, it is quite probable --- we are looking at a potential Cascadia Subduction Zone eruption.
The USGS recently came out with an announcement stating they expect with 99% assurance, a magnitude 6.7 or larger quake will occur in California ---- in 30 years. No one knows for sure why they came out with such a ridiculous statement leaving the geological and seismological community both laughing and embarrassed. Any geology 101 student can tell you with "100% assurance" there will be several large earthquakes hitting California over the next 30 years.
But the more serious question would be - are we seeing current signs telling of a coming large eruption along the west coast in the next "30 months" or even sooner than this.

Matrix-style virtual worlds

I put this article in, in it's entirety even though the technical parts are somewhat beyond me. The picture it paints is a mind blowing reality. So, are we just holograms ourselves as some scientists are starting to think? What is our reality? What is general reality? Questions, questions....
Matrix-style virtual worlds 'a few years away'
* NewScientist. com news service
Are supercomputers on the verge of creating /Matrix/-style simulated
realities? Michael McGuigan at Brookhaven National Laboratory
in Upton, New York, thinks so. He says that
virtual worlds realistic enough to be mistaken for the real thing are
just a few years away.
In 1950, Alan Turing, the father of modern computer science, proposed
the ultimate test of artificial intelligence – a human judge engaging in
a three-way conversation with a machine and another human should be
unable to reliably distinguish man from machine.
A variant on this "Turing Test
" is the "Graphics Turing
Test", the twist being that a human judge viewing and interacting with
an artificially generated world should be unable to reliably distinguish
it from reality.
"By interaction we mean you could control an object – rotate it, for
example – and it would render in real-time," McGuigan says.
Photoreal animation
Although existing computers can produce artificial scenes and textures
detailed enough to fool the human eye, such scenes typically take
several hours to render. The key to passing the Graphics Turing Test,
says McGuigan, is to marry that photorealism with software that can
render images in real-time – defined as a refresh rate of 30 frames per
second.McGuigan decided to test the ability of one of the world's most powerful
supercomputers – Blue Gene/L
at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York – to generate such an
artificial world.Blue Gene/L possesses 18 racks, each with 2000 standard PC processors that work in parallel to provide a huge amount of processing power – it
has a speed of 103 teraflops, or 103 trillion "floating point
operations" per second. By way of comparison, a calculator uses about 10
floating operations per second.In particular, McGuigan studied the supercomputer' s ability to mimic the interplay of light with objects – an important component of any virtual world with ambitions to mimic reality.He found that conventional ray-tracing software could run 822 times faster on the Blue Gene/L than on a standard computer, even though the software was not optimised for the parallel processors of a
supercomputer. This allowed it to convincingly mimic natural lighting in real time.
Not there yet "The nice thing about this ray tracing is that the human eye can see it
as natural," McGuigan says. "There are actually several types of ray-tracing software out there – I chose one that was relatively easy to port to a large number of processors. But others might be faster and even more realistic if they are used in parallel computing."Although Blue Gene/L can model the path of light in a virtual world both rapidly and realistically, the speed with which it renders
high-resolution images still falls short of that required to pass the
Graphics Turing Test.But supercomputers capable of passing the test may be just years away, thinks McGuigan. "You never know for sure until you can actually do it,"
he says. "But a back-of-the- envelope calculation would suggest it should
be possible in the next few years, once supercomputers enter the
petaflop range – that's 1000 teraflops."But others think that passing the Graphics Turing Test requires more than photorealistic graphics moving in real-time. Reality is not 'skin deep' says Paul Richmond at the University of Sheffield, UK. An
artificial object can appear real, but unless it moves in a realistic
way the eye won't be fooled. "The real challenge is providing a
real-time simulation that includes realistic simulated behaviour," he says.
Fluid challenge
"I'd like to see a realistic model of the Russian ballet," says Mark
Grundland at the University of Cambridge. "That's something a
photographer would choose as a subject matter, and that's what we should
aim to convey with computers."Grundland also points out that the Graphics Turing Test does not specify what is conveyed in the virtual world scene. "If all that is there is a diffusely-reflectin g sphere sitting on a diffusely-reflectin g surface,
then we've been able to pass the test for many years now," he says. "But
Turing didn't mean for his vision to come true so quickly."
McGuigan agrees that realistic animation poses its own problems.
"Modelling that fluidity is difficult," he says. "You have to make sure
that when something jumps in the virtual world it appears heavy." But he
remains optimistic that animation software will be up to the task.
"Physical reality is about animation and lighting," he says. "We've done
the lighting now – the animation will follow."