‘Tour de Force of the Scientific Method’
Any follower of Catastrophism the last few years has seen extraordinary confirmations of ancient cataclysm and novel contributions to our way of thinking. To the Tusk, three revelations have characterized the period: The discovery of an extraordinarily youthful late Pleistocene crater in Greenland; a series of popular, comprehensive and unrefuted major journal articles which exquisitely defined hard evidence for the Younger Dryas impact catastrophe; and the singular contribution of Dr. Martin Sweatman, as made in his fabulous book, Prehistory Decoded.
Dr. Sweatman has done our planet and history a tremendous favor by writing Prehistory Decoded. By employing the hard science of probability, he has managed to demystify the world’s very earliest and most mysterious art.
Prehistory Decoded begins by documenting Sweatman’s initial discovery, reported worldwide in 2015, of an empirical method for decoding the world’s first art using pattern matching and statistics. Guess what? The code is a memorial and date stamp for our favorite subject here: the Younger Dryas Catastrophe, and its associated Taurid meteor traumas.
Sweatman has managed to produce a synthesis explanation for the previously indecipherable succession of artistic animal figures at Gobekeli Tepe in Turkey, Chauvet Cave in France, Lascaux Cave in France, and Çatalhöyük in Turkey, among others. Unsurprisingly to the open minded, the ancient artists are communicating using a universally handy and persistent reference set: Stars. Or, more precisely, the appearance of constellations as adjusted over time according earth’s precession.
(Don’t you love the internet? One hyperlink and no need to explain all that!)
It seems reasonable then to the Tusk that, if there were a code, someone, somewhere, would break the code soon given the global availability and intense interest in the information. In fact, if I waited much longer without someone cracking it, the Tusk may have become convinced the oldest art is simply stunning cave paintings, and heavy carved rocks, with no relevant common narrative (other than horses are pretty, and moving rocks is cool).
But Earth is a big place and there are many, many very smart people. When you manage a globally relevant narrow-subject blog like the Tusk, you quickly realize that the sum of the intellectual power of those directly credentialed in the subject, pales when compared to the potential insights from just a couple of the millions and millions of other highly intelligent, non-experts on the planet.
In my experience, when there is a long-standing “mystery,” or an “unbreakable code,” to be explained, bet on an outsider to crack it first. (Unless the code itself is secret).
To my point, Martin Sweatman is a genius with credentials (here and here) not usually associated with art history — statistical probability, engineering and physics — and the intellectual mix of those fields turned out to be more important than the discipline generally relied upon as “expert.”
It is an odd assumption that only an archaeologist would be likely to add profound insight to Gobekli Tepe. Or only a Paleo-art historian could accurately decipher Chauvet Caves. If the message of these places is still a mystery, after decades of intense study, these folks have failed, right?
I recently had a long chat with Martin Sweatman, who has become something of a foxhole friend of mine. Like it or not, to the average brain, the statistical approach is not entirely intuitive, even if my intuition says he is dead right. So I needed some back-up.
Martin readily acknowledged that some assumptions needed to be made about the starting point for the exercise; for instance, which figure to match with which constellation. Like many problems, it must begin with a theorist making a intuitive “boot strap” assumption, a “hunch” if you will. And taking it from there to see if it yields useful, predictive information. Like winning a World War.
In this case, Sweatman’s first working assumption is that Scorpio is best represented at Gobekli Tepe by a Scopion. The constellations in proximity to Scorpio are then “best matched,” one by one, to the adjacent constellations, Lupus, Libra, Sagittarius, Pisces and so on. The best matches are consistent with the actual relative locations in the sky, and reveal the pillar to be a “star map,” based on constellations, just like thousands of others known from antiquity and modern times.
When the sky at Gobekli Tepe is examined for a match to a similar arrangement of the constellation at the equinoxes, it yields four possible dates in the last 20,000 years. Three of the dates, that are not our favorite date, including the recent 2000 AD, are ruled out by an ingenious reference legend at the top of the Pillar adjacent to the ever fascinating ‘handbags’ (which are to Martin simple sunsets).
Before I purchased the book, I presumed it would focus overwhelmingly on the pattern matching exercise and what it revealed, and would only reference the work of the Younger Dryas Boundary publishing team as needed. But Sweatman surprised me, and included a well-researched and desperately needed examination and comparison of evidence in the last decade’s YDB publishing battle, while also placing that shameful affair within the larger centennial context of Catastrophism versus Gradualism.
This is perhaps what is most impressive aspect to me personally, the book not only makes a shocking claim (based on empirical evidence) but expertly clarifies the larger ideological battle which haunts the empirical evidence of ancient catastrophes.
Read more at CosmicTusk.com
Pick up your copy of Prehistory decoded today!
Kontakt – assumendo cialis. Viagra wird eine echte Unlooked-for bieten! Con Cialis, questo è facile – Guida Comprare Il Viagra. Cialis con consulenza qualificata.
