Arcadia Discussion Zone

if this has been discussed before sorry
Imagine such an age that it is still thousands of years to the discovery of metal and that the best cutting tool available is made of a piece of flintstone, with which you will hack 25-ton obelisks out of the bedrock and, carving those frightful animal figures on them, drag them here and erect them. We are talking about a project that required the simultaneous toil of two thousand men, a project so big for its time as to be considered gargantuan.
http://www.balkantravellers.com/en/read/article/1029



http://www.google.com/imgres?hl=en&client=firefox-a&sa=X&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&biw=1600&bih=770&tbm=isch&prmd=imvns&tbnid=wKR68EVARxa5AM:&imgrefurl=http://www.earthfiles.com/news.php%3FID%3D1984&docid=vpCVH8uJYPaB8M&imgurl=http://www.earthfiles.com/images/news/T/TurkeyGobekliNightTimeURFAlights.jpg&w=504&h=401&ei=-kMEUI60F4es2gW3pJCoCw&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=1242&vpy=172&dur=653&hovh=200&hovw=252&tx=102&ty=113&sig=116854777030425544150&page=1&tbnh=134&tbnw=170&start=0&ndsp=32&ved=1t:429,r:14,s:0,i:119

Was just watching this documentary yesterday on the same subject.

[url][url]http://www.1channel.ch/watch-2732497-Gobeklitepe-The-Worlds-First-Temple[/url][/url]

Pretty good, but no subtitles for when the Turkish experts were speaking.

Reminds me very much of the Taula precincts that are peculiar to the island of Menorca in the Mediterranean.

The Taulas (tow-oolahs, tables in Menorquin) are late bronze age - much more recent by about 8,000 years!

I might do a thread on the Taulas.

Thanks Hayward for the link and
Whoop fascinating picture
I just feel that history is missing an important link
that Ancient man was much more sophisticated than he gets credit for

Lov, I have a teacher who claims to only work with humanity as it has existed for the last 35,000 years or so. I think he's being a bit conservative. If you met a man or woman from 200,000 years ago he or she would look and act very much like you or I.

We would find ways of communicating, of laughing and sharing and exploring our knowledge together. We only have to look at documentaries today of westerners living with tribes that have not had contact with the rest of the world to see how the dynamic works.

In some ways we are far more advanced and sophisticated. I can program microcontroller chips for instance and tell them to do things like flashing LEDs that would appear to be pure magic to our tribal members (I make magic tricks as a hobby).

Did the ancients possess knowledge that has since been lost to us that astounds us? We like to think not. Yet the appeal of the ancient stone monuments that exist all around the planet, in every continent, do astound us, because we cannot understand how they made what they did. The stones are huge. They fit together extremely well in many cases. They are clearly man-made artifacts, yet we cannot explain how they erected or planned such structures, let alone move the stones great distances in the first place.

In terms of natural medicine the ancients possibly knew more than we do today. The Arabs have long known about antibiotics. The didn't know it was antibiotics, they just knew from experience that the sweat from camels formed a fungus on the saddles that would cure some ailments. They put two and two together, scraped the gook off the saddles and kept it for future use. They didn't know how it worked, just knew it did and that was enough. Maybe they knew that willow extract was good for headaches and pains. They didn't know they were using aspirin or the mechanism that made it work, why should they need to?

I am an expert I suppose on the little known megalithic structures of Menorca, because my family had a house there for over 35 years. I spent days crawling over every ruin I could find, from the age of about 17 onwards. I had to go by talking to farmers and asking them what they knew. Very little was on a map of any kind. I would search fields full of cacti and thorns in the burning sun. Sometimes I would find nothing, until one day there I found it, hidden for thousands of years. I went down bronze age wells, with steps cut all the way down into the ground with bats flying around my head. I crawled along long tunnels with a torch, only to have to back out inch by inch. I found much more recent things, like ruined Roman temples, with mosaics floors you could pick up and take home. I never took anything, always left it. I did take fragments of bronze age pottery, which there was a huge amount of lying about. 4,000 year old fingerprints in the clay.

One thing unique to Menorca are navetas, so called because they are shaped a little like upturned boats. They were filled with ancestral skulls and bones. The stones are massive and fit together just like those stones in Peru, barely a gap between them. How they did it is a mystery.

There's a cave in Menorca that was found with thousands of skulls in it. The local people went out of curiosity and just about every local person I know has one of these skulls either in the house or the garden.



No we don't know the sophistication of these ancient people. But their monuments testify to a collective effort in a common purpose that shows a dedication beyond anything we can comprehend today. We can read into it tales of gods, beliefs and knowledge of the heavens but mostly we simply do not know.

absolutely yes.



How amazing...way to go!

That was a very good post to read, and sent me reaching for my "Megalithic European" (J Cope) to look at the Menorca section.



I know, it's quite mind boggling, impossible to comprehend, really. I don't think we'll ever know. I just wonder how the knowledge got lost.

You and I are on the same line of thinking Whoop
I so agree that from what is left Mankind had some sophisticated knowledge ...
I think Plato had the idea that we have had many ancient civilizations which encounterred cataclysms that pushed mankind back to survival mode
Atlantis call it or any other name
Menorca obelisk

It does look like the Gobeklitepe Obelisks

now Stonhenge and Avebury have that similiar structure of circle like and stones placed in certain positions in the circle
maybe not the sophisticated cutting like Menorca is 2000 BC and Stonhenge is 2200BC about

Gobeklitepe is 12ooo years old....

I had a friend who was a coal miner in Pennsylvania and he told me as you go down into the mines each strata of Earth was dated so many year
In his diggings he found a tooth from a sable tooth tiger

He showed me the tooth

He told me that the miners found things at depths where the age of the world was very old and man didn't really exist ...they found a doll at that depth
the doll was taken by the owners but nothing was said and no publications in the paper
In other words these things were confiscated and the public never told
In America we have a group called the Christian Right which are politically very strong and our Presidents and government has been influenced
by this religious group...
I'm just giving an example of how the Truth is suppressed from the public

An age of 4.55 ± 1.5% billion years, very close to today's accepted age, was determined by C.C. Patterson using uranium-lead isotope dating (specifically lead-lead dating) on several meteorites including the Canyon Diablo meteorite and published in 1956

We just discovered that in 1956

for along time it was the Bible who told us how old the Earth was and in some cases it still does
To give an example of suppression of truth to the public at the Grand Canyon Nat Park the rangers were told not to tell the public how old the Grand Canyon is for fear of upsetting the Creationists
The Creationists believe that the Canyon different layers of rock was due to the Great Flood of Noah

Now that Taula is called the Taula of Torralba d'en Salort. It was unexcavated and on an unmade road that was difficult to drive down. I had an old Peugeot moped that I drove quite illegally for a number of years and would visit it every year.

I once had a picnic lunch on Boxing day, the day after Christmas, actually sat on top of that stone. My mother took a picture of me doing so, I wonder where the picture is now?

In those days the level of the soil was about a third of the way up the main stem. There was a rock someone had put at the bottom and you could use those two holes cut in the spine to climb on top. It wasn't easy but a lot of people did it. It's impossible today. An English university dug it all in the 1970s. It is now a main tourist attraction, with space for buses to park and I think they even charge to look at it.

They found a bronze bull in there somewhere and I think they found the place where it's foot was broken off, set in a stone.

There are some good stones to be seen standing in the next field to the south. This is also where the bronze age well is. It has steps cut all the way down to the bottom and a sophisticated drainage channel for the water to run down without wetting the steps. It has long been closed off to anyone, but in the old days you would walk up to the farmhouse, the dogs would bark and the man would come out. If you asked him he would let you go and look at what was in his fields.

Menorca in the 1960s and 70s was a delight. Nobody ever locked their front doors, everyone knew everyone. You didn't knock on someone's door, you went straight in and shouted for them. It didn't matter if they were half naked. It was disconcerting at first when people came into your house unannounced, but actually the trust and respect everyone had was a beautiful thing.

A sophisticated jungle telegraph operated where news seemed to travel invisibly across the island within minutes. The island is only about 25 miles end to end and about 11 miles wide at the widest point. I once witnessed a horrendous car accident and by the time I drove to my village they already knew.

There were no telephones, but you could go to the main telegraph office in Mahon (where mayonnaise, mahonesa, was invented). You would queue on the stairs to make a telephone call. You would give the number to the operator who would make the call and hand you a handset. There was a bank of car batteries on the wall that powered the system - the main electricity was so unreliable. It would take you about an hour to make a simple call and you did it in full view of the people behind the desk and the people queuing on the stairs.

There was very little in the way of the Guardia Civil state police. They tried to recruit locals but nobody would join, on the grounds they would almost certainly know the person they were dealing with and it would cause family problems. Everyone is related, the main families being Pons, Carreras, Jordi and a few others.

There were no traffic lights - I remember the first one in Ciutadella being installed. People drove there just to look at it this wonder.

If you were walking anywhere, people would stop and offer a ride, as a matter of course. There are many times I arrived back home many hours later, having been invited in to share a 'quick' refreshment at a person's house, which turned into a meal and more drinks and story-telling and lots of back-slapping and laughter. A very drunken man would eventually drive you home, probably with a dozen eggs, some fresh fruit including a whole watermelon, some local cheese and bottle of home-made pomada, which is made from fresh lemons and gin. Easy to drink but lethal.

I remember that I could buy a whole tumbler of local gin for 3 pesetas, whereas a fizzy drink like coca-cola or tonic water was 15 pesetas.

In Franco's day it was oppressive too. Nobody was allowed on any beach after dark. There was still segregated male and female bathing. Bikinis were frowned upon. You had to be well dressed in the towns.

The death of Franco, corrupt left wing politicians taking massive bribes to develop holiday complexes and Spain's entry to the EEC led to rapid development. People got rich in Barcelona and started buying holiday homes too. They brought with them crime, drugs and delinquency. The doors got locked. Bars went up at windows. A part of me died.

Menorca is still fiercely independent. It has its own language, which is emphatically not the same as Catalan. It is not the same as the dialect spoken in Majorca either. It has a lot of Arabic words in it and is very guttural. Speak some of this and you are friends for life.

During the Spanish civil war Menorca opposed Franco's troops. The soldiers of course took over the island. They also requisitioned all the cars. One farmer had a car but would not say where it was. They beat him and bullied him but he still wouldn't say where he'd hidden it.

There is a paved Roman Road leading up the island's second largest steep hill, Santa Agueda. Almost at the top of this steep climb there is a small stone shed where he hid the car. They found it, pulled the car out of the shed and there it still stands today where they burned it in 1936. How he got it up there remains a mystery. A hot air balloon would be my best guess. There is no way he drove it up there. Maybe on a donkey cart, but how would it get up the stepped parts, which are very steep in places.