12,000 year old megalith circles turn knowledge of ancient humans upside down

[zoobyshoe]

I recall reading in at least two places that the inner rings, once encircled, were entered by a ladder from the roof - or open top, as it were.

Equally if not even more shocking to our modern sensibilities, I think most if not all the apartments at the later, full-bore city site of Catal Huyuk were entered in the same odd manner, from above. Like you, I am fascinated by this ancient culture, but not in any hurry to change places with them. There were working to a very strict plan. One with little thought for convenience, it would seem. Although the outer galleries of the rings might be decent places to store food.

Respectfully,
Steve

Now that you mention the ladder, I recall that the Hopi have a ceremonial structure that can only be entered the same way.

You're right that, once you step outside your own culture and times there's no telling what easily cured inconveniences other people take for granted and perpetuate with no thought of changing them.

 

[Evo]

Looking at this I am suddenly surprised to realize there is no way into the center. If you walk in through the very narrow entrance you are required to go left or right around a circle, or, into the completely mysterious dead end on the right, but there is no way into the center.

Bizarre. if the drawing is accurate, it appears you can't really go right either as you are blocked where the first inner wall starts.

It doesn't look like people could even see into the center by standing on the lower part of the outer wall that juts out.

In the documentary they showed a portal in one side of an outer wall carved from a single stone block, so they had the knowledge and abilty to have entries. So this might mean that the inner completely walled section might be for storage of something that wouldn't allow a door?

 

[zoobyshoe]

Bizarre. if the drawing is accurate, it appears you can't really go right either as you are blocked where the first inner wall starts.

You're right! I didn't notice that blocking wall in the shadow.

In the documentary they showed a portal in one side of an outer wall carved from a single stone block, so they had the knowledge and abilty to have entries. So this might mean that the inner completely walled section might be for storage of something that wouldn't allow a door?

I can't make heads or tails of it: you have this long, dramatic entrance corridor, that was not any easier to build than any other part of it, but which seems to lead no where important.

 

[eloheim]

This is a common misconception, but the notion that medievals thought the Earth was flat is a modern American myth. The anti-clerical Washington Irving, among others, perpetuated this myth as an attack on the "idiocy" of the organized religion.

Sorry to keep a little off topic, but I always heard that sailors knew well the Earth was curved because a ship coming over the horizon can be seen first by the tip of its sail, and then the rest comes up into view.

 

[PhilDSP]

Assuming the models are more or less accurate, they show how 'un-geometric' these things were. The layout has a Hundertwasser feel to it, naive and childlike:

http://www.masterworksfineart.com/inventory/hundertwasser/

That's an intriguing observation but isn't it very culturally conditioned? To me, it seems the introduction of geometry into art fairly well destroys the subtle aspects of art. Especially in music, geometry forces too much predictability and gives art a sterile, formal and inhuman, inorganic structure. Artistic masters often use pattern or small pieces of pattern combined in ways that are somehow integrated in a larger sense to produce masterpieces.