Saturday, November 15, 2008

Oldest Temple Found

11,500 years old. That's the age of a temple found in Turkey. It predates domestication and agriculture. Thus, it was set up by tribalist people, hunter-gatherers. This is a group who moved from tribalist into egoist psychology and social structure, which then led to settlement behaviors. It's quite an insight into human psychological and social development and emergence that it is what seems to have led to settlements, and not the other way around. I personally am not surprised, as I have argued elsewhere that the social order emerges out of the psychological order, as the social order is a spontaneous order which develops out of the kinds of entities that make it up. You have to have a high enough percentage of a psychological level to get a new social level.

1 comment:

John said...

It's too bad that under UNESCO regulations everything found on that site will be property of the Turkish government, despite the fact that the society that constructed it probably had no more in common with the present day Turks than, say, Eskimos, Basques, or Taiwanese do. Of course, Turkish scholars may well put their nationalist agenda aside (hopefully teaching the Chinese, Italians and Greeks a lesson), given the importance of the find, but this would be bucking a 40+ year trend in worldwide archaeology backed by the U.N.