Gavin Callaghan Wrote:
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> The Indus/Sumer connection, so fascinating to me,
> has been confirmed by numerous sources. Perhaps
> Heyerdahl was right, and civilization spread from
> Sumer to Indus to Easter Island to Caral in South
> America?
>
> All the ancient civilizations: Egypt, Indus,
> Sumer, Caral, Chinese, Malta, seem to have existed
> around the same time. It makes me wonder why they
> call Sumer the cradle of civilization? Seems to
> me civilization had many parents/starting-points.
> But since civilization seems to have started
> 12,000 years ago at Gobekli Tepe (10,000 B.C.) in
> Anatolia, I don't see how ANY of these sites can
> really qualify as the first staring point.
>
> [
www.smithsonianmag.com]
> gobekli-tepe.html
>
> [
en.wikipedia.org]
At this point, the question of Sumer is very much up in the air - the recent discoveries at Gobeki Tepi in South Turkey are being dated from 12 - 14,000 BC - much older than Sumer - and extremely sophisticated - too advanced clearly to have come from Stone Age hunter-gatherers - much was going on that we just don't know - especially when you something in Babylonian Cuneiform and it speaks of "the mighty men of old..." - The discoveries and hypotheses surrounding them that have emerged since 1990 (about the last opportunity anyone had of freely exploring in Iran) have turned the chronology of the ancient past on its head - it's a blast for me, since I hold the position as an Historian that anything the "regular" academic community opposes and rejects, must be right.
The history of "academe" says so quite clearly -