Five years after the publication of The Evolution, the second and final instalment…
Coming in 2019.
Egypt
Quite frankly I wouldn’t be surprised – human sacrifice appears to have been a worldwide phenomenon. However, one of my areas of research is how the human sacrifice interpretation of many ancient skeletons may well be wrong, and more or less used as a cop-out when no other evidence is apparent. For example, if a skeleton shows signs of damage caused by another human, it doesn’t automatically mean the person was sacrificed. There is often no such evidence that a sacrifice has taken place, so I believe there is major overkill on the sacrifice rhetoric.
It’s the same with the term “ritual”, which has the same connotation – if archaeologists don’t understand what’s going on with a particular burial, for example, does that automatically mean a ritual has taken place?
We need to be very careful about how we interpret burials and other such findings. There is no doubt that human sacrifice was widely practised all over the world, but is it as prevalent as we are led to believe? Cannibalism is seriously overlooked as an explanation, mainly because of the psychological implications. Disease, long term illness, and intense pain may be other reasons why a person might be “put to death” – it doesn’t have to be a sacrifice.
Anyway, this interesting and detailed article looks at the possibility of human sacrifice in ancient Egypt.
http://www.asor.org/anetoday/2018/08/Ancient-Egypt-Sacrifice
Israel
Of course I’m going to start with a moan!
This article, which was formed using the original, and thus copied the same report, suggests the same rhetoric that we are hearing constantly. I like the way the writer of this article is clear to see, as if she had done her own research into this. No, she’s just copying from someone else, without checking any real facts. Modern journalism is nothing more than that – copying other articles without reporting objectively.
The story goes like this – until recently the text books stated hunter-gatherers left the fields around 5,000 years ago and started building cities (including pyramids which we couldn’t build today, as if farming contained the evolutionary jump required to apply complex mathematics, geometry and engineering!)
Now we are at the point where discoveries of various sites like Gobekli Tepe have pushed that date back another 7,000 years. So what we now read is the same rhetoric – “This site was built at the time hunter-gatherers were starting to change from farming to building” e.g. Quite frankly it’s a joke! That very same sentence is now being employed for articles like the one here, and like most other ridiculous theories they don’t change the theory itself, they just change the dates!
It’s clear to me after 30 years of research that the models are just plain wrong, and when archaeologists have to double the date of one of the most important phases of human evolution, you’ve just got to admit the model is completely wrong in the first place.
I think it’s becoming more and more clear that there was an advanced civilisation that was destroyed when sea levels rose, and at that point humans lost their technology and had to start again. I do not believe for one second that there has been a steady evolution from cave man to space in ten thousand years.
Slowly but surely that is changing as more discoveries like the one in this article come to light.