Dave, please re-refer to the long data and analysis list I just provided a few comments ago. It is not specific to Catalhuyuk. It relates to all of Paleolithic life around the world from 2.5 million years ago to about 10K years ago. Catalhuyuk is actually a part of the Neolithic period, just after the Paleolithic. The archeological information we have about that particular settlement is only one piece in the larger picture, although it is a very compelling one because it demonstrates that for several thousand years, even the first settlements (of which Catalhuyuk is one) kept to the same peaceful and egalitarian ways that their hunter-gatherer ancestors used as a survival strategy. If the world around them had always been violent and warlike, how could they then possibly have a settlement of 10,000 people living without defensive capabilities on an open plain with no weapons for 3 thousand years? It doesn’t make any kind of logical sense.
This is what I’m talking about. The science and the data and the logical synthesis of those is overwhelmingly compelling in the clear picture that they paint, so I don’t understand why there is still room for saying, “Well, we don’t really know. It could just as easily be the complete opposite.” No, it couldn’t! The only thing that explains that kind of response in the face of overwhelming scientific analysis of the data is an emotional resistance to something that challenges previously held beliefs.
Coming up with half-baked resistance in the face of all of this data, without any that substantively contradicts it is just not a rational way to go about deciding between what is highly likely and what is almost certainly impossible. I’ve never once said that any of this is 100% so (it’s just overwhelmingly likely) and yes, science is always changing, but unless your position is that we can never know anything about anything, then this resistance is just being silly and kind of argumentative.
When dealing with facts, and data, and science, all we can do is to assemble all the data points, over time, from a wide variety of sources, and make a determination based on what they tell us right now. If that changes significantly somehow, then yes, we alter our view. But that wasn’t your initial thesis. You were talking about opinions that are parading as facts, but when nearly all the data points in one direction and almost none points in the other, is it a mere opinion then to say that the place with overwhelming data is really still just an opinion?
Our understanding of gravity keeps changing, but does that mean that we can’t teach our understanding of gravity at all because it might not be static?
