History in the Remaking:
Archaeologist Klaus Schmidt and a team of 40 Kurdish diggers have unearthed a temple complex in Turkey that predates the pyramids, about 11,500 years old.
"Schmidt's thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grain and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city.
"Religion now appears so early in civilized life--earlier than civilized life, if Schmidt is correct--that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it, less a revelation than a genetic inheritance."
3 comments:
I loved this article and found it so interesting. Makes a lot of sense to me that seeking God was earlier in humankind's development.
I think I would be inclined to agree with the idea that there is a basic human religious impulse, which makes more sense than to suggest that religion is merely the product of culture.
I also find it interesting that there hasn't been any more buzz about this than this article in Newsweek; at least I haven't heard about any, not even on NPR.
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