Re: Jomon References

On Sep 13, 9:01 am, "Digger" <p.du...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"J.LyonLayden" <JosephLay...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:1189684027.606863.187330@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I can't find a criticism for each theory in Urile's Machine, fo
instance. I find one or two articles with one or two refutations of
specific points in the book and then an archeologists saying.
"Therefore it's all hub-bub." What about the other 492 points they
made in the book? You have to disprove those too or we laymen will
think just an old cynical nay-sayer.

One MAJOR problem with the likes of Han*** is the way they present their
arguments.

Most good scientists/archaeologists/anthropologists will come up with a
hypothesis and, before publishing, they will research it in depth and even
attempt any number of things to knock their own hypothesis down. This is
called hypothesis testing. Only when they are certain that their ideas are
robust and will stand up to scrutiny will most of them go public with the
results. By going public I mean publishing. In the case of good scientists
this form of publishing will not involve the Discovery Channel, Tabloid
Newspapers or fancy websites. Normally they will publish their work in
professional journals so that it can be scrutinised by other professional
researchers.

So why not take the extra effort and market to the Discovery Channel
too, and therefore make some cashola?
I think Han*** gets away with alot of stuff because of the use of
"kept" terms in archeology and the slow process by which the
information filters down to the common public. Alot of those articles
that are available in the library (where does the 2.5 kid 9 to 5er
get the time to visit libraries, anyway?) or in a subscription service
(costs money and the layman only wants this one article), and on top
of that many of them are written in such a way as to make them only
readable by other professionals.

To many of us, the sheer fact that what is presented to us as fact
doesn't make sense, is evidence enough that the timeline is skewed. We
know that something is missing because things just don't add up with
the textbook timeline. So, not being able to find answers in history
books or readily available articles, we turn to the likes of fringers.
Though many of the fringers have wild unbelievable speculations, they
do have a gem here and there that begs further research, or at least
an acknowledgemental question that assures us that we're not the only
ones who realize that something just isn't right.

Maybe it would help if there were more of a conscious effort to
present articles to laymen in laymen terminology instead of archie
terminology.
For instance, when a text book says that agriculture started
independently and seperately in Korea at 15,000 and Turkey in 10,000
and mesopotamia in 8,000 then we think "How can that be?"
Then an archeologist says "Well it may have been an act of
desperation" but it still doesn't make sense to us because there were
other ice age ends during times when man as physiologically advanced
as he is today.

Wouldn't it be better to say that "The first evidence of SUSTAINED
agriculture was in Korea at 15,000?"

It makes us think that you are saying that there are no false starts.
Then low and behold after months of searching we find evidence of
agriculture or at least proto-agriculture of tubers on an island off
the coast of New Guinea at 29,000!
No one bothers to amend the encyclopedias or text books.

Here I am, seeing a sunken fertile land in the the Indonesian
archipelego, with rice agriculture spreading north from it and tuber
agriculture spreading south from it and pottery and sedentary fishing
villages spreading south-east from it and someone like Doug is telling
me that 130 meters plus Java's current elevation is not a mountain
(well it's a pretty damn big foothill then) and that no advanced
culture could have conceivably come from there.

Perhaps Han***'s wild speculations of electricity and crystal
telepathy have made such skeptics leary of the word "advanced," but I
don't make those claims. When I say advanced I just mean advanced,
nothing more.

At least Han*** recognizes things like that and points it out, though
he admittedly takes his derivitave speculations too far in the pursuit
of an agenda or a fat wallet.

Sure, the speculation that the reason why the neolithic revolution
happened in many places that are independent of each other within a
short period of time is because of alien influence or a pre-existent
knowledge from a world-wide former civilization is far-fetched.
However, alot of that speculation might be curbed if someone would say
"Sure, it came from pre-existent knowledge. It would be very hard for
man to gather plants for 180,000 years without realizing that when you
dig them up and through them somewhere, that they sometimes tend to
grow in the place you threw them as well as the place you got them
from. Sure, homo erectus could probably muster the ability to pick up
a stone and set it on top of another one, and we do realize that homes
are often built with the remains of other homes and that stacked
stones have a tendency to become unstacked over the course of
thousands of years- we just haven't found the evidence yet."

Then maybe when someone finds a 400,000 year old stone base hut in
Libya we aren't looking at the archeologists and saying "Told you so."



Now then, these journals are generally not in the public eye, but that does
NOT mean that they are somehow secret; not to be shared with the unwashed
masses. Any journal can be read by anybody who takes the time to find it.
That's what libraries are for! Heck, you can even find many of them on the
Internet!

Now, contrast this with the "fringers" like Han***. They will come up with
ideas that, very often, are completely untestable! How could you test
whether or not aliens have visited ancient civilisations? It is, of course,
impossible to disprove. This is where the problem comes in. The fringers
will then contest that because something can't be tested, it can't be
disproved and if it can't be disproved it must, therefore, be true! It's an
odd kind of logic but a logic that many employ when choosing what they want
to believe when presented with fragments of "knowledge" by the Discovery
Channel.

Han*** is, in my opinion, a genius. I think he knows exactly how people
employ this kind of logic and he, to his credit, has worked out how to earn
an awful lot of money by allowing them to do so.


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