9 Comments
Nov 17, 2022Liked by Stone Age Herbalist

Skull cults, human sacrifice, ritual de-fleshing of victims? Once again, it looks like Robert E. Howard is turning out to be a better guide to human history than the hippie anthropologist who taught me back in the 1960's and 70's. Conan the Barbarian, please pick up the white courtesy phone...

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Fascinating stuff. Quite apart from the scientific interest, there's a rich vein of material here that could be mined for a historical fantasy setting.

Are you familiar with Martin Sweatman's suggestion that Gobekli Tepe was a record of a cometary assault on the Earth? Obviously that's considered fringe in archeology, but I'm curious what your thoughts are on that speculation.

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Nov 18, 2022Liked by Stone Age Herbalist

They honored the dead by removing the skull. Later groups put the other dried bones in a circular building. Its part of the early bird religion. Fascinating discovery

Gobeli Tepe is a library a star map showing the eqinoxes and solstices that came before the Ice Age Dryad period that shoved all the living into the levant. The Germans have many of the gigantic T shaped maps to protect them from ISIS. Gobeli Tepe should be a world heritage site but not going happen in a war torn region

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Excellent piece. I've read about these things in isolation at different times, but it's great to have them brought into context so I can start to wrap my head around them in relationship to one another. Look forward to Part 2.

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Just found out my Amhara tribe of Abyssinia is ~40% Natufian-like (Stone Age West Asian), ~10% Bronze Age West Asian, and ~50% Nilotic.

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Nov 18, 2022Liked by Stone Age Herbalist

Great piece! Looking forward to part 2, and hoping there will be a part 3 where you compare New World skull cults.

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I came because I wanted to ask how to send you an email to ask about the Cormac McCarthy piece you did for Issue 4 of Man's World. I stayed because you are always worth reading. Speaking of McCarthy, in reading this I couldn't help but thin of the epigraph from Blood Meridian, " a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skill found in the same region earlier shows evidence of having been scalped." Anyway, is there a way to email or DM you?

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