So hot! So sexay! Mmm, baby! Could it *be *any more smutty? I hear coneheads are the latest fetish!
My point being - many paleolithic figurines are so stylized that it’s really hard to see anyone getting off on them. Although - there’s a fetish for everyone, I guess (pun intended)
Are you saying modern porn is any more realistic? Just because they distorted the female form in a different way than we do, doesn’t mean they’re distorting it more.
Not just modern porn, either - everything from the Moche pottery to Edo period shunga to Indian temple sculpture to whatever’s on Pornhub is much , *much *more realistic than what I linked to.
That’s not distorting, that’s abstraction. Hyper-abstraction, for a lot of it. Did you actually *look *at the examples I linked to? *Picasso *would look at those and go “Errm, maybe a bit tooo abstract…”
Go on, show me some -any - modern abstract porn like that…not art, unquestionable porn.
I am with you up to and including point #5 which I especially agree with.
Point 6 is in fact a big leap. Knowing nothing of substance about either culture you have nothing to base even a guess on.
Point 7 assumes that the behaviours of an isolated group of island dwellers can be extrapolated to the wider human population. It can’t.
Point 8 is absolutely correct. We can also theorize that gigantic kitty cats buried the structure under so much litter. We can theorize that but theorizing doesn’t make it true.
I*f anything, a discovery by Israeli archaeologists suggests the Göbekli Tepe construction project was even more complex than previously thought, and required an amount of planning and resources thought to be impossible for those times. Their study of the three oldest stone enclosures at Göbekli Tepe has revealed a hidden geometric pattern, specifically an equilateral triangle, underlying the entire architectural plan of these structures.
This implies that, in contrast to the prevailing assumption among Göbekli researchers until now, these three circles were planned as a single unit and possibly built at the same time, say archaeologists Gil Haklay and Avi Gopher of Tel Aviv University.*
Interesting and rather odd article.
How does that geometrical shape mean that the builders wanted to crystalize a less equal society?
What about dogs?
Yes, there might have been a halfway when we followed prey herds at arm’s length, the transition from hunter-gatherer to pastoralism might have been a smooth one.
What? Haven’t you seen hierarchical pyramids showing management structure in corporations, or feudal hierarchies?
Diagrams like these are very popular in Powerpoint presentations. 
What other significance could a triangle possibly have? Obviously those hunter-gatherers must have used the location for corporate team-building events.
Sure, it’s totally against their world view. Because hunter-gatherers are like new-age hippy types, man. They are into that whole ‘one with nature’ thing and all that.
It would be against their principles to like, you know, domesticate animals. They are into that whole conservation thing, no cruelty to animals, vegan diet, and yoga. They don’t believe in selfishly using animals.
But some guy got the idea that he would be the boss. So he laid out that whole place in a triangle to show them the idea of hierarchies, and employed them on zero-hour contracts. That’s how they got converted to agriculturists, man. That is the scientific conclusion.
On a different note, and in a slightly off-topic direction, have you seen the Australian Aboriginal movie Ten Canoes (2006)?
It’s probably the best movie ever made about hunter-gatherers, and certainly the most entertaining. It gives a real insight.
Reading the last year’s worth of posts, I’m not sure if Gobekle Tepe is on or off topic in this thread any longer :), but there was just a good Skeptoid on it:
Also rereading, I want to question a claim made earlier: That porn has been ubiquitous throughout human history and even prehistory.
Are there clear examples of “porn” before, say, the Bronze Age?
I think some people consider the various Venus figurines, found throughout Eurasia, to be porn. Could be, but likely we’ll never know for sure what their purpose was.
Have you *read *the thread. Hell, just read this page.
What’s so amazing about equilateral triangles? They are one of the most basic geometric shapes.
And there’s a bit of a leap there - just because 3 buildings have a geometric relationship does not mean they were built at the same time, or planned that way.
I could come and build a second building 100 years later at distance X. And when Og comes along another century later, he wants to build his Big Man monument equidistant from both of ours…and there’s only one geometric figure that supports that, quite organically. Not by chance, but not one big plan, either. That’s equally as plausible.
But even if they were built at the same time - this would be in line with the current thinking that it was a cultic site, anyway.
The difficulty with “clear examples of bronze-age porn” is that, any time anyone finds any, someone says “How do we know it’s porn? There’s no evidence that bronze-age people had porn”. The only way to settle it would be to ask the sculptor, which is of course impossible. The default assumption should rather be that people in different times and places are mostly similar, and ask what evidence there is that they didn’t have porn.
They had dogs. They predate other domesticated animals by at least twenty thousand years. They were camp-followers for probably tens of thousands of years before ever being “bred” for specific purposes. Because they are social hunters it was a simple transition to helping humans with hunting. On the other hand they’ve never been really good at gathering.
Maybe. But we are now removed from the previously ubiquitous human sense that the numinous is everywhere, that sexuality is holy and potentially dangerous, and that women hold a (dark) power men don’t have. If we are reduced to depictions of women with breasts = porn, I believe we’ve reached the ultimate shallows of patriarchal reductionist interpretation of the past.
Note I am not saying words like matriarchy, or harmony with all life. No need to go there.
I’m hoping to be educated; hence my question.
There are various reasons why “primitive” societies might not need or want porn: more intimate social life, lack of boredom or leisure, dramatically different morality and class structures. (We’ll also need a definition of porn: Are classical nude statues porn?)
Maybe the question is unanswerable. But circularity is unacceptable. We have the claim, paraphrased, that the Venus figurines were probably porn, because porn was common in the Stone Age. And now I read that the claim that porn was common in the Stone Age is based on the Venus figurines! Figurines whose consistency is at odds with the notion of opportunistic “porn.”
Again, I apologize for not knowing the Latin expression for such circular reasoning.
(Admittedly prehistoric “magic” was fuzzy; and sexuality and religion might share an umbrella.)
I don’t need a cite for porn being ubiquitous during the 20th century! Maybe you can provide much evidence for the Middle Ages and even the early Iron Age. But to extrapolate from the commonness of porn in modern times or even the Iron Age to the assumption that it was common in the Early Stone Age strikes me as excessive leaping.
Plus equilateral triangles are stable.
Besides, for all we know, they were placed that way because they thought it looked the best or thought the gods would appreciate that shape.
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