Prehistory Decoded

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Although I could entertain his, and Burley’s, view that the circle symbol on this pillar hovering above the vulture/eagle’s wing might represent the sun and therefore encode a date using precession of the equinoxes, I knew it could not represent the sun on the winter solstice as they both suggested. This was because the date implied, around 2000 AD, made no sense at all. Why would the people of Göbekli Tepe be interested in a date so far into their future? They had far more pressing concerns in their own time. The vase on the bottom was recovered from the grave of an important person, perhaps a warrior-king, in ancient Abydos. The animal symbols on this vase, which have some resemblance to an early form of hieroglyphics, have led Egyptologists to interpret it as belonging to the mythical ‘Scorpion King’, one of a succession of warlords thought to be responsible for uniting Upper and Lower pre-dynastic Egypt. This is because the hawk (or Horus) symbol at the top is often found preceding the name of a King, or Pharaoh, in dynastic times. Oh my. There is every reason to assume otherwise. For example, Martin’s statistical analysis of Pillar 43 depends in part on Pisces matching the “bent bird” more closely than any other possible animal figure. But how do the three birds on Pillar 38 (two “tall birds” and one completely different bird) match that asterism, in a context which is also explicitly treated as a sky map? And in what kind of script, proto or otherwise, does A=AAB?

M.B. Sweatman and S. Coombs, ‘Decoding European Palaeolithic art: Extremely ancient knowledge of precession of the equinoxes’, Athens J. History 5, 1 (2019). M.B. Sweatman, R. Fartaria and L. Lue, ‘Cluster formation in fluids with competing short-range and long-range interactions’, J. Chem. Phys. 140, 124508 (2014). M.B. Sweatman and L. Lue, ‘The cluster vapour to cluster solid transition’, J. Chem. Phys. 144, 171102 (2016).

Journal papers

Furthermore, symbolism on the pillars indicates that the long-term changes in Earth’s rotational axis was recorded at this time using an early form of writing, and that Gȍbekli Tepe was an observatory for meteors and comets. M.B. Sweatman, ‘Weighted density functional theory for simple fluids: Supercritical adsorption of a Lennard-Jones fluid in an ideal slit pore’, Phys. Rev. E 63, 031102 (2001). Possibly the most devastating cosmic impact since the extinction of the dinosaurs, it appears to coincide with major shifts in how human societies organised themselves, researchers say.

A. Atamas, M.V. Koudriachova, S.W. de Leeuw, and M.B. Sweatman, ‘Monte-Carlo calculations of the free energy of ice-like structures using the self-referential method’, Mol. Sim. 37, 284-292 (2011). You know, in archaeology we are not allowed to decide that a lion is an ibex, or a fox is an aurochs, just for the convenience of a pet hypothesis. But the wider importance of this error will become clear below, when we look at Sweatman’s treatment of Catal Huyuk. And suddenly, aurochs equals bison equals Capricornus. Sweatman even explicitly permits himself to make no distinction between aurochs and bison in his later statistical test; however, the Paleolithic peoples clearly did make the distinction, as both aurochs and bison images are present together in many of the caves he uses. Do both represent Capricornus, even when they occur in the same cave? Bear in mind also that aurochs=Capricornus is a junk identification based on an error, carried forward from the GT paper.

Book Chapters

M.B. Sweatman, A.A. Atamas and J.M. Leyssale, ‘The self-referential method combined with thermodynamic integration’, J. Chem. Phys. 128, 064102 (2008).

Sweatman’s analysis focuses on the so-called “shrines,” actually the decorated living rooms of some domestic structures, separated from the rooms devoted to food preparation and storage. They were also where the bodies were buried—literally, under the floor. Common decorations were wall paintings and installations incorporating horns, animal skulls and teeth, and high-relief plaster effigies of leopards, bucrania, and a “splayed” figure now interpreted as a stylized bear. The people of Gobekli Tepe in present-day southern Turkey, whose ancestors witnessed this catastrophe, built a megalithic monument formed of many hammer-shaped pillars decorated with symbols as a memorial to this terrible event. Before long, they also invented agriculture, and their new farming culture spread rapidly across the continent, signalling the arrival of civilisation. According to our ancient zodiac, these symbols represent Capricornus, Libra, Taurus and Leo respectively. Together, they provide a date for this scene somewhere between 15,300 to 15,000 BC, which is a far more precise and more accurate date range than that obtained by other methods. However, they are being selective, and fail to mention that one of the other samples at 1.51 m does exhibit a platinum anomaly. We only find this out by looking carefully at their raw measurements hidden in the supplementary materials.Since it was proposed in 2007, the theory about the catastrophic comet strike has been the subject of heated debate and much academic research. Now, researchers from the University of Edinburgh have reviewed evidence assessing the likelihood that an impact took place, and how the event may have unfolded. Martin interprets this image in three significantly different ways. First as a wolf, identified as the constellation Lupus, one of the eight figures on Pillar 43 that form the foundation of his statistical analysis. Second, as a fox, which he equates with the northern asterism of Aquarius, and uses as one link of a tangled chain of logic that ultimately verifies the importance of the Taurid meteor stream to the Gobekli Tepe astronomers. Third, he interprets a damaged image on Pillar 38 as an aurochs, also a critical element in the Taurid-radiant argument, and doubles down on that identification in his rebuttal: Analysis of ancient lake-bed sediments from a lake in the Czech Republic, with approximately 10-year resolution, supports this view [7]. A layer of Laacher See tephra underlies a layer of Younger Dryas boundary microspherules at a depth in these lake sediments equivalent to a difference of around 100 years. And, again, no significant cooling is observed immediately following the tephra abundance, while significant cooling accompanies the microspherules.