RE: The Ancient Zodiac, and Prehistoric Understanding of Precession
This is fantastic. Thank you for sharing. I hadn't heard of Gobekli Tepe until now, even though it was discovered in 1994.It definitely calls into question the timeline that was formerly understood about civilization's origins and progress. There's very little doubt in my mind that people before that time were biologically similar enough to pull it off. My question to myself when learning of all this stuff was, if we ceased to evolve significantly as a species millions of years before this time that civilization supposedly emerged, why didn't it happen sooner? Well, your speculations here suppose that maybe it did, and we just haven't learned of it yet.
There is also the possibility that the cataclysm that immediately preceded this emergence of civilization sharpened the collective intellect of the gene pool that survived it. This theory would go something like: The cataclysmic events killed off all but the most intellectually stout humans, and so with a small group of now exclusively intelligent humans left to rebuild the population, civilization was an inevitable consequence of this emergence.
It is beneficial to keep in mind that evolution is not a directed process. [Edit: Not naturally, anyway. Domestication is human directed evolutionary forces. It is acting on humanity. Prison is culling force on human evolution, for example, today.] It isn't directional. We aren't progressing towards a goal in evolutionary terms. It's just survival to breed, which is dependent on continually varying conditions, and in fact evolution can oscillate back and forth if evolutionary pressures do.
What is observed is that H. sapiens cranial capacity - brain size - has markedly decreased. Individual merit and intelligence is far more important in a non-social species like H. neanderthalensis than a eusocial species like H. sapiens. It seems to me that survival became higher for folks more willing to obey overlords in the conditions we have recently experienced as a species lately, and we observe that Neanderthals are extinct, despite their ~20% larger brains than we possess today. Cro Magnons, who immediately proceeded Neanderthals, and are our ancestors, had larger brains than Neanderthals.
Our ancestors were smarter than us, but that made society less controllable by overlords, and decreased societies' ability to wage war, as one potential reason for this decline in intelligence.
This is not the case. Evolutionary pressures remain in effect, they just vary continuously, and we don't necessarily know what they are. It is also not generally grasped that sometimes evolution happens in bulk, when cataclysm strikes. There is a tension between gradualist forces and catastrophic forces. Long term trends have effects that are suddenly countered, strengthened, or ignored by sudden and dramatic events like pandemics, geological, or political upheavals.
In biology, population spikes are a well noted phenomenon. Populations just don't rise exponentially to a plateau, and then remain at that higher level. When there's an exponential rise, there is inevitably an existential plummet. I sadly am confident this is something humanity will - again - experience, given our dramatic increase.
Genetic engineering and technology will present new evolutionary forces, and much of how that will impact humanity and life itself remains unclear to me. Once we escape Earth's corral, the limitless potential diversity of life will be unleashed completely, and wonders will never cease.
But, first we have to break free.
Thanks!