Is the Zodiac at GOBEKLI TEPE? | Pillar 43 and the Evidence for Constellations

for regular videos on ancient cultures and forgotten civilizations please subscribe if you would like to support the channel and become part of our ancient history fan community visit patreon.com slash world of antiquity a physicist has made a case that the symbols on pillars found at the archaeological site of gobekli tepe represent constellations an early form of the zodiac in today's video we're going to look at the evidence and see if this theory has legs myths of ancient history is aimed at dispelling common misconceptions about the past if you're interested in ancient history lost civilizations and secrets from antiquity i encourage you to subscribe to this channel because you will get plenty of that kind of material and if you find this particular video valuable please hit the like button and comment below with your favorite takeaway and feel free to ask any clarification questions that you may have my previous video on the origins of the zodiac provides some helpful background information for this one you don't have to go back and watch it first i tried to make this one so it can stand more or less on its own but i think it will make for a better overall experience if you watch it gobekli tepe is an archaeological site in south eastern turkey which comes from the late stone age the neolithic period so after the caves we were talking about in the last video but before the sumerian period and well before the first definitive evidence for the existence of the constellations of the zodiac in the late second millennium bce according to the claim that we're looking at today the symbols on one of the pillars at the site pillar 43 not only represent constellations but also indicate a date which the makers of the pillar recorded the promulgator of this hypothesis dr martin swetman wrote a book about this called prehistory decoded some articles and he has a youtube channel and website i hope he responds so that we can have a back and forth on this so far none of the makers of the various videos i've critiqued have responded but i think there's a greater chance that dr swetman will not only is he an academic and academics are usually inclined to defend their work but i've had conversations with him on twitter both publicly and by private message so maybe we'll get a public video discussion going that would be cool he did a five part video series which is based on his articles and on his book prehistory decoded i'm going to focus on his first and fifth videos because they deal directly with the issue of the appearance of the constellations of the zodiac at gobekli tapi and more generally the larger group of greco-roman constellations of which the zodiac is a small part i have nothing against dr swettman personally and he's been helpful to me when i reached out to him with clarification questions but i just want to say up front i haven't been persuaded and basically the point of this video is to explain why let's listen in as he recounts how he came to his conclusions for sake of time i can't include every part of his videos just the important points but i will provide the links to his videos below so that you can go watch them in full to make sure that i'm not doing him a disservice i'm martin swetman i'm a scientist at the university of edinburgh and in this series of videos i'm going to show you how we discovered a very ancient zodiac you may be curious what kind of scientist martin swettman is he's a chemical engineer with a phd in physics that expertise doesn't really come into play in this hypothesis but he does put his general knowledge of scientific principles to use not so much in the formulation of his hypothesis but in the defense of it so there are a lot of pillars at quebec tepe this is the the amazing thing about the site is is the pillars and the level of civilization or organization that they demonstrate um because clearly to have made these pillars to have carved them to transported them erected them and to have carved all these symbols that you can see on them requires a level of organization that was thought impossible for this this time the statement caught me by surprise i'm pretty darn sure that no archaeologist or historian ever said that the level of organization required to carve these pillars was impossible for this time it was a surprise to archaeologists it showed a greater skill than we had yet found for this period in this area we had to revise our understanding of the times as we do with every new discovery but this was never said to be impossible this is pillar 43 probably the most important artifact or ancient artifact in the whole world it's essentially our rosetta stone this is the the artifact that allowed us to decode quebec tepi you can see it's carved intricately with these various animal symbols and there are these handbag symbols at the top we'll see what they actually are later i discussed the so-called handbags on this pillar in michael peckley happy handbags video check it out when you get a chance but i'll discuss dr swetman's interpretation of the three handbags coming up probably if we can decode those animal symbols then we can understand what quebec is all about you see the animal symbols they don't appear to be random patterns they appear to be encoding some kind of information they appear to be telling a story i think we can all agree that the animals were not placed here randomly or in random patterns there no doubt was thought put into the depictions i don't see any indications that they're telling a story in that case i would expect to see content linking the various images together in an obvious order i also don't see what is indicating to dr swetman that they represent a code random patterns and code are not our only two choices of interpretation theories that have already been suggested both for these images and for other animal representations such as in cave art include that they were used in a mystical way to improve future hunting success or that they were used for shamanistic ritual we know the nearby natufian culture used animal remains in their shamanistic practices that being said i think it's entirely possible that these animal images could represent constellations it makes sense to me and as they are here at a sacred area i definitely can see people of this place seeing the constellations as gods animal gods in this case i don't know this for sure but i see it as a valid possibility so this is where i came in now i'm not an archaeologist but together with my colleague demetrius sacritsis who was a phd student at the time we managed to decode these animal symbols so we were able to understand the origin of civilization essentially wow this is quite a claim figuring out the meaning of the animal symbols enabled them essentially to understand the origin of civilization this is the first academic whom i've heard in my entire life that has made that claim and i've read a lot of books dr swettman is unabashedly placing himself at the top of the top scholars usually are wary of making overreaching assertions like this understanding the limitations of the knowledge we have and our own individual limitations it's wiser to be modest we may end up being embarrassed later on so we wrote this paper decoding back to tepe with archaea astronomy what does the fox say i've read the paper in preparation for this video and so i'll use it to clarify the statements that he makes in his videos when necessary i also wrote to dr swetman with clarification questions which he graciously answered i should make it clear right off the bat that the thesis of the paper is not simply that the images at gobekli tepe merely represent the sky on a specific date but that they make reference to a comet impact that dr swettman and his colleague demetrios tikritsis believe occurred around 10 950 bce the ruins of gobekli tepe have been carbon dated to 9600 to 8000 bce which is at least a thousand years later than that so if the pillar records the event it would suggest the inhabitants of the area still remembered it after a millennium that's a bit difficult to imagine if we compare the knowledge of other ancient societies even ones that had writing and this one did not they don't remember events a thousand years earlier very well at all you should also know that the comet impact hypothesis itself is controversial for our purposes we're focusing specifically on whether the zodiac that is the zodiac whose origins we were able to trace firmly only to about 500 bce in babylonia existed here thousands of years earlier actually not specifically the zodiac but the entire greek set of 48 constellations which we established last time to have been subsequent to the babylonian system so this too is controversial we won't at least in this video be going too far into the comet impact hypothesis only as far as necessary to discuss the greek constellation issue so what did we say in this paper we focused on pillar 43 that's the the key to understanding quebec tepee and therefore the key to understanding the origin of civilization i've been following um developments of quebec he said it was made public in about 2005 but i was none the wiser until i read graham hancock's book magicians of the gods i didn't know until i saw this that the germ of dr swetman's idea originated with graham hancock it turns out that dr swettman is a big fan of alternative history and lost high technology and this interest preceded his work on the subject so it would seem his efforts were intended from the beginning to establish the truth of lost advanced civilization this is not to say that i think this makes him automatically wrong oh no as i said i think it's perfectly feasible for the animals on the pillars to represent constellations i bring this up only so that you know that he has a horse in the race in fact in the paper he and sikritsis say at the outset that their hypothesis about the contents of the gobekli tepi pillars may be just the written confirmation of the comet impact that the comet impact theory needs the only problem is what we end up with is several controversial hypotheses being used to support another controversial hypothesis and in his book he suggested that the vulture or eagle symbol here represents the constellation sagittarius and that this scorpion symbol represents constellation scorpius and that this bending bird symbol with down wriggling fish might represent the constellation of futures although it's not quite in the right position and that set of correspondences or correlations looked intriguing to me i thought there could be something to it since his hypothesis is a revision of graham hancock's he begins with graham hancock's identifications he hasn't said it here yet but the circular object that the vulture is holding with its wing he identifies as the sun but the archaeologists who examine the pillar have identified this as a decapitated head and below you can see the body without the head the sun is unlikely to have been represented by a human head and it seems to me to be an integral part of the bird symbol rather than a separate symbol in other words the vulture is holding the head with its wing i can't help but be reminded of the sumerian vulture stila which more explicitly shows vultures feasting on human heads but there's even a more appropriate example at the site of chateau hoyok not too far away and also from the neolithic period we find hunting scenes painted on some of the walls and in them are vultures attacking headless humans but probably the best example of all is one from gobekli tepe itself where we see yes a vulture and just above its wing a human head now i'm not nitpicking when i dispute the identification of this image as the sun this is important because dr swetman believes that the positions of the symbols should be judged according to the relationship to the sun it absolutely must be the sun for his hypothesis to stand because if it's not he loses his stellar orientation as for the other animals the only one of these that matches with a known symbol of a classical constellation is the scorpion as scorpius in the bottom panel underneath the dividing line it's a shame that part of pillar 43 is covered up on the one side and also at the bottom on all the photos we find on the internet at least as far as i've seen i plan to visit there someday soon to see if i can get a better look in the meantime i would say our picture is both literally and metaphorically incomplete if this is a star map recording a date then it's essential that we know what all the symbols are anyway the scorpion symbol matches with the babylonian and greek symbol for scorpius so i would say if this is a constellation interpreting it as scorpius is entirely reasonable the other identifications he makes do not match known symbols for constellations having precedence would make his case stronger there are a number of avian constellations dr swetman could have chosen to associate with these bird symbols cygnus corvus aquila pisces which was a swallow in babylon but instead he associates them with constellations for which there is no evidence they were ever represented as birds now before you object i realized that in his view the symbols have to be associated with constellations that are in those positions in the sky but they don't have to be it's possible that these can be constellations without this being a map it could have conceptual rather than spatial significance i think it's important to make that point we could interpret these symbols by where they are situated on the pillar or we can interpret them according to what is being depicted is one approach superior to the other my inclination is to think the latter is superior simply because in this time period we already have evidence for conceptual imagery but we don't already have evidence that anyone was making star maps or recording dates by constellations but being the scientist that he is dr swetman prefers an interpretation that can be statistically calculated and my approach would not allow for that uh if only the human psyche could be understood mathematically attaining knowledge would be so much easier obviously it's not convincing as it is because with only three symbols that match to three constellations that could easily be a coincidence he's not clear about this in the video but when he says they match he means the lines and points of the constellation match the animal symbol and yes they could easily be a coincidence but when i look at them i'm not even seeing clear matches the problem with this exercise is how subjective it is this part is far from scientific as dr swetman basically admits the fact is the lines of the constellations are not ancient they're merely assumed no ancient document preserves them so why we're using them i don't know all we can say is that the ancient greeks saw this configuration of stars and saw a centaur with a bow and arrow we have a basic idea of what part of it was what but they never gave us lines and now if dr swetman wants to change it from a centaur to a vulture he's at liberty to change the lines between the stars however he likes and i could too to make it match with pretty much any animal i would like there's another problem there are animals that are depicted on the various pillars in different ways that is facing in different directions or different body positions that rules out the possibility that their design is meant to match a constellation so trying to match them to the points and lines of a constellation is a fruitless endeavor i think an approach that would give us more confidence is simply to match the known constellations with the known symbology he does that with the scorpion and that's the most convincing right i think we'd all agree but the other three identifications he provides don't match the known symbology and that for me is a problem why because if you want to argue for the existence of the classical constellations in this time period and in this region and i said this in my previous video then the more matching symbols you have the stronger your case but he only has one so far and if i recall he'll provide only one more example without matching symbols there's no way to verify that the classical asterisms existed here the people of gobekli tepe if they had constellations could very well have had different constellations different star arrangements and if you remember in my last video i showed you how it took a long time for the catalog of classical constellations to develop at least two separate systems were combined by the greeks and that was long after the time of gobekli tapi we know they got some of their constellations from the babylonians and we know they got other constellations from somewhere else not from the babylonians so the claim that the full greek catalog existed this far back is anachronistic the positions of the constellations are only significant if we have the correct constellation set but albeit unlikely let's continue with the assumptions dr swetman is making assuming that the people of gobekli tepe had a set of constellations closely resembling that of the greeks from thousands of years later and assuming that the arrangement on the pillar is representing the arrangement of the constellations in the sky and assuming that the circle on the vulture's wing is the sun and not a head or part of the vulture image then yes sagittarius is in the right spot but ophiuchus is not and then we got the problem of orientation scorpius is facing in the wrong direction now in the paper they make the point that quote it is possible the artists of pillar 43 did not intend to depict an accurate star map of the sky rather their intention was perhaps to provide a symbolic representation of the order and approximate placement of the constellations as they saw it sufficient to enable interpretation of pillar 43 unquote that may be true but when the placement of the constellations is a key support for your identifications imprecision weakens your case what concerns me is that he is giving himself considerable wiggle room before doing a statistical probability analysis making it more difficult for his hypothesis to be falsified so far just two constellations match in their positions in relation to the sun however starting from that idea i was able to go much further and decode the rest of the animal symbols of the becky tepee so for instance this duck or goose symbol at the bottom of pillar 43 looks rather like a constellation libra this dog or wolf symbol looks rather like constellation lupus and they're all in approximately the right position okay so he says upon these numerous assumptions he has the confidence to build further lupus as a dog or wolf is credible as it was one of the 48 constellations we inherited from the classical world and it was represented as a wolf it can also be traced back to babylon the only thing is this doesn't look like a wolf to me in fact when we compare it to the other foxes at gobekli tepe this seems to confirm that it's a fox for his purposes it doesn't matter because he's not making an effort to match the classical symbols but for us it should matter as for libra i'd be willing to bet that most people would not in fact think of a goose when they looked at libra and even in this paper he admits the constellation doesn't really look like a goose i suspect he's identifying it with libra not because the points and lines match but because it's in the right position but if you saw my last video you would already know that libra was invented as its own constellation only after it was separated from scorpius there is no sign of libra's existence as a separate constellation in mesopotamian astronomy before the second millennium bce it's highly improbable it would have existed as a separate constellation this far back and if it were placed properly it would be at the scorpion's claws not at the scorpion's tail moreover what about the other symbols that are here what can they tell us if we look at the bottom of the pillar there is this headless man what does that mean presumably that has something to do with death it might did you know that around this time people often buried their dead without heads yeah it was a customary part of their funerary rights and probably had spiritual significance since this practice was contemporary and local this image could very well be connected with this practice there's evidence of a skull cult at gobekli tapi and i'll leave an article discussing the evidence in the description below the video for you to check out but dr swettman doesn't make this connection instead he interprets it as a reference to a catastrophe more than a thousand years removed from gobekli tapi and then there are these strange handbag symbols what could they be and what are the animal symbols next to them well we proposed that these handbag symbols actually represent the other three solstices and equinoxes for the year so if this is one of them if this is representing the position of the sun on one of the solstices or equinoxes perhaps these are representing the other three solstices and equinoxes and in fact rather than being handbags you can imagine this is actually a picture of the sun on the horizon so that makes quite good sense and therefore these tiny animal symbols are perhaps the constellations corresponding to the other solstices in equinoxes at this time okay the amount of speculation is increasing we've gone from proposing that the animals may symbolize constellations to specific animals representing specific constellations without precedent in most cases to a headless corpse representing the catastrophe from long before the time of gobekli tapi to these symbols here representing three out of four solstices and equinoxes i can certainly understand a semi-circle positioned at a horizon as a reasonable interpretation of the sun but this isn't a neat fit is it the suns on these images don't look anything like the image of the sun dr swetman identified here they're hollow they would have been easier to carve solid and why is the horizon a rectangle is that an intuitive way to draw a horizon and what about a rising sun indicates that it's a solstice or equinox nothing the number of assumptions being made here are already too many to reliably hold up a theory and there are more to come and each proposal relies on the veracity of the previous one so that's a nice idea but what is procession of the equinoxes and how can it be used to represent a date well you know that the earth rotates on its axis does that once a day but that axis of rotation itself precesses over the course of about 26 000 years yes axial precession is the earth's wobble on its axis so to speak which is caused by gravitational forces and it's a slow wobble one wobble is approximately 26 000 years long what this means is that the earth's position in its orbit around the sun changes over time coming back to where it started after 26 000 years from our point of view here on earth the background of stars in the sky behind the sun slowly moves is it possible to record a date by showing the constellations at the time of an equinox or solstice no precession cannot be used either to represent a date or calculate one why because it isn't precise you can't record an accurate date by the position of constellations because it takes such a long time for the arrangement of stars to change i suppose precession could be used to guesstimate but you couldn't even get it right to within the lifetime of a nation much less to within a generation even in the case of an approximate date knowledge of precession wouldn't be needed to record it because all you would need to know is what constellations were in the sky on that date and even if you were recording a date during which time the arrangement of constellations was different than your own time all you would need to have is the information passed down to you not the information about precession just the information about the arrangement of constellations advocates of lost high technology usually argue that the ancient people had less knowledge and capabilities than mainstream archaeology assumes but in this case dr swettman has taken the opposite position by attributing knowledge of precession to the people of gobekli tepe he's assigning to them more knowledge than he would even give to later cultures if he believes in the fringe idea that a comet impact wiped out an earlier advanced civilization and all the knowledge they had so that humans had to start all over again wouldn't that place gobekli tapi early in that period of redevelopment a thousand years after the impact is too early for them to have advanced that far in their knowledge and too late for them to have retained anything from the pre-impact period of course i don't believe in an advanced lost civilization before the younger dryas the problem i have with his assertion that they knew about precession is first of all that he never explains how such a people were able to discover it but more importantly that he takes them out of their historical context we've learned a lot about the people of this region in this time period how they lived what tools they had what capabilities they had they hadn't even invented pottery yet and such advanced astronomical knowledge is out of keeping with everything else we know about them it's anachronistic so it's like a wobbling top that has observable consequences it means that if we look behind the sun if we could see behind the sun and see what constellation was there on the summer solstice today we would see the constellation gemini but eleven thousand years ago if we were to do the same thing we were to look at the sky behind the sun on the summer solstice we would see the constellation sagittarius as shown on pillar 43. so the summer solstice constellation gradually rotates around the zodiac and it's the same for the other equinox constellations and the winter solstice if you're wondering how the people would see the sun and the stars at the same time at sunrise there's a short period where both can be observed at this point we still haven't established yet that sagittarius is on pillar 43 but even if we did he has pointed to no evidence indicating the image featuring the vulture is a solstice or equinox so by writing down all four of the constellations corresponding to summer and winter solstices and spring autumn equinoxes you can write a date accurate within about 500 years so that's what we propose pillar 43 represents so he admits himself it's not an exact date that would indicate that the makers of the pillar either had no idea how to record an exact date did not have an exact date or did not care what the exact date was since an astrological age is about 2 000 years long then the date wouldn't actually be accurate to within 500 years as he says this configuration which he affirms is approximate existed for a good 1200 years if they simply were recording what they saw in the sky in their own time which i think is a feasible idea why does it have to be a date assuming it is a date who are they recording it for future posterity i find it very difficult to believe that they were recording a date for people a thousand years or more in the future it's more reasonable to suppose they made these pillars for themselves the idea of a stone age people making a time capsule seems very far-fetched to me doesn't it to you okay so if we compare the animal symbols at the top of the pillar next to these sunset symbols with their corresponding equinoxes or solstices we find that this spending bird symbol looks just like or a lot like pisces but this animal symbol which could be some kind of charging gazelle or ibex looks a bit like gemini at the winter solstice and this down crawling creature looks a bit like constellation virgo corresponding to the spring equinox the first one kind of matches but the other two no i don't think so what do you think but there really is no point in arguing over that because whatever animals they are he would still say they represent pisces gemini in virgo and if he's honest he'll admit that because he needs them to be those constellations for his date to work the symbols are irrelevant to the thesis and this all happens at around 10 950 bc more or less to within a few hundred years so we get that date by lining up the sun relative to constellation sagittarius in this software this is stellarium software you can download stellarium yourself and check everything i say so at 10 950 bc the sun is about halfway between this sort of head and wing on the constellation sagittarius and therefore it's probably quite close to the date if this is representing a date on pillar 43. i downloaded stellarium and it shows that in september the time of the summer solstice in those days the sun was between the head and wing of sagittarius between 11 700 and 10 500 bce that's a 1200 year span and since dr swetman has already indicated that the positions of the symbols on the pillar are approximate we can't narrow it down any further than that in the paper they said their date was accurate to within 250 years here in the video he widened it to 500 years according to stellarium which he claims to have used the date is more like 11 100 bce plus or minus 600 years there are four dates to choose from one is today's date more or less which is the one that graham hancock proposed corresponding to the not quebec italy available fact it precedes the radiocarbon date of enclosure d by about a thousand years or so from the numerous assumptions already discussed he draws the conclusion that the only solstice or equinox that this could represent is the summer solstice why because if this is a date the solstice or equinox with this configuration of constellations that provides a date closest to the date of gobekli tepe is the summer solstice around 10950 bce but it's still a thousand years removed think about it more than a thousand years not a hundred a thousand he believes the people who built this stone age ritual center remembered how the stars were arranged over a thousand years earlier and wanted to record them because they believed the date was important to remember even though it was so imprecise it could have happened anywhere within a 1200 year period and even though we have discovered no settlement here from 10950 bce dr swettman is assuming that the people of gobekli tepe recorded the stars as they would have been seen right here in this spot at a time when no one lived here i think we need to face the possibility that it may not even have been on a solstice or equinox at all if this is a representation of the heavens it may simply be the configuration of the sky on the date of the making of the pillar or the building or on the day of birth of an important person or day of death or some other significant day within the lifetimes of the makers that is far more realistic by the way in 9500 bce around the time carbon dating indicated this enclosure was built the configuration he proposes with the sun between the head and wing of sagittarius existed in mid to late september so we developed a statistical method to try and provide some confidence to this interpretation if dr swetman had merely provided the interpretation we've seen to this point it would never have seen the light of day in an academic journal but this is where it gets interesting while he himself admits that everything that has been proposed so far has been highly subjective he has a way to mathematically show that his interpretation is correct and he has so much confidence in it that in their paper he and sekritsis write that no other hypotheses even need be explored quote our basic statistical analysis indicates our astronomical interpretation is very likely to be correct we are therefore content to limit ourselves to this hypothesis and logically we're not required to pursue others unquote now i don't know if he's saying this just about himself or about everybody but it exhibits that same hebrews that we were talking about earlier the magnification and exaggeration of the significance of one's own work or abilities as we will go on to see his statistical method doesn't establish what he thinks it does this is how that method works first of all we propose that scorpion does indeed match the scorpius constellation we therefore ask what is the probability of these animal symbols appearing in approximately the right position to represent this date but this seems to me to be a vain exercise dr swetman's thesis doesn't rely on which animal symbols appear in the pillar apart from the scorpion and its relation to the sun it relies only on what constellations we assume the animal symbols to be if the vulture were a frog he would still say it was sagittarius if the goose was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich he would still say it was libra and so on he would say well this is just a symbolic representation of the order and placement of the stars he actually does say that in his paper when he acknowledged that the goose doesn't really look like libra dr swetman would still equate the symbols whatever they might be with the constellations that he does now because he started with his conclusion and worked his way back it's not the animals that are in the right positions it's the constellations that he assumes them to be but they're not in the right positions either as you can see the way we can think about that problem is by viewing each of these animal symbols so the three at the top next to the handbags or the sunset symbols plus ophiuchus the dark or goose and the dog or wolf and the vulture so we've got seven other symbols surrounding the scorpion let's suppose instead that each of those symbols is replaced by a dice and each dice has 13 sides why 13 sides well that's because there are roughly 13 animal symbols 13 different animal symbols that appear at quebec utica so far so if we replace each of these animal symbols with a dice and each dice has 13 sides and if we throw those seven dice then the total number of combinations that we can get for all the different animal symbols is in the tens of millions it's an extremely high number that means that there are tens of millions of different combinations of animal symbols that could have been placed on this pillar if we're going to remain in the framework of his hypothesis the number of possible animal symbols should be higher than 13. there could be other symbols that we just haven't found yet dr swetman himself believes that some of the animal symbols for the constellations are missing here at gobekli tepe he says so explicitly later if those missing symbols had been part of the constellation system the people here had then even those could have appeared here right we then ask well how many of those different combinations are as good as the one that actually appears on the pillar at representing this date and in our view there are only a couple of combinations that are as good as the one that appears on the pillar at representing this date so that means that the probability of achieving this set of animal symbols at random that represents this date so well is tiny it's it's about 1 in 20 million or so so that's our estimate for the chance that those animal symbols could be placed on this pillar i think we all can agree the placement of the images aren't random they are there by design 1 in 20 million okay establishing that the symbols are not put in those positions by chance however does not mean they represent a date they could have been put there deliberately to represent something else they could represent a hierarchy they could represent gods or if we interpreted them spatially they could represent regions they could represent different times of the year rather than one specific date they could be a mere representation of the sky at sunrise the hypothesis that this is a date doesn't rely on which animal symbols appear here but rather on what constellations are portrayed now that estimate of 1 in 20 million doesn't take into account the good orientational correlation of these animal symbols around the scorpion if we take that into account we get a factor of about one in seven and the details of that calculation are in our recent paper but as we've already seen they're not properly oriented and that's if we're generous and say that it doesn't matter that scorpius is upside down if scorpius is assumed to be facing in the correct direction then all of them are in the wrong spot so now if we combine that factor of one in seven with one in 20 million from before we get a combined estimate of about one in 140 million that the choice and position of those animal symbols is has occurred by pure chance since apart from the scorpion the animals depicted are irrelevant to dr swetman's hypothesis they could be any animal and he would still link them to the same constellations then a mathematical exercise determining the probability that these specific animals would be chosen appears irrelevant to me of course that statistical estimate completely depends on our view of how well the animal symbols fit the constellation when he says how well the animal symbols fit the constellations he means how well the animal shape matches the outline of the constellation so for example in my view this bending bird is the best animal symbol at quebec for fitting to pisces and that the duck goose is the best animal symbol that fits the constellation libra and so on so for example the eagle vulture is the best animal symbol at quebec tepe for representing sagittarius of course that's a subjective assessment and you might disagree with that you might choose different animal symbols you might think a different animal symbol for instance is is better than the duck goose representing libra he seems to leave out the possibility that someone might think none of the animal symbols fit the pattern of libra or of sagittarius but it turns out that although he doesn't need the symbols to be any particular symbols he does need the constellations themselves the asterisms to be the classical ones that's because at least as far as i can determine the basis of his linkages between the symbols and the constellations is the scorpion representing scorpius all the rest of the animals on pillar 43 hinge on that assumption but of course holding that position means that an explanation is needed as to why the other symbols are different from the classical ones and he never provides an explanation however if you agree more or less with our view then you two should conclude that pillar 43 represents a date using procession of the equinoxes not so we not only would have to agree on the meaning of the animal symbols but also his interpretation of the decapitated head as the sun and his interpretation that the main image is depicting the summer solstice or any solstice or equinox for that matter of course that's not a scientific result because this is so subjective it's matching of animal symbols to constellations subjective exercise dr swetman have you presented your gobekli tepe stellar arrangement to any professional astronomer groups has anyone with a deep knowledge of astronomy or astronomical history critiqued your work if so i'd be interested to hear what they had to say now it could be made more scientific agreed now let's see what his solution is in part 5 of his video series now the problem with this interpretation is that it is subjective so uh although i designed a statistical method to give support to this interpretation and we've got a level of confidence of around 140 million of being wrong uh that statistic is not properly scientific because it depends on my view of the rankings shown here for each animal symbol against each associated constellation and then a number of other assumptions and you might not share my view of these rankings nevertheless we would have to disagree very markedly about these pattern matches if this statistic is going to become insignificant in other words if you more or less agree with my rankings here in this column then you should also agree agree with my interpretation of the animal symbols actually you can uh create your own statistic for this uh for the vulture stone pillar 43. okay i will try out this exercise but i also want to point out that we skipped a step this exercise assumes that the animals are constellations from the greek system by doing this we aren't assessing the probability that they are the greek constellations we're determining the probability that if they were the constellations from the greek system how likely would dr swetman's identifications be we've jumped ahead in the scientific process for convenience i'll be referring to his statistical method as the pareidolia exercise i don't know if you've heard of peridolia before but it refers to the human tendency to see patterns or objects in random stimuli it's how constellations were invented in the first place but as you may already know it is subjective not objective and dr swetman admits to this so i don't think i'm insulting him by calling it the peridolia exercise it involves deciding which animal symbol best fits his chosen constellations but he's rigged it by limiting it to his own constellations and by limiting how many animal symbols you get to choose from and you can do it like this so first of all you need to create your own rankings for these seven pattern matches okay these seven here he's asking us to rank his pattern matches i don't know about you but i'm more inclined to make my own pattern matches and let him rank mine but let's play along i assume he's asking the viewer to do this because he wants each of us to judge how well his system holds up the basic form of the calculation is p divided by q where q represents the total number of possible permutations and p represents the number of permutations better than dr swetman's and by a better arrangement i mean a set of animal symbols that match the constellations that he has chosen better but note here that the constellations remain constant regardless they are what he chooses them to be if you believe that it's possible that the symbols do not represent constellations at all or that they are constellations but not the greek ones or that they are the greek ones but not the constellations he has chosen for you then this calculation is meaningless since his hypothesis hinges on what constellations the animals represent not on what animals the constellations represent i would say it's meaningless anyway so for example uh you would need to look at sagittarius and the vulture eagle and decide what rank the vulture eagle is in your view uh when fitting to sagittarius so if you thought like me and graham hancock that the eagle vulture is the best animal symbol out of these ones here okay these are the only ones that you can choose from there are only 11 here earlier he said there were 13 and did a calculation based on the number 13. and he's assuming that there are no animal symbols other than the ones we see at gobekli tepe but as i mentioned earlier the total number of animal symbols according to dr swetman is higher than 13. so if you thought it was the best of these animal symbols for fitting to sagittarius then you would put a one here but if you thought it was the second best if you thought there was another animal symbol that was a slightly better fit then you'd put a two here or if you thought there were two other animal symbols that go becky tepee that were better than the eagle vulture it fit into sagittarius then you'd put a three here and so on and you need to do that for all these seven uh constellations here with a rank beside them if you or i wanted to do this for our own matches and have him judge ours we would get to place ones in all the boxes and it would come out to a probability of 140 million now let's say that you thought none of the animal symbols fit what would you put in the box ah not an option he's forcing you to choose a number okay i've put in my ranks very subjective of course as anyone's would be many of dr swetman's choices i don't agree match the constellations to the best animal as you can see and to be clear i use the configuration of stars not the lines okay the drawn lines there are modern now once you've done that you simply need to multiply all your ranks together and divide by 280 million to get this statistic according to your own view of the pattern matches so in my case when i multiply all these ranks together i just get 2 which when divided by 280 million gives a chance of 1 in 140 million of this set of animal symbols being chosen by pure chance which is so small it means that they almost certainly chosen deliberately to represent this date using procession of the equinoxes wait i'm confused he gave us a figure of 140 million before uh taking the uh 1 in 20 million probability of the animal symbols being used and multiplying it by his orientational calculation of one and seven and he got 140 million so now how did it get to be 280 million i couldn't find reference to 280 million in either of his papers according to what he's already said it should be 140 million right his final result here should be 1 in 70 million not 140. so maybe you'd like to have a go at that yourself and see what you get okay i came up with a total of hundred and forty nine thousand four hundred eighty i'm not using his 280 million figure for the total possible number of permutations neither am i going to use the 140 million because i don't agree with the orientational correlation chance of one and seven i'm gonna go with his original figure of 20 million so i come out to a probability of one in eighty and if you find that your statistic is less than one in a million like mine is mine is much less than one in a million then you should really agree with my interpretation uh because to do otherwise would be irrational in a scientific sense well my chance is much greater than one in a million so nothing notable here anyway the point is that because the statistical test is subjective it is not properly scientific and as a scientist this is not very satisfactory so i knew i needed to find some more evidence to make this more scientific if it is subjective and not properly scientific why did you ask us to do it so what i'm showing here is uh are the zodiacal symbols from the set of symbols decoded from quebec tepe so it's just the ones from the previous slide that are part of our the zodiac so as you can see there are there are a few missing here so we're missing symbols for taurus and leo and so on they can only be considered missing if we assume that they had all the constellations of the zodiac in those days and so far i've seen nothing to suggest they did so i began to look around at other archaeological sites to see if the same system was used elsewhere that seems reasonable there are a number of other tepes in the region from the same time period and i wouldn't be surprised if we found more pillars with similar symbols on them and i also thought this system was probably used before quebec utepi um perhaps by thousands of years this does not seem reasonable as an a priori assumption i think we should assume that something existed only once we have the evidence for it and the reason for thinking that is that um procession of the equinoxes is so slow it takes nearly twenty six thousand years to complete an entire cycle or great year and and the people that built quebec tempe must have had a lot of confidence in this system to use it at the world's first megalithic temple temples they must have known this system for a long time already but we haven't yet established that the people of gobeklitapi knew about precession even if we assumed they recorded a date on the pillar knowledge of procession would not be necessary to have recorded it only knowledge of what the sky looked like on that date information that could have been passed down without knowledge of procession that's the subject of my next paper decoding european paleolithic art extremely ancient knowledge of procession of the equinoxes and so this was published towards the end of last year end of 2018 and this time it was co-authored with aleister coombs i'll leave links to all the pertinent articles in the description box below the video now alistair played an important role here um like me he'd been looking around at other archaeological sites to see if any of them also used this zodiacal system and then one day he contacted me and pointed me in the direction of chattel hoya because he thought he recognized one of the symbols there chattel hoyak is another well-known site in turkey it's about 400 miles from quebec tepe uh and it dates to the the seventh and late eighth millennium bc so it's really old but not quite as old as gobeki tepe cool i've always found chateau hayek a fascinating sight and the really special thing about cattle hoyak are it shrines in its lower level so that's that's the key thing of interest to us uh dr swetman is a little behind the times recent work and analysis has shown that what were once thought to be shrines were not in fact such there are no known ritual centers at chateau hayek which is too bad because that would have provided a nice parallel with the ritual center at gobekli tapi from the archaeological evidence all of the structures at chateau hayek have been determined to be domestic in nature people lived in them chateau hayek was a house society people's residences formed the structure of the community the more elaborate ones these are residences of those who had acquired more symbolic capital than other members of the community either through specialization or hierarchy now what interests us is that there are only four types of these shrines as shown here so you get these shrines made from bull's heads and horns and then there are ones made from rams heads and horns and then there are these sort of splayed creatures played quadruped uh shrines as well and it was this type of shrine that alastair recognized he thought it looked like the damn crawling or splay creature that represents virgo in our zodiac and then there are also these leopard shrines and there are only these four types of shrine in the in the lower levels of chattel work i'm confused why he's saying that the ball ram and splayed creature shrines were different shrines while pointing at a single structure more importantly his assertion that there are only four types of shrine is incorrect now it turns out that alistair was probably right and in fact this splayed creature is a bear so here i'm comparing um a bear seal stamp found at chatelhoyk the figure at the top right of pillar 43 that's this one here and a similar figure found in the um the fill of quebec tepee so this is this is now in san leaf a museum and over here we can see an artist's impression of one of these uh shrine symbols and you can see that by and large they look pretty similar at least the archaeologists now think that these splayed quadruped shrines are do actually represent bears and i agree although the bear at chateau hayek has the same body position as the creatures from gobekli tapi the head is completely different and the symbol from gobekli tepe looks nothing like a bear it looks like an amphibian or a reptile if you recall back at gobekli tapi dr swetman emphasized heavily the correspondence between the layout of the animal symbols and how well they match the layout of the constellations in the case of the bear he can say that the layout matches but he has completely discarded the correlation and layout for the rest of the symbols now apparently all we need to do is match the animal type and if the animal symbol here at chateau hayek doesn't match the layout of the constellation well that's just ignored i have to wonder what would have happened if we started with chateau hayek how would he have made the connection between the animals and the constellations he couldn't have i would be interested to hear dr swetman explain why the people of gobekli tepe have more accurate depictions of the constellations than the people of chateau hayek did the people here at chateau hayek forget what the symbols represented all right so they're going back to chateau hoyok there are these four shrines in the lower levels and so according to our zodiacal theory they might represent the four constellations uh corresponding to the equinoxes and solstices of a given year but since there are not only four types of shrine this conclusion has to be discarded so if we take stellarium again we find that well from our zodiac we find that the bull represents capricornus and we find that the bear represents virgo so using stellarium we can deduce from that that the ram head represents aries just as it does today and therefore um the the leopard represents cancer not leo as it does today okay so the leopard represents cancer so we've been able to decode um two more symbols ram equals aries leopard equals cancer even though he's promised that in this video he would provide not subjective but objective scientific proof of his hypothesis he's not doing that here he is not using chateau hayek to establish the truth of his earlier interpretation at gobekli tapi otherwise the reasoning would be circular what he's doing is assuming his interpretation of pillar 43 at gobekli tepe is true and using that to interpret this it's adding more cards on top of his house of cards we have no evidence at any time in history of cancer being represented as a leopard he just needs the leopard to be cancer we learned in our last video that the ram symbol for ares was certainly not the original one in babylon i suppose we could assume that the ram tradition can be traced back to another source but the problem is we already know that the classical set of constellations combined two separate traditions and that could have happened no earlier than the hellenistic period yet dr swetman wants to assume the combined system existed thousands of years before it possibly could have it's all very ahistorical and anachronistic he needs to address this objection and as far as i know he never has and i don't mean just saying oh well the mainstream view is wrong i mean show us how your system doesn't contradict any of the existing evidence knowing that this system was probably used for millennia before quebec tepi was built the next most obvious thing to do is to look at european paleolithic cave art wait what what makes it obvious we're removing ourselves from chateau hayek and gobekli tapi by thousands of miles and thousands of years shouldn't we be looking at sites from the same general time period in area and the reason for this is that we find many of the same symbols in our ancient zodiac in these very ancient caves but you haven't yet demonstrated that they had the zodiac at gobekli teppy i'm still waiting for that now if the symbols were the same in both places i would say he has something here but what he means is not that the symbols are the same but just that some of the animals are the same just as at chateau hayek they do not in fact match the design of the symbols at gobekli tapi for example there is this fantastic one from the altamira cave in spain of a bison and so there are many similar artworks um there are hundreds of caves and hundreds of artworks in caves across spain and france and we see similar symbols like bears and ibex and leopards or lions reason would dictate that just because we find animals in art in one area and some of the same animals in art in another area that alone is insufficient to posit an obvious connection so there are a lot of similarities and so could it be that the people even as far back as say uh 15 000 bc which is more or less when this painting was painted and earlier we're already using this zodiacal system uh well let's see here's the next uh important piece of art from uh cave in western europe this time it's the lasko cave system in france i know there have been some anthropologists that have suggested that the art in lasko cave might depict constellations and i'm open to such an idea there's a national geographic program that came out in 2009 which explained the hypothesis but one thing i noted about that one is that the researcher offers links between the symbols in the cave and the constellations for one they for the most part used the known symbols for the constellations instead of inventing new ones they also match the images to the constellations in much the same way as dr swetman tried at gobekli tapi and although that still is subjective we will see how dr swetman has completely dropped that exercise in his second paper not making any attempt to show matches between the appearance of the symbols and the appearance of the constellations he just assigns symbols to constellations as he desires precedent or not so these animal symbols and there are four of them again are found in the lasko shaft scene except the horse is on a different wall uh which is probably the most famous cave art scene uh of all so here we see a bull or a bison or an aurochs and here is a kind of duck-like bird on a stick and then off to the left here we've got what is actually a rhino and on the rear wall uh there is this horse painting okay so now there are only there are only four animals here so maybe we can use these to complete our ancient zodiac it seems to me that he's just looking for animals to complete his zodiac and he's willing to take whatever he finds regardless of the place or the time so using stellarium again we find that these four animal symbols if they represent the solstices and equinoxes in the same year as we think they do then we find that uh well we know that the bull is capricornus and according to our zodiac the bird this duck or goose like bird is is libra so that means that the rhino must be taurus and the horse must be leo using stellarium that's what we find in fact those were the two missing pieces of the jigsaw so now we have completed our zodiac why is he okay with the fact that the animal symbols don't match any known symbol ever used for those constellations and in the absence of that connection he makes no effort to show that the design of the symbols match the layout of the constellations the only thing that connects this image to the solstices and equinoxes so far as he's told us is that there are four animals and there are four solstices and equinoxes are we to assume that every time we see four animals on a cave wall or pillar we ought to assume they're the solstices or equinoxes uh now we'll come back to this painting in a later video and actually try and work out what this scene is all about but for now we're just using it to complete our zodiac which looks like this so to summarize that section we've used quebec tepee chatelhoyuk and now lasko and we found that the down crawling um or splayed quadruped is probably a bear representing virgo the feline symbol so the lion or leopard uh represents cancer and not leo as it does today leo is not a leopard today the ram represents ares as it does today the horse represents leo and the rhino represents taurus okay so now this is great we've got a complete zodiac but you have shown us nothing to suggest that they should be connected with the zodiac nothing at all so now what can we do well we still have the problem that all these associations between animal symbols and their uh the constellations it's still all subjective and we still haven't shown that these connections are scientific but the great thing about um paleolithic cave art is that there are hundreds of these animal paintings known in dozens of caves in europe that just opens up the possibilities even more uh even more importantly many of these animal paintings have been radiocarbon dated because they have organic paints so this means that we can finally perform a fully objective scientific test of our zodiacal system so basically what we can do is compare the radiocarbon ages of these paintings with their ages predicted by our zodiacal system you can perform a test on the cave paintings but what about gobekli tepi as we will see it isn't included in the test but why not after all we have a carbon date for the enclosure in which pillar 43 was found ah but you see dr swettman doesn't believe the images on pillar 43 were made at the time the imagery would have matched the sky and yet he does believe that the imagery here in the caves at the time of their creation would match the sky but isn't there a possibility that the cave painting could represent a date other than a contemporary one just as gobekli tepe does if he's ruling that out which he apparently is on what basis is he doing so he never says but it's very clear that he thinks that the cave painters were using the same system as that gobekli tapi but apparently for entirely different reasons so he's basically testing imagery from a different place in time from gobekli tepe and that was made for a different reason than gobekli tepe but somehow it's supposed to tell us what the images at gobekli tepe mean as in the case of the first paper also in this one it seems to me that dr swettman skips a number of scientific tests in the earlier parts of his process and only performs one after he has piled speculations on top of each other in other words he doesn't test each speculation he tests them as a group i think that increases the possibility of error okay so let's look at this diagram here so it shows the great year which takes about 26 000 years to go through one cycle and so you can kind of imagine it like this so there are these four arrows which correspond to the four solstices and equinoxes of any given year and they point to the four symbols on this zodiac but very slowly of course over 26 000 years this circle rotates so that the equinoxes and solstices gradually change which constellation they're pointing to now suppose that the summer solstice um suppose this is the summer solstice and suppose that it's pointing towards virgo which is the bear sign in our zodiac then we can expect bears to be painted uh on the caves at this time but after a few thousand years the summer solstice will have moved on and it will then point at leo which means that we can then expect horse symbols to be painted in these caves at this later time what would be the purpose and because each symbol is just over two thousand years wide on average in terms of procession we can expect that bears will be painted for a little over two thousand years before they stop being pointed and horses are being painted instead for the next uh couple of thousand years and we don't expect to see bears to appear again in these caves in terms of bare paintings in these caves for another 4 000 years because that's how long it takes for the next equinox to rotate around and start to point to virgo again when you can match your animal symbol to four different parts of the year and notice he's done that ahead of the calculation you allow yourself more opportunity to make your hypothesis work if i see a bison and i can choose from four times of the year which each cover a period of two thousand years that's eight thousand years coverage it makes it easier to get a match he has the bison symbol matched to summer and autumn and winter and spring how often did they come here and portray a specific representation the constellation the sun rose in front of during a specific solstice or equinox every year that can't be because there aren't that many images and there are years when it would seem only one solstice or equinox would be portrayed why what would make a solstice or equinox worthy of drawing and another one not never explained and it turns out that we can measure this periodicity like this so suppose suppose we compare the radiocarbon age of every animal painting with its uh zodiacal age um corresponding to the the center of that zodiacal symbol okay and because each symbol is on average a little over 2 000 years wide in terms of precession we should find these distribution these age differences have a distribution that looks like this here i'm drawing the expected distribution of age differences if our zodiacal hypothesis is correct so i'm plotting the age difference along the bottom here and the number or the the probability distribution is plotted on this axis with vertical axis if there are any statisticians in the audience who might want to check his work i'd be interested to hear your comments just put them in the comments below the video and we can talk about it okay so actually there's an important complication we need to think about first which is that the radiocarbon ages are all somewhat uncertain um and this is because all radiocarbon measurements all experimental measurements always involve some amount of error which can be for radiocarbon measurements it can be hundreds or even thousands of years sometimes now as the radio carbon age uncertainty in the data grows we can expect the expected distribution is going to get smeared out it's going to get flatter and flatter so for very large uncertainties in the radiocarbon age it's going to look just like the null hypothesis basically that means that if we want to detect this expected distribution we will have to limit the data we use to that with less than a certain threshold of uncertainty in the radiocarbon age now the problem is if we set this uncertainty cut off or threshold too low we will eliminate too much data and our statistics will be poor on the other hand if we set the uncertainty cut off too high we won't be able to detect this expected distribution because all we'll see is the null hypothesis so for this exercise i chose an uncertainty cut off in the radiocarbon data of exactly one third of the maximum of 3222 yeah so i actually chose a value about uh 1080 years and with that let that cut off in the radiocarbon uncertainty we should still be able to detect the um the expected distribution if our hypothesis is correct a big problem i have is how they choose to exclude data from their chart and although they always provide a reason it looks an awful lot to me like they are cooking the books so to speak here's a list of data they exclude any carbon date whose range of uncertainty exceeds 1080 years in the paper they say 1074 years the reason they give for deleting this data is quote because radiocarbon data that exhibits large experimental uncertainty cannot be used to distinguish between a successful prediction and pure chance unquote this may be true but the figure of 1074 1080 years is arbitrarily chosen and i find it suspicious also the uncertainty range of carbon dates is based on how far back in time the sample is so that suggests he's excluding older samples and favoring more recent ones if there are two carbon dates taken of the same cave painting and they are too far removed from each other in time they exclude them both yet one of these could very well be correct what i would expect in a scientific paper is a discussion of the reliability of the samples based on independent evidences i'd be willing to bet that there has been discussion and analysis done by others which could have been taken into account they exclude all carbon dates from cost or cave that were taken below sea level saying they must be contaminated i would like to know what the scientists who took the sample say about that there is as you might guess no discussion of this in the paper they also excluded all carbon dates published in any language other than english i don't think that's necessarily in order to rig the experiment but i do think it's lazy and it strikes me as very unscientific not to analyze a comprehensive collection of data and even more so to base your selection on what's convenient results from an independent sample can only be left out in exceptional circumstances and only if there are especially compelling reasons to justify doing so a further problem i have is that he conducts his experiment on all the caves and chateau hayek together as a group they are far removed geographically and do not belong in the same experiment you can't supplement european paleolithic cave paintings with neolithic history house artifacts just to make it look like you have more samples and to make your analysis appear more statistically sound the fact is there simply isn't enough data from chateau hayek but he unscientifically throws everything into the pot so the radiocarbon and zodiacal age difference plus or minus should be roughly evenly distributed up to about a thousand years because most symbols are around 2000 years wide in terms of procession but then there should be a kind of cliff or a drop off and the distribution will go down to zero pretty quickly this won't be a completely sharp drop off or cliff edge because the zodiacal symbols are not all the same width so here i'm showing the results now each symbol here represents a single painting of an animal symbol in our ancient zodiac that appears in a european paleolithic cave where the radiocarbon age has been measured and reported in an english language peer-reviewed research journal okay so basically this is all the data that there is in english language peer-reviewed research data english language peer-reviewed research journals every single piece of data is here yes we already established that this test is anglo-centric but notice how by saying every single piece of data he makes it sound as if it were thorough i'm sorry but this is anything but thorough so on the bottom we've got the calibrated radiocarbon age and at the side we've got this the age difference plus or minus between the radiocarbon and zodiacal ages up to a maximum of 322 years see the hollow triangles square and circles those are all the omitted carbon dates it just so happens the majority of them are above the line and would detract from dr swetman's conclusions but no worries they have been disregarded on what he claims are independent grounds so it turns out that the chance of getting this distribution of filled circles where two just two points are above this horizontal line at one thousand four hundred and fifty years is about 1 in 500 million okay in other words the chance that this zodiacal hypothesis is wrong is about 1 in 500 million therefore this test has confirmed our zodiacal hypothesis to an extraordinary level of confidence probability is wrong the probability is wrong is so small that you can practically just forget about it i mean so this is how science works normally in science we are looking for statistical results at around about one in a million uh to be confident of a result uh but here is much better than that it's one in 500 million of being wrong so that's a that's a really tiny chance but here is the most important question what about this statistical experiment connects the paleolithic caves in europe to gobekli tepe nothing the experiment did not include gobekli tapi it was mainly just an analysis of the european caves so even if it somehow demonstrated that the cave paintings were related to the solstices and equinoxes which i'm not convinced of it has no bearing on the meaning of the symbols at gobekli tepe which was built by different people far away at a different time it doesn't prove anything about gobekli teppy because gobekli tapi isn't included look at the chart and the animal symbols that are listed that were analyzed from the caves bison rhino horse lion how many of these symbols are found on pillar 43 at gobekli tepe zero the only connection to lands further east would be the data from chateau hayek but we don't have a proper spread of samples from chateau hayek as we do from europe and chateau hayek is also too far removed from europe to assume any connection actually work after this paper was published has shown that the stag symbol or stag animal painting and not the fox probably represents the constellation aquarius in european paleolithic cave art if we take that into account the statistic becomes even better it goes up to about 1 in 2.3 billion moreover if we combine this result of 1 in 2.3 billion with the one from pillar 43 quebec tapi of 1 in 140 million we get a combined statistic of around one in 300 quadrillion now that is incredibly tiny i would like to hear dr swetman explain how it's scientific to combine the results of a probability test conducted with subjective data in one region of the world with a separate probability test conducted in another region of the world with no overlapping data between the two tests into an overall probability figure for the entire hypothesis a conclusion can only apply to the population from which you took the random sample of independent measurements basically what we have proven in a scientific sense now is that the zodiacal hypothesis is correct these animal symbols definitely represent constellations it would be irrational to think that they don't it would be irrational to think they do science always needs to consider plausible alternative interpretations of an observed result dr swetman seems to think we can dispense with all that so this has profound consequences most obviously for the disciplines of anthropology and archaeology so it means that current theories for the origin of civilization and the origin of religion and the origin of writing that they are probably not quite correct they need to be adjusted to take into account the younger driest impact coherent catastrophism and this ancient interest in astronomy and the ancient zodiac and of course it means that our understanding of the history of astronomy is completely wrong so for example it's generally thought that the uh our constellations it's generally thought we get those or we obtain those from the mesopotamians so that's babylonians or the sumerians in the second or third millennium bc but this looks to be wrong by many tens of thousands of years likewise procession of the equinoxes was thought to be first noticed by hipparchus of ancient greece in the second century bc and of course now we see that is also wrong by tens of thousands of years and so on and uh this discovery even has consequences for many earth sciences so remember that many aspects of modern earth science have traditionally been built on the edifice of gradualism which which rules out cosmic impacts from the very beginning and now we now know this is very clearly wrong even on the time scale of human development on the time scale of um homo sapiens so we now know that uh we need to take account of catastrophic impacts with cometary debris which often don't even leave craters uh so this could be important for our understanding of the ancient climate uh ancient animals and ancient plants and their extinctions and so on and it even affects our understanding of evolution science is knowledge obtained by repeated experiment or observation one statistical experiment is insufficient to establish a scientific fact notice how with the single study with this single mathematical calculation dr swettman feels justified in saying that we should overturn our current understanding of history archaeology anthropology earth science and biology this one experiment will revolutionize everything we know do you think he's overestimating the value of his work do you think he might be placing more faith in his abilities as a scientist than is reasonable i'll let you be the judge thanks for watching all the way to the end if you've made it this far i can only assume you're a lover of ancient history whether you felt that way for a long time or are just a newbie you might like my little e-booklet why ancient history matters it's designed to persuade people that the subject is important even in the modern world you might also wish to use it to help spread the word so feel free to share it with someone you know it's free for anyone who wants it i've left a link in the description box below the video for you to grab a copy catch you later

Channel: World of Antiquity

Views: 76,785

Keywords: ancient history, ancient civilisations, ancient civilizations, myths of ancient history, David Miano, world of antiquity, megaliths, ancient temples documentary, archaeology, ancient high technology, lost high technology, ancient advanced technology, lost advanced technology, ancient engineering, ancient building techniques, prehistory decoded, martin sweatman, gobekli tepe, gobeklitepe, pillar 43, paleolithic cave paintings, zodiac, history of the zodiac, catalhoyuk, catal hoyuk

Id: vUdJCVwqJNM

Length: 83min 57sec (5037 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 09 2020