Lies & Statistics and Gobekli Tepe | A Response to Martin Sweatman

for regular videos on ancient cultures and forgotten civilizations please subscribe last year at this time i made two videos on the history of the zodiac and in the second one i looked at a proposal made by dr martin swetman that animal symbols found on monuments at gobekli tepe testify to the existence of the greek zodiac in prehistoric times i did not and still do not think that dr swetman made a convincing case now i encourage dr swetman to make a video response to my critique and i'm happy to report he finally has in fact i've been waiting for a video response to any of my myths of ancient history videos but so far no one whose work i've critiqued has done so so i'm stoked that someone finally has made a rejoinder i believe that dialogue of this sort especially in front of a popular audience is a benefit to that audience i hope you agree let's take a look at dr swetman's video together and i'll give you my thoughts if you want to see his entire video unfiltered i'll leave a link to it below but i'm including practically all of it here about a year ago professor david miano on his youtube channel made a highly critical video of my work on the zodiacal theory for interpreting ancient artworks and especially who focused on pillar 43 at quebec tepe that is indeed true i don't think my analysis of the history of the zodiac would be complete without a consideration of his hypothesis which made quite a stir in online media and continues to be referenced by many of the alternative history crowd as proof of advanced knowledge in the stone age his channel is aimed at debunking what he considers misconceptions about ancient history and as my work says some somewhat radical things about ancient prehistory i suppose my work would eventually fall under his gaze as you just heard dr swetman acknowledges that he has made some radical claims and is not surprised that i would respond so clearly there was nothing personal in this it's just what i do now david contacted me in advance about this about making his video and we exchanged correspondence about the details of my work that is true i wanted to make sure i understood matters fully before commenting because i didn't want to make a mistake or misrepresent his argument i asked david many times instead to write a rebuttal of my research to an academic journal seeing as my work is published in academic journals but paraphrasing him he said this is essentially beneath him and a waste of his time so he made a video instead dr swetman is misremembering the situation he never asked me to write a rebuttal in an academic journal instead of doing a video he did ask me to write my rebuttal in an academic journal but that was only after my video was published he wanted me to write a rebuttal in addition to publishing the video when we had our conversation prior to the publication of the video he never asked me even once to write it in an academic journal i went back over the logs of our conversation to make sure my memory was correct about this and it is such a request never occurred in fact he expressed interest in the forthcoming video and said he was looking forward to seeing it now the reason i much prefer the usual academic route is that the debate would be refereed by a journal editor and so any personal digs and criticisms would be prevented he would have been forced to stick to arguments based on the evidence also it would limit the number of responses so a never-ending and tiresome back-and-forth argument would be prevented david would have his one shot at presenting his key arguments against my proposals i would have my response and not be that after my video was posted dr swetman responded with a written comment and asked me to pin it to the top for everyone to see this i was happy to do you can go there now and see the whole thread with our conversation when he asked me to write up a paper and have it published so that we could debate it in an academic forum i told him that since my video was designed for a popular audience much as his own videos and book are i encouraged him to respond in video format so that we could open up a public dialogue he has a youtube channel i reminded him that the vast majority of his audience is non-academic and that he owed it to them to defend his hypothesis in a public forum plus preparing an article for an academic journal takes months seeking publication takes more months and then finally getting it printed takes more months so my feeling at the time and i told him so was that this was a delay tactic on his part or a means to take it out of the public eye the people want to hear about it now i told him that if he was concerned about fairness i would be happy to debate him on a neutral platform here on youtube or on a podcast but he declined as for his wish that he could just make one response and that i would not be able to reply to it well come on if you've watched his response video already which calls into question my character you would find it reasonable that i should be able to reply to it and i told him that if he ever did choose to do a video response i would reply he decided at that time he would not make a response video i thought that was that and i expected never to return to the topic again now a year has passed and he has chosen to respond with a video so i take that as an indication he is now okay with my replying even if he isn't i have the right to defend myself as he also does anyway david published this video instead in which he targets both my work and me personally which is unacceptable again i did not publish the video instead the video came first and then the request to put it in an academic journal came afterwards also i did not attack him personally i do not attack people i critique their ideas my understanding is that his research specializes in the ancient historical period of the eastern mediterranean but not the prehistoric period as far as i understand yes that's true and in that sense we're on equal footing but i should add and i think this is relevant i don't think david has much or any proper training in science or mathematics and i think this is relevant because my research into pre-history is based on the scientific method and it uses some basic mathematics so he's probably not best placed to review it that's not a personal dig at david at all i think these are simply the facts he says david may not be qualified to review my work because you know it's based on the scientific method and uses basic math but that's not a personal dig these are simply the facts if that isn't a personal dig i want you to keep that in mind as we go forward and see what he deems a personal dig at himself now his video criticizes specifically my youtube videos which serve as an introduction to my book prehistory decoded shown here i never intended these videos to be standalone they were always intended to serve as a gateway to my book but my impression from his comments is that david hasn't actually read my book which is regrettable because i expect it would have helped him to make a better video not only did i read dr swetman's book prior to the making of my video and use it to fill out my understanding of his videos i told this to dr swetman in our discussion under the video he seems to have forgotten many of his comments are addressed in my book if he did actually read my book then that makes his video even worse i wish i knew what comments of mine are addressed in his book but sadly i couldn't find any instances in this video where he provides an example so it's impossible for us to assess the truthfulness of this statement no i'm not going to try to rebut every sentence in david's video that would take far too long his video was nearly an hour and a half long and it would take me five times that to address every point at least i think that's fair as long as he rebuts the parts of my critique that are aimed directly at his thesis so instead i'm just going to focus on those parts where he attacks me personally and on the part where he tries to use my statistical method for evaluating pillar 43 at quebec tepe which is the most important part of this whole debate i'm surprised to hear him say that this statistical test which he refers to as his subjective test is the most important part of this whole debate he says quite clearly in his videos that it is his other test the one he calls his objective test that demonstrates with certainty that his hypothesis is correct how did his subjective test suddenly become the most important part so let's jump forward to his first criticism i'm martin swetland 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 dr swetman refers to this as my first criticism but this is just part of my introduction the part where i provide some background info on the person whose ideas i'm considering this is merely to let people know who martin swetman is and why he might be important and why they might want to watch this video i didn't even get to my criticisms yet well i would strongly disagree with david's assertion there my expertise is in statistical mechanics which means my professional research concerns the analysis of the configurations of atoms and molecules and this is exactly the kind of expertise that is useful in decoding the symbols at quebec tepe the logic and maths that are used to analyze configurations of atoms and molecules can be applied straightforwardly to patterns on stone pillars there's really not much difference of course david wouldn't know about that because he's got really no idea what my professional research is all about statistical mechanics does employ statistical methods to the study of microscopic entities and as i said i do think the general principles he learned in this field prove useful but the narrower focus of statistical mechanics may create some blind spots and pitfalls which an expert in statistics would be less likely to fall prey to the fact that his tests are riddled with errors is testimony to this and remember i said that his scientific expertise doesn't come into play in the formulation of his hypothesis but only in the defense of it that is the testing of it some knowledge of statistics would serve him well in the testing of his hypothesis but my point still stands the formulation of his hypothesis did not employ statistics or any other science he just came up with ideas maybe you could say that to come up with a hypothesis that could be tested by statistics you have to know statistics in that case yes i can acknowledge that his training would come into play for that i just meant when he thought to himself hmm maybe these are constellations and maybe that's the sun and these are equinoxes and solstices you know all that that this was not done scientifically and please keep in mind that the statement i made is not part of my critique i wasn't saying that his thesis is invalid because of his education or training and those of you who have been following me for a while know that i have repeatedly said both in videos and in comments that i judge claims by their merits and not by who says them dr swettman however as we shall see does not appear to hold this view so i would contend that my expertise is far more useful than david's and for the same reason more useful than quebec deputies archaeologists this sounds very gatekeepey to me does it to you it gives the impression that dr swetman is saying that because he is an expert in statistical mechanics and i'm not then it's not my place to call his conclusions into question it sounds like one of those academics who says hey stay in your lane buddy i'm the authority here to be clear i value expertise i'm one of those who believes that in an area in which i am not an expert i should defer to the experts but that means the consensus of the experts not the opinions of a single expert actually i think david's comments there reveal a deep-seated bias against science and what it can offer this statement i had to mull about for quite a while i'm trying to figure out how dr swetman could have thought my comment revealed a bias against science i'm guessing because he imagined i was thinking in my mind that only archaeologist views should be valued but that's not my meaning at all i just meant that although he tested his hypothesis scientifically he didn't arrive at his hypothesis scientifically in other words it wasn't a step-by-step process using evidence to arrive at each step he's even warned me directly on twitter to stick to my own research field which is a kind of genetic fallacy in other words he thinks only people like him so historians and archaeologists can know the truth about our past but that kind of thinking is philosophically bankrupt and eventually leads to the creation of religions with people like david as their priests huh this is some red meat for the fans i guess those historians and archaeologists are trying to tell us what to think i find this ironic though because numerous times dr swetman has appealed to his standing as a scientist to argue that he can know the truth about our past better than archaeologists i don't remember telling him to stick to his own research field it doesn't sound like something i'd say but i can't check it to confirm because he has me blocked for some reason i think this shows he doesn't really understand the scientific method at all and this is amply demonstrated in his video for example he makes frequent errors in his video that relate to his misunderstanding of the difference between developing a hypothesis and testing the hypothesis he confuses these time and time again it gets very tiresome for example he criticizes the parts where i'm simply developing a hypothesis by effectively saying but you don't know that or by asking for strong evidence to justify an assumption which is anti-science this is not true it may just be that he misunderstood me and i put that on myself for not being clear enough in my video the parts of his hypothesis that i criticized for not being backed with evidence generally are the parts that he does not test science begins with a guess no justification for the guess is needed because that would then result in a never-ending cycle of justifications then once you have guessed a hypothesis you test it by comparing predictions with observations and that's it i'm fully aware of that the problem i have with dr swetman's tests is that they are partial tests but he presents them as if they test all of his claims which they do not well whatever david thinks about it i think it remains the case that my hypothesis is the only one for which a statistical test has been created i assume he means the only one of the ones made about gobekli tepe but what would that prove it's not perfect yet but i clearly point out the areas that are subjective and which might become more scientific in the future with more work on the pattern matching algorithm that's something i'm currently working on it does have some serious flaws for some reason anyone who points them out is stepping out of line it turns out that dr swettman is a big fan of alternative history and lost high technology now that's a slanderous fabrication i have never uttered fanatical or even mild support for the idea of lost high technology this is completely unacceptable david should remove his video or remove that remark from his video let me explain how i came to the conclusion that he was a fan of lost high technology so you can understand why i said this when people hear the phrase sometimes ancient aliens comes to mind but there's a spectrum of beliefs about lost high technology the basic idea is that there was in the stone age prior to a great catastrophe a group or groups of people who possess technology higher than what is indicated in the archaeological record or what is generally believed by archaeologists and historians and that this technology was lost in the catastrophe and had to restart dr swettman's thesis proposes that stone age culture most certainly had an astronomical science more advanced than what is generally assumed which included a knowledge of axial precession he says this explicitly the wobble of the earth on its axis now it seems to me that this knowledge is not possible without knowing the earth is spherical and without knowing how to pass recorded information down over long periods of time this is a science higher than what is generally assumed for this period the rate of precession corresponds to a period of 25 772 years so in order for humans to have figured it out they would need to have records spanning thousands of years which were preserved and handed down from generation to generation without alteration in his words quote the concepts represented in the pillar require communication over very long time scales unquote indeed the symbols that gobekli tapi he asserts are a form of writing this is a technology more advanced yes higher than what is assumed for this period of time in his book prehistory decoded dr swetman also posits that the egyptian myths of zeptepi may indeed refer to and i quote a golden age of civilization in egypt that has since vanished or been destroyed by a cataclysm and that the sphinx is a product of this lost golden age civilization going by the controversial dating of the sphinx suggested by robert shock and putting it thousands of years earlier it would require an assumption that the people in that area during the stone age had a higher technology than what the archaeological record indicates for that period especially if you imagine a golden age of civilization at that time so i hope you and he can understand why i said this it's a perfectly reasonable conclusion i should add that in one of his videos that i responded to he makes this statement 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 that we now know this is very clearly wrong even on the time scale of human development on the time scale of homo sapiens so we now know that we need to take account of catastrophic impacts with cometary debris which often don't even leave craters so this could be important for our understanding of for the ancient climate ancient animals and ancient plants and extinctions and so on and it even affects our understanding of evolution so we need to make sure that um this version of catastrophism is taken into account in how we think about evolutionary biology what is this clash between gradualism and catastrophism that he's talking about when people use the term gradualism they mean development or progress by degrees it applies not only to earth sciences but to technology catastrophism challenges the assumption that technology develops and progresses gradually over time it assumes that technology can be set back by a catastrophe and will need to restart again so it's not a single line of development we have to conclude that as an opponent of gradualism and a proponent of catastrophism dr swetman assumes a setback of technology due to the younger driest comet impact this necessitates the view that there was lost advanced technology he may not envision it to be as advanced as some others might but catastrophism assumes lost technology that was higher than what came after 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 again this is completely untrue another slanderous fabrication i have never uttered support for any lost ancient high civilization if you had read my book david you would know this again you need to remove your video or this slanderous remark from your video dr swetman is not giving you the context of my statement he just played i said it in response to a comment that he made that an interpretation of pillar 43 by graham hancock was the impetus for his research on this subject i've been following um developments at quebec techy since it was made public in about 2005 but i was none the wiser until i read graham hancock's book magicians of the gods this book advances the idea of you guessed it a lost advanced civilization this is what i was responding to i truly wonder why dr swettman who says he's not a fan of such ideas would take interest in this book and form a hypothesis based on a suggestion made by this book if he doesn't want to be associated with mr hancock's views why would he name drop him and say that the book made him wiser why would he appear at hugh newman's megalithomania conferences why would he write for graham hancock's website i'm not trying to suggest that dr swetman holds the same views as newman or hancock what i'm wondering is why he's so offended that i associated him with lost high technology so much that he considers it slanderous and defamatory and at the same time rub shoulders with lost high technology proponents and not be embarrassed by it why is he telling me to delete my video but not asking graham hancock to take down this photo of course it suits david's purpose to misrepresent me personally like this which is why i would rather he had written a journal paper because these kinds of personal attacks would not be allowed in a journal paper so no i have never uttered support for a lost ancient high civilization or for lost ancient high technology you can rest assured that if i ever did write a paper about it i most certainly would bring up where he got his idea from and his comments about the sphinx in a golden age of civilization what i do think based on the available evidence is that ancient people were keen naked eye astronomers nothing to do with ancient eye technology or ancient high civilization just good naked eye astronomy but this should be expected there is every reason to expect ancient people would be good astronomers given that all resources at that time tens of thousands of years ago depended utterly on the seasons people lived at that time completely in tune with the seasons they had to to survive and the seasons can be tracked accurately with simple naked eye astronomy through the solstices and equinoxes naked eye observation without knowledge of precession is reasonable to me as i said in my video i'm open to the idea that some of the symbols that gobekli tepe could be constellations it also is reasonable to suppose people were familiar with the seasons and the changes in the sky though it will become way more important later when agriculture depends on it you don't have to have telescopes to have more advanced tech than what most people think stone age cultures had by the way if the sun were this high in the sky how would anyone see any stars if this were a visual observation wouldn't the sun be absent at night or just before sunrise the sun wouldn't be there i'm far from the first person academic or otherwise to suggest this and there is plenty of evidence to back this up and if david had read my book he'd know this was my view i did read his book and i knew that was his view now the surprising thing my work does suggest is that ancient people like those at quebec tepe we're using some constellations that are similar to our modern ones not exactly the same but sufficiently similar that we can see the correlations yeah i didn't see many correlations only the scorpion stood out as being similar none of the rest of course david misrepresents my position on this too this is one of his favorite strategies it's called the straw man fallacy so what he does over and over again in his video is misrepresent my ideas and then he proceeds to criticize those ideas he makes sure the misrepresentation is close enough to fool the unwary but nevertheless his criticism applies to the things he has made up and not my ideas classic straw man tactics i don't think i strawmanned him i certainly didn't intentionally let's see what examples he gives and see if i did see what he says here for example 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 that's completely untrue i have never made that claim nor do i have any evidence for it i claim only that some of our familiar zodiacal and a few nearby constellations were known approximately nothing more what i mean by approximately is that they were sufficiently similar to be recognizable in terms of the symbols used so that's just one example of his favorite strategy the straw man fallacy ah i see so he says that he's only claiming that the zodiac and some of the other greek constellations existed in approximate form thousands of years earlier whereas i said he assumed the existence of the zodiac and all the other greek constellations but please note that i did not state that he claimed this i stated that my video will be focusing on the question of whether both the zodiac and the rest of the greek constellations existed back then the reason i said we have to focus on that is because he is open to the idea that any of the greek constellations could have existed then he doesn't find evidence for all of them but he is open to the idea all of them are on the table so we have to discuss that as a topic i do however acknowledge that someone not paying strict attention to my wording could mistakenly assume i was attributing something to him that he never claimed so i apologize for my lack of clarity there let's look at another example of this kind of fallacy which in my view is the only one that really matters in david's entire video this is the part where he attempts to use my statistical method to evaluate pillar 43 this is the only one of my fallacies that really matters okay i guess he could have started here just so that you know what's going on to provide some context in this part of my statistical analysis of pillar 43 i compare each animal symbol that appears at quebec tepe with the constellation that we hypothesize is represented by an animal symbol on pillar 43. so take pisces for example we hypothesize that this bending bird at the top left of pillar 43 represents the constellation pisces which would be the autumn equinox constellation at the time of the younger droughts impact roughly 10800 bce so here they are shown side by side now this is my hypothesis in this case is that the bending bird represents pisces to test this hypothesis we compare all the other animal symbols at quebec tepe with the same constellation pisces in this case and put them in ranked order and we do that for each of the animal symbols on pillar 43. here is a table of the seven constellations we expect are written on pillar 43 in addition to scorpius the scorpion with the animal symbols ranked against them and as you can see according to my view in nearly every case the animal symbol already in that position on pillar 43 is better or as good as any other animal symbol at quebec tepe for representing that hypothesized constellation so for example i rank the bending bird first amongst all the animal symbols at for representing pisces and so on he says in this test we are to compare all the other animal symbols at gobekli tepe with the same constellation i want everybody to note that he gives you only 11 but there are far more animal symbols found at gobekli tepe than just eleven and there may indeed be more found there still as well as in the other tepes in the neighborhood so the question to ask ourselves is how useful is a test such as this if it doesn't include all the animal symbols you need an accurate number of permutations right by keeping that number as low as possible just 11 he rigs the test so that anyone taking the test is more limited in options that means they are more likely to find fewer possible similarities between animals and the constellations so according to my view represented by these rankings it's extremely unlikely that the best animal symbol would appear in every position on pillar 43 rather than some other animal symbol that could have been chosen if they were placed purely by chance please take note because what he says here is very important he's testing what the odds are his interpretation is correct over whether the symbols were placed by pure chance he came out to 1 in 20 million now correct me if i'm wrong but it seems to me that a test that calculates whether placement of symbols is random or not as this one does does not establish that another non-random system wasn't employed here if for example someone had another theory which proposes that the symbols are placed and oriented on the pillar exactly as they would expect them to be they too would come out with statistically significant odds would they not and i would say the same about their hypothesis it is one in millions more likely to be correct than to be random but that doesn't mean their interpretation is the most probable of all non-random interpretations and what this means is that pillar 43 can be read as a kind of date stamp since the constellations we hypothesize are represented on it can be read as a date using precession of the equinoxes so that's the essence of this hypothesis test if what we see on the pillar could be established as the representation of the sky at a given point in time he thinks it was on the summer solstice it could be understood as giving a date only if we understood a date to mean a time period hundreds of years long this is because the configuration of the constellations would look like this on the summer solstice for centuries not usually what we think of as a date also making a drawing of what is seen in the sky in itself in no way indicates knowledge of precession of the equinoxes and it needs to be pointed out that his test which he uses to claim that his entire hypothesis is correct doesn't for example it doesn't test the likelihood that the depiction of the sky on the pillar represents what it looked like on the summer solstice a key part of his thesis he calculated the probability that the symbols around scorpius would be in these positions but he never calculated the probability of whether this image represents what was seen on that day of the year this configuration could fit many different times note that i'm comparing the constellations as they appear in stellarium which is a popular astronomical software with the animal symbols that quebec tepe and by constellations i mean the patterns of points and lines in stellarium shown here one of the things i had a really hard time understanding and still do is why dr swettman made a test that matched animal symbols to constellations but didn't include a test that matched constellations to animal symbols that way he could determine the odds that an individual animal could be connected to a constellation is he not interested in knowing this now of course you might disagree somewhat with my rankings but nevertheless by going through the same exercise you can obtain your own statistic for how good the hypothesis is you can come to your own conclusion this is where we get to another problem with this test it commits what is commonly called the prosecutor's fallacy this is a fallacy in statistical reasoning that often occurs when evidence is compared against a large database the size of the database increases the likelihood that a match will be found in this case the database he is using is the configuration of stars seen in the sky from gobekli tepe over a period of thousands of years he claims a very low probability that the configuration on the pillar would match a specific date he posits but the fact is this pillar matches the configuration of the sky on many dates not just one he commits this fallacy by assuming that the prior probability of a random match is equal to the probability that his hypothesis is correct so what does david do with this hypothesis test after all this is the absolute key to my theory well as i said he performs another straw man fallacy you see what he does or at least what he says he does is ignore the lines in stellarium and then he somehow compares the distribution of constellation points so that's the positions on the stars only with the animal patterns let's see him do this 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 let me ask you something if someone devises a test to test a hypothesis and asks you to take it and the test is flawed do you take the flawed test or do you correct the test and then take it in this case it seemed best to me to correct the test as it stood even though he was making claims that these were ancient constellations the test was using modern ones so i made an adjustment accordingly what i also should have done was include all the animal symbols of gobekli tepi in the test this would have strengthened the accuracy of the test considerably but dr swetman is miffed that i didn't take the test as he rigged it but that process is nonsense it's meaningless to compare points without lines between them with a two-dimensional animal symbol you see points are dimensionless so they can't map out any two-dimensional pattern at all unless you connect them up somehow for example with straight lines that's just basic mathematical logic of course david doesn't realize this probably because he's almost no training in mathematics look i understand that the test doesn't work as well that way but you don't sacrifice the accuracy of a test just so that you can take more subjectivity out of it in effect though although he doesn't say this explicitly he is implicitly making up his own lines and patterns in his imagination yes constellations are an exercise in peridolia now as i said david and i had communicated via direct message on twitter about this so he knows very well my argument but instead he decided to effectively make up his own constellations he never actually reveals the lines he was imagining between the points he just asks you to trust that he has made up some good ones and then he compares them against the animal symbols i didn't make up my own constellations they're the same group of stars think about this for a minute the lines of the constellations whether modern or ancient greek are based on the outline of an animal or person but apart from the scorpion dr swetman has opened up the possibility that different animals were used at gobekli tepe than in greece or now that changes the lines the lines outline a shape if you connect the dots to create a shape to create a different shape you would connect dots differently how can you say that the lines that represent the shape of two humans can now be used to represent the shape of a gazelle you get what i'm saying now it's obvious to anyone that this is not my hypothesis anymore he's implicitly made up his own lines so he's testing his own hypothesis not mine that's the straw man argument right there he has the freedom to make whatever hypothesis he likes but he doesn't have the freedom to make whatever statistical test that he likes the test is only valid if it tests his hypothesis accurately if it tests something else entirely or if it tests only a portion of his hypothesis or tests his hypothesis inaccurately it can't be used to validate his hypothesis in fact it's worse than that because by making up his own patterns which he never actually reveals he creates an invalid hypothesis you see in order for a hypothesis like this to be valid it's not allowed to depend on anything which might be influenced by the person making the hypothesis so in my case i'm comparing the animal symbols that govern tepe with the constellations that's the lines and points in stellarium and i've had no influence on either of them they both existed before my hypothesis was developed but in david's case he implicitly made up his own lines which means they could easily be biased and that invalidates his hypothesis if i had made up my own lines to fit the animal symbols on pillar 43 that would be equally invalid and david would have pointed that out as a flaw straight away with good reason yes and this is my point his own test despite his denial of this is influenced by him he influenced it in several ways he limited the number of animals in the test which affects the outcome in his favor he created the test with the presumption that the constellations of libra and ophiuchus are oriented properly on the pillar when they are not these factors corrupt his test he also allowed for the constellations to be rotated in any direction which affects the outcome in his favor in other words the animal does not have to match the constellation in the sky as it is seen it can be sideways or upside down now i know he will say well that is my hypothesis my hypothesis says the people recorded what they saw in the sky without regard for the rotational orientation of the constellation think about how nonsensical that is can you imagine this conversation hey joe make sure that when you carve the figures on that pillar each one matches the shape of the constellation very important oh and also they have to be placed in their correct positions in the sky too don't mess up on that uh can i put some of them upside down yeah sure no problem right but that aside by allowing the symbol to be in any rotational position he decreases the falsifiability of his claims thereby compromising the usefulness of his test in fact david asked me specifically about this point he asked me what this line in our paper meant so this what i'm showing here is our rebuttal of the archaeologist's response to our initial fox paper in 2017. so here we say note that we are comparing given constellations with given animal symbols this is not an arbitrary process and is therefore statistically meaningful what this means is that our hypothesis ends valid because we have no influence on either the animal patterns on pillar 43 or the constellation patterns in stellarium i repeat he did influence the test on the other hand just underneath we say it is common in popular media and across the internet to take a different approach where given or arbitrary symbols are compared with arbitrary star patterns this strategy is statistically meaningless and therefore not scientific this means you're not allowed to make up your own star patterns now even though i explain these sentences to david at length he seems to have ignored them the reason i made this video in the first place was to see if ancient greek constellations were represented on this pillar if the test uses modern configurations of constellations then it leaves the question of ancient greek constellations out of it now david's argument for making up his own lines as you just heard is that the lines in stellarium are modern and therefore they aren't valid either let's hear them say this again to be clear i use the configuration of stars not the lines okay the drawn lines there are modern so according to david it doesn't matter that he effectively made up his own lines because the ones in stellarium are modern inventions too and he doesn't see any difference of course this argument is nonsense it assumes that david's implicit or effective lines which as far as we know are completely random are as good as the lines that appear in stellarium which is of course ridiculous and here's why for starters we can assume the makers of stellarium are trying their best to reproduce the greek constellations by which i mean the points and lines the makers of stellarium are trying their best to reproduce the greek constellations unless he knows something that i don't know the constellations in stellarium are not meant to represent ancient constellations they are meant to represent our own constellations that we use today now i realize that some of our modern constellations can be traced back to ancient greece but they also include any and all revisions since and secondly the greeks wrote down their constellations with the intention that they could be reconstructed in the future the best source we have is from ptolemy's almagest about 150 a.d where he describes the position of each star in a constellation in relation to its symbol so here's the page in ptolemy's alma guest relating to pisces as you can see these descriptions are very detailed and should allow construction of the constellation lines by themselves just in case there is some doubt we also have the thanes atlas which actually tells us what the symbols looked like and again this is for about 150 a.d and it's thought the thanes atlas and ptolemy's alma guest are both based on the constellations of hipparchus from about 150 bc so from these sources we can recreate the greek constellations that's the points and lines as the greeks might have imagined them at least approximately ah okay now this is great this is something he should have done before it's a necessary component of his argument if you're going to argue that the constellations at gobekli tepe are approximations of ancient greek constellations use the ancient greek constellations can we recreate them perfectly no but we can expect that the points and lines in stellarium are a reasonable reconstruction of how the greeks saw the sky because the greeks told us what their constellations looked like and the makers of stellarium are deliberately trying to reconstruct them using points and lines as best they can no this is in direct contradiction to what stellarium itself states at the same time we can have no confidence in david's imagined lines because they're biased because he made them up himself and he doesn't reveal them anyway so his hypothesis is fundamentally flawed and this should be obvious in fact it's so obvious that it calls into question david's competence in this area he seems to have a very limited understanding of the scientific method and as i said at the beginning david has limited experience with scientific hypothesis testing and mathematics and i think it shows i think he's out of his depth here you know it would be a great statistical test add up all the ad hominems in dr swetman's video and add up all those in mind and compare indeed i think it's fair to ask why david did this it's so obviously flawed there must have been a strong motivation for him to do this rather than use the lines in stellarium or similar software my guess is that david realized that if he did use the lines in stellarium as they are rather than making up his own he would get a strong statistic that he felt he would have trouble arguing against dr swetman apparently is none too pleased that i wouldn't take the kobayashi maru as he programmed it and there's a clue in his video which supports this view let's listen to what he thinks of having to use the lines in stellarium 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 yes i'm forcing you to use my hypothesis david that's the whole point and by the way it's not about matching it's about ranking what david is saying though is that he doesn't like to be forced to use the lines in stellarium but if you don't do that david it's no longer my hypothesis he's basically admitting defeat here i'm not testing my hypothesis i don't have a hypothesis the problem is that his test doesn't properly test his own hypothesis what this shows i think is that david is having trouble reconciling what he thinks he knows about pre-history with what his own eyes are actually showing him and he simply can't face that level of cognitive dissonance okay he's just flexing and posturing now in any case his entire youtube channel is dedicated to debunking what he sees as misconceptions about the past not agreeing with them so he's got a huge amount of skin in the game there's no way he was ever going to agree with me problem for david is that sooner or later he's going to tackle an issue that is actually correct and isn't a misconception at all that is going to look a bit foolish just to be clear my entire channel is not dedicated to debunking misconceptions only this series and it is not dedicated to debunking what i believe to be misconceptions it's dedicated to debunking what archaeologists historians and scientists as a whole consider to be misconceptions if you for one second think that the scientific consensus on gobekli tepe agrees with what dr swettman is saying you would be mistaken mind you they haven't all weighed in on it but there isn't a single independent published paper that i've been able to find that corroborates or replicates his findings this is bad science and i'm willing to stake my reputation on that anyway i think it's obvious that rather than confronting my hypothesis properly he ducted entirely by making up his own lines and his own hypothesis classic straw man fallacy i didn't make his test appear weaker than it is i attempted to make it stronger and it doesn't get any better david uses several other kinds of fallacy apart from the many straw man fallacies in his video for example david sometimes state things as fact when in fact they are not known with any certainty it's a strange behavior for a historian who should know better is it a fallacy when someone states something as fact when it isn't i think that's just being wrong was i wrong maybe let's find out let's take a look at an example we learned in our last video that the ram symbol for aries 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 was 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 david thinks it's known beyond any doubt that the greek set of constellations were created in greece in the latter part of the first millennium bc shortly before hipparchus in fact this is not known with any certainty it's just a convenient story that historians like david like to promulgate based on a logical fallacy the evidence for this is given in my first zodiac video you can go check it out and judge for yourself but here are the cliff notes ancient greek writers testified to the fact that the greeks borrowed the zodiac from the babylonians in the 4th century bce so the full set of greek constellations could have been completed only after that happened what we do know is that the first written evidence we have for our zodiacal constellations dates back to the mulapin and the three stars each lists which at the earliest date to the mid-second millennium bc in babylon all of the constellations of the babylonian zodiac do appear in the mullapin though not as a set of twelve the three stars each lists which are earlier do not contain all the constellations of the zodiac only sum but remember we're in babylon and in babylon many of the other greek constellations the non-zodiacal ones are not here they clearly at this point have not yet been combined they're still separate that is why finding them together at gobekli tepe is anachronistic and we also know that the first written evidence we have for any of our non-zodiacal constellations is in the early classical greek texts such as homer's odyssey which were probably first written down significantly before 700 bc and that's it we don't know when any of these constellations were actually invented he's right we don't but what we do know is that these constellations were invented at different times in different places in history and were only brought together by the greeks in the hellenistic period and we certainly don't know when the full set of greek constellations we know today was assembled it's entirely possible that the full set of constellations was already assembled say by 3000 bc and that for whatever reason the babylonians decided in the mid second millennium bc to write down some of the zodiacal constellations and then a few hundred years later the early greek authors decided to use some non-zodiacal ones in their stories and that view is entirely consistent with the historical evidence we have the assumption that both of these societies had the full set is not only unsupported by the evidence it is contradicted by the evidence and you don't need to take my word for it that's basically the conclusion of this paper by professor bradley schaefer which is probably the best paper published on this subject published in the journal for the history of astronomy where he suggests that based on all the available evidence the full set of greek constellations was likely known already by 1100 bc and possibly earlier i want to thank dr swetman for pointing to this paper an excellent study by the way which concludes convincingly that the astronomical lore in the writings of the greek eudoxas who lived in the 4th century bce is based on observations that were taken in 1100 bce in assyria that's northern mesopotamia dr swetman mistakenly concludes that this means the greeks had all this astronomical lore in 1100 bce but that is not what dr schaefer concluded he wrote another article shortly thereafter titled the origin of the greek constellations to give the bigger picture and i'm excited to share this information with you his findings comport with everything i have said dr schaefer does not say that the greeks had their full set of constellations by 1100 bce he says that the mesopotamians had their full set or at least most of them by 1100 bce these are the constellations listed in the mullapin in my video i stated that the observations of the mulapin probably dated back to a thousand bce dr shaffer has been able to pinpoint it more precisely to eleven hundred by looking at the relative positions of the constellations in the mullapin and comparing them to how the night sky appeared in certain places at certain times this is fantastic information but the greeks he says did not obtain this lore until later please note how dr shaffer describes the greek constellations before they met the babylonians the two earliest written sources from the greeks the epics of homer assumed to be 8th century bc and the farmer's almanac of hesiod also dated to the 8th century both mention two prominent constellations orion and the great bear two star clusters the pleiades and the hyades and two stars sirius and arcturus but nothing more and all other greek sources from before about 500 bc are silent on the stars so the greeks had the most prominent star pictures before 500 bc but perhaps not many more his examination of the work of the greek writer eudoxas who lived in the 4th century bce and who presented the system of constellations at that time crediting the babylonians for much of it revealed that it basically was the same as in the mullapin i have noticed that mulapin and eudosis share a substantial amount of information leading me to conclude that the data used by both came from an original database made by an assyrian observer around 1100 bc because both surviving branches contain most of the ancient constellations albeit some with different names i conclude that the set of constellations was largely complete by sometime around 1100 bc therefore it is reasonable to conclude that sometime after this and before the existence of eudosis's book 366 bc the greeks received the mesopotamian star groups you see that between 1100 and 366. the lack of any evidence for the greek constellations other than the bear in orion mentioned in homer before 500 bc suggests that most of the transfer happened after that time so he's saying probably between 500 and 366. we know from textual evidence that the babylonian zodiac system came to greece around 400 bc this is perfectly in line with what i've been saying all along and is at odds with what dr swettman is arguing dr schaefer also notes that the greeks brought other constellations into their system that were not of mesopotamian origin despite the heavy reliance on mesopotamian star groups the greek system of constellations still has 18 star pictures with no roots in the east nor anywhere else that we can discover moreover the nature of these constellations is characteristically greek there is the quintessential greek hero hercules for example joined in the sky by other constellations that represent creatures the great warrior had defeated leo and draco among them ophiuchus carrying the serpent is there as well and the dolphin as would be appropriate for seafaring people such as the greeks six of these constellations depict a tableau from greek mythology concerning perseus's rescue of andromeda most likely these new star pictures were invented by the greeks themselves i thank dr swettman for citing this article as it further reinforces the view that constellations like ophiuchus had a separate origin from the babylonian set of constellations schaefer's conclusion by the way is based on the evidence contained in those written texts on what they actually say and is not just based on when those texts were written david on the other hand is i think basing his view only on when a few surviving texts were written his view doesn't take into account the possibility that not everything that happened in history was written down and that not everything that was written down has survived his view is a kind of perfect idealistic view of the surviving written historical record and it also ignores other forms of evidence it's basically total nonsense indeed there's a convenient phrase for this kind of logical fallacy which is that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence if dr swetman had paid better attention to my video he would have realized i didn't date the constellations to the time of their earliest recording in any case this entire point is another straw man fallacy remember i have never suggested that the entire set of greek constellations existed at quebec tepe so any discussion about exactly when the greek constellations was assembled is irrelevant david is making a straw man fallacy on top of a logical fallacy no but he did make the claim that constellations from two different systems were together at gobekli tepe before they had actually been brought together he is thousands of years off on this in fact when you remove all the personal attacks on me and the numerous straw man fallacies and all the logical fallacies and all the genetic fallacies and all the demonstrably incorrect statements and all of his archaeoastronomical errors and all of his misunderstandings about the younger giraffe's comet impact and all his misunderstandings of the scientific method and all his misunderstandings of mathematics and his idealistic view of the historical record you'll find there's almost nothing left of his video no wonder he wanted to make a youtube video rather than write a proper journal paper this is like saying there's a bunch of other stuff i could say that would totally demolish him trust me but i'm not gonna bother pointing them out right now so those are my thoughts on dr swetman's rejoinder video i hope it clarifies a few things let me know your thoughts in the comments below if you got something out of this video please give it a thumbs up if you'd like to help out the channel further you can become a patron for as little as two dollars per month at patreon.com slash world of antiquity 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 you

Channel: World of Antiquity

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Length: 62min 39sec (3759 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 11 2021