This text is fairly difficult to parse. I like the way that the AI handles the Substack's super-links to Substack posts as quotes, and reads them in another voice.
Is there a cutoff for how long a footnote it will read inline?
It's not entirely automated, I've got a pipeline setup involving a quick editing and voice selection pass. It's a manual choice how to integrate footnotes and which voice to use for which paragraphs.
I was studying the relationship between religion, symbolic art, and war in the Neolithic, and read some articles on Göbekli Tepe by Christopher Knüsel & Bonnie Glencross, including "Çatalhöyük, archaeology, violence", in Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 23: 23–36.
They studied skeletons with severe skull trauma up high on the skull, which indicates they were probably inflicted intentionally rather than by falling on something. They began by saying how uncritically archeologists had jumped onto the bandwagon of claiming that Neolithic cultures were matriarchal, peaceful, egalitarian societies, ignoring or rationalizing away all evidence to the contrary.
Then, instead of explaining all the skull trauma as due to some kind of war, they took a sharp left and explained it as all being due to scapegoating as per Rene Girard's theory. The entire story made no sense: This was a city where 1/5th of the population was ritually stoned? Neolithic people can stone victims carefully enough to fracture their skulls multiple times without ever killing them? And then they take the scapegoats back into society, and bury them with honor? And the scapegoats are the outcasts of society, but stoning them is supposed to somehow keep the elite of society in line? There were all sorts of inconsistencies, even worse than under the "peaceful earth mother goddess worshipping Neolithic" theory they ridiculed.
So I started googling, and Girard is all over the place. The only way this makes sense is if we've moved into a new stage of wokeness in which Girard's theory is more useful than the earth-mother peaceful matriarchy story. And this is alarming, since the implications of Girard's theory is that to have social justice, we have to kill lots of uppity bourgeoisie.
Do you know anything about this? Why is Girard's extremely hypothetical just-so story catching on?
Once you're reading from the Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture you're in deep. I'm only vaguely familiar with Girard. I recall Robin Hanson recently asking what was up with him, so must be part of the zeitgeist.
The skull trauma/deformation is interesting. Ritual violence followed by healing is a weird fit. I haven't looked at it in Gobekli Tepe specifically, but have hinted at trepanation being medically more necessary in the past, because the shape of skulls has been changing in the last 10,000 years. This implies that people who had different shaped skulls died, probably because of horrible headaches or epilepsy or "possession" or the like. The wiki on trepanning (drilling holes in the skull), says 5-10% of all Stone Age skulls found have been trepanned. The percentage is higher in men. And there would have been times and places where it was significantly higher than the average. It's a really strange practice to pop up multiple times independently, so I'm partial to explaining it as diffusion. It's also strange that it was so prevalent, and then died out. No longer needed?
I was about to write that I'm really interested in whether those "stone age" skulls were paleolithic or neolithic, because if religion is the explanation, then we'd expect it to spike in the neolithic. But I just checked that wikipedia page, and it says they were /all/ in the neolithic.
What's your source for saying that the shape of skulls has been changing faster in the last 10,000 years? That could be a result of populations that had been isolated during the ice age starting to mate with each other, in which case the skulls would also have become more similar around the world, all converging towards a genetic average.
The Gobekli Tepe skulls aren't thought to be trepanned; they're mostly fractured, in some cases a depression fracture with the loss of the bone. But the authors never considered trepanning. If the fractures /were/ trepanning rather than the result of war, that would explain why nearly all of the wounds had healed, and why some people had 3 different skull fractures. I figured they weren't burying the people who died immediately in the same place (since they probably died somewhere else), but I couldn't explain why so many people had survived multiple fractures, when most skull fractures that were meant to kill someone, did.
I like to think the audio format is great for everything.
https://askwhocastsai.substack.com/p/vectors-of-mind-february-subscriber?sd=pf
That was fast!
Wonders of the modern age, with a few tools text posts can be converted easily into (to my ear) pretty darn listenable audio.
This text is fairly difficult to parse. I like the way that the AI handles the Substack's super-links to Substack posts as quotes, and reads them in another voice.
Is there a cutoff for how long a footnote it will read inline?
It's not entirely automated, I've got a pipeline setup involving a quick editing and voice selection pass. It's a manual choice how to integrate footnotes and which voice to use for which paragraphs.
I was studying the relationship between religion, symbolic art, and war in the Neolithic, and read some articles on Göbekli Tepe by Christopher Knüsel & Bonnie Glencross, including "Çatalhöyük, archaeology, violence", in Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 23: 23–36.
They studied skeletons with severe skull trauma up high on the skull, which indicates they were probably inflicted intentionally rather than by falling on something. They began by saying how uncritically archeologists had jumped onto the bandwagon of claiming that Neolithic cultures were matriarchal, peaceful, egalitarian societies, ignoring or rationalizing away all evidence to the contrary.
Then, instead of explaining all the skull trauma as due to some kind of war, they took a sharp left and explained it as all being due to scapegoating as per Rene Girard's theory. The entire story made no sense: This was a city where 1/5th of the population was ritually stoned? Neolithic people can stone victims carefully enough to fracture their skulls multiple times without ever killing them? And then they take the scapegoats back into society, and bury them with honor? And the scapegoats are the outcasts of society, but stoning them is supposed to somehow keep the elite of society in line? There were all sorts of inconsistencies, even worse than under the "peaceful earth mother goddess worshipping Neolithic" theory they ridiculed.
So I started googling, and Girard is all over the place. The only way this makes sense is if we've moved into a new stage of wokeness in which Girard's theory is more useful than the earth-mother peaceful matriarchy story. And this is alarming, since the implications of Girard's theory is that to have social justice, we have to kill lots of uppity bourgeoisie.
Do you know anything about this? Why is Girard's extremely hypothetical just-so story catching on?
Once you're reading from the Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture you're in deep. I'm only vaguely familiar with Girard. I recall Robin Hanson recently asking what was up with him, so must be part of the zeitgeist.
The skull trauma/deformation is interesting. Ritual violence followed by healing is a weird fit. I haven't looked at it in Gobekli Tepe specifically, but have hinted at trepanation being medically more necessary in the past, because the shape of skulls has been changing in the last 10,000 years. This implies that people who had different shaped skulls died, probably because of horrible headaches or epilepsy or "possession" or the like. The wiki on trepanning (drilling holes in the skull), says 5-10% of all Stone Age skulls found have been trepanned. The percentage is higher in men. And there would have been times and places where it was significantly higher than the average. It's a really strange practice to pop up multiple times independently, so I'm partial to explaining it as diffusion. It's also strange that it was so prevalent, and then died out. No longer needed?
Epistemic status: quite speculative
I was about to write that I'm really interested in whether those "stone age" skulls were paleolithic or neolithic, because if religion is the explanation, then we'd expect it to spike in the neolithic. But I just checked that wikipedia page, and it says they were /all/ in the neolithic.
What's your source for saying that the shape of skulls has been changing faster in the last 10,000 years? That could be a result of populations that had been isolated during the ice age starting to mate with each other, in which case the skulls would also have become more similar around the world, all converging towards a genetic average.
The Gobekli Tepe skulls aren't thought to be trepanned; they're mostly fractured, in some cases a depression fracture with the loss of the bone. But the authors never considered trepanning. If the fractures /were/ trepanning rather than the result of war, that would explain why nearly all of the wounds had healed, and why some people had 3 different skull fractures. I figured they weren't burying the people who died immediately in the same place (since they probably died somewhere else), but I couldn't explain why so many people had survived multiple fractures, when most skull fractures that were meant to kill someone, did.