Satellites Expose 8,000 Years of Civilization 138
ananyo writes "By combining spy-satellite photos obtained in the 1960s with modern multispectral images and digital maps of Earth's surface, researchers have created a new method for mapping large-scale patterns of human settlement. The approach was used to map some 14,000 settlement sites spanning eight millennia in 23,000 square kilometres of northeastern Syria — part of the fertile crescent of the Middle East. Traditional archaeology has focused on the big features such as cities or palaces but the new technique uncovers networks of small settlements, revealing migration patterns and sparking renewed speculation about the importance of water to city development."
Re:doh! (Score:4, Interesting)
The same way they explain all the other evidence for a 14 billion years old universe: by ignoring or misunderstanding it.
Right at the most simple: we can triangulate the distance to a star and determine that what we see is as old as the amount of time light takes to get here. If they deny this evidence they either fail basic math or refute relativity: the scientific theory with the best proof track record ever.
Re:doh! (Score:4, Interesting)
How are young earthers going to explain this one?
There are all sorts of methods, some more creative and convincing than others(at the low end, if you and your target audience simply don't give a damn about this 'empiricism' nonsense and consider goddidit! to be a valid solution, things of any apparent age are no problem: an omnipotent entity wouldn't have any trouble magic-ing something that looks ten million years old into existence ten seconds ago...).
However, I have heard a number of stories from buddies who got into archaeology and did some fertile crescent digs; that there is an interesting demographic who has a real, visceral attack of this problem:
Your sharper breed of American christian fundamentalists, coming from an area where any evidence of human habitation is either a few hundred years old, max, or fairly subtle and 'radiocarbon dating/the flood/etc/etc. awayed' during their growing up decide that they want to do some biblical archaeology. So, off they go and they find themselves grubbing through masonry that just oozes OLD in a much more immediately dramatic way than some of the subtler isotopic dating results or other inferrential work does. Apparently some of them find it quite traumatic or transformative: The "This wall/building/house/whatever had already been standing for at least a few millenia at the point when God is supposed to have created the earth" thing is much more potent than the "Some scientists say that C14/C12 ratios in cave charcoal suggest timeline... yaddda, yadda..."
Or just a few decades (Score:5, Interesting)
I once used the satellite view of Google Maps to look for old train tracks that have been torn up and gone for decades. It's actually pretty interesting. If you go out and visit spots where the tracks used to be, you can't see anything out of the ordinary. But a satellite shot clearly shows the "scars" of where the tracks used to be. Where they cut through forests, the trees are a little shorter. The soil in farm fields is colored differently. Roads bend to intersect the track at a right angle, things like that.
Here's a good example [g.co] in Washtenaw county. You can see the "ghost tracks" going southwest/northeast. If you follow them northeast, you'll see that a new subdivision was built on an area of land that they used to cut through. Curiously, the developers built no houses where the tracks were. Instead, they added footpaths, gave some houses larger backyards, and left "gaps" where houses could have been built. (I'd love to know why this was done. Any developers in the audience?)
You can follow the tracks southwest as well, but eventually you get to a region where the images were taken with a different satellite at a different time of year and the loss of contrast makes the tracks impossible to follow any further.
Re:Or just a few decades (Score:4, Interesting)
That particular run goes reasonably close to my house. The totally apocryphal explanation for those "tracks" was that Norfolk Southern, or whatever the iteration of the railroad was named at the time the development was planned, bought the rights to that land with the plan of bridging Ford Lake (why they would I have no idea. That'd be an expensive bridge at that point) and connecting to the auto plants (at the time GM Hydramatic and GM Willow Run Assembly), the Airport (Willow Run, with the idea of being a sort of intermodal hub) and the NS line just north of the airport that runs East - West.
In the end they backed out on cost and opted to serve both plants from the East - West line, even though it necessitated a longer trip to connect. (Incidentally, Amtrak will eventually own that stretch of line all the way from K-zoo to Detroit, adding to their longest continuous track track section outside of the Northeast corridor.) That ghost trail was also part of the line that crossed US-23. Not under, crossed. A two lane divided highway that at one point had a live rail crossing.
Interestingly, the http://www.historicaerials.com/ [historicaerials.com] images don't show the 'ghost' trail until 1963. The 1955 images don't show anything. NS also owns property much closer to bridge road (take Textile west from Bridge, look to the right. You'll see a large section of land with NS branded 'no trespassing' signs).
Re:doh! (Score:4, Interesting)
Except that the Bible says that God is revealed through his creation as well. This would seem to indicate that God wouldn't make things appear to be a way they are not. (I say this as a Christian who does not believe that young Earth makes any sense. I could possibly see an argument being made that human's have only been around 6000 or so years (I don't personally believe this is necessary or accurate either, but I could at least see grounds for the argument (using the Bible, not science)).) Ultimately, those who claim the Bible says the Earth is only 6000 years old fail at both their own religion and science. The term translated as "day" more closely means age or period. Clearly, without a planet yet, you can't have a 24 hour day, so it doesn't even make sense to assume that the "days" referenced were literal.