The Çatalhöyük 'murals' being dismissed as grain storage marks had me rolling my eyes for years

I was sure archaeologists were just making up stories again until I saw the actual residue analysis from 2023 that showed animal fat and pigments layered intentionally. Has anyone else changed their mind on a dig finding after seeing the lab results yourself?

3 comments

3 Comments

shane1708d ago

Hated it too honestly, thought it was just more academic fluff until I sat down and actually read through that 2023 study myself. The way they mapped out the layers of pigment and fat got me because it's not like someone just spilled oil on a wall by accident. There's patterning in there that's way too careful for it to be a storage mess. Still bugs me how long it took for the data to override the old assumptions though, feels like a lot of early archaeological "interpretations" skip the science until someone proves them wrong.

river_thompson8d ago

Exactly, that whole process drives me crazy. It's the same everywhere, not just archaeology. You see it at work or even in neighborhood stuff, people stick with the old way of doing things even when new data shows a better way, and it takes someone screaming from the rooftops to change it. Like at my cousin's car shop, they swore the old diagnostic tool was fine until a tech documented all the missed problems it caused, then suddenly the new system was a great idea. So @shane170, we're basically watching the same stubbornness play out with cave paint as we do with bad software updates.

logan2718d ago

Is it just me or do we all secretly hope the next big discovery proves some old expert completely wrong? I guess I'm biased because I once argued a "rare" rock was just a dropped piece of asphalt.