State of the Insanity

The only thing that gives me solace these days is archaeology.  I love it so much.
There is a really important Native American site that was excavated right down the road from me. I have been reading articles and watching lectures about that and other local sites.
I have also watched all 20 seasons of Time Team twice in the past few months.   I know more about artifacts found in English farmland than I ever desired.  (It did manage to break my Forensic Files addiction though).
But mostly I have been learning about Gobeckli Tepe.  It's a place in the fertile crescent where agriculture began.  It seems to be a place where hunter tribes gathered and taught each other about where to find and gather grain and how to make beer.

The desire for beer and the loss of large game animals due to unrestrained arrow hunting are now proposed to be the trigger for the adoption of agriculture and the beginning of "civilization".
Not intellectual enlightenment. Not religion.
It was lack of impulse control causing environmental collapse.

As far as I can tell, civilization has mostly led to more usage and reverence of beer and ballistic weapons, though.

The thought that a sick, demented man is going to bomb cultural artifacts in the Middle East, and alcoholic men with guns are cheering him on-- right when humanity is figuring this out-- just makes my brain melt...