Bye doma,
I'm sorry you were uncomfortable with someone not simply accepting your hypothesis, but who challenged it using linked evidence. That's the test process by which others get to figure whether a theory has wings. You work out if the theory fits the known facts. It's what I do to my own theories before presenting them, at least. It isn't disrespectful to do so. Least of all when someone describes others as rigid in their thinking.
As I've said previously, this is a space in which your theories won't get deleted.
It's also a place in which the facts get to be right. It isn't me. I just check things and bring the results here. I didn't write the wikipedia article which contradicted you. I simply accepted what it said as having an authority. I didn't translate the Enuma Elish or the Epic of Gilgamesh. I just read and/or searched them to see if what you were quoting was accurate as it didn't conform with my memory. I am interested in Mesopotamian history. I am interested in evolutionary theory and the beginnings of homo sapiens sapiens and the exodus of mankind from Africa and the beginnings of language and art and science and law. I have read a bit about mankind's story and the origins of civilisation. It's a really interesting tale.
It just seemed whenever I looked things up, your theories didn't match the reality beyond the unique cuneiform translation or the shaman or the unidentifiable mineral magazine or whatever. In your shoes, I'd want to know that. I'd want to flex my theory to a reality that is testable and in which the age of a mine which isn't documented elsewhere also doesn't shift around from 100,000 to 200,000 to 60,000 years old. I'd want to know that modern humans emerged around 200,000 years ago and seem to have begun mining around 43,000 years ago in search of red ochre. For painting, I guess. Man's earliest impulse was to create. Ain't that something!
Could it be that rather than me needing to be right, this is about you being reluctant to acknowledge that your historical theory simply doesn't fly? And to preserve it, you have to say that everyone else is naive, rigid, sheep-like, and that the world is run by a mysterious and unidentified group of illuminati in control of the world's wealth and information etc. That you are the only one with access to truth because nothing anyone else knows matches your ideas.
I certainly wouldn't want to spend my life believing something which turns out to fail the test of a simple challenge. I'd want the cold bath of reality. I'd think someone who offered it actually was showing me some goodwill. But that's me.
Why not read the story of man as science and research and archaeology and literature and art reveals it? It's there to be read. And it makes a fabulous story.
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