It's pretty easy for some people with the benefit of 8000 years of learning to look at something like this and call it a cult. That must be the default description archaeologists use to describe a society that left no clear records written in the archaeologist's native tongue or one that can easily help them understand the culture that lived during that time or that built those structures.

I originally read this article when it was posted to BBC news last week. I was not able to come to the same conclusion about this being some kind of cult. Cult to me has negative connotations. I would describe these people more charitably and probably more accurately as inhabitants who used local materials to construct buildings and structures intended to help them manage their local resources - food supplies, animals both wild and domesticated, protection from heat and cold, etc.

The mustatils themselves look like efficient pens for animals raised for consumption and the fact that there are so many scattered in such a large area, where we also see evidence of many people living together tells me that these mustatils were probably meat markets.

The existence of skulls of the goats, cattle, and gazelles just tells me what they had managed to capture, control, or domesticate. People have to eat.

Another thing really chaps my ass here as the author uses ridiculously irrelevant hyperbole to describe one of the mustatil in terms of the Eiffel Tower that make no sense to a deep thinker.

>Some of the mustatils weigh as much as 12,000 tonnes; more than the Eiffel Tower.

What? A mustatil is a collection of rocks. When you put enough rocks together you can end up with something that weighs a lot. Their dumbass statement makes it sound like building a structure out of individual rocks that collectively ended up weighing more than a large modern steel structure was a major accomplishment. I disagree. I think it was an ordinary response to the need to keep a good food supply close to their settlements.

I picture the people who lived here as industrious people who had all the skills needed to survive in the climate at the time and a good understanding not only of local materials, but of how to use those materials to their advantage. Later peoples in the area carved massive buildings into solid sandstone. Their predecessors were not ignorant cave men stumbling about. Instead, they were bright enough to be able to lay out plans for large structures and then to build them by doing exactly what we would do today. They would use their muscles and reach down and pick up rocks of many sizes and over a period of time they would be able to stack enough together to accomplish their goal.

I don't know whether they used animals to help drag the larger stones or rolled them along the ground on sleds or even how they did it. The fact is that they built it one rock at a time and in the end they had a well-organized collection of rocks that weighed about as much (if you believe an archeologist's estimate) as the Eiffel Tower which was itself constructed one piece of steel at a time and held together with bolts or rivets. Again, that is the way you build something that starts off small and ends up huge.

I hope they keep digging out there and that they catalog things and geo-reference everything as they go and that one day they can tell me what the last guy to live there had for supper based on the composition of the most recent coprolite found in the most recently dated septic pit.

I just don't think they need to start right off describing something as a cult and making it sound mysterious that people would slaughter their food animals near where the animals were penned and eat the carcass somewhere else. How many of you bring a goat head home from the grocery store?