A lot hinges on the dating of this site. How was it done?
According to this article[1] (which has a nice wide-angle view of t-pillars in context), it was radiocarbon dating[1]. You find bits of stuff at the site and the isotopic composition of the carbon-containing material tells you the age based on known rates of carbon-14 decay.
The actual isotopic analysis seems pretty solid.
The problem is that this isn't any ordinary site. The article notes that the site appears to have been deliberately buried. This raises the question of where the samples that were dated actually came from.
This critical review suggests major problems with the older-than-everything-else hypothesis for the site.[2] It notes that at least some of the samples were dated from "fill," or the stuff that was used by someone at some point to bury the site. And that stuff could have itself come from sites much older than Gobeklitepe:
> We already discussed the problem with dating “fills” as opposed to dating “structures”. A fill’s date (no matter how confident we may fill about its actual date) in no way dates structures, as it simply can be coming from soil deposits that are either older or younger than the structure itself. You can fill your home with dirt from your yard, which could be from various geologic strata, some containing fossils from the Pleistocene. This will not make your home a Pleistocene Epoch home. Or you can currently fill a 4th century BC Temple with soil from riverbanks containing live exoskeletons; this will not render the Temple a 2000 AD structure.
Even if the site wasn't deliberately buried, everything hinges on where the fill came from. The base assumption of radiocarbon dating is that no foreign material was brought in. The shakier that assumption, the shakier the claim to the ages being quoted.
Things rarely depend on any single form of evidence. The prevailing interpretations are usually based multiple forms of corroborating evidence. For example, there are plenty of other neolithic sites in the same region, and many of them share the same art style as Göbekli Tepe. The overall timeline is rather well established based on evidence such as human / animal / plant remains, art, tools, and genetics.
Also, [2] seems to be a self-published article written by someone with no background, publication record, or known collaborations in archaeology or related fields. I would not put much weight on it, especially because I have no background in archaeology either and I'm therefore unable to interpret its reliablity.
Things rarely depend on any single form of evidence.
The article deals at length with those other forms of evidence. In particular, the site does not fit (architecturally, the author's specialty) with what was happening around it at the alleged time of building.
> Also, [2] seems to be a self-published article written by someone with no background, publication record, or known collaborations in archaeology or related fields.
Perhaps true, but irrelevant. Einstein was a patent clerk, a standing that prevented a great many people from even bothering to read the work.
The article is packed with citations that can be followed up on. It methodically takes apart Schmidt's original work. If you doubt the credibility of the analysis, perhaps start there. If he's being unfair to Schmidt's evidence, then that's a different matter.
Einstein had already published several papers in physics and he was about to receive his PhD when he made his major discoveries in 1905. The idea that he was just some outsider patent clerk is an urban legend that needs to die.
As an active researcher, I often find papers in distant fields easier to understand than those in my field. Papers on topics related to my research but not that close to it are particularly difficult. When I'm unfamiliar with the topic, I just see some text written in everyday language. And while most researchers are not great at writing, they are not particularly bad either, because they write so much. When I read such papers, I have absolutely no idea what I'm missing or misinterpreting. I may interpret technical terms with specific definitions as everyday words, and there may be shared context, implicit assumptions, and basic background knowledge I'm simply unaware of.
Hence my default assumption that if you read a research paper and think you understood it, you probably didn't. Research is so specialized these days that you should require something better than your own beliefs to convince yourself that you understood what you read. Relying on external validation ("an expert is someone other experts on the topic recognize as an expert") is pretty useful when you are not an expert yourself.
You might have read a specialized article and understood it, i.e. created a meaningful whole of all the parts. But you cannot verify it from prior experience with the domain, so it is an internally unconfirmed reading. In addition, subtle key terms might have been replaced with their mundane meanings.
So while you understood the article, you don't have enough information (yet) to confidently say that you understood it correctly.
Over time you gain domain knowledge, and it becomes easier to verify assumptions of new things you read, or to question and correct your own apparatus of understanding.
There's an important observation to be made here, though, with regards to this behavior. Whenever subject field outsiders want to discuss a matter in my field of study, they invariably simplifies what they've read to childish levels and relate some personal property or recent event in their own life. I recognize they're simply being social, and appreciate the interaction for what it is, rather than getting annoyed by what it isn't.
Human beings are social beings, and many internet comments (including of own) are just expressions of individuality and basic human need to partake rather than thoughtful arguments in an actual effort to discover something new.
That said, I do believe e.g. Einstein's Relativität was written for the larger non-expert audience, so I would expect it to safeguard against most of the interpretative traps that would entail.
Idk, I read it as a humble, even self-effacing, comprehensive, yet concise, explanation of how to evaluate claims in common scenarios, as well as an explanation of interesting observations you gain from looking outside your discipline regularly.
Dendrinos is a moderately well-known guy by ancient near-eastern peeps and he's not regarded well. He doesn't really know what he's talking about and his paper makes that pretty obvious. Here are some random issues I can quickly point out from a skim:
1. Doesn't understand how typological classification works
2. Kind of offhandedly acknowledges, but doesn't actually cite the PPNA plaster dating that Dietrich and Schmidt did 6 years prior, negating the entire fill argument.
3. Starts comparing things to Natufian and other levant material cultures.
4. Just randomly starts assuming his urban planning hypotheses, which are neither well-accepted in the field nor well-regarded by people who specialize in that stuff as it applies to the ancient near-east.
All of this is fine because he's essentially retired and simply getting into internet fights to avoid boredom. Nothing wrong with that, but let's avoid bringing him up as an authority.
Picking a case you think supports your claim without checking the rate at which unknown author claims turn out to be true likely only undermines your claims.
The proper metric is: is the rate at which unknown authors making big claims that stand up to further scrutiny higher than the rate for well established experts in a field?
The answer is no. Crackpots litter all fields, and rarely is anyone at that level correct when the experts are not.
As to Einstein, he was published in top physics journals before he became a patent clerk, and he published at least 16 papers (some incorrect) before his big 1905 paper, which was a few years into his patent clerk job. He was certainly not some unknown. Your case is nothing at all like Einstein's case.
"doesn't fit architecturly" is not a good argument. We have never built temples in the same style as houses. The dating is rejected only because it doesn't fit the author's worldview.
I laughed out loud at the caption of a photo of a much younger site;
"structure more primitive than Gobekli Tepe, thus older."
According to this publication [1] by the "rediscover-er" of Gobeklitepe, they found and dated an animal tooth that confirmed their original dating of the site to somewhere around 9000 BCE. It doesn't look like the critical review that you linked in your comment addresses that.
"The last intrusions in the big enclosures can be dated by a charcoal sample taken from under a fallen pillar fragment in Enclosure A to the middle of the 9th millennium."
The review I linked has a remarkably readable discussion of this. In a nutshell, the filling of the site rendered everything that has been tested liable to contamination by the fill.
Apparently, the plaster on the walls (which contain lime, which I believe is thought to have come from fires) was one of the main pieces of evidence presented by Schmidt. But plaster can absorb carbon from the fill. This is plausible given both age (at least thousands of years) and the fact that plaster only occurs on the surface in direct contact with the contaminating fill.
AFAICT, there as been no enclosed space from which samples have been dated. It all comes from areas that were directly exposed to fill, or the fill itself.
The author of the review also notes something that should be obvious to those outside the field, but for some reason doesn't get discussed much inside:
> Thus, in questioning the claim about Gobekli Tepe’s date (of PPNB, possibly earlier) one might think that the one who does the questioning must have extraordinary and abundant as well as “almost beyond reasonable doubt” convincing evidence to counter what the archeological establishment has claimed about Gobekli Tepe. In effect, it seems it is no longer asked that the agency who makes the extraordinary claims about Gobekli Tepe provides the extraordinary evidence. But instead, the burden of proof has shifted to those who tend to counter the claims. Be that as it may, the paper will proceed as if the burden of proof is on the counterclaim. The paper will be setting the most stringent of all arguments and criteria in an attempt to support the counter arguments, although it doesn’t have to do so.
As Sagan famously said "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." But the evidence on the dating of this site seems pretty weak.
According to Sweatman (a year ago), 'three bodies' have been found in 'a burial' 'under the floor of houses'. Start at about 5:10 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F3qZQRzzA4]
That sort of assumes you have a structure containing elements that were a) made by hand that b) survived. A pile of stone laid by hand doesn't help, for example.
As someone who knows nothing about the field of archeology, it would interst me to know, what are other methods of dating they coud use to improve the estimate, or address to some degree the concerns you raise?
When other known and nearby civilizations are around at the same time, you also date by the foreign goods you find -- Greek coins, or pieces of Bronze-age armor, for instance. In this case, I'm not sure whether that stuff exists or is easily dated.
Depending on the site, the situation can be quite different. The curves are specific for a certain type of tree in a certain region. Very long unbroken curves are still quite rare. The "better" ones go back about 5,000 yrs. The longest one is the Hohenheimer Jahrringkalender, based on oak and pine trees from Southern and Eastern Germany. It goes back about 12,500 yrs (researchers work to extent it to 14,400 yrs before now).[1] To my knowledge, this is the only curve that goes back to the Gobekli Tepe area, but it is from a different region and therefore not helpful here.
Related: I recently watched the amazing Turkish Netflix series Atiye (2019-21), in which Göbekli Tepe features centrally. The main character, Atiye, is a painter who's painted the same symbol all her life, and one day sees it in a news story about Göbekli Tepe, and feels compelled to travel there immediately. The epic story involves time travel, alternate realities, spirituality/mythology, archaeologists, academics, history, family, love etc. Also you get to see a lot of the Turkish countryside. I and the SO thought it really wonderful, highly recommended. (Warning: Season 3 is a kind of new story and loses the addictive watchableness of the first 2, but is not terrible.)
I enjoy ethos greatly. I saw Atiye as well. Enjoyed both, but ethos to me was a eye opening and pretty deep. I knew about Kemalists (seculars) vs Muslims (supported by Erdogan) and was kinda fascinated by the division and how different is
from Greek division (left vs right) but also by similarities.
In Ethos, the seculars are a caricature of what is known as "White Turks", i.e. the well educated middle class Turks with Western values who live in affluent neighbourhoods. Many people felt offended by it because it's also a political message from the conservatives about the "elites" being disconnected from the rest of the population. There was a culture and class war and the conservatives won, only to reduce their conservative values to clothing and alcohol, becoming the new "White Turks" who are detached from the rest of the society.
Anyway, the Turks and the Greeks are much more similar to each other than let's say, the French or the British. When a Turk and a Greek meet in western Europe they find relief as they understand each other much better than anyone else. Turks and Greeks are huge frenemies, in a sense that on state level they have never ending disputes over territories and things can quickly heat up but on social level they are almost like the same people and they love each other. When a disaster strikes, Greeks would be among the first to help the Turks and vice versa.
In Turkey, there's also Left&Right but the leftist were slaughtered during military coups(which happen every 20 years!) in the past, there's no sizeable movement by the left. Instead, the society is divided by many other things like ethnicity(Kurds vs Turks) and religion(sunni muslims and alawi muslims), cultural alliance(west v.s. russia among the seculars), values(liberals v.s. nationalists) or any other thing, including even cuisine!
Tangentially, I wasn't aware of Turkey as an exporter of TV until I recently traveled in Cambodia and everyone I spoke to went on about the Turkish dramas they were watching. Thanks for the recommendation! this sounds like a good starting point for me to get into Turkish shows.
Sounds like something copied from Battlestar Gallactica. One of the characters paints the same symbol her whole life and eventually discovers it means something significant for her and all of humanity.
Which in turn sounds a bit like the Star Trek:TNG episode "The Chase" where a symbol seen all over the universe brings four alien species together to find a message from an ancient race they all descended from.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) has a similar element: several people obsessing over a mountain-like shape, they paint it, sculpt it, etc, and want to travel there. Later it turns out to be the place where the UFOs arrive.
Off topic from the post but something I find fascinating. I live in Maine and recently became aware of the Vail Site in northwest Maine, which purports to be around 13000 years old [1]. The beringian migration predates that by a few thousand years I believe but the actual dispersal of Paleo-Indians to the broader Americas hinges on the melting of the ice sheets that covered North America up until only a thousand years or so prior to the Vail site proper. I know we are talking about a scale of thousands of years but it blows my mind that people (without work animals) found their way across the continent and set up shop here when there was probably little actual reason to come here at all since, presumably, game and fish were as robust in all the lands they traveled to arrive here and fellow human pressure was non-existent.
When I consider stuff like this I look back on my own experiences in life and it is easy enough to see that an ordinary person or group of people can cover a lot of ground in a short period of time on foot.
From the west coast of Alaska to the east coast in Maine it is about 5500 miles. Moving 10 miles a day it only takes 18 months. Even if you only lived for 30 years back then there is plenty of opportunity for a single individual to have made the entire journey on foot allowing lots of opportunities for seasonal pauses or to delay progress because they liked the new digs better than the last place they stopped.
A reasonably adventurous person could easily have seen most of the continental US in a lifetime especially when you consider that boats were part of their skill sets. Even moving as a group you could easily traverse the continent settling for short periods wherever things looked promising.
I will have to look up the Vail site as I am not familiar with that one. I know there is the Buttermilk site in central Texas (Gault site) that has yielded dates in the 16000-21000 yr range as near as I remember.
Note, this isn't generally true. The low average life expectancy in those ages is skewed down by infant mortality and conflict. In a way, human life span follows a bathtub curve so reducing infant mortality in our (modern) age has massively increased the average life expectancy, but it doesn't mean people in those days didn't live past 40.
Or, exaggerating mildly: nobody lived for 30 years back then; half the population didn't make it past their first birthday, the other half lived for 60 years.
Yes. I agree with the lifespan information you've laid out.
There has been a misconception amongst laymen that our lifespans have become longer for a number of reasons because it is usually framed in a way that bolsters the notion that all those who came before had shorter lifespans than we are likely to enjoy.
That isn't really the case because obviously if someone mentions an average lifespan or a median lifespan then that is the number that sticks in the memory and most people whiff on the fact that with any average or median, around 50% of the people lived longer and 50% of the people did not live as long. No upper bound is given and the lower bound is intuitively occupied by those who didn't survive infancy.
In hindsight, I should've framed that differently. I was attempting to illustrate that it doesn't take much time at all to cover a lot of ground and if you are motivated by the need to feed yourself or your family or if you just feel the unshakable need to see what is over that distant hill then a short lifespan still offers plenty of opportunity to see the world and scratch those itches.
I spent several months when I was younger living on the road and in the back-country. I knew every morning that my primary goal needed to be locating drinkable water for myself, my traveling partner, and our horses and my secondary goal was finding food. We carried our shelters and implements that we would need to keep all our gear in order but water and food were paramount concerns. We were young and totally not clued in to all the planning that would normally be involved in undertaking a multi-week, multi-state trip so inaccurate assumptions were made about accessibility, cost, and availability of necessities. We had fun, we survived our own incompetence and we moved on with new skill-sets and an enhanced appreciation for how the real world really works.
I agree a man can travel a whole lot just by taking small steps on a regular basis.
However, I am not sure it was that easy.
- It will be easy if the map was laid out, they unlikely had any sense of where they were going those days, so to cover a hypothetical straight-ish line distance of 5500 miles they probably had to travel 10000 or maybe many many more miles
- It will be easy if there were roads like now, they unlikely had very rough terrain - much denser forests, way uneven land, wild animals
- They probably had to fend for food on a daily basis which would distract from an orderly journey of 10 miles a day
This is not to say it could not be done, obviously it seems like it was done, and the journey probably took closer to the higher end of the extremes mentions (18 months vs 30 years) and that too mostly by happenstance.
I doubt that fellow human pressure was non-existent. A thousand years is plenty of time for even a small founding population to swell enough in size to fill every nook and cranny of a continent.
>there was probably little actual reason to come here at all since, presumably, game and fish were as robust in all the lands they travelled to arrive here and fellow human pressure was non-existent.
I don't think this is true, there were lots of good reasons to move into the Americas, notably the presence of many large species of game animals that evolved without natural defences against humans (which were all quickly hunted to extinction or out-competed). Maine would have been on the fringes of habitability at the time, but other areas like Mexico and Peru were ideal climates for humans to move to, much better than the Siberian wilderness their ancestors travelled through.
One thing that really blew my mind was learning that Beringian civilization lasted thousands years before the ice sheets receded enough for people to move into North America as Berginia was slowly swallowed by the sea. This is sometimes referred to as the "Beringian standstill population". By the time people made it down to Mexico they were likely another few distinct civilizations removed from Siberia.
Human footprints were recently found in New Mexico that were definitively dated to 23,000 years ago so humans have probably been here for much longer than that.
Me too. It's essentially a polemic of the common idea that modernity "fell" from Eden, or more conventionally, "fell" from Rousseau's State of Nature.
Gobekli Tepi is used as one of many examples of how nowadays the evidence is stacked against the idea of agriculture being an inevitable and necessary step on the road to civilisation and all its concomitant ills. Rather the picture is far less linear, indeed it would seem that many societies both knew and had the ability to farm, but actively chose not to.
I haven't finished it yet, but personally it's bringing "modernity" down a peg or 10. It seems that all the possible forms of social organisation that we can imagine, and more, have already been experimented with, multiple times even. What's unique about our version, isn't so much its innovation, but merely its scale. And if we consider this current scale as, encompassing-all-the-lands-we-know-of, then that too has already been and, crucially, gone. What if there have already been societies that, not only witnessed that ultimate jeopardy of the complete collapse of their all-encompassing civilisation, but also went beyond and innovated a post-civilisation society? In some ways that would make them more "modern" than us.
This debate is raging right now. Is it better in North America to eat domesticated cattle, which basically destroy any chance at a healthy ecology, or just go shoot a bison when you need food? The bison can support a mature ecology.
And basically, if you have capitalism/individual property rights then the answer HAS to be cattle, plus a lot of fossil fuel inputs.
But at the systemic level is it better? It’s probably worse. So does that mean we’re just waiting on culture to invent the right social structures so we can return to hunting?
We have tools that don't require us to find sites that may have been destroyed. For one, genetic studies constrain human population levels assuming any descendants were related to either living people or sampled remains. That constrains population levels quite a bit. Moreover, we can roughly track human habitation on landscapes by how much fire they used as well as changes in flora and fauna. Recent results have even demonstrated direct detection of ancient humans from environmental DNA they left behind in skin cells and such, but that's quite new.
All of these different lines of evidence greatly constrain the types of 'civilizations' that were possible to highly localized ones with small populations, or that were completely and utterly wiped out with no surviving material culture, technology, or descendants.
That's to say it's not impossible, but highly unlikely. Any explanations all those lines would have to be parsimonious and no one's brought forth good evidence for such a narrative.
First, define civilization. It's pretty much common sense that human tribes had their own sets of customs and rules, even back then. Is that enough to have "civilization"? Is getting out of Africa a prerequisite to have "civilization"?
At one point in our history, humans developed language and could tell each other stories about major events in their lives. If developing an oral legacy is your definition of having "civilation", your question is unanswerable because there's no way we can prove conclusively which ancient humans had those capabilities and which didn't.
At some later point, we developed writing. Mural inscriptions and stone tablets are the first examples we have of humanity's communicative abilities. Is using the written word enough to have "civilization"?
Taking the other extreme, it's pretty much assumed that until the European exploration phase in the 15th-16th century, humans lived within their own local/continental society. Is being in contact with people on the other side of the globe a prerequisite to have "civilization"?
A layer of systems built by organisms atop their natural biology, where new members of an species are inducted into those systems by “choice” and not biological requirements.
Example: Bees and termites build nests, but that’s part of their natural biology: They can’t practically survive without it.
Humans “choose” to build houses, but a human infant could survive and grow to adulthood without one, albeit with less convenience.
Basically it comes down to lack of archeological evidence. We have lots of cave paintings (and many other things) from 50-100k years ago and they depict a caveman lifestyle not civilization.
We also find tons of tools and fossils such dating back to 200k years ago and there's no evidence of civilization there too. Rather the evidence is pretty clear on how primitive those people were.
Note that advanced, wide-ranging social relationships (i.e. civilisation) do not leave obvious archaeological traces.
We only think it does because we conflate civilisation with technologies of violence and bureaucracy, and those indeed leave clear archaeological traces.
They leave genetic traces, and we’re fairly sure about the migration patterns of all people currently alive on Earth through those.
All of us are very closely related as far as species go, so there must have been a serious population bottleneck at one point. We’re all more similar to each other than two chimpanzees.
> All of us are very closely related as far as species go, so there must have been a serious population bottleneck at one point. We’re all more similar to each other than two chimpanzees.
Is this true of Africans as well? I would expect there to be much more variety in humanity's original homeland than in the rest of the world.
It's true of Africans as well, but you can divide humans by the little variation we have, and it turns out there are a dozen or so groups in sub-Saharan Africa, and one group pretty much everywhere else.
Humans haven’t been around long enough for that to happen. The most divergent groups outside Africa are that way because we met our distant relatives like Neanderthals, but it seems in our case they were just incompatible enough it didn’t add that much.
Africans esp the San have much more diversity than everyone else but IIRC it’s still remarkably low for our current population size.
"Primitive" is relative, we have evidence of tools and tool manufacturing industries more sophisticated than what any other animal uses dating back a whopping 2 600 000 years ago :
Oldowan, also : ~first (non-sapiens) Homo, ~beginning of the current Ice Age (~50 interglacials so far),
and maybe even 3 300 000 years ago (Lomekwian) - also note that even going that far back, Australopithecus *still* doesn't have other remaining descendants than us.
> "Primitive" is relative, we have evidence of tools and tool manufacturing industries more sophisticated than what any other animal uses dating back a whopping 2 600 000 years ago :
That's kind of the point though with regard to early humans and proto-humans and civilization, isn't it? We've found plenty of evidence of basic stone tool manufacture and use of fire and intentional burials from much earlier eras.
But we haven't found evidence of what we call civilization - and traces of iron tools and irrigation works and cities and monuments ought to be easier to discern than small cut flint if early humans flourished with them over those periods - until the last 10-15k of human existence.
I figured (related to previous poster) that the lack of evidence of domesticated animals was a decent indicator that there were no big civs in the past interglacials
It's an excellent "reset" on pop science anthropology. Some of which, like that Rousseau and Hobbes oversimplified to support their philosophies should be fairly obvious as anthropological evidence mounts. Similarly, that hunter-gatherer and farmer are points on a spectrum.
We have choices about how we organize civilization. Neither Rousseau nor Hobbes depicted destiny, just choices.
Gobekli Tepe and others in it's surroundings are surely a great archeological discovery that brings the date of what we call civilization back some thousand years. Anyway let's not forget that Jericho is 11k years old or even older and probably there are many many other ancient cities buried deep under the thousands of tells in the Near East.
(those that follow are just wild conjectures)
A thing that I always thought is that around that era the sea level was rising since some thousand years and kept rising for some thousands more [1] to a total of 130 meters. Humans always tried to live near the sea, fishing was easier, we need iodine to be healthy, better and more stable climate, etc... so my take is that our first settlements will never be found, they are 100 meters underwater, eroded and covered by sand.
The cities we find are the ones that humans built after they got pissed of by the ever rising sea and one day decided "fuck it, I'm going way up now". So those ancient fellas already had lot of experience building cities by then.
We do tend to build near sources of water, but rivers and lakes have always been popular. I see no reason to believe they would have been less popular back then than at later periods.
Obviously there’s a good chance a lot of significant sites were flooded by rising sea levels, but no reason to expect all of them were.
If we keep digging tells (or other areas of interest) we will find one of those lucky cities you are referring to, I really hope to witness this one day :)
edit: by the way it is even harder since, of those rivers and lakes, most dried up or changed course, especially in the Near East.
So yeah one hypothesis is there was an advanced pre-historic culture that's now buried under the Persian Gulf and the fairly rapid filling of the Persian Gulf dislocated and drove dissemination of culture and common mythological elements we see in many cultures today in all directions.
Ephesus is far more recent, anyway it is now inland because of river silting. The sea didn't went nor up nor down, it was pushed further away over the centuries.
A little over 2,000 years ago was the height of Rome. 2,000 years before that the dominant empire not that far from there was Assyria. 2,000 years before that it was Mesopotamia and woolly mammoths still roamed the Earth. This is about our limit of recorded history as the earliest surviving writing (actually pictographs) is from ~3500 BC.
Obviously there was history before then and we can really only see evidence of this from surviving archaeological evidence (as per this article). So another 2,000 years before Msopotamia we've found remains of Neolithic villages that are now under the English Channel.
And yet we're still 4,000 after the ruins from this article. It's wild. Stonework has a tendency to last. Wood obviously wouldn't. You really wonder how long humans have really been in permanen tsettlements and we can only imagine what life was like then, what language they had and what they believed.
And to put it in even more perspective, if the entire history of Earth as a whole year, all of the above happened in the last 83 seconds.
To put that in perspective, 2000 years is roughly how long it took humans to question/revisit Aristotle’s 4 element theory - captured in the The Sceptical Chymist: or Chymico-Physical Doubts & Paradoxes. That was written less than 400 years ago. It’s amazing how slow things moved until the 1600s and the explosion of progress that’s followed.
No. Aristotles 4 element theory was that there are two dichotomies of matter: wet/dry and hot/cold. From these they derived the 4 elements:
* cold + dry: earth
* cold + wet: water
* hot + dry: fire
* hot + wet: air
These were not states of matter. They were the base components of matter - everything was made by some combination of these 4 elements, and everything could be broken down into some proportion of these 4 individual elements.
A big part of what caused humanity to stagnate for 2000 years post-Aristotle was the tendency to back-propagate discoveries and attribute new knowledge to the ancients. Aristotle was wrong. The Greeks were wrong about most things. That’s fine - we are too. Even if you can twist their conclusions in an attempt to reconcile them with modern constructs - their methods used to reach their conclusions very much missed the mark. Trying to give them more credit than what is due is how you cause society to stagnate for another 2000 years.
In the 1600s a spin off of Alchemy proposed the 3 element theory - and found quite a bit of success using it for medicine: Quicksilver, Alchemical Mercury, and Alchemical Salt. A lot of people were really upset about this theory. They’d never really had to defend ancient wisdom before - they’d spent 2000 years assuming ancient wisdom was complete. They went to work attempting to disprove the 3 element theory, which they successfully did. But, in their attempt to disprove the 3 element theory, they accidentally laid the groundwork for disproving the 4 element theory.
For a concrete example. It turns out the alchemists were correct: transmutation is possible. When you split an atom (I.e. in a nuclear reactor) you transmutate the element. That’s not the same as saying the Alchemists were right - they were looking for a red dust made from a pulverized piece of pure earth that could turn copper into gold. They were correct for the wrong reasons - that is not the same as being right. They were lucky in their conclusion and wrong in their methods.
> A big part of what caused humanity to stagnate for 2000 years post-Aristotle was the tendency to back-propagate discoveries and attribute new knowledge to the ancients. Aristotle was wrong. The Greeks were wrong about most things. That’s fine - we are too. Even if you can twist their conclusions in an attempt to reconcile them with modern constructs - their methods used to reach their conclusions very much missed the mark. Trying to give them more credit than what is due is how you cause society to stagnate for another 2000 years.
I disagree. Not that ancients can be wrong, but the idea that appreciating their knowledge held back society for 2000 years (I think it is just the opposite, as seen by how the rediscovery of Plato, Aristotle and Hermes catalyzed the enlightenment). If you understand Plato, you appreciate that it is a dialectic—there isn’t a singular truth presented, but provocations for thought. Now, Aristotle doesn’t leave so much room for that, but I’m less an expert on Aristotle than the Pythagoreans— who originated the four element theory, heliocentrism, emergence from a singularity and the notion that the world is composed of math, not matter.
For instance, the idea of the 5 elements came from the idea that there are only 5 simple Platonic solids. The simplest mathematical 3D shapes should be the simplest physical forms, right? And the geometry of their construction should lead to their material properties, right? They got this right— except that it took nonEuclidean geometry— atoms are composed of the simplest geometries (spherical harmonics in the electron shells) and their geometric properties do govern their material properties.
And, the universe did come from an ineffable oneness or singularity.
And the harmonies in the cosmos do derive from harmonies in basic mathematics.
It was precisely these ideas, when rediscovered, that led to Kepler’s discovery of the laws of planetary motion, kicking off the scientific revolution.
Their core method was dialectic. Their conclusions are modern science. Many other issues stagnated science — dictatorship, religion, economic collapse, war. Appreciation for ancient philosophy was almost always a basis for advancement of the dialectic, not dogmatism.
It's fascinating to think about the past in this fast backwards fashion, I love it (and also fast forwarding from past to present).
What you said about the language reminded me of this video about PIE language, I speak some European languages and it's amazing that many words feel so familiar. And it's even nicer to read the comments, all that people from around the world finding stuff so close in their native modern language!
Are you sure your timeline is correct? Assyria as an empire is closer to -1400 to -700, with the dominant part coming after -1000.
Similarly, there was no "Mesopotamian empire" in -4000 that I'm aware of: before -2000 I think it was mostly city states all around the near east.
Their timeline is definitely incorrect beyond Rome. "2000 years before Rome" was the period of dominance of the Akkadian Empire of Sargon, and right afterwards of the Sumerian Third Dynasty of Ur. You are correct about Assyria and the Mesopotamian warring cities.
You are ignoring the extremely detailed recording of history in the Indian subcontinent. Events, including the kings/queens that ruled over the Gangetic plains, their sons & lineage, wars, migrations, volcanic eruptions, weather changes (floods, earthquakes etc) have been VERY meticulously recorded as Itihāsa - Sanskrit for "It so happened". This goes back to at least 27,000 years before present - firmly placing the Indian subcontinent as the root of all of current human civilization. Why would you ignore such a vast & undeniable evidence, unless your "recorded history" is deemed to be Greek centric and not universal? That is hardly history!!
Apparently, new evidence discredits the idea that the site was built by hunter-gatherers:
"New insights from several deep soundings excavated... have exposed the weaknesses of the temple-narrative, meaning that a revision of the popular scientific view is now unavoidable (Fig. 1). Specifically, the latest observations relate to the existence of domestic buildings and the harvesting and distribution of rain-water at Göbekli Tepe."
Note that the dichotomy between "hunter-gatherers" and "permanently settled" is a bit overstated.
- There's some evidence that various people in history have been seasonally permanently settled, and foraging without a fixed home part of the year.
- Other people settle for a few years and then move on, doing small-scale growing of crops when they are settled.
- Yet others encourage wild growth of food crops, and generally move around and forage in a large area that has been lightly tended to in that manner. (Meaning they don't build homes that last for centuries, but they also permanently inhabit a large area.)
- And in some societies, there are classes of people that are permanently settled but live in symbiosis with more mobile foragers, who live in the permanent settlements only a little at a time.
Yes, for example the Yanomamo hunters-gatherers in the Amazon basin stay in approximately one place for years or decades, in jungle clearings they build semi-permanent "shapoons", a structure from wood and leaves that obviously does not survive in the archeologic records (nothing survives in the Amazon; there is a lack of stone there and organic structures decompose soon), plus they cultivate a lot of plants locally.
The concept of a hunter-gatherer roaming the endless steppe is romantic, but it does not seem to occur that much in known history.
TFA itself talks about this, but not to disparage the hunter-gatherer aspect but rather to claim that there was an actual, ~permanently inhabited city here, that was still nevertheless pre-agrarian. That’s part of the mystery and importance of these sites: they upend what we thought we knew.
Yeah there is a fair amount of sexual activity going on but the whole series is about the reverence of the motherly spirit, the donii, and so it's contextually appropriate.
I know that’s it’s established that some of the oldest civilizations started in Anatolia/Mesopotamia. Could it be because the dry climate there preserves old structures better than damp Germany or tropical Southeast Asia?
Tropical forests are so aggressive, I don't think we'll ever appreciate how rich the civilizations of Central and South America were until we've had major advances in subterranean mapping technology. Most of the artifacts are likely in anaerobic pockets underground, if they still exist at all.
I recall years ago when they discovered that a 'ziggurat on a hill' was in fact not on a hill, the jungle was just doing an excellent job of burying it.
> When we find remains of beavers, we assume they built beaver dams, even if we don’t immediately find remnants of such dams.
> [...]
> When we find Homo sapiens skeletons, however, we instead imagine the people naked, feasting on berries, without shelter, and without social differentiation.
Sorry but that quote has convinced me not to read the rest. It’s absurd. Firstly no we don’t just assume beavers made dams, we don’t need to because we’ve found plenty of ancient remains of beaver dams. We know beavers and dam construction behaviour evolved at some point and want to know when and how that happened, so we look for evidence linking the two. If we just made blind assumptions it would not be possible to figure out the developmental timeline.
Secondly the development of evolved instinctive behaviour is in no way comparable to human learned cultural behaviour, such as technology. That should be so obvious I’m at a loss that I have to even point it out.
Isn't the point that our ability to learn and develop cultural behaviour is pretty much instinctive? Of course humans everywhere did things recreationally, it seems part of what it is to be human.
Fair enough, however I’m not making a point about the origin of the behaviour, but how the behaviour manifests. Cultural behaviour can change very rapidly, and propagate through a population in significantly less than a generation, whereas instinctive behaviour takes many, many generations to develop and propagate. It’s not reasonable to equate the way they develop and propagate as being the same simply because they are both behaviour, and anyone who suggests they can clearly isn’t a credible source on the subject.
I also noticed this was a thing that bothered them:
> Along the way to the site, a forgettable visitor’s center greeted me with animations and music evoking primitiveness. Such art is a window into our modern shared subconscious rather than into the culture of a people who erected buildings 11,500 years ago.
I discovered it’s more
of a political website, not one typically about archeology, and it made more sense in that context. They seem to have a chip on their shoulder about the perception of older cultures. Which also explains the opening about Turkey’s development.
That said it’s a good read and later on has some interesting history on the development of archeology.
> When thinking about the dating of agriculture it is important to remember that Göbekli Tepe was rediscovered rather than discovered. In October 1994, the archaeologist Klaus Schmidt was reviewing archives of known sites, trying to decide where to dig next. A site description caught his attention: a hill that had first been excavated in a 1963 survey by the University of Istanbul and the University of Chicago, but abandoned soon after.
Heh. A much less prosaic version of the story with the mulberry bush in OP's article.
My favourite movie is called "The Man From Earth", about a man who was born 14,000 years ago and hasn't died.
He doesn't know why, but he just keeps living.
What I think about every time I think of this movie is, "Okay, so he was 12,000 years old at the time of Christ". He lived then - now 6 times, and then then-now again.
He was 8,000 years old in Mesopotamia..
Now I can imagine this beloved character in this new, very old, civilization
I like that movie too. You might be interested in Heinlein’s novel Time Enough For Love. It’s set a couple thousand years in the future and centers on a guy who was born in the early 1900s and is still alive, due to rejuvenation technology and perhaps other reasons :). Other people in the story live long lives as well, but the main character is by far the oldest known in the world. It’s a bit sprawling and weird (even off putting) in some parts, but I found it to be excellently written and very easy to fly through the pages.
This particular sequel is really bad. Plenty of issues with the script and cast but to me the disconnect between a character that doesn’t age and the actor that does made it really hard to watch
I remember having similar thoughts of awe about how _old_ are things in this region of the earth, when I was listening to one of the famous Dan Carlin hardcore history series.
There he mentioned how when the romans were conquering Babylon, it had already had a 3000 year history. So its like similar time from us to the romans, as the relative starts of those two civilizations.
Babylon was _old_ and they knew it - who was this young upstart trying to recklessly mess with the natural order?
I can’t even process things like 12-14 _thousand_ years of human civilization…
What's even nuttier is that them invading something with a 3000 year history would be a little like us stumbling over ancient Rome today it having been a thing for that long.
On the other hand, one could argue the cultures around the North Atlantic are close enough to Roman culture and jurisprudence that we are to ancient Rome what later Babylon was to earlier Babylon?
>What I think about every time I think of this movie is, "Okay, so he was 12,000 years old at the time of Christ". He lived then - now 6 times, and then then-now again.
In the movie he claimed to have been Christ, which that experience put him off trying to do anything really public to try to help people.
Ok I didn't think that was a spoiler, pretty common for the genre, the immortal guy has been someone important in the past. I think there would be only one real spoiler plot wise that you don't see coming.
Fun fact: If you believe in the Everett interpretation of QM (Also called Many World), there may be one "world" for each of us where we become thousands of years old.
He was a Magdalenian (so a homo sapien), no reason was ever given for his agelessness. And his tribe (who presumably were all related to him) lived natural lives
I eagerly await the admission from mainstream historians that all these tons of rock were not carved by semi-nomadic hunter gatherers. The scope of the stonework is evidence of agriculture; it's obnoxiously obvious yet still fringe to say it.
These are claims, not evidence. Your claim appears to be you can't carve a big stone if you're a hunter gatherer although It's not clear why you think that.
I think I've made that clear. Where else in the world has a hunter-gatherer lifestyle afforded the caloric surplus necessary to do this much manual labor?
Hunter gatherers didn’t exactly live in a state of deprivation. We also a lot of examples of cultures that didn’t farm building giant earth works, like those found at Poverty Point in Louisiana[1]. We know that a number of pre-Colombian societies shunned agriculture and developed quite complex societies like the people along the gulf coast, or the Coast Salish to name to areas of interest. Pre-agricultural forbears of the Iroquois were probably mining copper. Agriculture doesn’t seem to be necessary for organization or communal work.
I thought it was well established that the transition to agriculture caused a decline in general health and nutrition for most humans, shorter, smaller brains, etc.
Suppose that their diets are equally good for health (which is a big supposition). Suppose a hunter-gatherer and a farmer both get sick with the same thing. Why would the first die and the second not?
Having access to an excess of calories? Doesn't make sense. Yes, agri societies make more food, but people are always starving all the same, because the count of people goes up until you once again have food scarcity.
I’d think agricultural diets were less healthy insofar as they didn’t have nutrition science (even we barely do) and would have to rely on what they could get to grow, mainly grains. Most likely they weren’t actually fully agricultural and were using the farms to make beer or feed their animal herds.
But I was just thinking that hunter-gatherers need more active participation and can’t provide a surplus to feed as many idle hands.
The population growth problem is the purpose of religion whose main thing has always been telling people to not have sex.
> I’d think agricultural diets were less healthy insofar as they didn’t have nutrition science
More likely, agriculture was less healthy because it had less in common with what humans had been consuming over recent evolutionary time. Animals eating mostly grain over millions of years, would be able to produce vitamin C themselves, for instance.
> But I was just thinking that hunter-gatherers need more active participation and can’t provide a surplus to feed as many idle hands.
I think the data from recent hunter-gatherer tribes indicate that they work fewer hours per day to gather food than farmers.
> The population growth problem is the purpose of religion whose main thing has always been telling people to not have sex.
I think the main reasons why agricultural societies tend to build more buildings, are:
- Agriculture allows the production of more calories within a geographical area, allowing much higher population densities.
- Agriculture ties people to a geographical area, while most hunter gatherers will relocate now and then (or even all the time). Pastorial cultuers can go in either direction.
- In fertile areas, not everyone needs to be a farmer. Specialized soldiers, priests, artisans, etc evolve.
- Agriculture creates a dependency on the protection of the land until the time of harvest, which increases the need for some kind of military organization to resist raiding tribes. This develops into something like kingdoms pretty easily, where a single (or a few) individuals control a large number of people.
So, agriculture increases population density, promotes specialization, and encourages local investments in land and buildings, and requires some kind of soldier and ruling class. Over time, it's not strange that the ruling class invent non-violent means of retaining control, such as buildings that are impressive/and or easy to defend, social structures and religions that justify their "right" to power, etc.
For hunter-gatherers, the hunter and warrior roles overlap. Essentially, the same tools are used for providing food and protecting territory, so no special warrior class elite develops. In consequence, the chieftain is likely to be a first-among-equals, who participates in the hunting and fighting just like the others, and who is more likely to have his role due to personal ability rather than inheritence. With every man being a warror, a semi-democratic system would typically exist, since any sub-group that had the support of more than half the men would be the strongest one in a fight.
Just as an analogue, democracy in the West just happened to come at the same time that conscript armies armed with cheap firearms replaced elite knights/men-at-arms. A similar pattern could be seen in Greece and Rome, both of which had some kind of rule by the people for as long as their armies remained citizen armies. (When Rome switched to professional soldiers, it only took a couple of generations for Sulla, Ceaser and Octavian to arrive.)
Exactly how many calories does one need to do this? What is the cutoff? What papers are researchers are you building your claims on?
How long can they work on such tasks? Maybe, if they build slowly, then one needs almost no "caloric surplus".... There's so many holes in such a wild and absolute claim that I don't see it as much of an argument against the experts that have built on previous knowledge and have published peer reviewed papers on this topic.
Yup, without any doubt, because a society can not possibly work stone without eating meat. Just look at the the lack of stonework in the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain cultures. Oh, wait...
We need more funding for experimental archaeology to provide evidence of whether it’s possible to live a hunter gatherer lifestyle while constructing large stone temple complexes.
Evidence is not the same as proof. Evidence can often be interpreted in different directions.
As more and more evidence accumulates about some topic, we can use a Bayesian process to continously update our priors, but it is common to disagree about what constitutes enough evidence to conclude.
This is partly due to us having different priors, but also often due to our tendency to not trust evidence that is in conflict to our priors.
For both of these reasons, sufficient evidence for a new proposition for it to be logically more likely than the pre-existing consensus typically exist for quite a while before it becomes the new consensus.
In many cases, what is required for the paradigm shift to eventually happen, is not so much more evidence, but rather for the old guard to retire. In the interrim, it can be 'obnoxiously obvious' for some that the evidence is already there.
In the late 80s, I (a teenager at the time) was discussing the topic of airplanes being flown by computers. I was convinced that computers would be able to fly airplanes within my lifetime, and would even replace pilots in figher planes at some point. For me, this was 'obnoxiously obvious'.
The first time, I discussed it with an engineer/hobbyist pilot. He claimed that flying an airplane was an impossible task for a computer. His argument was from chaos theory; a computer would never be able to calculate all the variables involved in turbulent airflow, so they would not be able to fly an airplane. Clearly, he ignored that humans do not do those calculations either, but I was unable to make my point.
The second time, it was a former figher pilot, then airline pilot. He did not in principle object to a computer flying an airplane, but he completely dismissed the possibility of a computer flying a fighter plane into combat.
Both are now retired. I still think it is obnoxiously obvious that computers can fly planes, and that within my lifetime, even fighters will be unmanned. Clearly, there is more evidence now, but I think that today, the evidence from the 80s would have been considered sufficient by most people my age or younger.
(Now, I'm almost 50, and maybe this time I'm the one being obnoxious, as indicated by my previous post being downvoted.)
There was plenty of evidence for this in the late 80s, from cruise missiles to the space shuttle and many other systems. It's just that 80s arguments didn't have the benefit of the internet and the web in everyone's pocket.
The thing we're dealing with here is the extraordinary-sounding claim that it was just about biochemically impossible for pre-historic hunter-gatherer societies to have carved some bigass stones. The person making it seems to have the boon of internet access to help them buttress their argument.
> There was plenty of evidence for this in the late 80s, from cruise missiles to the space shuttle and many other systems. It's just that 80s arguments didn't have the benefit of the internet and the web in everyone's pocket.
I would agree, but that was not even the evidence that I (a 13 year old kid at the time) was using to draw my conclusion. In my opinion then (and still) the main argument was that the brain is not magical, and provided that Moore's law would continue, computers would eventually be able to do most of the things a human brain is doing.
While it might take some time for computers to do all things as well as the brain, computers would have advantages in terms of cost, space requirements and not being restricted to 9g (for fighters). I think the 40 year engineer and 50 year old former fighter pilot had a model of the mind that were dualist, ie there was some ghost in the machine that allowed humans to do things that computer never will be able to.
Many famous thinkers have had similar ideas, such as Gödel, von Neumann and Penrose, all extremely intelligent.
Now, the consensus has shifted, but Penrose has not changed his mind. Recent developments in AI may be seen as pretty hard evidence that computers one day will be able to do what the brain is doing, but Penrose doesn't think the evidence is strong enough, and still looks for his ghost in the machine in quantum effects within neurons.
As for the original discussion, I actually don't have a strong opinion. But when someone claims that something is 'obnoxiously obvious', I presume good faith, and that evidence has already been presented, but not yet accepted by the community.
Maybe I was unfair in my first comment in this thread. Generally, strong claims do require strong evidence. But it IS pretty common for the Old Guard to require the evidence for a new idea to meet much higher standards than the evidence for the old idea, and if so, it is typically the case that one just has to wait and see what will become the consensus over time (often more than 1 generation).
Graeber spends a lot of time arguing against exactly this assumption in The Dawn of Everything. I.e. that agriculture must come before civilization. Pretty persuasively, IMHO.
I haven't read that book [yet], but I'll say that 'civilization' is not the same thing as carving up tons of rock. That you can form a civilization without agriculture doesn't surprise me. That a civilization could support megalithic stone carving endeavors without agriculture beggars belief.
Besides these sites in Turkey, are there any places in the world where huge amount of rock was carved supposedly without agriculture to fuel the workers? The Stonehenge builders had agriculture, as did those who made the Easter Island statues. Agriculture built Egypt.
I'll say what I like about anything I like. If the book is so great than those of you who've read it should be able to present the arguments from it. It sounds like it left all of you with an impression of having learned something, but unable to convey much of anything that you actually learned. Did you actually read that book?
I did not get the impression that the carvings at this site were anywhere near as large as StoneHenge, Easter island, or Giza: they mention a life-sized man statue, large pensis, and friezes.
And if the site was occupied for hundreds of years, they could have been carved over time, spreading out the caloric requirements.
What other way was there to feed a city full of people? Certainly, you could have culture within a hunter-gatherer society, but not civilization. How could hunter-gatherers provide enough food to sustain a city? Unless we redefine civilization by removing cities/urban centers from its definition.
Even the idea of a hard binary between 'agricultural' and 'hunter gatherer' societies is put to the test, with evidence of civilizations that changed both locations and whole modes of culture and caloric intake seasonally.
IIRC there is evidence that Gobekli Tepe was not fully occupied year round, so more of a festival site or wintering ground. Maybe in the later stages it did have a more permanent population, and if so they could have been some of the first people to invent actual farming. This is around the time and place we think Einkorn was first domesticated, and a bunch of people growing it near a festival site to brew booze to supply a bunch of nomads when they come around to party makes a good narrative on how we transitioned from hunters to farmers.
Obvious based on what ? Assumptions we make about history ? The idea that there's a linear, idempotent path of progress has been challenged for good reasons : discoveries such as these.
Based on experience with physical labor? Bang some rocks together for an afternoon, see how much progress you've made and take note of how tired it made you. Whig history has nothing to do with it.
To this layperson, the narrative on Gobekli Tepe seemed fairly compelling. Here is a site situated at roughly the time and place grains first started being cultivated (per previous studies on ancient grains). A site where large amounts of meat was consumed, but animals not slaughtered on site. The animals where killed elsewhere and only the desirable bits transported there. And earthenware troughs believed to have been used to ferment beer. So a gathering site for nomadic hunter gatherers to gather at (festival? winter? just hang out?), at the point in time where we were starting to actually cultivate grains and stop being hunter gatherers and start being farmers. Other sites found dating later were definitely agricultural, with equipment for farming grains and animals and human remains showing the poor health associated with early agricultural settlements and the dense populations they allowed.
If people are interested in pre-history and archaeology, the podcast Tides of History is doing a great series on the emergence of humans and states:
https://art19.com/shows/tides-of-history
The article mentions this fellow 5 times exactly like this. His discovery launched the careers of hundreds, generates millions in tourism, and transforms our understanding of Paleolithic human history.
Why not write his name? Does he not deserve historical mention by name like Necmi Karul and Klaus Schmidt?
TIL not only did the fellow discover Göbeklitepe, it was on his own land. He gave up his land for this! I sure hope he and his family were compensated well!
I think Göbekli Tepe[1] is the better known of these sites in Turkey. As this story mentions that was only discovered in 1994, and completely rewrote history.
I find these incredibly ancient and basically unknown civilisations fascinating. Recently there has been evidence of attempts of cultivation in 21,000 BCE[2] by hunter-gathers. Some of the first semi-permement dwellings were near this in Syria, and believed to be the start of a transition from hunter-gathering to agricultural populations.
By contrast, I think these sites in Turkey are still believed to be ceremonial in nature rather than places people lived.
"At the end of its uselife, the megalithic enclosures of Göbekli Tepe were refilled systematically. This special element of the site formation process makes it hard to date the enclosures by the radiocarbon method, as there is no clear correlation of the fill with the architecture. Several ways have been explored to overcome this situation, including the dating of carbonate laminae on architectural structures, of bones and the remains of short-lived plants from the filling. The data obtained from pedogenic carbonates on architectural structures back the relative stratigraphic sequence observed during the excavation. But, unfortunately, they are of no use in dating the sampled structures themselves, as the carbonate layers started forming only after the moment of their burial. At least these samples offer a good terminus ante quem for the refilling of the enclosures. For layer III this terminus ante quem lies in the second half of the 9th millennium calBC, while for layer II it is located in the middle of the 8th millennium calBC."
I'm not an archaeologist and I'm having difficulty looking up "uselife" online. What does it mean?
Is it jargon for "the duration of its use by humans?"
In the above quote that's how I read it: "When Göbekli Tepe was no longer used by humans, the megalithic enclosures were refilled systematically." Correct?
But in that case it seems like the refilling determines EOL and not the other way around. What am I missing?
You're missing that it is dating the material you ise to refill, not the refill action itself. You can refill with topsoil, which woild indicate EOL as you say. or you could refill with dirt from a pit, which could be thousands of years older. You could use dirt with dinosaur fossils in it, but that doesn't make the site 65 million years old.
Anyway according to other comments apparently they used a few means of dating already.
Megalithic raves were getting out of hand, so the priestly class had topsoil and gravel dumped into the underground rave-atoriums in the hope that everyone would go back to quietly contemplating the sky. Similar thing happened at Chaco canyon when younger generations insisted on partying in the kivas and didn’t much care about the sun-dagger or the celestial desert roads to nowhere, anymore.
I read it similarly - as the present article for this post says, these were carved of “living rock”, which I take to mean that rock/dirt was removed from around the megalithic sculptures. In this context, the refill was when these hollowed out areas were covered back up. I read “uselife” similarly to you - the end of their usability vis a vis the refill.
I was looking for this too -- 11,000 years is sort of the benchmark for earliest civilization, so having that be the bounding side for how "young" this place could be struck me as some equivalent to click bait?
edit: looks like someone posted from another source that it was with radiocarbon dating - no reason to think that's incorrect, it just would've been a nice extra sentence or two to include to avoid this very hang-up that at least two people had..
But I think the question is radiocarbon dating of what..?? Saying they dated a lithic archeological site with radiocarbon measurements doesn't tell us anymore than they measured something with a given method. What was the something??
I posted an extract from link earlier in this thread about the other site, which explained that they were dating the laminae on the structure that started forming after the fill, or sampling organic material tossed in with the fill, but neither really gets at how old the structure itself it. Curious to understand more if people find it.
The hardness of a rock is related to its diagenetic history and mineral content. These rocks are sedimentary rocks - limestone, sandstone, etc. If one has a source of metamorphic or igneous rocks from which to fashion tools then carving these figures is simplified. Even a tightly cemented sedimentary rock can be used to grind or carve and flint is a sedimentary rock that has multiple documented uses as a tool. Needles, awls, spear and arrow heads, axes, hammers, etc.
If you have the time to do something like this and the imagination then I'm sure you could produce these carvings using things you found on the ground pretty easily.
Flint chips very easily though. I always assumed it was more for cutting meat. I guess I could see a really thick "hand axe" being used for very primitive wood carving.
Glad to see work continuing in this area. I've been keeping an eye out, since first reading about Gobekli Tepe (related site nearby) several years ago. If they're truly as old as purported, that's interesting.
Yet another crazy thing found in Turkey which won't turn into an unbelievable tourist attraction. They have the oldest churches, Cappadocia, Anatolia etc. None of them are known by foreigners.
Known for decades (since the 60ies) that those old Anatolian cities were the oldest cities in the world. Nothing new here.
First Çatalhöyük, which was a real town, then Göbekli Tepe, which was an artificial cult center at the top of a mountain, and several other Anatolian (Kurdish) neolithical cities.
“ archaeologists in southeastern Turkey are, at this moment, digging up a wild, grand, artistically coherent, implausibly strange, hitherto-unknown-to-us religious civilisation, which has been buried in Mesopotamia for ten thousand years. And it was all buried deliberately.”
I suggest you read the article, which is fascinating and based on archeological research at Gobekli Tepe and other nearby sites. Hancock seems to incorporate real archeological sites into pseudo-scientific narratives.
What makes you think the site is Indo-European? There's no obvious link mentioned in the article, and the site predates earliest known Indo-European migrations by 4000 years.
What gets me about prehistory is that even before civilization (the development of permanent settlements), humans existed in anatomically modern form, and even if they never wrote anything down, would surely still have used language. What did they talk about? We know that illiterate people today are perfectly capable of forming complex thoughts and reasoning. When did those thoughts first emerge? Somebody must have been the first to look up and the stars and wonder. They could have done more than just wonder. There could have been geniuses and villains and poets and master storytellers, long before they had any capability to preserve their culture through writing. And this was probably tens or even hundreds of thousands of years before the earliest stone remains that we call civilization.
A useful heuristic as far as I know is to imagine "what would a modern human do in that environment?"
Make foraging plans, tell stories, bicker, gossip, predict weather, teach toolmaking and clothesmaking, discuss fair allocation of resources, arrange parties, celebrate relationships, make gifts, design song performances, learn dance moves, coordinate construction, agree on repairs for criminal damages, learn local and exotic flora, plan long travels to faraway lands, and the list goes on.
As far as geniuses go, many of the people we would think of as geniuses today have two things the people we are discussing here had not:
- They are able to stand on the shoulders of a far broader range of giants, thanks to writing; and
- They have access to far more tools of reasoning (arithmetic with Roman numerals is just the start!) that those in the past did not have.
So while there may well have been intellectual equals to the geniuses of today also back then, they would not have been able to perform the feats of geniuses today. Again, for lack of tooling, not wit.
I really don't know. It's generally phrased as Hindu-originating - I can only speculate why it's now attached to a religious / social group rather than a language.
I guess for now we can't know - but were they truly modern humans? They might have had the same hardware but the cultural/consciousness software may have been far different than what we have today. It's fun to think about, books like The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind or the Sapiens both explore some version of this.
>what would a modern human do in that environment?
and be sure to knock them in the head (and everyone that you want to bring with them) so they won't remember anything. I doubt they are any different than a hairless monkey. One thing that we got going for us is the written/oral knowledge that we have accumulated.
This is probably closer to the truth. We don’t notice the benefits of modern society and institutions because they are the water that we swim in, they have “always” existed since we were born into them. We are blissfully unaware that a few short centuries ago people often behaved in much more depraved ways as soon as they were far enough away from the tenuous rule of law. I believe the reasons why it took us a hundred thousand years to escape a subsistence lifestyle were more to do with man’s inhumanity to man than it was a reluctance to leave some imagined eden.
A George Carlin quote comes to mind:
Think of how stupid the average person is and then realize that half of them are stupider than that.
> We are blissfully unaware that a few short centuries ago people often behaved in much more depraved ways as soon as they were far enough away from the tenuous rule of law.
What makes you think this is true? I have plenty of experience of people who play very nicely with each other, even when they are for all practical purposes not bound by law to.
> why it took us a hundred thousand years to escape a subsistence lifestyle
You use the word "escape" as though we are universally better off now than when we spent a few hours a day foraging. Do you have evidence for this? What if people preferred to live their lives the way they did -- much like, I suppose, you prefer to live life the way you do?
(No doubt do many people now have it better than many people then, but it sounds like you're asserting that the opposite is not the case too.)
Very close similarities between mythological narratives in very different parts of the world (e.g., South Africa and Australia) show that some of them should have appeared tens of thousands of years ago. The earliest motifs seem to be about the origin of death. https://folklore.elpub.ru/jour/article/view/28?locale=en_US
Humans are amazing at recording facts through narratives passed down through generations. Geography that has long since disappeared can be preserved through thousands o years: https://www.sapiens.org/language/oral-tradition/
Humans in 13k years will look back and wonder at us too. Somebody must have been the first to upload to the HyperBrainSuperXL10000 and feel one with the solar system.
The way things are going, we will be the next dinosaurs, and that civilization in 13k will be digging artifacts from our time, while telling legends of a civilization that supposedly went to the stars, could travel across the globe in hours, being able to talk with anyone across the globe, cure most desease, designed machines that could see bodies at molecular level.
Naturally every adult knows that those stories are just ways for the grandparents to ease kids into their sleep, who would believe in such nonsense, given the current state of the planet in 13k years.
The nukes prohibit their own use. Besides, there's been more than 2000 nuclear bombs exploded, >500 of which in the atmosphere, and I bet you didn't notice.
I tend to be labeled a pessimist. When covid came, I was not surprised. If anything, I was surprised that it was not more deadly. At the same time (March 2020), I expected that Covid would lead to supply chain disruptions, nationalizatoin of industry and international conflict.
The way I see it, the period from 1945 to 2020 was the exception, not the norm. Apart from that period (in the Western World), humans have been facing more difficult times than 2020-2022 through most of history. Still we have surivived, and at times, prospered.
In the future, we may face disasters (climate change, pandemics, wars) that are hundreds of times worse than covid. Still none of those (except possibly nuclear war at some point) are likely to be the end of humanity, or even set us back so much that we are completely unable to record history. (A big nuclear war today would perhaps be a setback for human knowledge of history comparable to the loss of the librariy in Alexandria)
There are still existential threats. One may be if we build millions of new nukes and use them all at once. Others could be technological (AI, nanotech), yet other could come from space (asteroids, aliens).
But for humanity to be wiped out by pandemics or climate change seems highly unlikely.
> The way I see it, the period from 1945 to 2020 was the exception, not the norm. Apart from that period (in the Western World), humans have been facing more difficult times than 2020-2022 through most of history. Still we have surivived, and at times, prospered.
Now you got me thinking about this. Perhaps that period was a technological "sweet spot." Technology assisted us in our tasks. It wasn't too primitive where it hindered us like the periods prior. On the flip side, we were not overly reliant on that assistance like perhaps we are now (think chip shortages disrupting nearly every facet of life).
Also, population growth. The planet is significantly more populated. For example, had this baby formula shortage happened during a period of less population, could it have had less of an impact? Even if the same proportion of the population were, it may have been not so great of a stress as supplies may have stretched longer.
> Now you got me thinking about this. Perhaps that period was a technological "sweet spot."
Maybe, but I really doubt that. I find it much more likely that it was a combination of luck and culture. (Or rather of a culture that had not yet been corrupted.)
Anyway, even Corona was an extremely minor disaster, in the grand scope of things. In terms of years of life lost, the average per capita number is in the order of between a few days and a couple of weeks. Had corona been spreading in 1946, it would hardly have been noticed.
By comparison, the Black Death probably caused average life expectancy to fall by something like 20 years, globally for those alive when it started to spread. In other words, Covid was less than 1% as serious as the Black Death for the average person.
> Also, population growth. The planet is significantly more populated. For example, had this baby formula shortage happened during a period of less population, could it have had less of an impact?
Most people througout history would be completely unable to grasp why we make a fuss about things like the baby formula shortage. They were used to child mortality in the order of 50%, even in peacetime. Lack of baby formula in the US may perhaps cause the child mortality rate to go up by 0.000001%.
If I have a concern, it is not that we are living through difficult times now. We are not, these are still some of the best time in human history (for the average person, even in most developing countries). Rather my concern, is that most people have NO CLUE how much worse it can get.
I don't mean the semi-religious concern that you can find surrounding climate change, or a fatalist view on nuclear war. This kind of fatalism tends to just passify people, make them shrug, and say "if it happens, we're all dead anyway".
I mean for people to actually imagine living in a world where it is normal for your children to die from starvation, where there are no medicines. Where the infection in your thumb that you got from working in the fields until your hands were bleeding can actually kill you. Where packs of wolf-dogs roam the cities to feed on human corpses, many of them carrying rabies.
I mean in particular the willingness so many people seem to have to tear down our institutions that work very well, because they identify some minor flaw. Their willingness to polarize politically, the re-emergance of both facist and communist ideas to conveniently place the blame for our small problems on the "Others". And finally the signs that countries once again seem to be willing to use military force to annex other nations, for no other reason than nationalism.
I don't predict that any of this will lead to human extinction, but I'm worried that within 100-200 years we will see a conflict that will completely eclipse WW2, with 500million or more deaths.
THIS is why I call myself a pessimist, because I see it as likely (or not as unlikely as I would like) that humanity will return to a state that is, in fact, more or less the average of what humanity has experienced up until now, while most people seem to take it for granted that the near-Utopian (EDIT) situation we have now will remain mostly as it is.
> Maybe, but I really doubt that. I find it much more likely that it was a combination of luck and culture. (Or rather of a culture that had not yet been corrupted.)
I really think it was all the aftermath of WWII. That was such a catastrophic event with all that "never forget", that instead of going for war, peace was the better solution at any cost (for west and central Europe). Now as the remembrance is waning, military options become increasingly an option. The germans shipping heavy military equipment? Unthinkable 10 years ago.
WW2 was probably the main ingredient, but without Mutually Assured Destruction, a common enemy in the Soviet Union, a booming economy as well as the lessons learned in the 20's and 30's about not living beyond your means, the effect might have ended sooner.
In other words, the 1945-2020 period required "luck" in a number of dimensions, and should be considered a fluke, not the norm.
COVID was a minor speed bump, in the grand scheme of things. I’m not playing it down in a “it’s just the flu” Trump kind of way, but it was no worse than the Spanish flu or many past pandemics. It didn’t even cause a recession really, most of the economic issues we have at the moment are self inflicted.
We’re just not used to dealing with a disease like this. It was a serious problem, but the idea that it was any kind of existential threat is absurdly hyperbolic.
The Spanish flu was similarly dangerous and virulent, it’s impact was vastly greater, yet for most people it’s a forgotten historical footnote.
> It didn’t even cause a recession really, most of the economic issues we have at the moment are self inflicted.
It did, it was central banks by pressing money, who held the faith in economy high. There would, and time will tell, should have been some more companies default.
COVID was mindblowing. For the first time in recorded history the entire planet coordinated a response to an existential threat. And we survived.
In a matter of just three years we rethought how we work, live, travel, and socialize. The global community came up with a vaccine in an extraordinarily short amount of time, and then coordinated a roll out.
We've seen how humanity can adapt at scale when we are motivated. I don't know what answer we will have to the ecological ruin we have layed out. Maybe we don't have an answer to it, that will be a truly humbling moment.
"For the first time in recorded history the entire planet coordinated a response to an existential threat"
Umm...
- Smallpox eradication was a global effort.
- Polio eradication was a global effort.(unfortunately delayed by religious
fanatics in a small number of countries)
I agree with all that you said. It is a great feat to witness. But just imagine, multiple viruses like Covid-19 cropping up all at once. That’s where we will fail.
We were already shifting to different working patterns before COVID hit. Had it been 10 years earlier it would have been much more impactful but the concept of working from home wasn’t novel in a great many industries before COVID. And those that couldn’t function remotely continued operate largely like they did before the pandemic.
Also it’s worth noting that the vaccines were already years into development before COVID hit. We knew there was a risk of a Coronavirus outbreak (by virtue of the fact that we had dodged two Coronavirus pandemics a decade earlier). Granted the increased funding and urgency of COVID helped speed things along; but they weren’t exactly starting from scratch.
So it’s still not really clear how we would cope with a more dramatic or unknown situation.
What I did learn about the pandemic was normal folk will completely disregard their own safety just to stick a middle finger to the government. Which is not only concerning for the future survival of our species but also a direct contradiction to your point about civilisation banding together.
Second order effects from global warming striking in synchrony with resource depletion and biodiversity drop looks pretty consumption -civilization destroying to me. Definitely 10 Billion humans don't have a happy life in 2100. Then again if you ask a 4th Century AD farmer about the Roman Empire they would probably give you a shrug.
I feel a bit hopefull because globally we really did try to get Covid right, most people tried in their own ways. That goes for all parts of the political spectrum. That of course led to conflicts and group think, which is the part that will destroy us. The issue with global warming is not the temprature, it's how we will all be affected and how we act because of that. History says we can not handle external stress, civilizations fall easily. Yes we are global now, that will mean a global civilisation destroying.
Well, yes - anatomically (and to a large degree, intellectually) we're probably indistinguishable from homo sapiens of 300k years ago.
In Yuval Noah Harari's book 'Sapiens - a Brief History of Humankind' he posits that there was a 'cognitive revolution' about 70k years ago, during which our cognitive & language capabilities moved beyond the purely physical observations, to the more abstract & metaphysical.
This allowed for a shedload of cultural changes -- larger societies, the birth of religions / mythologies, money, etc. All those abstract concepts that work when we all agree they exist even if they actually don't.
To your question - yes, we necessarily only have written history from civilisations that wrote things down (and those things survived), but it seems like there was an evolutionary change that meant we could finally leverage our one distinctly useful skill, coordinating large groups of people at scale, by getting us all to adopt a shared reality that didn't exist yet. (This kind of explains why we adopted agriculture, despite it clearly being a bad idea at the time.)
“Another unnerving oddity is the curious number of carvings which show people with six fingers. Is this symbolic, or an actual deformity? Perhaps the mark of a strange tribe? Again, there are more questions than answers. Crucially, however, we do now have tentative hints as to the actual religion of these people.
In Gobekli Tepe several skulls have been recovered. They are deliberately defleshed, and carefully pierced with holes so they could – supposedly – be hung and displayed.
Skull cults are not unknown in ancient Anatolia. If there was such a cult in the Tas Tepeler it might explain the graven vultures pictured ‘playing’ with human heads. As to how the skulls were obtained, they might have come from conflict (though there is no evidence of this yet), it is quite possible the skulls were obtained via human sacrifice. At a nearby, slightly younger site, the Skull Building of Cayonu, we know of altars drenched with human blood, probably from gory sacrifice.”
The prevalence of human sacrifice throughout history baffles me. I know it's just my cultural heritage to see humans as unique individuals with brains full of original ideas, but it still shocks me every time I hear it that someone would willingly, without being threatened, extinguish a human life.
It would be mind blowing to watch and many were watching. Big theoretical benefits for social cohesion for culturally disparate people. Whole is greater than the parts.
They might have believed in the afterlife, so from their point of view they weren't really extinguishing anything, just converting it from flesh to spirit.
(a) is such a belief really compatible with what we think is the selective force of evolution, i.e. stay alive long enough to make sure your children have children? In other words, is this something people truly feel when it comes down to it, or is it just a story they tell each other in low-stakes situations? and
(b) even if I believed in this, that's orthogonal to my belief that every human has a valuable role to play in this, current-life society!
Evolution doesn't suggest everyone reproduces or "stays around long enough to make sure your children have children" . In World War 2 for example lots of 18 year old men for example were drafted and sacrificed their lives without having a chance to reproduce. Taking your thought experiment to it's conclusion you might conclude world War 2 couldn't have happened.
Your argument about selective pressure would by the same logic lead one to conclude chaste nuns can't exist and monestaries and vows of celebacy are fiction.
Religious belief just needs to be useful on average for there to be selective pressure.
Also evolutionary psychologists can't really explain the existence of gay people (attempts to do so have been a stretch, according to the evolutionary psychiatrist author of The Moral Animal) which demonstrates the limits of declaring things are impossible due to thought experiments about evolutionary pressure.
>i.e. stay alive long enough to make sure your children have children? In other words, is this something people truly feel when it comes down to it
The Aztecs sacrificed an estimated tens of thousands of people a year, because they believed it would postpone the next apocalypse in which everyone would die
But do we think this was a belief shared by everyone until their deaths, even the people who were sacrificed? Or was it a belief primarily instituted by people who thought they, themselves, would never be sacrificed?
> Through virtually all of history, there's a strong correlation between "more people" and "better living conditions".
That's survivorship bias. Populations always try to grow, not to shrink. However, growth will only occur when possible (due new technologies or more resources being available).
There’s a fascinating hypothesis about the development of recursive reasoning that’s worth a read. Obviously we don’t have access to the actual language and verbal culture of people back then, but it looks like we might be able to map out some of the cognitive functions they had available to them, and correlate that to the development of material culture, including artistic expression.
One of the many notions from Lingua ex Machina [2001] is the evolution from protolanguage to proper language. From nonrecursive verb-noun clauses to recursive subject-verb-noun clauses.
That book had so many intriguing open ended questions, before we had the tech (ability) to verify stuff. IIRC, others were:
the way the neocortex is organized into hexagonal columns, which I think is what Jeff Hawkins (et al) is working on;
how notions compete inside our head using Darwinian processes;
how thinking (consciousness) may be like resonance across our brains, like a song.
Thanks again for the link. Am noob, so just barely grasp this stuff, but am excited nonetheless to learn about more recent findings.
We live in an age of miracles.
--
Summary copypasta from Amazon:
A neuroscientist and a linguist show how evolution could have given rise to structured language.
A machine for language? Certainly, say the neurophysiologists, busy studying the language specializations of the human brain and trying to identify their evolutionary antecedents. Linguists such as Noam Chomsky talk about machinelike "modules" in the brain for syntax, arguing that language is more an instinct (a complex behavior triggered by simple environmental stimuli) than an acquired skill like riding a bicycle.
But structured language presents the same evolutionary problems as feathered forelimbs for flight: you need a lot of specializations to fly even a little bit. How do you get them, if evolution has no foresight and the intermediate stages do not have intermediate payoffs? Some say that the Darwinian scheme for gradual species self-improvement cannot explain our most valued human capability, the one that sets us so far above the apes, language itself.
William Calvin and Derek Bickerton suggest that other evolutionary developments, not directly related to language, allowed language to evolve in a way that eventually promoted a Chomskian syntax. They compare these intermediate behaviors to the curb-cuts originally intended for wheelchair users. Their usefulness was soon discovered by users of strollers, shopping carts, rollerblades, and so on. The authors argue that reciprocal altruism and ballistic movement planning were "curb-cuts" that indirectly promoted the formation of structured language. Written in the form of a dialogue set in Bellagio, Italy, Lingua ex Machina presents an engaging challenge to those who view the human capacity for language as a winner-take-all war between Chomsky and Darwin.
However, our genetic form may have been very different. It seems that lactase persistence[0] was not wide spread in nearly any human population until the domestication of animals.
I know that comes off as a bit pedantic, but sometimes those little genetic variations matter quite a bit. I won't cop to being well read in paleogenetics, but I have a feeling that there's been a lot of evolution between them and us.
Civilization is usually defined as more than just the development of permanent settlements. Permanent settlements existed in the fertile crescent during the neolithic for thousands of years before civilizations emerged in that region during the early bronze age.
What characterizes civilizations is the emergence of stratified societies in those settlements, with specialized classes of people such as priests and metalworkers, who relied on others to provide them with food.
I only recently have heard about the 'stoned ape theory'. It basically plays with the idea, that drugs (in this case mushrooms) must have played a crucial role in the development of thinking, thought and consciousness (as we humans know it).
>> I am staring at about a dozen, stiff, eight-foot high, orange-red penises, carved from living bedrock, and semi-enclosed in an open chamber. A strange carved head (of a man, a demon, a priest, a God?), also hewn from the living rock, gazes at the phallic totems – like a primitivist gargoyle.
[x] Earliest known example
[x] Giant penises
Second Life will one day become a digital archeologist's incredible discovery
This is fairly typical for HN links that touch on ancient archaeology, especially anything tangentially related to popular alt-history figures like Graham Hancock. However, metadiscussion about the quality of other comments feels like it goes against a few of the rules. It's better to explain the issues directly in replies.
> But I do definitely know this: some time in 8000 BC the creators of Gobekli Tepe buried their great structures under tons of rubble. They entombed it. We can speculate why. Did they feel guilt? Did they need to propitiate an angry God? Or just want to hide it?’ Klaus was also fairly sure on one other thing. ‘Gobekli Tepe is unique.’
I think it'd be rather hard for a hunter gatherer society to realistically cover such a large area under tons of rubble. It makes me wonder if this covering with rubble is somehow related to the Black Sea deluge hypothesis [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis]:
> "In 1997, William Ryan, Walter Pitman, Petko Dimitrov, and their colleagues first published the Black Sea deluge hypothesis. They proposed that a catastrophic inflow of Mediterranean seawater into the Black Sea freshwater lake occurred around 7600 years ago, c. 5600 BCE .
> As proposed, the Early Holocene Black Sea flood scenario describes events that would have profoundly affected prehistoric settlement in eastern Europe and adjacent parts of Asia and possibly was the basis of oral history concerning Noah's flood. Some archaeologists support this theory as an explanation for the lack of Neolithic sites in northern Turkey. In 2003, Ryan and coauthors revised the dating of the early Holocene flood to 8800 years ago, c. 6800 BCE."
I think there's a poetic feel to it (which makes me wholly question it); the start of agriculture, Babylon, The Garden of Eden, Noah's ark, all wrapped in one, discovered by a shepherd in the hills and filled with penises.
It's worth noting that Karahan Tepe, Gobekli Tepe, and most of the other PPN-A/B sites in Southern Anatolia are on top of hills and mountains at fairly high elevations. They're not really candidates for any sort of flood event.
As for the poetic feel, the term of art is a 'just-so story'.
Just for wonder's sake. Do you think it could be possible for a system of underground waterways to basically be pushed uphill by a natural dam breaking and the pressure of the Mediterranean sea forcing the water to sort of gush uphill?
> "In the Estonian village of Tuhala, there is a well that starts spouting water after a heavy downpour. The well happens to be placed just over an underground river. After rain water floods the river, water pressure builds to the point that it shoots up out of the well, sometimes up to half a meter high. This continues for a few days. During this time, more than 100 liters of water can flow out every second."
Kipling has a book of "just so" stories that I enjoyed as a child. I'm sure I'd find most of it more cringe as an adult. I think you're correct though that it fits the poster's usage.
The force of water capable of pushing such a large amount of rubble would have bulldozed the entire structure and there would be practically nothing left. Simply look at the pillars[0] that are being excavated, there is no way they could have survived such a force. The builders of this complex would have no technical problems with burying them, filling in a hole is much easier than carving and erecting hundreds of stone blocks, pillars and structures.
> it'd be rather hard for a hunter gatherer society to realistically cover such a large area under tons of rubble
We should be careful about underestimating the capabilities of predecessor cultures. We don't even know to what extent these sites were hunter-gatherer societies, right? Isn't a good part of its significance that it's pushing the clock back on our assumptions?
Some years ago someone posted here on Hacker News some article about a bronze-age battle that had more corpses (archeologists found the battle when they stumbled into the corpses, some even still holding swords and all) than expected, the amount of corpses suggest the calculations of the world population at the time was wrong.
> We should be careful about underestimating the capabilities of predecessor cultures
This is surely true, however allowing oneself to imagine and dream, especially when not in a position of authority in the matter can't be that bad, can it? I'm wholly open to any and all possibilities and rebuttals.
> We don't even know to what extent these sites were hunter-gatherer societies, right?
I think the article mentions this is a theory they have.
> Isn't a good part of its significance that it's pushing the clock back on our assumptions?
It is! I hope I'm not detracting from it by entertaining a wild thought.
In this 6-mo-old video [0], Marvin Sweatman reports that Gobekli was indeed a settlement, not just a 'temple' (bodies have been found buried under floors), that the original dating is now being re-evaluated, and there's a theory that the 'rubble fill' came from buildings built around it in later times.
Bodies haven't been found at gobekli tepe, only some cranial bone fragments in the fill. They did attempt to date them, but there wasn't enough remaining collagen.
Do you have access to a recent source spelling out that "haven't been found" ? I don't, but Sweatman has visited the site in the past year, is a well-known student of the site and may know someone who knows.
The skull fragments were found many years ago. Sweatman is very careful about science. 'Level II enclosures' are houses, and he says that in one 'they have found a burial with three bodies'. You'll need to take that up with him
Thanks for making me double-check. I was going to link [1], which was published June 2017, but was not aware of the burials found in Nov. of that same year. I assumed he was simply confusing it with similar sites that have long been known to have subfloor burials. In my defense they seemingly haven't published the burial in any papers that I can find, only in-person lectures that I'm not in the habit of attending anymore. Still, my mistake.
I think it'd be rather hard for a hunter gatherer society to realistically cover such a large area under tons of rubble
People didn't think hunter gatherer societies were able to build such structures and complexes in general. It seems a lot less likely that the Mediterranean flooded an area that far from the Black Sea that also happens to be 700m above sea level.
>> But I do definitely know this: some time in 8000 BC the creators of Gobekli Tepe buried their great structures under tons of rubble. They entombed it. We can speculate why. Did they feel guilt? Did they need to propitiate an angry God? Or just want to hide it?’ Klaus was also fairly sure on one other thing. ‘Gobekli Tepe is unique.’
> I think it'd be rather hard for a hunter gatherer society to realistically cover such a large area under tons of rubble.
I'd also be interested in knowing how they know the creators of Gobekli Tepe where the ones who buried it. Maybe their neighbors didn't like them, or maybe it was their now-farming descendants moving the temple to somewhere better suited to growing their crops. These sort of sites tend to have several generations of societies using them, often hostile to the previous cultures (eg. the vandalism of Egyptian temples by their later occupants).
> In response to which Graham Hancock slowly sits back in his chair and breathes a sigh of victorious relief.
Honestly, he didn't need vindication, but I'm glad for everything Graham has had to put up with his entire career as a JOURNALIST, not and archaeologist, that he finally gets the funding he needs to keep doing his work.
I've been reading America Before on long trips and the way he describes his work on podcasts like JRE make me realize just how terribly ossified academia has become--it's heresay to question the per-established POV. It's no longer, or perhaps never has been in my lifetime, about genuine curiosity and the leap into trying to explain the unknown with the most rigorous and methodical practices (scientific method) when careers are made and lost on parroting and upholding Conventional wisdom above all else. His investigative work in Egyptology was eye opening to me as it reminded me so much of my work in Biology/Chemistry.
I remember sitting in my Biohem lass listening to my professor (who I now consider a friend) describe Walter and Cricks work, and the infamous LSD trip, and telling us of all the women Radio Crystolgraphers (Lindsay, Broomhead, Franklin) who contributed to the ability to arrive to the double helix structure---he too was a crystolographer and used their work for his research. It also entered my mind how Madam Currie is seen as the discoverer of Radioactive particles, while her husband Pierre who also died, is almost never mentioned.
What I'm saying is that narratives are not drawn on division of sex, but rather a seductive and captivating narrative that help lend authority to a specific origin of something, instead of the messy reality that we really have no idea what most of what or where we've come and that things are oftendiscovered by accident (Phleming with penicillin being the most commonly told). And that having a cohesive and seemingly palatable story told from authoritative voices about 'how things really are' gives us a false sense of confidence that lets us accept things as they are.
Graham put's it incredibly eloquently when he says 'we are a Species with amnesia.'
Also worth noting is that Asia Minor, modern day Turkey, is also where the first traces of agriculture are found, which is a pre-requisite for a division of labour and a surplus of food in order to create this kind of specialization to create such immense monoliths.
Gunung Pedang in Indonesia is another mega monolith site that may be even older than this site which is really intriguing, because it makes more sense given that the Indonesia is mainly comprised of so many Islands but still has one of the largest populations in all of the World.
There have been a few articles written about Turkey attempting to derive its current power legitimacy narrative by creating this story of an ancient civilization being founded within their borders. They have pointed out that this is a common trend among dictators that often stretched credulity to the limit (Sadam and Babylon, Mogabe and ancient southern Egypt, Mussolini and the Roman Empire etc) and many attempt to build up their propaganda with such connections.
Im curious how true that is, but there is a trend.
Another archeological propaganda technique is to omit from the history the people you don't like and/or who you don't want to have any claim to the territory. Without naming names, one country likes to skip back thousands of years.
The sites and their importance were known before the current issues in Turkey. Some of the publicity now may well be to encourage nationalism, but the reality is we probably would have been hearing about it 10-20 years earlier if the site hadn't been in a war zone.
And Zimbabwe was no where near the Egyptian Southern Kingdom, and Mussolini came ~1800 years after the height of the Roman Empire. There is no point other than attempting to create a narrative of ancient power & nationalism and aligning it with yourself. Propaganda doesn't operate with logic.
the 'point' is being able to say that turkey is the world-historical nexus of civilization, with the earliest urban civilization, which feeds nationalist narratives. every country likes to think they're special.
Let's be clear it's completely wrong about nearly everything, but it was entertaining and I think would be quite persuasive to a lot of people.
The Turkey archeological digs is the factual underpinning of all these theories, so it goes to show how important it is and how much more of our models we need to clarify.
I'm not sure how comfortable we should be 'knowing' anything we can't make predictions on. There is certainly a spectrum of quality in scientific knowledge and things like psychology and archeology seem on the weak end
There's an old saying about online headlines: If the headline asks a question, the answer is always no. If the answer were yes, the headline would say so.
Only if we count 35 years of archeology at Gobekli Tepe as 'unknown'.
I find this particular set of archeological investigations to be amazing, and I'm glad to see larger awareness of them. But I think there's a good argument that Betteridge's law of headlines still applies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge_law_of_headlines
This time, the answer seems to be yes. It's really quite impressive if these were created by hunter-gatherers before the invention of written language.
> "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." ... It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not.
A 2016 study of a sample of academic journals that set out to test Betteridge's law and Hinchliffe's rule (see below) found that few titles were posed as questions and of those, few were yes/no questions and they were more often answered "yes" in the body of the article rather than "no".[12]
Why would it mention Armenia? If I'm reading your map correctly this site wasnt in Armenian control for 700 years. I visited the region before, if I remember correctly this region is more geographically in the center of the Assyrian empire than Armenian.
That map look like one extremely nationalist view from Armenians. There were a billion other civilization/dynasty/kingdom that controlled the region what is so called as “Greater Armenia”.
The excessively phallic architecture was buried with great prejudice, apparently. making it the first known triumph of matriarchal justice and an example for the modern feminist movement, surely?
/s, but I wonder what the A/B on a headline like that would be.
Every movie where they open something they shouldn't and something dangerous escapes. The most popular being when the Nazis open the ark of the covenant and their faces melt (apologies for the spoilers).
We need an older word than civilisation in English.
Civis (citizen) is Latin (civil etc) which is only around 2500 years old give or take a bit. We also have polis (city) related words from old Greek for politician, police polite etc.
We clearly need some words derived from really old Anatolian languages or perhaps there are some already.
“Civilization” Congress from an Indo-European root “kei” meaning “to lie” as on a surface. That takes it back about 4-5000 years. That PIE root certainly had an older ancestral word. Since PIE is from just north of Anatolia it is possible that PIE is descended from a language of Göbekli Tepe.
Take a swing at it, but I wager the idea is that the Latin and Greek words presume a state of human community that doesn't exhaust these even older configurations, premised as they are on erected physical barriers between inside and outside, state and nature, whereas a hunter-gather group building something like Tepe defies this difference.
Aristotle asserted that human communities form no less naturally than a hive of bees or an ant mound (something Spinoza will echo thousands of years later), in contrast to say Hobbesian theory of community, but he jumped right to the configuration of the city straight from there when we have glimpses of stranger possibilities that arose before, and labeled all other configurations defective.
Some parts of "English" deliberately lean on Latin and Greek and get no further - I suppose we call it the classic influence. I'd like to see English crack on and continue to subsume words and concepts from foreign parts.
Now, here we have evidence of a really old civilization and I'd like to see English words being extrapolated from the languages (lingua - Latin) extant (Latin) of the region (Latin - regio).
I think it is time that we start pinching Anatolian names and concepts. It's quite a large region and over 10,000 years it must have had quite a lot of ideas and concepts that we take for granted now and given the age of the place - probably invented them.
> archaeologists in southeastern Turkey are, at this moment, digging up a wild, grand, artistically coherent, implausibly strange, hitherto-unknown-to-us religious civilisation, which has been buried in Mesopotamia for ten thousand years. And it was all buried deliberately.
Maybe they realized that civilization is a miserable slog and they should just go back to hunting and gathering.
What is wrong with referring to the physical evidence? The bloody things are literally sticking up out of the ground.
OK - not really "literally" unless the nobs have learned to write or have been written/drawn or I've messed my vowels and got litorally confused with literally (litor is shore as in seashore or river bank in Latin). Oh and they are not bloody either unless rubbed too hard. Nob, is of course: en_GB (slang) for an upper class person or a penis.
Back to the article. This archaeological site seems to be extremely important. It seems to show that our ideas of when people started to put down roots ie build stuff and become fixed to a location (Latin - locus) started to happen earlier than we thought it did.
As far as civilizations go, Gobekli Tepe is not really "advanced".
edit: I'm not sure why the downvotes, trying to clarify that this does not add credence to pseudohistorical narratives about long-lost advanced civilizations.
That really depends on what you mean by "advanced". It's evidence of a larger, more organized, more hierarchical civilization than archaeologists had expected to see anywhere near its time period. This is either evidence that they had agriculture way back then or that these things that we normally associate with sedentary agricultural civilization are separable from it. Either one is surprising!
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