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Göbekli Tepe is interesting because it predates the neolithic, let alone "cities". They came around several millennia later.
by AlotOfReading 6y ago
Göbekli Tepe is interesting because it predates the neolithic, let alone "cities". They came around several millennia later.
- shakezula 6y agoI recently got into a kick reading about ancient civilizations and learned about Göbekli Tepe and it blew my mind. It's substantially older than _anything_ else we have, and we're still finding sites older than it, and Turkey is chock full of sites like that. I really hope we're able to gain some more understanding about our past from these sites.
- egeozcan 6y ago> learned about Göbekli Tepe and it blew my mind It's also funny if you speak Turkish because it literally means "a hill with a belly".
- riffraff 6y agoare you sure about it predates the neolithic? AFAIU, the temple is dated ~8-10000 years BCE, while the neolithic start should be around 12000 BCE, so it would be "early neolithic". But maybe I'm missing something.
- AlotOfReading 6y agoThanks for pointing this out, I was unclear. The era we call the "Neolithic" does indeed start a bit earlier, and the earliest layers of the site are within the PPNA. Sometimes we use the term neolithic to refer to certain sets of economic and cultural modes, the so-called "Neolithic Package". The general thinking has been that the earliest layers and probably the site as a whole were not made by one of these groups. There's been a long-running argument that all of the elements of a really old, really bad concept called "civilization" require this so-called "neolithic package" to be invented. All the other known examples post-dated the earliest of these societies, and the (dumb) explanation was just that the ideas had diffused from more "sophisticated" societies. Gobekli Tepe was clear evidence against that.
- garmaine 6y agoIt's also very region-specific. Because of the euro-centrism of these fields in their traditional naming schemes, the "Neolithic revolution" often refers to the invasion/migration of Neolithic peoples into better documented regions, in particular Western Europe. That happened after Göbekli Tepe. But if you ask "where did the Neolithic people come from" the answer is somewhere in central or western Asia. And presumably they developed their technology and society over thousands of years before taking the world by storm, so that puts Göbekli Tepe (potentially!) inside the bounds of the Neolithic peoples.
- KingOfCoders 6y agoOften words like "Neolithic" (like Iron Age) are no longer used by experts but they linger on.
- riffraff 6y agothank you for the explanation!