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It's important to note that this is a rather controversial paper. For one, the authors aren't actually neolithic experts, they're (presumably otherwise excellen
by AlotOfReading 6y ago
It's important to note that this is a rather controversial paper. For one, the authors aren't actually neolithic experts, they're (presumably otherwise excellent) engineers. They also don't get the dating right and fail to cite a wide range of literature relating the iconography at Gobekli Tepe to a wide variety of sites in the region like Jerf el Ahmar and Tell al-'Abr where it appears in more pedestrian contexts. Moreover, their argument relies on the extremely controversial and as-yet unsettled Younger Dryas Impact hypothesis. After assuming this (fine), they leap straight into assuming they understand both what the original authors were intending (completely unsubstantiated) and that these intentions were shared by disparate cultures across multiple continents and tens of thousands of years (mostly covered in a followup paper). This was egregious enough that many of the archaeologists working on Gobekli Tepe wrote a group paper [1] pointing out some of the methodological issues and problems with how their conclusions failed to follow from them.
As a disclaimer, I'm a big proponent of outsiders contributing to unrelated fields and do so myself as an archaeologist in tech. The way to do it is not by ignoring prior work done in the field, but instead by engaging with it constructively. These authors haven't really done that and it shows in the quality of this paper.
[1] http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.581724 http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.581724
- benbreen 6y agoJust want to say thanks for this excellent comment. Out of curiosity, would you be up for sharing more about your own research? I always wanted to be an archaeologist as a kid; wound up becoming an historian almost by accident instead.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- AlotOfReading 6y agoI mostly did work around nomadism and the early neolithic in the Northern hemisphere, but I also worked privately in the southwest for awhile. It's a fun gig, but they don't tell you how much paperwork is involved in finding anything until you're 10hrs from the nearest civilization and ankle deep in mud. I miss fieldwork a bit :)
- robotastronaut 6y agoThey also don’t tell you quite how bad it is on your knees. I did most of my fieldwork in the Midwest with a some additional work on North American migration following the younger dryas in Alaska. My knees are safe now, thanks to a career in software. I miss fieldwork every summer, though.
- 8bitsrule 6y ago>extremely controversial and as-yet unsettled Younger Dryas Impact hypothesis. While the 'impact' hypothesis is certainly unsettled, there isn't much controversy in the hard sciences. The great majority of over 200 papers published in the last dozen years certainly establishes the presence and dating of fallout from major (probably multiple) extra-terrestrial sources in that era. That evidence is in accordance with multiple Greenland ice-cores. Whatever the purpose of Gobekli, it's only one data point in a long and growing list of recent discoveries and observations. Human history in the early Holocene will be re-written as a result.
- AlotOfReading 6y agoYou're right that this could have been stated better. The impacts themselves are something for geologists and other scientists to discuss. Linking the YDB (quaternary extinctions, demographic bottlenecks, and possible conflagrations) to those impacts remains a combination of under-discussed and controversial in the archaeological community.
- 8bitsrule 6y agoIMO archeologists who pay attention to this stuff now (like those who've embraced lidar and radio-dating) will leave their competition in the dust.