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Ancient civilisation under eastern Turkey estimated to be 11k-13k years old
- haspoken 4y agohttps://archive.ph/ER5d9 https://archive.ph/ER5d9
- TeeMassive 4y ago
- hrdwdmrbl 4y agoThere'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.
- ergonaught 4y agoAnd yet the answer is yes.
- runesofdoom 4y agoOnly 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge_law_of_headlines
- capableweb 4y agoBetteridge's law of headlines: > "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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- notacoward 4y agoBetteridge's Law from 2009, arguably repeating offline antecedents all the way back to 1991. If that seems old, maybe archaeology isn't for you.
- 867-5309 4y agonot all questions have binary answers
- SemanticStrengh 4y agoA 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]
- ksaj 4y agoThis is similar to: - Look before you leap - He who hesitates is lost Studies and adages aren't all that different, it seems.
- ksaj 4y agoThis 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.
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- smoothsnake5 4y ago
- h2odragon 4y agoThe 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.
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- SemanticStrengh 4y ago
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- vmception 4y agoReturn the slab To seal it off again No human remains and intentionally sealed off, take the hint
- andrewljohnson 4y agoWhy do you say this, are you implying there is some danger?
- jonny_eh 4y agoThey're making a joke.
- andrewljohnson 4y agoWhat's the joke, is it an allusion?
- tpmx 4y agoSomehow uncovering very old novel virus strains compatible with humans was my first thought.
- SllX 4y agoOr the Flood.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoDon’t forget the statues at the site have 6 fingers. No one has explained that yet.
- jonny_eh 4y agoEvery 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).
- gobengo 4y ago'eastern Turkey' aka Armenia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide
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- alephxyz 4y agoIt's actually in southeastern Anatolia, not a region with a historical Armenian presence
- gobengo 4y agomaybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Armenia_(antiquity)#/media/File:Maps_of_the_Armenian_Empire_of_Tigranes.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Armenia_(antiquity)...
- selimthegrim 4y agoUrartu is a little north of here
- hereforphone 4y agoNice try
- lovemenot 4y ago>> 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
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- jonny_eh 4y agoI skimmed the article but didn't see how they determined its age.
- layer8 4y agoRadiocarbon dating: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe#Chronology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe#Chronology
- its_ethan 4y agoI 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..
- aksss 4y agoBut 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.
- aksss 4y agoFrom Gobekli Tepe, but probably similar: "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." https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258182967_Radiocarbon_dating_the_first_temples_of_mankind_Comments_on_14C-Dates_from_Gobekli_Tepe https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258182967_Radiocarb...
- mftb 4y agoGlad 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.
- user3939382 4y agoIn response to which Graham Hancock slowly sits back in his chair and breathes a sigh of victorious relief.
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- Melting_Harps 4y ago> 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.
- poundtown 4y agois this the same thing graham hancock(Gobekli Tepe) has been going on about for sometime or is this different?
- pvg 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karahan_Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karahan_Tepe It's nearby but it's a different site
- mkl 4y agoI 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.
- tsunamifury 4y agoThere 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.
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- hereforphone 4y agoThose borders didn't exist at the time the "ancient civilization" was constructed. So what's the point?
- DrBenCarson 4y agoIt inspires nationalism which enables dictators
- hereforphone 4y agoErdoğan is a dictator propped up on Islamic sentiment and tradition. He is not a nationalist.
- tsunamifury 4y agoAnd 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.
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- DrBenCarson 4y ago> extensive article about ‘ancient eastern Turkey’ > no mention of Armenia and/or ancient Armenia Mmm…kay For the curious, this is what Armenia used to look like on a map before that whole ‘genocide’ thing: https://www.gampr.org/historicaltimeline https://www.gampr.org/historicaltimeline
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- thriftwy 4y agoEvery nation has such a map and we probably need three earths to satisfy all of these.
- trentearl 4y agoWhy 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.
- ascari 4y agoThat 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”.
- jscipione 4y ago-1 on this article and its abundant phallic references. +1 on Gobekli Tepe being evidence of a pre-literate advanced civilization.
- mysecretaccount 4y agoAs 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.
- pjscott 4y agoThat 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!
- mysecretaccount 4y ago"Advanced" is presumably used to disambiguate less advanced civilizations. This was among the least advanced civilizations.
- KaoruAoiShiho 4y agoWhen some people say advanced they mean at least roman level civilization, cities with hundreds of thousands of people etc. Some of them mean things like space-faring level advanced. https://www.reddit.com/r/AlternativeHistory/comments/ed5gd1/a_species_with_amnesia/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AlternativeHistory/comments/ed5gd1/...
- gerdesj 4y agoWhat 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.
- hrkucuk 4y agoThis was apparently a brothel of some sort that's why nobody is buried there for gods sake
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- maegul 4y agoI’m not sure I’ve seen such superficial commentary here (it feels more like Reddit frankly) for such a popular thread. Not really a criticism (ok maybe a little), but perhaps more of an indication that these discoveries are truly novel and baffling.
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- AlotOfReading 4y agoThis 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.
- yung_steezy 4y agoI would guess comments are more insightful when the topic being discussed is less niche.
- 5cott0 4y agoHighly recommend THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeverything https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeveryt...
- tombh 4y agoMe 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.
- BlueTemplar 4y agoOne question that has been bugging me for years : Homo sapiens is 300k-350k years old. We'we known 3-4 interglacials... how can we be sure the previous ones didn't have civilizations ? (Because we didn't get out of Africa before roughly the middle of the last glacial ?)
- AlotOfReading 4y agoWe 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.
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- gerdesj 4y agoWe 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.
- bobkazamakis 4y ago>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. Do we need a new word for yeet? Seems like that might be outdated too!
- Bjartr 4y agoWhy is the age of the word or its roots significant here?
- imbnwa 4y agoTake 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.
- gerdesj 4y agoSome 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.
- sydthrowaway 4y agoSo the Proto Indo Europeans have finally been found.
- selimthegrim 4y agoCould be the proto-Vainakh/Chechens for all we know
- danans 4y agoWhat 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.
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- astrange 4y agoThat’s the Yanmaya. They’re from the area of approximately southern Ukraine and Crimea.
- Mo3 4y agoSome day, they'll find us too.
- jonylaw 4y ago
- travis_brooks 4y agoRight, the future archeologists will find some old parking meters and assume the primitive ancients had some sort of steel penis cult.
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y agoWhile that sounds funny, it wouldn't be that wrong, considering how cars are seen as penis enlargement prosthetic by some ;->
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y agoSee? EPSI hyncaaar! TSHVANNTZ!
- coffeeblack 4y agoOr maybe not. Who knows how many large civilizations have never been found.
- wolverine876 4y agoIs there any serious scientific source for this story? A report in a journal?
- ThalesX 4y ago> 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 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.
- aksss 4y ago> 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?
- ThalesX 4y ago> 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.
- robonerd 4y agoI 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.
- throwyawayyyy 4y agoGraeber 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.
- robonerd 4y agoI 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.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoI 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.
- alophawen 4y agoYou are clueless and should read that book instead of speaking out like this.
- robonerd 4y ago
- Barrera 4y agoA 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. [1] https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14487942 https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14487942 [2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317433791_Dating_Gobekli_Tepe https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317433791_Dating_Go...
- dataflow 4y agoI'm confused, why wouldn't they date some tiny piece from the structure itself? It seems like an obvious thing to do, is it not?
- ska 4y agoThat 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.
- yesenadam 4y agoRelated: 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.) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10075318/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10075318/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gift_(Turkish_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gift_(Turkish_TV_series) p.s. Bir Başkadir (aka Ethos, 2020-) and Fatma (2021-) are another two excellent Turkish Netflix series. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11301642/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11301642/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11961378/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11961378/
- bsnnkv 4y agoI'm going to check this out based on your recommendation!
- adastra22 4y agoThis sounds right up my alley, thanks!
- devilbunny 4y agoThank you for the recommendations.
- Thorentis 4y agoSounds 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.
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- 01acheru 4y agoGobekli 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. [1] https://sealevel.nasa.gov/faq/13/how-long-have-sea-levels-been-rising-how-does-recent-sea-level-rise-compare-to-that-over-the-previous/ https://sealevel.nasa.gov/faq/13/how-long-have-sea-levels-be...
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoEphesus, an ancient city in Western Turkey, was a coastal city. Now it is 6 km inland.
- 01acheru 4y agoEphesus 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.
- x3iv130f 4y agoEphesus was founded after this rise in sea level. Ephesus was founded 3,000-4,000 years ago. The sea level rise occured over a period of 21,000 to 3,000 years ago.
- simonh 4y agoWe 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.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago“ 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.”
- prescriptivist 4y agoOff 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vail_Site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vail_Site
- briga 4y ago>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.
- krrrh 4y agoOne 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beringia#Human_habitation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beringia#Human_habitation
- prescriptivist 4y ago
- cletus 4y agoA 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.
- 01acheru 4y agoIt'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! https://youtu.be/FD2yPqODlBA https://youtu.be/FD2yPqODlBA
- walrus01 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogger_Bank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogger_Bank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland There's a fair bit of things that may be far under the ocean now, but were dry land during the last glacial maximum.
- r3trohack3r 4y agoTo 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.
- pratik661 4y agoI 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?
- hinkley 4y agoTropical 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.
- Synaesthesia 4y agoThe climate of the middle east was different thousands of years ago. Arabia and the Sahara were not deserts.
- ComputerGuru 4y agoNot to be that person, but Anatolia and Mesopotamia were not “dry” even if they approach that description today. They had milder weather than Germany to be sure, but I don’t know if you can definitively say they saw less precipitation.
- system2 4y agoYet 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.
- dimitrios1 4y agoMight blow your mind that the Patriarchate of Constantinople is still located in Instanbul.
- thewarpaint 4y agoKapadokya is a pretty popular touristic attraction. Source: was there in 2018 with a bunch of non-Turkish people.
- 7thaccount 4y agoThe article says it is a tourist trap now with over a million visitors a year.
- bgroat 4y agoMy 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
- rapind 4y agoHe was a Neanderthal which was supposed to be why he didn’t age (not that that makes sense). I really enjoyed that movie too.
- bgroat 4y agoHe 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
- diggernet 4y agoThat is really a great movie. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_Earth https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_Earth A couple interesting details I learned while looking up that link: - They released a sequel 10 years later. - The author also wrote the Star Trek episode "Requiem for Methuselah", which has a similar theme.
- FRacevedo 4y ago
- whats_a_quasar 4y agoIf 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 https://art19.com/shows/tides-of-history
- KaoruAoiShiho 4y agoI wasted about 30 minutes recently watching some pseudo historical videos on youtube with millions of views like this one about atlantis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDoM4BmoDQM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDoM4BmoDQM 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pwndByDeath 4y agoI'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
- dimal 4y ago> 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.
- astrange 4y agoYou’ll like hunting and gathering if you like having to kill twin children because they’ll exhaust the food supply.
- hsn915 4y agoSamo Burja has an excellent essay about why civilization is older than we think https://palladiummag.com/2021/05/17/why-civilization-is-older-than-we-thought/ https://palladiummag.com/2021/05/17/why-civilization-is-olde... Some interesting quotes: > 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.
- russellbeattie 4y ago> 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.
- simonh 4y agoSorry 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.
- dmix 4y agoI 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.
- throwawayboise 4y agoProof that dick humor is as old as humanity?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- reactspa 4y agoDoes anyone know how something like this could have been carved back in the stone age, without metal tools? https://palladiummag.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/gobekli-photo-3.jpg https://palladiummag.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/gobekli-...
- ricardobeat 4y agoHarder stone?
- vlz 4y agoYou would need a rock that is harder than the rock you carve into. Possibly a „Hand axe“ made from flint would suffice: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_axe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_axe
- 7thaccount 4y agoFlint 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.
- doodlebugging 4y agoThe 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.
- nl 4y agoI 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe [2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0131422 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
- uwagar 4y ago
- jl6 4y agoWhat 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.
- dieselgate 4y agoYeah it’s interesting to think about humanity living without any “permanent” settlements and what the conversations were like.. _pass the salt_
- kqr 4y agoA 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.
- kajaktum 4y ago>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.
- towaway15463 4y ago
- Emma_Goldman 4y agoApparently, 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." https://publications.dainst.org/journals/efb/article/view/2596/7095 https://publications.dainst.org/journals/efb/article/view/25...
- kqr 4y agoNote 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.
- inglor_cz 4y agoYes, 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.
- ComputerGuru 4y agoTFA 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.
- astrange 4y agoI was hoping to learn something about the six-fingered statues here, but no comments about it. Anyone know any six fingered Turkish people we can ask?
- op00to 4y agoKarahan Tepe? More like Karahan peepee, am I right? No? Sorry, I’ll show myself out.
- fantasticshower 4y agoIf you're excited by prehistory and hunter-gatherer society might I suggest reading The Earth's Children Series by Jean Auel. It's one of my favorite series and was well researched by the author before writing. It tells the story of a young human who travels across Europe.
- trashtester 4y agoThe first one was very interesting, interestingly it included interbreeding with neanderthals before neanderthal dna was disovered in our DNA. The rest had quite a soap opera / "housewife porn" elements, but also some interesting bits surrounding toolmaking, hunting, etc.
- fantasticshower 4y agoYeah 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.
- rendall 4y ago> The shepherd who discovered Gobekli Tepe 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?
- mavci 4y agoI thought about that too while reading. His name is Mahmut Yıldız. If you want to read more about him, you can check out the article below. https://www.dailysabah.com/history/2018/03/27/security-guard-dedicates-life-to-preserve-turkeys-gobeklitepe https://www.dailysabah.com/history/2018/03/27/security-guard...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Shadonototra 4y agoanother evidence of the great flood
- rurban 4y agoKnown 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.