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Göbekli Tepe dates to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, between c. 9500 and 8000 BC, which would make it over 10k years old. It didn't get built overnight https://en.

Göbekli Tepe dates to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, between c. 9500 and 8000 BC, which would make it over 10k years old. It didn't get built overnight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

mhuffman 4y ago
I am not some "ancient aliens" kook, but many comments above seem to overlook the fact that until relatively recently we thought that people 10k years ago, world wide, were fresh out of caves/hunter-gathers and some of the more brighter ones were starting to farm and do animal husbandry. Then, Göbekli Tepe is unearthed and it is obvious that, as you say, that shit did not happen one day with just some super talented hunter-gatherer having an artistic streak. I do not understand why academics think all people on Earth were always at the same technological level at the same time. Add to that that most things (wood, iron, basically anything other than hard rock) disappear pretty quickly in large timescales and it gets really murky to think about and archaeologists in particular seem to become outraged at anything that isn't currently in vogue.
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  Complex society -- legislatures, economics, the works, even writing -- could easily have occurred hundreds of times over the millennia, without building with stone and so leaving no trace after they collapsed or were wiped out by invaders. We know about a precious few that did build with stone, that could have been as socially sophisticated as you like, but left no trace of that. We know extremely little about people in the Amazon basin, beyond that they had already domesticated orchard trees by 10,000 years ago, built over wide areas, and had no access to stone. They had ceramics, but did not favor bricks. They left us a few enigmatic inventions including curare and terra preta. Assuming primitive social relations is very close to racism. Sophistication seems to need nothing more than population.
  - AlotOfReading 4y ago
    Population demographics are one of the things archaeologists are most interested in. There's lots of independent methodologies that we've developed to tell us when people were present and in what numbers. Many don't even rely on finding artifacts. Things like genetic work directly tell us effective population sizes at various points in human history (low), charcoal analysis tells us how many fires were burning, hearth counts (indicated by rock or soil discoloration) tell us how many people were cooking, pollen analysis tells us what the plant landscape looked like in areas, etc. There's even an incredible technique based on eDNA analysis that can directly measure how many people were in the area when a soil sample was deposited by measuring the DNA from their shed cells. I've only seen that one used for results back to 30-40kya, but it's still pretty cool. As you might have guessed from how I've written this, all these different lines of evidence consistently point to low population densities and overall populations, especially before the main human expansion out of Africa. Advanced ice age societies aren't impossible, but there would need to be some pretty strong evidence and a good explanation to account for all the data we have against them.
    - moloch-hai 4y ago
      Those tests are run only in places we already knew people were. Notably, none have been run on the million square miles of Sundaland and the continental shelf off China, now under water, where people lived for at least 70,000 years. We know they invented oceangoing navigation pretty early, because they got to Australia. People did that another 100,000 years earlier and got to Crete. The null hypothesis has to be that people in places with sufficient population have complex society, because that is baseline human behavior. You need good evidence of someplace they didn't, and an explanation why not.
      - AlotOfReading 4y ago
        The genetic work actually does include those people, namely those whose descendents have been sampled.
        4y ago
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  I do not understand why academics think all people on Earth were always at the same technological level at the same time. They don't. Archaeologists are well aware that terms like "Hunter-Gatherer" and "lithics" subsume huge amounts of diversity covering hundreds of thousands of years, but they've stuck around for legacy reasons. Quoting the intro from my old textbook (The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum): [...] in the models developed in the twentieth century to describe hunter-gatherers, variation was something to be explained away to uncover the essential hunter-gatherer. There are thousands upon thousands of recognized "industries" of distinct toolmaking traditions and that's only a minuscule proportion of what must have existed.

mhuffman 4y ago

I am not some "ancient aliens" kook, but many comments above seem to overlook the fact that until relatively recently we thought that people 10k years ago, world wide, were fresh out of caves/hunter-gathers and some of the more brighter ones were starting to farm and do animal husbandry. Then, Göbekli Tepe is unearthed and it is obvious that, as you say, that shit did not happen one day with just some super talented hunter-gatherer having an artistic streak. I do not understand why academics think all people on Earth were always at the same technological level at the same time. Add to that that most things (wood, iron, basically anything other than hard rock) disappear pretty quickly in large timescales and it gets really murky to think about and archaeologists in particular seem to become outraged at anything that isn't currently in vogue.

moloch-hai 4y ago
Complex society -- legislatures, economics, the works, even writing -- could easily have occurred hundreds of times over the millennia, without building with stone and so leaving no trace after they collapsed or were wiped out by invaders. We know about a precious few that did build with stone, that could have been as socially sophisticated as you like, but left no trace of that. We know extremely little about people in the Amazon basin, beyond that they had already domesticated orchard trees by 10,000 years ago, built over wide areas, and had no access to stone. They had ceramics, but did not favor bricks. They left us a few enigmatic inventions including curare and terra preta. Assuming primitive social relations is very close to racism. Sophistication seems to need nothing more than population.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  Population demographics are one of the things archaeologists are most interested in. There's lots of independent methodologies that we've developed to tell us when people were present and in what numbers. Many don't even rely on finding artifacts. Things like genetic work directly tell us effective population sizes at various points in human history (low), charcoal analysis tells us how many fires were burning, hearth counts (indicated by rock or soil discoloration) tell us how many people were cooking, pollen analysis tells us what the plant landscape looked like in areas, etc. There's even an incredible technique based on eDNA analysis that can directly measure how many people were in the area when a soil sample was deposited by measuring the DNA from their shed cells. I've only seen that one used for results back to 30-40kya, but it's still pretty cool. As you might have guessed from how I've written this, all these different lines of evidence consistently point to low population densities and overall populations, especially before the main human expansion out of Africa. Advanced ice age societies aren't impossible, but there would need to be some pretty strong evidence and a good explanation to account for all the data we have against them.
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    Those tests are run only in places we already knew people were. Notably, none have been run on the million square miles of Sundaland and the continental shelf off China, now under water, where people lived for at least 70,000 years. We know they invented oceangoing navigation pretty early, because they got to Australia. People did that another 100,000 years earlier and got to Crete. The null hypothesis has to be that people in places with sufficient population have complex society, because that is baseline human behavior. You need good evidence of someplace they didn't, and an explanation why not.
    - AlotOfReading 4y ago
      The genetic work actually does include those people, namely those whose descendents have been sampled.
      - 4y ago
AlotOfReading 4y ago
I do not understand why academics think all people on Earth were always at the same technological level at the same time. They don't. Archaeologists are well aware that terms like "Hunter-Gatherer" and "lithics" subsume huge amounts of diversity covering hundreds of thousands of years, but they've stuck around for legacy reasons. Quoting the intro from my old textbook (The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum): [...] in the models developed in the twentieth century to describe hunter-gatherers, variation was something to be explained away to uncover the essential hunter-gatherer. There are thousands upon thousands of recognized "industries" of distinct toolmaking traditions and that's only a minuscule proportion of what must have existed.