8 ms·

It feels like the significance of this is lost on many people. My understanding is that complex things like statues were not supposed to be possible 12,000 yea

It feels like the significance of this is lost on many people. My understanding is that complex things like statues were not supposed to be possible 12,000 years ago. I think it’s supposed to be more like 6000 years ago. The fact that it has been carbon dated to 12,000 tears should means that we have to rewrite the theories on the start of human civilization. These statues needed to be carved out of tools and the educational techniques for carving it off stone and the social structure to support art were not supposed to exist at this time. This is pretty huge in terms of figuring out the birth of human civilization. And the fact that the same site also has these huge stone megaliths that also weren’t supposed to be possible and were also dated to 12,000 years so just solidified the idea that our current theories are completely wrong.

softfalcon 3y ago
A common statement was brought up in my history classes: "humans of the past were often as resourceful, if not more resourceful than we are, they simply had less opportunities than we do today." If you put yourself in the place of your ancestors. Who you are, you could probably figure out a way to make a statue. It stands to reason that someone a bit smarter (or more motivated) than you or I could also figure it out without our modern day tools. Human ingenuity is astounding and I love the idea that past humanity was just us without iPhones.
beezlewax 3y ago
Do you need special tools to do this though? Or just one rock that's harder than the other one? That said I used to make "tools" out of sticks and rocks as a child playing outdoors. Why do we think people didn't have tools or the capacity to invent them 12000 years ago?
poulpy123 3y ago
I don't even understand what are you on about. The same kind of statue up.to the holding of the genital has been found in the same area in 1993 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urfa_Man https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urfa_Man Not even talking of the fact that 25000 years before people were making incredible art at the grotte Chauvet or that around the same time, a 30cm statue was carved in Germany representing an anthropomorphised Lion ans
asvitkine 3y ago
How does carbon dating work on a statue? Wouldn't it be dating the underlying material (i.e. the stone), which presumably predates the actual carving of the statue out of that material? Edit: I guess if it was buried, they date the organic material around it.
- defrost 3y ago
  There's very little, if any, carbon in stone. They dated the charcoal in layers settled about the statue: https://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-telegrams/2016/06/22/how-old-ist-it-dating-gobekli-tepe/ https://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-telegrams/2016/06/22/how-ol...
- p-e-w 3y ago
  > How does carbon dating work on a statue? It doesn't, and the stone itself is typically hundreds of millions or even billions of years old. However, many ancient artifacts are found buried in the ground, and it is often possible to carbon-date organic material in the soil surrounding the artifact, which produces an estimate for when it was buried. This is typically combined with historians' estimates for when the culture that presumably produced the artifact flourished, though uncertainties of several millennia remain in some cases.
  - tephra 3y ago
    In some cases you can also use luminescence dating[0], which can tell you the last time a mineral was exposed to sunlight. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminescence_dating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminescence_dating
p-e-w 3y ago
> My understanding is that complex things like statues were not supposed to be possible 12,000 years ago. Huh? The Venus of Willendorf[1] is twice as old, and to my eye displays a higher degree of artistry than the statue shown in the article. Several such Venus figurines have been found in central Europe. Compared to the intricacy of the Venus' limestone carving, the statue from the article looks downright crude. The idea that it's "not supposed to be possible" to make something like that 12,000 years BP is ridiculous, and I can't imagine where you might have got that impression. Yes, the new statue is life-size, while the Venus is a figurine, but that doesn't necessarily make it any more difficult to manufacture (possibly easier, in fact). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf
- arp242 3y ago
  Venus of Willendorf is quite small, and not especially life-like, but similar large statues have been found in the area before, from around the same time (12kya ago). It's not even a unique find, and fits reasonably well(ish) in established chronology and progression (insofar that's possible for pre-history). Pretty much everything the previous poster said is wrong.
  - 31carmichael 3y ago
    looks pretty lifelike to me; like most people I see at Walmart.
  - runsWphotons 3y ago
    its not as lifelike as i hoped when i opened. not a Michelangelo.
    - Fluorescence 3y ago
      IMHO it's more interesting and a greater achievement than lifelike. To me it's an expression of fertile abundance that shows more intention, more imagination, more desire to communicate, more understanding of form and humanity than a straight depiction would.
unsubstantiated 3y ago
[dead]
prvc 3y ago
It's roughly as complex and realistic as other artifacts that have already been discovered on the site.
kcyb 3y ago
I think you might appreciate the book The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow [1]. They dive into the archaeological record and argue precisely that: that the common story of how civilization developed is very wrong, and that complex societies existed before the rise of agriculture, longer than is usually assumed. These findings at Göbekli Tepe appear very much in line with their theory. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything
bazoom42 3y ago
We know sculptures and cave-paintings much older than this, some made with great artistic skill, so clearly no archeologist would suggest art was “not possible” at this time. Still a significant find and very fascinating.
- boffinAudio 3y ago
  Not to mention, Narwala Gabarnmang pretty much blows every precept about the rise of humankind out of the water. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabarnmung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabarnmung The birthplace of masonry .. the worlds oldest, longest-running university .. its oldest (still functioning) commons ..
  - defrost 3y ago
    It's a stand out site, for sure. There are more photos than just the single one in the wikipedia link here: https://landscapeaustralia.com/articles/nawarla-gabarnmang/ https://landscapeaustralia.com/articles/nawarla-gabarnmang/
  - sgt101 3y ago
    >The birthplace of masonry .. the worlds oldest, longest-running university .. its oldest commons .. Pardon my ignorance - what separates this from other sites like Lascaux?
    - boffinAudio 3y ago
      Literally, 10's of thousands of years. Gabarnmang is older, and has been continuously occupied and in use, with only a break in occupation on the order of 50 years, last century, when it was "forgotten about" by the caretakers, in order to protect it ... only to be re-discovered recently (this century). It is a truly extraordinary site and I personally consider it the holiest of all human sites, ever. More holy than any other - in constant use as a school and commons, for 10's of thousands of years of human existence, containing an extraordinary collection of art, both ancient and contemporary ... probably one of the most important collections of human art, ever. If Australians had any decency they'd immediately sever ties with the British and make this site the seat of their new sovereign - its that powerful a record of human civilization, imho.
jl6 3y ago
> not supposed to be possible Our knowledge of such ancient peoples is so limited and subject to so many filters, that we should hesitate to think of some achievements as impossible. It’s just not that black & white. The general pattern of civilizational development could still be broadly correct, with this site just being a notable outlier.
TheGRS 3y ago
All those thoughts were going through my head as I was reading it, and I’m not like a history major or anything. Modern humans biologically have been around for a pretty long time so I’ve often wondered if civilizations existed where we simply haven’t found their artifacts, maybe because they didn’t produce or value them at the time.
moffkalast 3y ago
Clearly it's aliens who made them with laser tools /s
hnfong 3y ago
> My understanding is that complex things like statues were not supposed to be possible 12,000 years ago. I think it’s supposed to be more like 6000 years ago. Recently I keep wondering whether people have thought about this from a statistical perspective. Like, if I suddenly find a dead rat in my kitchen, what should I think about it? Should I consider that maybe I have had a pest problem for months or possibly years, or should I consider this as "we found evidence for rats existing in my house for at most one day"? It seems archeology takes the "evidence based" approach and refuses to calculate the expected probability of more stuff being discovered that's older/more impressive using the fact that we are discovering (mostly) random stuff buried in the ground. What are the chances that the stuff we dug up are not the pinnacle of human civilization back then, and merely an average object? If people 3000 years from now dug up a brick from a rural village, should they infer that we only know how to build brick houses and not skyscrapers? What are the chances of digging up remains of a skyscraper? I have so many burning questions lol
- HPsquared 3y ago
  Pretty big error bars on any estimations, with the low number of samples. But yeah, I wonder if anyone has tried to give a confidence interval for "tech level over time".
- fecal_henge 3y ago
  You could look at multiple points and try to generate a distribution of when this kind of activity happened. You might find that the number of points results in a pitifully poor confidence level in an expected probability though. Not enough rats and not enough kitchens.
- bazoom42 3y ago
  There is no way to calculate that, since current finds are not random digs. Archeologist search where they have reasons to think something of interest can be found.
- stainablesteel 3y ago
  this is a great analogy its why i love graham hancock and everything he talks about, its so exciting to think about the great achievements of all the human civilizations that have come about in the 200-300k years that humans have been around
sgt101 3y ago
Yup - if you are thinking about what the story was in about 1978... Since then there's been a big change from the idea cities were the only locus of culture and technology to a view that nomadic peoples were able to create significant ritual art, technical knowlege, and complex cultures. Of course the view from the 19th and early 20th C's was significantly informed by the need to justify all the genociding of nomadic peoples ("it's for their own good"). The idea I've heard recently is that agriculture grew out of nomadic people encouraging the food plants that they would be looking for in a years time by planting selected seeds and then going off to the next area, over time this led to crops that were more and more adapted as food stuff and this then enabled settled agrarianism. Places like Göbeklitepe are thought to be the ritual centers of nomadic cultures doing this sort of per-agricultural precession. I have read (no expert) that are similar sights in the southern united states where (now genocided) nomadic people used to come together and conduct major rituals which required significant communal investment and co-ordination. Civilization with no cities... who'd have thought?
Fluorescence 3y ago
Has the statue itself been dated? 12,000 yo is the estimated founding date of Göbekli Tepe not it's last use. Humans like to move things about go through many phases of inhabitation of a place. How is dating as a science faring in the replication crisis? It seems fraught with incentives for those involved. Discover something 2000 years old and no-one cares but 12,000 years old and you've got a TV career and a book deal.
- tomek_ycomb 3y ago
  The incentives are that the person who discovered the previously oldest <12,000 island that defined their archeological site as the coolest site, tends to fight. That plus 3rd party dating and other solutions. Because sometimes there is not a lot to go off of for dating, I've also seen people complaining that samples aren't always shared. So it's not perfect for sure, but I'm noting there are still incentives in that system
xbmcuser 3y ago
It has been my pet theory that human civilizations had advanced a lot more before a some kind of extinction event pushed humans back to 1. Maybe not as technologically advanced as the current civilization but advanced in its own way.
- maebert 3y ago
  It’s an entertaining idea, however unfortunately easily proven wrong. The most striking argument against it (or any “Silurian” theory) is that any form of “civilization” in the strictest sense needs permanent settlements that require permanent agriculture, and hence fertilized soil. We should hence be able to find nitrogen rich layers of soil or sediment where prehistoric civilizations resided, but that’s just not the case.
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    No one mentioned agriculture though, you’re attacking a straw man.
tralarpa 3y ago
> I think it’s supposed to be more like 6000 years ago There is also the Urfa man, dated 9000 BC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urfa_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urfa_Man
M4v3R 3y ago
> My understanding is that complex things like statues were not supposed to be possible 12,000 years ago. I think it’s supposed to be more like 6000 years ago I think your understanding was just incorrect. Here's a video [0] from Kurzgesagt that explains in a nutshell when the human civilisation started (spoiler: as far back as around 20,000 years ago, but definitely the case 12,000 years ago, though the boundary is very fuzzy). But also note that even before a proper civilisation started to form people already made art. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWu29PRCUvQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWu29PRCUvQ
blacklion 3y ago
It is very interesting, that you says about 6000 years ago. It is "calculated" (in the middle ages) age of The Great Flood. I've read some opinion, that modern European historians, even atheist ones, still "primed" by this number and it skews all our understanding of history and perception of archaeological finds. It is not some random number, but legacy of pre-Renaissance Biblical studies, haunting us to these modern times.
- bazoom42 3y ago
  What moderne European historians are you talking about? We know of cities 9000 years old.
  - blacklion 3y ago
    And we know about sculptures 24000 years old, but still it is seen as exceptions by many.
mcphage 3y ago
> My understanding is that complex things like statues were not supposed to be possible 12,000 years ago. Your understanding is not correct. > The fact that it has been carbon dated to 12,000 tears should means that we have to rewrite the theories on the start of human civilization. It does not. Göbekli Tepe has in general, but I don't think this specific find does.

softfalcon 3y ago

A common statement was brought up in my history classes: "humans of the past were often as resourceful, if not more resourceful than we are, they simply had less opportunities than we do today." If you put yourself in the place of your ancestors. Who you are, you could probably figure out a way to make a statue. It stands to reason that someone a bit smarter (or more motivated) than you or I could also figure it out without our modern day tools. Human ingenuity is astounding and I love the idea that past humanity was just us without iPhones.

beezlewax 3y ago

Do you need special tools to do this though? Or just one rock that's harder than the other one? That said I used to make "tools" out of sticks and rocks as a child playing outdoors. Why do we think people didn't have tools or the capacity to invent them 12000 years ago?

poulpy123 3y ago

I don't even understand what are you on about. The same kind of statue up.to the holding of the genital has been found in the same area in 1993 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urfa_Man https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urfa_Man Not even talking of the fact that 25000 years before people were making incredible art at the grotte Chauvet or that around the same time, a 30cm statue was carved in Germany representing an anthropomorphised Lion ans

asvitkine 3y ago

How does carbon dating work on a statue? Wouldn't it be dating the underlying material (i.e. the stone), which presumably predates the actual carving of the statue out of that material? Edit: I guess if it was buried, they date the organic material around it.

defrost 3y ago
There's very little, if any, carbon in stone. They dated the charcoal in layers settled about the statue: https://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-telegrams/2016/06/22/how-old-ist-it-dating-gobekli-tepe/ https://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-telegrams/2016/06/22/how-ol...
p-e-w 3y ago
> How does carbon dating work on a statue? It doesn't, and the stone itself is typically hundreds of millions or even billions of years old. However, many ancient artifacts are found buried in the ground, and it is often possible to carbon-date organic material in the soil surrounding the artifact, which produces an estimate for when it was buried. This is typically combined with historians' estimates for when the culture that presumably produced the artifact flourished, though uncertainties of several millennia remain in some cases.
- tephra 3y ago
  In some cases you can also use luminescence dating[0], which can tell you the last time a mineral was exposed to sunlight. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminescence_dating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminescence_dating

p-e-w 3y ago

> My understanding is that complex things like statues were not supposed to be possible 12,000 years ago. Huh? The Venus of Willendorf[1] is twice as old, and to my eye displays a higher degree of artistry than the statue shown in the article. Several such Venus figurines have been found in central Europe. Compared to the intricacy of the Venus' limestone carving, the statue from the article looks downright crude. The idea that it's "not supposed to be possible" to make something like that 12,000 years BP is ridiculous, and I can't imagine where you might have got that impression. Yes, the new statue is life-size, while the Venus is a figurine, but that doesn't necessarily make it any more difficult to manufacture (possibly easier, in fact). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf

arp242 3y ago
Venus of Willendorf is quite small, and not especially life-like, but similar large statues have been found in the area before, from around the same time (12kya ago). It's not even a unique find, and fits reasonably well(ish) in established chronology and progression (insofar that's possible for pre-history). Pretty much everything the previous poster said is wrong.
- 31carmichael 3y ago
  looks pretty lifelike to me; like most people I see at Walmart.
- runsWphotons 3y ago
  its not as lifelike as i hoped when i opened. not a Michelangelo.
  - Fluorescence 3y ago
    IMHO it's more interesting and a greater achievement than lifelike. To me it's an expression of fertile abundance that shows more intention, more imagination, more desire to communicate, more understanding of form and humanity than a straight depiction would.

unsubstantiated 3y ago

[dead]

prvc 3y ago

It's roughly as complex and realistic as other artifacts that have already been discovered on the site.

kcyb 3y ago

I think you might appreciate the book The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow [1]. They dive into the archaeological record and argue precisely that: that the common story of how civilization developed is very wrong, and that complex societies existed before the rise of agriculture, longer than is usually assumed. These findings at Göbekli Tepe appear very much in line with their theory. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything

bazoom42 3y ago

We know sculptures and cave-paintings much older than this, some made with great artistic skill, so clearly no archeologist would suggest art was “not possible” at this time. Still a significant find and very fascinating.

boffinAudio 3y ago
Not to mention, Narwala Gabarnmang pretty much blows every precept about the rise of humankind out of the water. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabarnmung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabarnmung The birthplace of masonry .. the worlds oldest, longest-running university .. its oldest (still functioning) commons ..
- defrost 3y ago
  It's a stand out site, for sure. There are more photos than just the single one in the wikipedia link here: https://landscapeaustralia.com/articles/nawarla-gabarnmang/ https://landscapeaustralia.com/articles/nawarla-gabarnmang/
- sgt101 3y ago
  >The birthplace of masonry .. the worlds oldest, longest-running university .. its oldest commons .. Pardon my ignorance - what separates this from other sites like Lascaux?
  - boffinAudio 3y ago
    Literally, 10's of thousands of years. Gabarnmang is older, and has been continuously occupied and in use, with only a break in occupation on the order of 50 years, last century, when it was "forgotten about" by the caretakers, in order to protect it ... only to be re-discovered recently (this century). It is a truly extraordinary site and I personally consider it the holiest of all human sites, ever. More holy than any other - in constant use as a school and commons, for 10's of thousands of years of human existence, containing an extraordinary collection of art, both ancient and contemporary ... probably one of the most important collections of human art, ever. If Australians had any decency they'd immediately sever ties with the British and make this site the seat of their new sovereign - its that powerful a record of human civilization, imho.

jl6 3y ago

> not supposed to be possible Our knowledge of such ancient peoples is so limited and subject to so many filters, that we should hesitate to think of some achievements as impossible. It’s just not that black & white. The general pattern of civilizational development could still be broadly correct, with this site just being a notable outlier.

TheGRS 3y ago

All those thoughts were going through my head as I was reading it, and I’m not like a history major or anything. Modern humans biologically have been around for a pretty long time so I’ve often wondered if civilizations existed where we simply haven’t found their artifacts, maybe because they didn’t produce or value them at the time.

moffkalast 3y ago

Clearly it's aliens who made them with laser tools /s

hnfong 3y ago

> My understanding is that complex things like statues were not supposed to be possible 12,000 years ago. I think it’s supposed to be more like 6000 years ago. Recently I keep wondering whether people have thought about this from a statistical perspective. Like, if I suddenly find a dead rat in my kitchen, what should I think about it? Should I consider that maybe I have had a pest problem for months or possibly years, or should I consider this as "we found evidence for rats existing in my house for at most one day"? It seems archeology takes the "evidence based" approach and refuses to calculate the expected probability of more stuff being discovered that's older/more impressive using the fact that we are discovering (mostly) random stuff buried in the ground. What are the chances that the stuff we dug up are not the pinnacle of human civilization back then, and merely an average object? If people 3000 years from now dug up a brick from a rural village, should they infer that we only know how to build brick houses and not skyscrapers? What are the chances of digging up remains of a skyscraper? I have so many burning questions lol

HPsquared 3y ago
Pretty big error bars on any estimations, with the low number of samples. But yeah, I wonder if anyone has tried to give a confidence interval for "tech level over time".
fecal_henge 3y ago
You could look at multiple points and try to generate a distribution of when this kind of activity happened. You might find that the number of points results in a pitifully poor confidence level in an expected probability though. Not enough rats and not enough kitchens.
bazoom42 3y ago
There is no way to calculate that, since current finds are not random digs. Archeologist search where they have reasons to think something of interest can be found.
stainablesteel 3y ago
this is a great analogy its why i love graham hancock and everything he talks about, its so exciting to think about the great achievements of all the human civilizations that have come about in the 200-300k years that humans have been around

sgt101 3y ago

Yup - if you are thinking about what the story was in about 1978... Since then there's been a big change from the idea cities were the only locus of culture and technology to a view that nomadic peoples were able to create significant ritual art, technical knowlege, and complex cultures. Of course the view from the 19th and early 20th C's was significantly informed by the need to justify all the genociding of nomadic peoples ("it's for their own good"). The idea I've heard recently is that agriculture grew out of nomadic people encouraging the food plants that they would be looking for in a years time by planting selected seeds and then going off to the next area, over time this led to crops that were more and more adapted as food stuff and this then enabled settled agrarianism. Places like Göbeklitepe are thought to be the ritual centers of nomadic cultures doing this sort of per-agricultural precession. I have read (no expert) that are similar sights in the southern united states where (now genocided) nomadic people used to come together and conduct major rituals which required significant communal investment and co-ordination. Civilization with no cities... who'd have thought?

Fluorescence 3y ago

Has the statue itself been dated? 12,000 yo is the estimated founding date of Göbekli Tepe not it's last use. Humans like to move things about go through many phases of inhabitation of a place. How is dating as a science faring in the replication crisis? It seems fraught with incentives for those involved. Discover something 2000 years old and no-one cares but 12,000 years old and you've got a TV career and a book deal.

tomek_ycomb 3y ago
The incentives are that the person who discovered the previously oldest <12,000 island that defined their archeological site as the coolest site, tends to fight. That plus 3rd party dating and other solutions. Because sometimes there is not a lot to go off of for dating, I've also seen people complaining that samples aren't always shared. So it's not perfect for sure, but I'm noting there are still incentives in that system

xbmcuser 3y ago

It has been my pet theory that human civilizations had advanced a lot more before a some kind of extinction event pushed humans back to 1. Maybe not as technologically advanced as the current civilization but advanced in its own way.

maebert 3y ago
It’s an entertaining idea, however unfortunately easily proven wrong. The most striking argument against it (or any “Silurian” theory) is that any form of “civilization” in the strictest sense needs permanent settlements that require permanent agriculture, and hence fertilized soil. We should hence be able to find nitrogen rich layers of soil or sediment where prehistoric civilizations resided, but that’s just not the case.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  No one mentioned agriculture though, you’re attacking a straw man.

tralarpa 3y ago

> I think it’s supposed to be more like 6000 years ago There is also the Urfa man, dated 9000 BC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urfa_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urfa_Man

M4v3R 3y ago

> My understanding is that complex things like statues were not supposed to be possible 12,000 years ago. I think it’s supposed to be more like 6000 years ago I think your understanding was just incorrect. Here's a video [0] from Kurzgesagt that explains in a nutshell when the human civilisation started (spoiler: as far back as around 20,000 years ago, but definitely the case 12,000 years ago, though the boundary is very fuzzy). But also note that even before a proper civilisation started to form people already made art. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWu29PRCUvQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWu29PRCUvQ

blacklion 3y ago

It is very interesting, that you says about 6000 years ago. It is "calculated" (in the middle ages) age of The Great Flood. I've read some opinion, that modern European historians, even atheist ones, still "primed" by this number and it skews all our understanding of history and perception of archaeological finds. It is not some random number, but legacy of pre-Renaissance Biblical studies, haunting us to these modern times.

bazoom42 3y ago
What moderne European historians are you talking about? We know of cities 9000 years old.
- blacklion 3y ago
  And we know about sculptures 24000 years old, but still it is seen as exceptions by many.

mcphage 3y ago

> My understanding is that complex things like statues were not supposed to be possible 12,000 years ago. Your understanding is not correct. > The fact that it has been carbon dated to 12,000 tears should means that we have to rewrite the theories on the start of human civilization. It does not. Göbekli Tepe has in general, but I don't think this specific find does.