5 ms·

I thought the Gobekli Tepi age thing was a fringe theory? Not aliens style inanity, but not widely believed in the archaeological mainstream. So maybe a bit ear

• klabb3 3y ago
  11500 years ago according to Wikipedia. I don’t think that’s disputed. There’s a lot still underground and also more sites in the area. “Turns out the hunter gatherers where more advanced than we thought”
  • mcv 3y ago
    Hunter gatherers were still humans. Theoretically capable of everything we're capable of. The idea that they would get together to build something big is not impossibly far-fetched, but the fact that it was abandoned shows that their society wasn't able to maintain it in the long term. That requires more complex social structures.
    • Maken 3y ago
      Göbekli Tepe was not abandoned but purposely buried. It is composed of several successive structures, built and then buried over the span more than a thousand years. That's a considerable long term commitment.
    • fiedzia 3y ago
      > the fact that it was abandoned shows that their society wasn't able to maintain it in the long term A flood, drought, climate change, war or better jobs elsewhere were common reasons for abandoning locations. We have many abandoned projects today, that doesn't have to say anything about social structures.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • morsch 3y ago
    Yep, I confused it with Gunung Padang, which recently was claimed to be 25000 years old, but those claims are disputed.
  • Tor3 3y ago
    It's only people like Graham Hancock who thinks that hunter gatherers are primitive and unable to do anything organized. The reality is that they were perfectly capable, and they even have quite a bit more time on their hands than an agricultural society (which until very recently had to work day and night to survive - wait, it's still like that, for modern farmers in my own country. No time for holidays, ever). The only thing hunter gatherers were lacking compared to agricultural societies was a possible difference in manpower, though for the latter all that manpower was occupied with farming. I think Graham Hancock & co are confusing hunter-gatherers with nomads always on the move, with nothing more than they could carry. But that's nomads, nobody claimed nomads built Göbekli Tepe.
    • dr_dshiv 3y ago
      I thought the leading theory was that seasonally migrating nomads built Göbekli Tepe — because there is no housing.
      • Tor3 3y ago
        That was the original claim, these days it's not (from wikipedia: "Current excavators interpret Göbekli Tepe as a settlement, based on recent findings such as domestic structures and features, water supply installations, and Neolithic tools associated with domestic use." The referenced paper seems to be fully available online: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358411654_There_and_Back_Again_-_Towards_a_New_Understanding_of_Abandonment_Practices_at_the_Neolithic_Settlement_of_Gobekli_Tepe https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358411654_There_and...
• jltsiren 3y ago
  Göbekli Tepe is not that old. There are plenty of other sites of comparable age in the region, such as Jericho. The exceptional part is that the ancient structures are largely intact, because the site was abandoned rather than repeatedly destroyed and built over.