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I got pretty into this alt archaeology stuff and eventually had to move away from it. I totally agree that the tepes challenge our timeline of when humans made

I got pretty into this alt archaeology stuff and eventually had to move away from it. I totally agree that the tepes challenge our timeline of when humans made cities and whatnot, but so much of their arguments is the perfect fit of stones or how flat stones are and saying it _must_ be done by modern tools. I think they have left out how much you can get done from a construction standpoint when you have forced labor or no labor rules like we have had for some time now all over the world and especially in the West. When I was first in Delhi and went to the Red Fort, I was shocked when they said they built the whole thing 100s of years ago in 9 years. Think about how long it would take us to build something like this now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Fort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Fort So, I really want the ancient atlantis civ in the Sahara to be true, but the guy's I've seen promoting this are too removed from the scientific method to really be taken seriously. This guy does some good debunking of a lot of the Netflix/Youtube Alt Archaeology people -- https://www.youtube.com/@miniminuteman773 https://www.youtube.com/@miniminuteman773

ch4s3 1y ago
> challenge our timeline of when humans made cities Do they? We know non-sedentary people in the Americas sometimes built large mounds and extensive fish works.
- pwillia7 1y ago
  I think it pushed back when humans started building large structures together a few 1000 years. Oddly, there is no evidence of agriculture at Gobekli Tepe https://www.reddit.com/r/Archaeology/comments/kxquwx/is_gobleki_tepe_the_oldest_known_archaeological/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Archaeology/comments/kxquwx/is_gobl...
  - hinkley 1y ago
    If it turns out to be earlier than we thought then the climate may have been different. These sites could be the swan song of a civilization in decay, or a group that had an amicable diaspora and used these places for social purposes. I imagine a culture that realized the land couldn’t support them in concentrations, picked a spot to meet every spring equinox to party and maybe make romantic matches and then dissolved back into the surrounding countryside. Maybe this was their Burning Man. Essentially someone had to figure out the civilized part of civilization and the density part of civilization. It’s a chicken and egg problem, and who is to say they did at the same time? As GP mentioned, there were somewhat similar arrangements in North America not so long after this time period.
ahmeneeroe-v2 1y ago
Not defending alt-archaeology, but there is a major difference between precision of construction and volume of construction.
acuozzo 1y ago
> I got pretty into this alt archaeology stuff Links?
- pwillia7 1y ago
  This guy has a whole netflix show if you're so inclined https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMHiLvirCb0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMHiLvirCb0
  - hinkley 1y ago
    I only watched a little bit of his stuff before I realized people thought he is a kook. But in small doses some of this stuff can sound like sense. The one that got me was a supposed foundation legend from Sumer that a handful of strangers came and taught them civilization. The idea of a remnant people floating down a river to escape some sort of societal collapse and then being adopted into a new tribe for their usefulness has a certain something as a hypothesis goes. It’s the “strangers” part that’s a bit suspect since how would you not meet neighbors like that. Unless the river was the end of their journey and not the start.
    - forgingahead 1y ago
      > before I realized people thought he is a kook But what is your own opinion?
      - hinkley 1y ago
        I didn’t listen long enough to get to his really fringe stuff.
        forgingahead 1y ago
        But why would you call it fringe then, if you didn't hear it yourself?
    - AlotOfReading 1y ago
card_zero 1y ago
The Crystal Palace was built and designed in 11 months, 1850-1851. I'm not sure what the key factors making this possible were, but I suspect low wages and complete disregard for worker safety figured.
- itopaloglu83 1y ago
  Yes, some of it is due to lack of safety etc. must I must say the majority of it is the complete lack of competence in modern times because it’s now being built by normal folks. I assume it was a limited number of people how knew how to make things and they kept roaming around setting new sites etc. Similar to bridge engineers etc. most of what they make just disappears in the background but they keep building things that makes our modern life possible.
  - clickety_clack 1y ago
    It’s not lack of competence. There is an unbelievable weight of regulation in construction now. It would probably take 2 years of planning consultation just to get the idea approved. Then, each facet of the design would have to be coordinated and iterated between several different specialist teams and contractors, with the tree of contractors increasing as each layer of design takes shape. At the end, you also have the labor laws that people are talking about here. If we weren’t too worried about things falling down and killing people, or about damaging peoples conception of the vibes in a city, we could have the kinds of developer/architect/engineer/foreman outfits that used to build this kind of thing.
    - rsynnott 1y ago
      I mean, it flat-out wouldn't be approved today, and for good reason. Bear in mind that it _burned down_. And, like, see the See Also section on its Wikipedia page; there were a bunch of similar structures, which mostly also burned down. It just wasn't a good design.
    - itopaloglu83 1y ago
      Yeah, definitely regulations affected the effectiveness, but also good things happened as well, we have a lot more power tools to use and we're not likely to lose our head just because we didn't deliver a job on time. We have a lot more infrastructure around now, so much that we don't even see the wonders that tame the nature and make it comfortable for us.
clickety_clack 1y ago
I also feel that people then were about as smart as we are now, so they could have solved problems in inventive ways they way we do now. Just because they didn’t have an electric stone flattener, it doesn’t mean that stones cannot be made flat in a fairly repeatable way.
- leptons 1y ago
  And there were no video games, which I think is a huge source of brain-drain these days. I read somewhere once that people played more solitaire on Windows 95 per year than it took in man-hours to send people to the moon (something like that, I don't remember the original statistic). And that's just a shitty game on an old OS.
  - JrProgrammer 1y ago
    To me, blaming an activity which requires active participation for “brain-drain” is such a weird and quite dated thing. Take social media for example, these require no active participation other than moving your thumb up and down, and is in my opinion the real brain rot these days. People will always find a way to get their dopamine, be it video games, reading, watching stuff, etc. Don’t pick out a single thing and make it the boogey man.
    - leptons 1y ago
      Sure there are plenty of other frivolous and pointless pursuits that people engage in, like yourself making pointless comments on HN.
  - Cthulhu_ 1y ago
    You're attacking video games and the like a bit, but the core of your argument is sound I think - there's 24 hours in a day, a percentage will be spent on taking care of your needs, what percentage that is depends on various factors but most anthropologists agree that that number was much lower in ancient civilizations. People get bored and when they get bored they get creative. Polishing a rock would be one of the things they could end up doing.
itsnowandnever 1y ago
just to nitpick: the Tepe sites definitely did not have forced labor. they had no social hierarchy at all. hunter-gatherers were fairly egalitarian. definitely sedentary neolithic people had forced labor. all the Sumerian legal texts that were some of the first writings ever included legal definitions of slaves, for example. but the pre-neolithic Anatolian people were nomadic animistic people with no social hierarchy.
- pwillia7 1y ago
  Agree and good point -- do we know how long the Tepes took to build?
  - itsnowandnever 1y ago
    as far as I'm aware, we have no idea other than that they didn't do much at one time. we can only deduce little modifications were done semi-regularly by the ancient pre-historic version of open source contributors. they had to lift 10+ ton limestone blocks and move them into place. but there's ample evidence of them trying to lift those blocks out of the quarry and failing, thus leaving behind broken would-be pillars of limestone for 12,000 years. the best assumption is just that they had tons of wild cereals and gazelle to munch on so these people were able to work on this persistently over many generations. they had no social hierarchy or need for labor at all, so they had all the free time in the world to use stone age tools to build structures that rivaled the greeks 9,000 years later
    - pwillia7 1y ago
      Yeah I love the idea of ancient peoples living in abundance, doing animism, showing up to party at the giant ancient structure every season. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QfsSfhaDVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QfsSfhaDVY
- dimal 1y ago
  How are we so certain that they had no social hierarchy at all? I thought that that was the main theory but that very little is certain at this point.
IAmBroom 1y ago
> I think they have left out how much you can get done from a construction standpoint when you have forced labor It's time to kill the "slaves built the pyramids" myth. "Aliens built the pyramids" has exactly the same amount of evidence. Unless you're referring to wage-slaves, who definitely were the middle-management of the crews. We've found graves of Jewish construction bosses.

ch4s3 1y ago

> challenge our timeline of when humans made cities Do they? We know non-sedentary people in the Americas sometimes built large mounds and extensive fish works.

pwillia7 1y ago
I think it pushed back when humans started building large structures together a few 1000 years. Oddly, there is no evidence of agriculture at Gobekli Tepe https://www.reddit.com/r/Archaeology/comments/kxquwx/is_gobleki_tepe_the_oldest_known_archaeological/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Archaeology/comments/kxquwx/is_gobl...
- hinkley 1y ago
  If it turns out to be earlier than we thought then the climate may have been different. These sites could be the swan song of a civilization in decay, or a group that had an amicable diaspora and used these places for social purposes. I imagine a culture that realized the land couldn’t support them in concentrations, picked a spot to meet every spring equinox to party and maybe make romantic matches and then dissolved back into the surrounding countryside. Maybe this was their Burning Man. Essentially someone had to figure out the civilized part of civilization and the density part of civilization. It’s a chicken and egg problem, and who is to say they did at the same time? As GP mentioned, there were somewhat similar arrangements in North America not so long after this time period.

ahmeneeroe-v2 1y ago

Not defending alt-archaeology, but there is a major difference between precision of construction and volume of construction.

acuozzo 1y ago

> I got pretty into this alt archaeology stuff Links?

pwillia7 1y ago
This guy has a whole netflix show if you're so inclined https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMHiLvirCb0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMHiLvirCb0
- hinkley 1y ago
  I only watched a little bit of his stuff before I realized people thought he is a kook. But in small doses some of this stuff can sound like sense. The one that got me was a supposed foundation legend from Sumer that a handful of strangers came and taught them civilization. The idea of a remnant people floating down a river to escape some sort of societal collapse and then being adopted into a new tribe for their usefulness has a certain something as a hypothesis goes. It’s the “strangers” part that’s a bit suspect since how would you not meet neighbors like that. Unless the river was the end of their journey and not the start.
  - forgingahead 1y ago
    > before I realized people thought he is a kook But what is your own opinion?
    - hinkley 1y ago
      I didn’t listen long enough to get to his really fringe stuff.
      - forgingahead 1y ago
        But why would you call it fringe then, if you didn't hear it yourself?
  - AlotOfReading 1y ago

card_zero 1y ago

The Crystal Palace was built and designed in 11 months, 1850-1851. I'm not sure what the key factors making this possible were, but I suspect low wages and complete disregard for worker safety figured.

itopaloglu83 1y ago
Yes, some of it is due to lack of safety etc. must I must say the majority of it is the complete lack of competence in modern times because it’s now being built by normal folks. I assume it was a limited number of people how knew how to make things and they kept roaming around setting new sites etc. Similar to bridge engineers etc. most of what they make just disappears in the background but they keep building things that makes our modern life possible.
- clickety_clack 1y ago
  It’s not lack of competence. There is an unbelievable weight of regulation in construction now. It would probably take 2 years of planning consultation just to get the idea approved. Then, each facet of the design would have to be coordinated and iterated between several different specialist teams and contractors, with the tree of contractors increasing as each layer of design takes shape. At the end, you also have the labor laws that people are talking about here. If we weren’t too worried about things falling down and killing people, or about damaging peoples conception of the vibes in a city, we could have the kinds of developer/architect/engineer/foreman outfits that used to build this kind of thing.
  - rsynnott 1y ago
    I mean, it flat-out wouldn't be approved today, and for good reason. Bear in mind that it _burned down_. And, like, see the See Also section on its Wikipedia page; there were a bunch of similar structures, which mostly also burned down. It just wasn't a good design.
  - itopaloglu83 1y ago
    Yeah, definitely regulations affected the effectiveness, but also good things happened as well, we have a lot more power tools to use and we're not likely to lose our head just because we didn't deliver a job on time. We have a lot more infrastructure around now, so much that we don't even see the wonders that tame the nature and make it comfortable for us.

clickety_clack 1y ago

I also feel that people then were about as smart as we are now, so they could have solved problems in inventive ways they way we do now. Just because they didn’t have an electric stone flattener, it doesn’t mean that stones cannot be made flat in a fairly repeatable way.

leptons 1y ago
And there were no video games, which I think is a huge source of brain-drain these days. I read somewhere once that people played more solitaire on Windows 95 per year than it took in man-hours to send people to the moon (something like that, I don't remember the original statistic). And that's just a shitty game on an old OS.
- JrProgrammer 1y ago
  To me, blaming an activity which requires active participation for “brain-drain” is such a weird and quite dated thing. Take social media for example, these require no active participation other than moving your thumb up and down, and is in my opinion the real brain rot these days. People will always find a way to get their dopamine, be it video games, reading, watching stuff, etc. Don’t pick out a single thing and make it the boogey man.
  - leptons 1y ago
    Sure there are plenty of other frivolous and pointless pursuits that people engage in, like yourself making pointless comments on HN.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  You're attacking video games and the like a bit, but the core of your argument is sound I think - there's 24 hours in a day, a percentage will be spent on taking care of your needs, what percentage that is depends on various factors but most anthropologists agree that that number was much lower in ancient civilizations. People get bored and when they get bored they get creative. Polishing a rock would be one of the things they could end up doing.

itsnowandnever 1y ago

just to nitpick: the Tepe sites definitely did not have forced labor. they had no social hierarchy at all. hunter-gatherers were fairly egalitarian. definitely sedentary neolithic people had forced labor. all the Sumerian legal texts that were some of the first writings ever included legal definitions of slaves, for example. but the pre-neolithic Anatolian people were nomadic animistic people with no social hierarchy.

pwillia7 1y ago
Agree and good point -- do we know how long the Tepes took to build?
- itsnowandnever 1y ago
  as far as I'm aware, we have no idea other than that they didn't do much at one time. we can only deduce little modifications were done semi-regularly by the ancient pre-historic version of open source contributors. they had to lift 10+ ton limestone blocks and move them into place. but there's ample evidence of them trying to lift those blocks out of the quarry and failing, thus leaving behind broken would-be pillars of limestone for 12,000 years. the best assumption is just that they had tons of wild cereals and gazelle to munch on so these people were able to work on this persistently over many generations. they had no social hierarchy or need for labor at all, so they had all the free time in the world to use stone age tools to build structures that rivaled the greeks 9,000 years later
  - pwillia7 1y ago
    Yeah I love the idea of ancient peoples living in abundance, doing animism, showing up to party at the giant ancient structure every season. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QfsSfhaDVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QfsSfhaDVY
dimal 1y ago
How are we so certain that they had no social hierarchy at all? I thought that that was the main theory but that very little is certain at this point.

IAmBroom 1y ago

> I think they have left out how much you can get done from a construction standpoint when you have forced labor It's time to kill the "slaves built the pyramids" myth. "Aliens built the pyramids" has exactly the same amount of evidence. Unless you're referring to wage-slaves, who definitely were the middle-management of the crews. We've found graves of Jewish construction bosses.