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To me, it looks like a festival ground, so I imagine people coming from all directions and multiple nomad tents etc. around it. What makes me wonder is that wh

To me, it looks like a festival ground, so I imagine people coming from all directions and multiple nomad tents etc. around it. What makes me wonder is that why did these hills survive, and why are we not finding similar things in north Africa and other civilization cradles. Maybe these were one off sites with limited use and were later just left alone, while anything in Egypt had continuous settlements so things just eroded over time, with the things like pyramids as exceptions.

alephnerd 1y ago
> why did these hills survive Because it's low density arid scrubland that is primarily inhabited by Kurdish and Turkish herders, and was a no-go zone during the PKK Insurgency.
dismalaf 1y ago
> north Africa Possibly covered by the Sahara, or if we're talking along the coast, underwater. Or covered by current settlements. > other civilization cradles. Because people still live there and built on top.
- Tuna-Fish 1y ago
  The interesting places to find new archaeological sites are places where we know there were lots of people nearby, and where for some reason human habitation ceased and the sites were preserved. I hold some hope for new methods of underwater archaeology to uncover sites on the southern coast of the Black Sea and in the Persian Gulf. The latter especially because it was vast, rich floodplain during the last glacial maximum, and the oldest known true cities sprouted into existence on it's northern shore pretty much instantly after it flooded. I like to think that the oldest city ever built lies submerged in mud and water somewhere in there, just waiting to be found. (Not that there would be necessarily much to find anymore, they probably didn't build out of rock.)
- engineer_22 1y ago
  As I understand it, Tepe is local word for tel. Climate in this region makes them easy to distinguish since not a lot of plant cover making it easier to identify potential sites? Fertile crescent floods. Nile floods. Unique geography and climate in Turcep key to this?
  - mrighele 1y ago
    "Tepe" is just a Turkish word for hill or mound. So "Göbekli Tepe" literally is "Hill with a belly", "Taş Tepeler" is "Stone hills" etc.
AlotOfReading 1y ago
We find similarly old structures across Eurasia, like the epigravettian mammoth bone huts. The late PPNA when KT/GT were seemingly built is when we find the first monumental, stone structures that we know of. It's entirely possible that ancient near east is where these kinds of things were first built. There's reasons I can go into why that's thought to be the case, but we can't rule out that there could be a streetlight effect happening. The ANE is where we expect to find this sort of early structure, and it's also one of the most heavily studied areas alongside North America and Europe. North Africa, particularly Tunisia where there's already a number of known epipaleolithic sites, is substantially less accessible for this kind of research. To directly answer your question though, the Tas Tepler sites survived because they were buried and the locations they're in are pretty bad places for people to live today. They're way up on hills around the urfa/harran plain where there's outcroppings of the stone used to build them, but also without water. People seemingly just carried water up the hills from cisterns farther down. The locations of those cisterns also suggest that there may be further sites we haven't found, because some of them don't correspond to anything we know of.
- lumost 1y ago
  To what extent is our understanding of this period limited by survivorship? Granite doesn't weather significantly, so we see lots of metalithic stone structures with ambiguous dating. The near east had significant changes in inland climates so we find ancient cities that were not built over there. Soft rock/mud Brick structures can survive in dry climates - so we see evidence of the oldest civilizations in deserts. Colonial New England barely exists outside of active preservation attempts.
  - AlotOfReading 1y ago
    Short answer: it's hard to fully say, but most people believe that the holocene is a lower bound on this sort of thing. I'll try to explain, but keep in mind that I'm trying to massively simplify a huge field of open questions. The fundamental assumption underlying most archaeology is that changes in material culture broadly reflect people reacting to the world around them in intelligent ways. Most archaeologists therefore believe that Pleistocene people didn't build permanent structures out of stone because nomadic or seminomadic lifestyles were more optimal for the chaotic pleistocene environments happening globally. There's a few people who disagree with the universality of this idea, most famously the authors of Dawn of Everything who argue for a more diverse family of lifeways in early humans, but that's just quibbling about the edges of this overall narrative rather than rewriting it. And we'd expect to have more evidence than we do if the holocene boundary wasn't the effective start date for this kind of structure. Cave environments are much more stable, and it's where much of our evidence comes from. Gobekli Tepe (GT) and other Tas Tepler sites are made with local limestone, an extremely erosion-prone rock. We have sites covered by existing urban cities like Jericho, the earliest layers of which date from around the same time as GT. We also have older structures, like the epigravittean mammoth huts, and a fairly good idea of the forager->farmer transition in the near east across the natufian culture. GT is actually thought to be part of that transition. But yes, a lot of organic stuff from the pleistocene is gone. Organics were probably the dominant form of material used, so that leaves a huge gap we're still struggling with. Not really sure where I'm going with this, so I guess I'll stop here?
itsnowandnever 1y ago
it was definitely a festival ground for (relatively) nearby complex semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers to meet up occasionally. I had a professor describe it as a pre-historic UN where these clans would meet up and feast but I think festival ground is an even better analogy
MomsAVoxell 1y ago
>What makes me wonder is that why did these hills survive, and why are we not finding similar things in north Africa and other civilization cradles. In my honest, personally informed opinion, there is much to be said for ignorance of the subject - and I don't mean you personally, just generally - at large - human cultures have a very intractable level of mystery, among our languages and human history, as a whole. In anticipation of this fact, I personally invest myself in certain mysteries. The Tepe civilisation is one - but the things to be learned at Narwala Gabarnmang, are .. personally, I admit .. astonishing. We do in fact have tens of thousands of years of human history to comprehend. The issue is, we rapidly discard a lot of it in the rush to preserve just a bit of it.
goobatrooba 1y ago
While humans and the first basis of culture evolved in Africa, many of the key cultural/technological innovations happened outside Africa, notably the invention of agriculture and pastoralism which happened 3-6 times independently (modern Turkey, China (possibly twice) and South America, possibly in addition also in Iran and India). So if you look at Africa it stayed for the longest times with hunter & gatherer cultures until neolithic settlers came back into Africa from modern Turkey. Moreover Africa in large parts is either moist or desert/savannah, both of which do not help preservation. And there are simply much fewer archaeologists going around Africa.

alephnerd 1y ago

> why did these hills survive Because it's low density arid scrubland that is primarily inhabited by Kurdish and Turkish herders, and was a no-go zone during the PKK Insurgency.

dismalaf 1y ago

> north Africa Possibly covered by the Sahara, or if we're talking along the coast, underwater. Or covered by current settlements. > other civilization cradles. Because people still live there and built on top.

Tuna-Fish 1y ago
The interesting places to find new archaeological sites are places where we know there were lots of people nearby, and where for some reason human habitation ceased and the sites were preserved. I hold some hope for new methods of underwater archaeology to uncover sites on the southern coast of the Black Sea and in the Persian Gulf. The latter especially because it was vast, rich floodplain during the last glacial maximum, and the oldest known true cities sprouted into existence on it's northern shore pretty much instantly after it flooded. I like to think that the oldest city ever built lies submerged in mud and water somewhere in there, just waiting to be found. (Not that there would be necessarily much to find anymore, they probably didn't build out of rock.)
engineer_22 1y ago
As I understand it, Tepe is local word for tel. Climate in this region makes them easy to distinguish since not a lot of plant cover making it easier to identify potential sites? Fertile crescent floods. Nile floods. Unique geography and climate in Turcep key to this?
- mrighele 1y ago
  "Tepe" is just a Turkish word for hill or mound. So "Göbekli Tepe" literally is "Hill with a belly", "Taş Tepeler" is "Stone hills" etc.

AlotOfReading 1y ago

We find similarly old structures across Eurasia, like the epigravettian mammoth bone huts. The late PPNA when KT/GT were seemingly built is when we find the first monumental, stone structures that we know of. It's entirely possible that ancient near east is where these kinds of things were first built. There's reasons I can go into why that's thought to be the case, but we can't rule out that there could be a streetlight effect happening. The ANE is where we expect to find this sort of early structure, and it's also one of the most heavily studied areas alongside North America and Europe. North Africa, particularly Tunisia where there's already a number of known epipaleolithic sites, is substantially less accessible for this kind of research. To directly answer your question though, the Tas Tepler sites survived because they were buried and the locations they're in are pretty bad places for people to live today. They're way up on hills around the urfa/harran plain where there's outcroppings of the stone used to build them, but also without water. People seemingly just carried water up the hills from cisterns farther down. The locations of those cisterns also suggest that there may be further sites we haven't found, because some of them don't correspond to anything we know of.

lumost 1y ago
To what extent is our understanding of this period limited by survivorship? Granite doesn't weather significantly, so we see lots of metalithic stone structures with ambiguous dating. The near east had significant changes in inland climates so we find ancient cities that were not built over there. Soft rock/mud Brick structures can survive in dry climates - so we see evidence of the oldest civilizations in deserts. Colonial New England barely exists outside of active preservation attempts.
- AlotOfReading 1y ago
  Short answer: it's hard to fully say, but most people believe that the holocene is a lower bound on this sort of thing. I'll try to explain, but keep in mind that I'm trying to massively simplify a huge field of open questions. The fundamental assumption underlying most archaeology is that changes in material culture broadly reflect people reacting to the world around them in intelligent ways. Most archaeologists therefore believe that Pleistocene people didn't build permanent structures out of stone because nomadic or seminomadic lifestyles were more optimal for the chaotic pleistocene environments happening globally. There's a few people who disagree with the universality of this idea, most famously the authors of Dawn of Everything who argue for a more diverse family of lifeways in early humans, but that's just quibbling about the edges of this overall narrative rather than rewriting it. And we'd expect to have more evidence than we do if the holocene boundary wasn't the effective start date for this kind of structure. Cave environments are much more stable, and it's where much of our evidence comes from. Gobekli Tepe (GT) and other Tas Tepler sites are made with local limestone, an extremely erosion-prone rock. We have sites covered by existing urban cities like Jericho, the earliest layers of which date from around the same time as GT. We also have older structures, like the epigravittean mammoth huts, and a fairly good idea of the forager->farmer transition in the near east across the natufian culture. GT is actually thought to be part of that transition. But yes, a lot of organic stuff from the pleistocene is gone. Organics were probably the dominant form of material used, so that leaves a huge gap we're still struggling with. Not really sure where I'm going with this, so I guess I'll stop here?

itsnowandnever 1y ago

it was definitely a festival ground for (relatively) nearby complex semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers to meet up occasionally. I had a professor describe it as a pre-historic UN where these clans would meet up and feast but I think festival ground is an even better analogy

MomsAVoxell 1y ago

>What makes me wonder is that why did these hills survive, and why are we not finding similar things in north Africa and other civilization cradles. In my honest, personally informed opinion, there is much to be said for ignorance of the subject - and I don't mean you personally, just generally - at large - human cultures have a very intractable level of mystery, among our languages and human history, as a whole. In anticipation of this fact, I personally invest myself in certain mysteries. The Tepe civilisation is one - but the things to be learned at Narwala Gabarnmang, are .. personally, I admit .. astonishing. We do in fact have tens of thousands of years of human history to comprehend. The issue is, we rapidly discard a lot of it in the rush to preserve just a bit of it.

goobatrooba 1y ago

While humans and the first basis of culture evolved in Africa, many of the key cultural/technological innovations happened outside Africa, notably the invention of agriculture and pastoralism which happened 3-6 times independently (modern Turkey, China (possibly twice) and South America, possibly in addition also in Iran and India). So if you look at Africa it stayed for the longest times with hunter & gatherer cultures until neolithic settlers came back into Africa from modern Turkey. Moreover Africa in large parts is either moist or desert/savannah, both of which do not help preservation. And there are simply much fewer archaeologists going around Africa.