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Bronze Age mega-settlement in Kazakhstan has advanced urban planning, metallurgy
- Danuser 11mo ago“AMA Kazakhstan" (Ask Me Anything) Hey this week I'm in Sillicon Valley, let's talk over Coffee or Chai" and watch tomiris movie before or NEO
- mitchbob 11mo agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20251119171014/https://archaeologymag.com/2025/11/bronze-age-mega-settlement-in-kazakhstan/ https://web.archive.org/web/20251119171014/https://archaeolo...
- noiv 11mo agoLooking at properly aligned buildings I realized school never prepared me into thinking city planner might have been a bronze age job. How come we call mobile phones progress?
- szundi 11mo ago[dead]
- altairprime 11mo agoMobile phones generate GAAP revenue for corporations beyond the initial sale; architecture and city planning do not.
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- einsteinx2 11mo agoI have no idea how this sentence: > Looking at properly aligned buildings I realized school never prepared me into thinking city planner might have been a bronze age job. Is related at all to this sentence: > How come we call mobile phones progress?
- cryptonector 11mo agoI think u/noiv might be saying that ancient cities were better than ours.
- bcraven 11mo agoIf humans were so advanced to have city planning at that point, how do we only have mobile phones by now?
- cortesoft 11mo agoBecause city planning doesn’t require the same technological advancements that a cell phone does? Human sophistication and intelligence is not the same a technological advancements.
- anon84873628 11mo agoThere is a reason we name eras after materials - the bronze age, iron age, etc. Currently we're living in the silicon age. Progress in fundamental materials science tends to unlock whole new technology paradigms. You can do city planning with sod and stone. Mobile phones, on the other hand, require a nearly incomprehensible level of materials innovation. It is everything from the battery to conductive touch screen glass to plastic casing to silicon microchip... Not to mention all the science of satellites and rockets and radio waves that make them useful... By the way, the show "Connections" by James Burke is brilliant. A must-watch for any tech curious nerd.
- AndrewKemendo 11mo agoYou have to remember this is rediscovering the past in ways that previous cultures only had mythology around. The fact that this paper is basically “Stone Age people aren’t less sophisticated” is a relatively new idea since levi strauss reinvented anthropology in the 1950s and 1960s Hindu, then Greek then confuscian theologian-philosophers laid the foundations for the idea that their group had left behind simply being “animals” and sought out to distinguish human form (in their specific form) from all other forms of life. Humans also approach things linearly and it fights intuition that regression is not just possible but the norm.
- LudwigNagasena 11mo agoAncient Greeks attributed Mycenaean remains to the “Age of Heroes”. They were amazed by the scale and engineering quality of the work and thought it was done by gods and mythical creatures such as Cyclopes. They didn’t approach progress linearly or mono-dimensionally. Heinrich Schliemann was probably the first to connect the myths with tangible proof through archeology in late 19th century. While Lévi-Strauss work was much later and more political and polemical rather than scientific.
- BirAdam 11mo agoYeah, the “Age of Heroes” was just Ancient Aliens for the Greeks: “we can’t do it, so it can’t be human work”
- AndrewKemendo 11mo agoExactly, it wasn’t some view to the past as the root of great culture. If you read the actual Polybius you’ll see that there was no ideas of evolution or that we’re in the same category as other living things
- zozbot234 11mo agoGlorious ancient people of Kazakhstan had internet over wires made of copper and tin, powered by steam energy from the puffs of llamas. Very nice!
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- monospacegames 11mo agoIs this the culture referred to as BMAC? I've recently heard that both them and the Indus Valley Civilization remain fairly unresearched, which was surprising to me.
- Ar-Curunir 11mo agoThe BMAC is pretty far from Kazhakastan. It’s likely that they traded with these folks though
- neom 11mo agoWow their art was fantastic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bactria%E2%80%93Margiana_Archaeological_Complex#Art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bactria%E2%80%93Margiana_Archa...
- jb1991 11mo agoThose are indeed some very nice photos, though it is clear that a couple of them were made by aliens.
- jamiek88 11mo agoThis modern day chauvinism needs to die. Ancient peoples were fully as intelligent as us. Maybe even smarter as there was no lead poisoning their brains!
- card_zero 11mo agoThey didn't know about equality, bacteria, electromagnetism, fallibilism, evolution ... so you must mean a kind of "fully intelligent" that includes extremely ignorant people with bad ideas.
- jamiek88 11mo agoHuh? Knowledge/education and intelligence aren’t equivalent. Is English your first language? Seems a very basic error to make otherwise.
- cpursley 11mo agoInteresting book on this topic: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1831667.The_Horse_the_Wheel_and_Language https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1831667.The_Horse_the_Wh...
- Telemakhos 11mo agoThis is the right book for a beginner on the bronze age, because it tells you the importance of tin and who was supplying it (and horses) to the large and well-known cities like Mesopotamia. There are a lot of comments today about, "wow, the ancients were more advanced than I thought," but this book will have you understand that steppe pastoralists were much more advanced than you thought.
- duttish 11mo agoWhat would be a good intermediate level book? It's okay if it's academic, doesn't have to be popular science.
- Telemakhos 11mo agoAnthony's own update is A Bronze Age Landscape in the Russian Steppes: The Samara Valley Project (2016).
- duttish 11mo agoThanks, I'll take a look at it.
- mkoubaa 11mo agoThe use of "has" in the title instead of "had" caused to imagine that this was about a modern community like the Amish
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- johnmnemonic 11mo ago[dead]
- Herod55 11mo agoDo you think it’s because some blocking my requests
- adidoit 11mo agoThis is fantastic. I'm reminded of the Samo Burja thesis that civilization is actually a lot older when we think and ancient civilizations including the Bronze Age were much more advanced than we think. With better imaging, tooling, and archaeological funding, I'm sure we'll find much more evidence like this So many countries bronze and ancient ages are underexplored
- SilverElfin 11mo ago> ancient civilizations including the Bronze Age were much more advanced than we think. I think part of the reason people tend to underestimate ancient civilizations is because there is only so much preserved, especially because so much of their culture and knowledge was passed on orally, rather than documented in writings. Even if we come up with more archaeological findings or new technology to analyze it, there’s a limit to how much we can know. But another culprit in this underestimation is supremacist thinking. For example, there is a tendency to elevate the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) above others. The older cultures and religions are often described with pejoratives like “pagan”. In many countries, the history that is “worth studying” is seen as only starting a couple thousand years ago. Another aspect is racial supremacist thinking - I think this is still vast even though progress has been made on the issue of race. For example, textbooks and classes tend to not spend much time acknowledging the mathematical and scientific discoveries of the ancient world. I hope it improves but I also think there are serious social/tribal problems today that will prevent people from exploring all this with genuine curiosity.
- lmf4lol 11mo agoI see the same thinking in philosophy. We know a lot about the great thinkers of the West, from Plato to Aristoteles, to Jesus, to Thomas van Acquin, to Descartes, to Kant, to Hegel, to Nietsche, to Heidegger, to Foucoult, and so on... Its one western-european based lineage. And many of the western philosophers were supremacists indeed. They saw western philosophy as the pinaccle of human thought. The most advanced way of reasoning and understanding . This mindset obviously got them trapped. But there is much to learn from other philosophies. China is the worlds oldest continuous civilization. Surely there were some great thinkers besides Konfuzius. Same with India. I attended last week a lecture about the Upanishads. And so much of the wisdom in there can be mapped, more or less specifically, to wisdom from Western philosophy. There is an interesting field of study emerging: Comparative Philosophy. ith the aim to bring it all together. (See for instance, https://studiegids.universiteitleiden.nl/courses/133662/comparative-philosophy https://studiegids.universiteitleiden.nl/courses/133662/comp...).
- Herod55 11mo agoThe good things we are rewriting system
- Herod55 11mo agoOr making it better
- johnmnemonic 11mo agoNobody got server yet, server is safe
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- Danuser 11mo ago“AMA Kazakhstan" (Ask Me Anything) Hey this week I'm in Sillicon Valley, let's talk over Coffee or Chai" and watch tomiris movie
- Danuser 11mo ago[flagged]
- cpursley 11mo agoFor a book... recommendation?
- tomhow 11mo agoWhat the hell was this for? You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to, but especially not a helpful book suggestion. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46089518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46089518 and marked it off topic.
- Danuser 11mo agoBronze Age бабушка будет пиздить, точнее по пинок в зад
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- Danuser 11mo agoBronze Age don’t worry бабушка will fix you