Comment by fhjdjksksksks6 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fhjdjksksksks6 | Hacker News Reader

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You clearly lack background knowledge about contemporary archaeological understanding of the palaeolithic and neolithic periods in southwest asia and anatolia.

First off, referring to 'civilizations' as basic entities or units of analysis is just nonsense. Sure, there has been some talk about 'social complexity' up to the mid-90s, but (a) that discourse is largely outdated since it tends to be based on justifying prior presumptions regarding the nature and boundaries of societies that were already assumed to be 'civilizations' without adequate reason, (b) that perspective is being replaced by more bottom-up approaches that model various kinds of behaviours and interactions, including possibilities and limits thereof, and as guided by the archaeological evidence, and (c) even when we do talk about so-called 'civilizations', that is typically limited to a period starting around 4000 BCE. You are clearly ignoring (what I consider to be) the most exciting topic of archaeological research, the pre-pottery neolithic. As bildung points out, coherent models about this period have been formulated by drawing on evidence accumulated from dozens of PPN sites.

EDIT: Beyond the Ubaid is a fantastic edited volume that touches on this shift, with papers by leading archaeologists: https://oi.uchicago.edu/research/publications/saoc/saoc-63-b...

EDIT2: See also: https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2014.44 and https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10963-007-9008-1

Yes, it is true that Gobekli Tepe has no habitation associated with it, but we do not consider this an unresolved puzzle. Gobleki Tepe is commonly accepted as a great example of the ingenuity of nomadic peoples. Why do you assume that it would be necessary for its builders to have been sedentary?

Please omit swipes like "You clearly lack background knowledge" and "Umm what?" from HN comments. They just add poison to the community.

If you know more, that's wonderful, but please share what you know in the spirit of helping everybody learn, not putting other people down.

Getting frustrated like at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24473147 and going into a flamewar style is definitely not going to help. Of course it's frustrating to encounter wrong comments on the internet, but the fix is to respectfully provide correct information and explain the problems with false claims.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> the fix is to respectfully provide correct information and explain the problems with false claims.

This is precisely what I did in the post you are referring to.

> If you know more, that's wonderful, but please share what you know in the spirit of helping everybody learn, not putting other people down.

I wasn't aware that these discussions are meant to be records for collective learning. I have been framing my replies as responses to particular positions, held and presented by particular people. In almost all situations I target the ideas presented and not the individuals, the exception being the comment you highlighted above. I definitely should have been more respectful in that instance. But I disagree with the notion that I've been trolling or making pointless personal attacks (even in that one case, I expanded upon my reasoning in lots of detail).

For it to count as respectfully providing correct info, you have to omit the personal swipes. Fortunately that's not hard, though it sometimes requires an editing pass or two (that's how I do it).

I do not assume it would be necessary for its builders to have been sedentary.

Neolithic behaviors differing from the modern familiars are all interesting, but when we use the word "civilization", we are definitively talking about cities. Associating onset of civilization with 3-4000 BCE is a conclusion from present evidence, not a definition, and would need to be changed in the face of new evidence of cities.

Hints at civilization pre-4000 BCE typified by GT are as interesting as other neolithic phenomena. To be clear: while it is possible, in principle, that GT builders invented all their stonework methods de novo, it is clearly much more likely that they drew on a long history of gradually more sophisticated stonework not yet unearthed, possibly elsewhere. What we know about sea level changes allows that much of such evidence may now be under water, although it could also be found in the Tepes yet to be excavated.

We have absolutely no reason to believe that areas now deluged were unoccupied, or that the people who lived in those places chose to stay there and drown. They would have brought their culture uphill with them.

The entire Persian Gulf was recently dry land. Australians retain oral records of the social upheavals when people who lived in the Sahul region between present Australia and New Guinea were obliged to move uphill, to where other people already lived. Similar upheavals must have occurred on the present Indonesian islands and nearby peninsulas, absorbing influx from the hundreds of thousands of square miles of the the now deluged Sundaland.

People 6000 years ago, or 11,000 years ago, were no more clever than 20,000 years ago. What was evidently done 6000 years ago could have been done longer ago, given only population density and surplus food production. Undiscovered civilizations are certainly possible: the huge Amazon basin civilization was entirely unsuspected only decades ago.

> when we use the word "civilization", we are definitively talking about cities. Associating onset of civilization with 3-4000 BCE is a conclusion from present evidence, not a definition, and would need to be changed in the face of new evidence of cities.

The term 'civilization' is not really used at all among archaeologists, to be frank. You are correct in recognizing the link between the notion of civilization and the notion of cities, since both of these terms are ambiguous, co-dependent and ultimately useless. What evidence is needed to call something a city? Many settlements have been excavated dating to times before 4000 BCE which include features that would be classically referred to as characteristics of cities. If you were to follow the evidence, as you claim to do, the distinction between cities and settlements and between civilizations and whatever is associated with settlements (which is ambiguous as well!!) becomes meaningless. Only cranks really lean on this distinction as having any sort of significant meaning, which tends to be upholding a truly arbitrary notion of what constitutes a civilization (i.e. circular logic, with conclusions leading the parameters of reasoning).

> while it is possible, in principle, that GT builders invented all their stonework methods de novo, it is clearly much more likely that they drew on a long history of gradually more sophisticated stonework not yet unearthed, possibly elsewhere. What we know about sea level changes allows that much of such evidence may now be under water, although it could also be found in the Tepes yet to be excavated.

Where is your evidence for this wild claim? How is this clearly much more likely, when there is literally nothing but speculation to base this on?

> the rest

So much cherry picking and mental gymnastics going on here, I truly don't know where to start.

Start with the facts.

We have extensive evidence of incremental development of technology, throughout all of history and pre-history. Thus, suggesting that any sophisticated development, such as is seen in the stonework at GT, would follow less sophisticated work is no kind of "wild claim". The term smacks of name-calling and bad faith, so I leave you there.

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