Civilization Is Older Than We Thought | Hacker News Reader

Civilization Is Older Than We Thought

palladiummag.com

153 pointsthrowkeep79 comments

I have been fascinated with Göbekli Tepe since I first heard of it. I really do think we need to rethink our idea of civilization and that it likely stretches back (as loose groups) tens of thousands of years. However, the common definition of civilization as it stands does not include sites like these. Göbekli Tepe Is thought by archaeologists to be a a pre-Neolithic or early Neolithic and that it is more of a site where tribes, who were otherwise hunter gatherers, would meet for religious purposes. Jericho is another where we have an actual city that is thought to be made up of non farmers who were otherwise sedentary. This doesn’t meant that the article is wrong about farming being crucial to Göbekli Tepe but it does mean that archaeologists aren’t seeing all of the signs of a true civilization which they tend to care more about writing than farming per say.

I do think writing as we know it stretches back just not as an alphabet but more as tally marks and cave painting. A lot of information can be exchanged that way and we do have records of cultures going back >20,000 years using these.

I think if you went back a few tens of thousand years you would see culture that are a lot closer to civilization than we like to think. But again, they wouldn’t fit the current definition of civilization.

I think the modern, mainstream opinion underrates oral traditions greatly, which is to be expected because we only practice empiricism in our world. However, oral traditions are very important in a lot of cultures around the world, and they have been for a long, long time.

Yes, I would like to study the probably complex philosophic system of the celtic druids for example. But this is not really possible with the fragments remaining preserved only through the writing of christian monks.

What do you base this on?

Others seem to think your claim for evidence is unreasonable, but I think it's a perfectly reasonable to ask.

One thing I've seen is that Indigenous Australian oral history is thought to extend back at least 37,000 years[1]. Natural events that have been demonstrated to have happened tens of thousands of years ago have been passed down in the oral history of some civilizations. This knowledge conversely seems to be lost with a transfer to written records, probably due to a lack of people keeping mental note of ancient knowledge. e.g., a lot of Native American history is just lost for countless reasons, despite them having written records now.

[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/aboriginal-tale-anci...

I’d say on the fact that we only count societies who write their stories down as “civilized” while there have been numerous societies that lacked writing in America, Africa and the Steppe that you really have to try to not count as civilization. The Mississippian culture comes to mind.

What does he base what on? The importance of empiricism in the modern world? The importance of oral storytelling and teaching in the ancient world? Both of those are extremely well known and documented, so I assume you mean something else.

I think the modern, mainstream opinion underrates oral traditions greatly

When you go against the opinion of mainstream experts, you should have some evidence of rationale.

While the process of science might be done well enough, is it a case of looking under the lamppost for our keys that we lost somewhere over there in the darkness?

It feels akin to conservation groups in Wales fighting to maintain the barren hills, nevermind they used to be covered in trees before we cleared the land for sheep.[0]

[0] Feral, by George Monbiot https://www.worldcat.org/title/feral-rewilding-the-land-the-...

But they aren’t going against it, they are saying that (for kind of obvious reasons) most people don’t look to oral tradition as a sign of civilization. Mostly because it’s impossible to date and verify oral tradition.

Lol, the act of asking for empirical evidence strengthens his point..

He can almost base his argument on your response to it.

I didn't ask for empirical evidence. You call it an argument. It's not an argument. It's just a naked claim, without any kind of basis at all. To ask for support somehow seems to offend everybody.

Okay, fine, let's just believe whatever feels good to us.

The ask you made was lazy nonsense. My use of language was imprecise. Fwiw I'm not offended in the slightest but think about it logically:

- language is important?

- speaking predates writing?

- in our current society writing is the source of truth?

This is the premise he implicitly asked for in order to voice his sentiment ... and you deny him even that without him listing a source (which is precisely the thing he was concerned with).

"I am saddened by all the violence" -> "take that back or I hit you"

Edit (slightly OT): let's not "all believe" in anything. We need to be able to allow contradictory things to coexist

Uhm common sense I guess. But as I said, in our society, you can't even make a statement like that without someone asking for a source or something. It's amusing, but also kinda unfortunate.

If it was common sense, it wouldn't be against mainstream opinion.

In our society, you can just say whatever you want without backing it up in any way, and then get irritated when someone asks how you figure.

Mainstream opinion isn't based in common sense, quite the opposite sometimes.

The Iliad and the Odyssey were originally oral works in a prehistoric (pre-writing) culture. Transmission of culture was done orally and visually just as they are today. Culture wasn't just technology. It was also origin stories of the tribe, origin stories of the universe, and so on. A lot of information can be exchanged orally and visually without writing.

Definitely I guess my point is more that our definition of what constitutes writing seems to be arbitrary when we do have “writing” that goes back ~20k years it just isn’t letters representing sounds. I mentioned tally marks and we’ve found them all over the place. If our definition has to be that people use an alphabet to record sentences then civilization under the definition of writing + multiple city states may not be moved back. But I think that doesn’t capture a large (like 2-3 times as long) span of time in which there were “civilizations” and it’s really a shame.

I think that isn't defined as a writing system as you can only record numerical data.

Same as how the Inca Quipu[1] isn't generally defined as writing, despite the fact it seems they may have encoded some non-numerical information such as provinces for accounting purposes - like having a province_id in a database.

You can keep track of taxes etc. with a system like Quipu, but you couldn't write down the Iliad with it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu

>I really do think we need to rethink our idea of civilization

Why? Civilization is a description, not a value judgment.

If a society we value doesn't fit the description the answer isn't to change the description.

The answer is to remove the value you are placing on the label.

I would imagine trade centers would be another possibility.

civilizations come and gone, hopefully throughout the universe, are such a deep romance to me. the ancient egyptians should be enough to get you to this mental state. one of the largest and most mysterious structures in the world was built by them and still exists. expand this concept to the entire universe and boom my mind is blasted.

For the Göbekli Tepe site mentioned in the article you can use Google maps [0] and drop the little yellow man on some of the dots where pictures were taken. There's some panoramic pictures that show it much better than the article [1]

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/@37.2234784,38.9216386,306m/data...

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@37.2233037,38.9225345,3a,75y,18...

20,000 years ago the ocean levels were 130 meters lower.

Imagine all the coastal settlements that are lost

Not just that. The Persian Gulf, in the heart of the cradle of civilization, is an average of 50m deep, never more than 90m. That's 250,000 square km of prime real estate (a river valley fed by the same rivers that would eventually produce Sumeria) that would have been well above the water line when civilization was just getting started. No wonder every culture has a flood myth.

How quickly did coastal areas get reclaimed by the seas? If it happened over centuries then it’s a slow creep and hardly a flood, though given geography, it’s likely some areas got reclaimed at accelerated rates. In any event we’d need some evidence before accepting that this was the genesis of the myths.

It seems like somewhere between 1m-5m per century depending on time and place[1]. At 5m that would be noticeable in a lifetime in a coastal estuary, you would see dwellings from your childhood swallowed by the sea by middle age. Interestingly, Sumerian myths said that the Akkadians arrived from the sea and brought with them the knowledge of city building. Certainly begs some interesting questions.

[1]https://noc.ac.uk/news/global-sea-level-rise-end-last-ice-ag...

We need to know how people settled. Was it permanent dwellings, limited-lifespan dwellings (wattle/reed), seasonal dwellings, or nomadic dwellings. If people kind of moved from season to season, or as local resources get depleted, then water creeping up is kind of just accepted as "they way things happen." If it was settled for hundreds of years and then water crept up, sure, I can see that being considered a flood if it happened quickly enough.

I guess we may have to live with guesswork as I doubt we'll have convincing answers.

You need to adjust your timescales. "Settled for hundreds of years"? No. Settled for tens of thousands of years. In many places the shoreline moved three feet per year, when water was rising fastest; the beach one played at as a child was wholly gone by adulthood. The grandparents' ancestral shoreside village was underwater.

People could not just move inland; other people already lived there. Australians still keep careful oral records of negotiated resolutions of conflicts over living space when Sahel, between Australia and New Guinea, was inundated.

Between where Indonesian islands are now, and for hundreds of miles off the coast of Viet Nam all the way to Korea, were millions of square miles of prime habitat ("Sundaland"), also for tens of thousands of years. Every tribe there had to find somewhere else to live.

We don't exactly know the carrying capacity/density of those populations and their territorial needs. We don't know if they were nomadic or not, if they seasonally moved. did they live in permanent places or did they move as resources depleted... did they rely of marine life, wildlife, proto-agriculture, foraging, hunting, etc.

We can't presume people lived "there" if we don't know much of the above.

Which is more likely: millions of square miles of river valley forest and savanna, inhabited? Or meticulously avoided?

Nomadic people have very rarely ranged over more than a few hundred miles. We have here thousands of miles. There is room for every variation you can imagine, and even more you can't.

Rather, there was.

That’s hardly a flood though. A flood is the village disappearing in day or two. Disappearing in a decade or two? I’m not sure what I would call that, but definitely not a flood.

It's not necessarily a binary thing. You can have gradual sea level rise punctuated with rapid inundation events.

This is exactly what happened in the British Isles when low lying Doggerland (between modern England and Denmark) was wiped out by a wave which was likely caused by an underwater landslide; that wave was in turn caused by the melting ice at the end of the ice age, which was otherwise causing gradual sea level increase.

True, but if you invented writing today and decided to record a 500 year old story, in that scenario are you really likely to be able to discern what the term flood meant back then, or if the word flood was even in the original story? Hundreds of years later people who weren't there are going to get lazy with the details.

I will be sure to relay your misgivings to the people displaced, once my time machine is ready. I will need to teach them English when I get there/then, so I can explain your careful distinction between a flood and ... what, an inundation? You didn't say.

I harbor doubts about their receptivity to the correction.

There are zillions of flood myths. More of them are cataclysmic like Noah and his ark, than gradual over a generation like The Pretenders' My City Was Gone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flood_myths

Having an ocean on top of an archaeological site does make it tricky to investigate.

I think it’s interesting that there could be amazingly preserved human settlements, and maybe even human remains, in the depth of the Black Sea. It’s an oxygen deprived environment below a certain depth, meaning things could be fairly well preserved. For example:

https://news.mit.edu/2000/blacksea-0920

> If it happened over centuries then it’s a slow creep and hardly a flood

They probably flooded increasingly regularly before being abandoned and eventually subsumed, no unlike Venice today. Some could have been much quicker though, there are fault lines through the region though, so it's entirely possible a small tsunamis could have knocked out villages that sea level rise made vulnerable.

It depends. It was not something that happened at a fixed rate. There were periods steady rise between 1 and 2.5m per century... but then you had events like the sudden flooding of the Black Sea area from the Med, or the Tsunami which finished off Doggerland - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland#Disappearance - both of these events would have had human victims, and survivors, and must have been absolutely terrifying.

There wasn't exactly a lot of news that went around back then I imagine.

That claim struck me as extraordinary, but sure enough: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_sea_level

Not sure there were that many coastal settlements in the first place. Ultimately you need access to drinking water and being next to a river is much better than being next to the sea.

Thats why those settlements are usually all located on a river that goes into the the sea.

(but for actual drinking water, smaller springs are preferrerd and can be found almost everywhere, except the dessert, too)

So you have drinking water - and can do extensive fishing, in the river as well in the sea - and in the very fish rich area in between.

Also with a river you can more easily connect inland.

(have you never played civilisation?)

> being next to a river is much better than being next to the sea.

You can be next to both.

Coastal settlements provide excellent food sources, and greatly limits various health issues (lack of salt, iodine, …). Consuming fish blood would also help, it’s going to be much closer to isotonic than seawater.

Depending on land structures, coastal settlements would also often benefit from much higher precipitation rates, providing freshwater. That’s essentially the story of Polynesian settlements, islands would be settled if they either had natural springs or enough precipitations.

A story about similar, for those who haven't seen it: https://xkcd.com/1190/

The North Sea was Doggerland 8500 years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland

You could walk from the Netherlands to Britain.

Before that, the Mediterranean Sea was a dry depression. When the Atlantic barrier collapsed, you can imagine the wall of water filling the basin and chasing early humans uphill.

The Mediterranean has been full throughout human prehistory.

Some think the Black Sea was much smaller, and filled up, during the period in question. But evidence there is inconclusive.

We know there was a cataclysmic meteor strike toward the west end of the Persian Gulf, well after it had filled in.

> Some think the Black Sea was much smaller, and filled up, during the period in question. But evidence there is inconclusive.

Evidence of catastrophic flooding is debated and inconclusive.

That the black sea’s level used to be much lower is not, all water levels were much lower at the glacial maximum, and gradually rose as the ice age ended, nearing stable historical sea levels around 7.5kya (5500 bce).

I am corrected: Yes,the Black Sea level was much lower, and rose. But how quickly? E.g., if the Bosporus was blocked, and later broke, the water could rise very quickly, over weeks, not years. It could fall, instead, if the sea had filled in, and then suddenly drained by a similar process.

But the subject is complicated by the unknown inflow from rivers, and from meltwater of retreating glacier.

Hydrology is complicated.

The Zanclean Flood (refilling of the Mediterranean) happened about 5 million years ago. That predates not only Homo sapiens sapiens, nor the Homo genus itself, but even Australopithecus itself.

Look up Dwarka city that’s submerged under water! Age old civilizations that knew city planning, rock cutting and other advanced technologies who knows.

The oldest artefacts/ruins of Dwarka can be reliably dated to 1500 BC, which is well past the age of city building in that region. Most of the ruins are from the Vedic age (although it may have been a Harappan city before).

The article refers to complex structures built before 10,000 BC, which is approximately established to be the age of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent/Anatolia (from which it is theorized to spread into Europe and S.Asia)

For example Pavlopetri in Greece, about 5 000 years old.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlopetri

Dwarka city which was part of Indus Civilization or Mythological Dwarka city of Lord Krishna?

“... with [these assumptions] in mind we can conclude...”

The exploration of what could have been is reminiscent of how an historian might piece together a narrative from available evidence. The historian, out of necessity, must fill in the blanks where there is no evidence, but also keep the narrative going.

I am not convinced the author made the case, but it is an interesting story.

Good overview and hypothesis that proposes pushing back the pastoral-agricultural transition to 20000 y before present. Long interludes that can be read quickly.

Too long for my taste. The guy must be paid per character. That information might have been packed into 10th of the article size. Really annoying style.

The guy works for the Long Now Foundation. He doesn't care if his articles take a couple of microcenturies to read.

I wonder if there's a general principle when you can assume any scientific finding that makes currently alive humans seem special, will underestimate how non-special we are.

And if you can plot that against some metric does it asymptotically approach how special we really are?

As more and more evidence piles on, I wonder how long it will take for mainstream archaeology to accept these ideas.

Mainstream archeologists have already integrated many of the "suggestions" the article makes. It's bad enough that were I less charitable, I'd think the author was putting up strawmen that have been outdated for decades. Instead, I think they just read the wrong books, probably from some stodgy British academic that hasn't left the country since there was a British empire. Take this concluding sentence as an example:

> The old paradigm of agriculture and civilization beginning after the last ice age, and proceeding on a materially overdetermined set course of progress, seems to rest on increasingly shaky theoretical grounds

If you find an archaeologist arguing that, you've found a time traveler from the 60s at the latest. Archaeology isn't easy and it's gotten a lot of things wrong over the years. However, methodologies are constantly improving and the best info is the stuff we have today rather than the stuff we had 50 years ago. That's what these sorts of articles should be calling for improvements in.

I want to second this, as another archaeologist. Most attacks on 'archaeological orthodoxy' come from a very misinformed and outdated perspective of contemporary archaeological views. Moreover, in general, archaeologists tend to be extremely aware of the limitations of our methods and theories, to the point where we are often unwilling to make universalizing claims. Perhaps this is why many confident 'facts' that were established in the 1960s, and which have since been reconsidered and problematized, still linger. Archaeologists now rarely talk in terms of absolutes, but those kinds of claims grab more public attention than nuanced and tentative discourse.

So, out of curiosity, where should I go or what should I read if I'd like to find out what the modern archeological views are?

Every once in a while someone (typically a senior PhD student) will write a brilliant review article of relevant work related to a given field, method or theory. These papers may be difficult to identify and are not really assembled under a single journal or collection, but you'll know it when you see it. One great example is this one: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4754.2012.00708.x

Those archaic archaeologists are not just holed up in department basements, ignoring recent discoveries. From their basements they are curating Wikipedia articles, defending them tooth and nail against unwelcome hints of currency.

Wikipedia's a bit of a mixed bag, especially around the early neolithic stuff. If you look at the east Asian articles, some of them are still using antiquated terms like mongoloid and caucasoid. The southwest asian stuff is theoretically underdeveloped and last time I checked reflects an 80-90s bent, citing people like Hodder. Other regions have very underdeveloped articles. NA is probably the best with the rather excellent chronologies, but not much besides.

What's the best resource to read online instead?

I'm struggling to think of a great unified resource, but with regards to Gobekli Tepe specifically (which is the a major focus in this thread) the blog maintained by the actual archaeologists who work at the site is fantastic: https://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-telegrams/

I don't know of a best resource, but good information usually comes from reading different takes on the same thing. Encyclopedia Britannica is still around.

https://www.britannica.com/event/Neolithic/additional-info#f...

The problem with Wikipedia is unlikely to be geriatric archeologists, but rather wikipeidas policy to disallow citation of all primary scientific research [1]. As long as pop science articles are the gold standard, quality will be low in niche topics with low media coverage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_and_usin...

Wikipedia most certainly does not disallow citation of all primary scientific research.

Wikipedia's rule is against original (ie unpublished) research.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...

IT looks like you are correct. Unfortunately, I have seen simple reiteration of primary research findings removed with such frequency that there appears to a great amount of confusion on this topic

>In science, data is primary, and the first publication of any idea or experimental result is always a primary source. These publications, which may be in peer-reviewed journal articles or in some other form, are often called the primary literature to differentiate them from unpublished sources.

>All analyses and interpretive or synthetic claims about primary sources must be referenced to a secondary or tertiary source, and must not be an original analysis of the primary-source material by Wikipedia editors.

The rule concerning citation of primary sources is that secondary sources are preferred, not that primary sources are forbidden.

Unpacking that a little: a reliable secondary source provides interpretation and evaluation. If material in an article is cited to a primary source, then any interpretation and evaluation has to be provided by the wikipedia editor, which amounts to OR. So if all you have is a primary source, the material cited to it is often little more than a quote.

The citation system is broken since most publications in various fields are pure junk. Having a link to a biased or poorly researched source does not prove anything.

That's exactly why wikipedia prefers secondary sources. You can 'prove' almost anything by citing junk articles in journals.

And yet, this is what Google serves up as one of the first results when searching for ancient civilizations during/before the last Ice Age: (No, There Wasn't an Advanced Civilization 12,000 Years Ago)[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/no-there-wasnt-an...]

The dude clearly has a bone to pick with Graham Hancock, and honestly I'm not a fan of some of his crazy ideas either. But it seems like he is missing the bigger picture by making this is a personal battle.

Neither Michael Shermer nor Graham Hancock are archaeologists, so I'm not sure where you're going with that. If you're asking me which one to trust without critical reading (neither), I'm certainly not going to recommend the ancient aliens dude who's been repeatedly called out by multiple archaeological associations for publishing pseudoscience.

Anyway, part of the issue here is that archaeology doesn't have answers to every question you could ask and the farther back you go, the harder it is to answer even basic questions. And ultimately, the archaeological community as a whole is still coming to grips with trying to understand how the people we do see in the archaeological record conceived of the world, which is a necessary prerequisite to start talking about how concepts in it relate to concepts in our own. Take this 2019 paper trying to survey how we understand the term 'home' [1] or Maher's Hunter-Gatherer Home-Making? as examples of some of how primitive our current working vocabulary and methodologies are on this topic. Our understanding of paleolithic lifeways is still very much in its infancy. Nevertheless, suggestions like the presence of a industrialized society much like our own before the LGM is something I've seen no evidence to even hint at yet.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1086/701523

What’s wrong with this article? They explain exactly what they mean here

> Göbekli Tepe was a ceremonial religious site, not a city—there is no evidence that anyone lived there. Moreover, there are no domesticated animal bones, no metal tools, no inscriptions or writing, and not even pottery—all products that much later “high civilizations” produced.

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