Ancient civilisation under eastern Turkey estimated to be 11k-13k years old
spectator.co.uk
spectator.co.uk
According to this article[1] (which has a nice wide-angle view of t-pillars in context), it was radiocarbon dating[1]. You find bits of stuff at the site and the isotopic composition of the carbon-containing material tells you the age based on known rates of carbon-14 decay.
The actual isotopic analysis seems pretty solid.
The problem is that this isn't any ordinary site. The article notes that the site appears to have been deliberately buried. This raises the question of where the samples that were dated actually came from.
This critical review suggests major problems with the older-than-everything-else hypothesis for the site.[2] It notes that at least some of the samples were dated from "fill," or the stuff that was used by someone at some point to bury the site. And that stuff could have itself come from sites much older than Gobeklitepe:
> We already discussed the problem with dating “fills” as opposed to dating “structures”. A fill’s date (no matter how confident we may fill about its actual date) in no way dates structures, as it simply can be coming from soil deposits that are either older or younger than the structure itself. You can fill your home with dirt from your yard, which could be from various geologic strata, some containing fossils from the Pleistocene. This will not make your home a Pleistocene Epoch home. Or you can currently fill a 4th century BC Temple with soil from riverbanks containing live exoskeletons; this will not render the Temple a 2000 AD structure.
Even if the site wasn't deliberately buried, everything hinges on where the fill came from. The base assumption of radiocarbon dating is that no foreign material was brought in. The shakier that assumption, the shakier the claim to the ages being quoted.
[1] https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14487942
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317433791_Dating_Go...
Also, [2] seems to be a self-published article written by someone with no background, publication record, or known collaborations in archaeology or related fields. I would not put much weight on it, especially because I have no background in archaeology either and I'm therefore unable to interpret its reliablity.
The article deals at length with those other forms of evidence. In particular, the site does not fit (architecturally, the author's specialty) with what was happening around it at the alleged time of building.
> Also, [2] seems to be a self-published article written by someone with no background, publication record, or known collaborations in archaeology or related fields.
Perhaps true, but irrelevant. Einstein was a patent clerk, a standing that prevented a great many people from even bothering to read the work.
The article is packed with citations that can be followed up on. It methodically takes apart Schmidt's original work. If you doubt the credibility of the analysis, perhaps start there. If he's being unfair to Schmidt's evidence, then that's a different matter.
As an active researcher, I often find papers in distant fields easier to understand than those in my field. Papers on topics related to my research but not that close to it are particularly difficult. When I'm unfamiliar with the topic, I just see some text written in everyday language. And while most researchers are not great at writing, they are not particularly bad either, because they write so much. When I read such papers, I have absolutely no idea what I'm missing or misinterpreting. I may interpret technical terms with specific definitions as everyday words, and there may be shared context, implicit assumptions, and basic background knowledge I'm simply unaware of.
Hence my default assumption that if you read a research paper and think you understood it, you probably didn't. Research is so specialized these days that you should require something better than your own beliefs to convince yourself that you understood what you read. Relying on external validation ("an expert is someone other experts on the topic recognize as an expert") is pretty useful when you are not an expert yourself.
You might have read a specialized article and understood it, i.e. created a meaningful whole of all the parts. But you cannot verify it from prior experience with the domain, so it is an internally unconfirmed reading. In addition, subtle key terms might have been replaced with their mundane meanings.
So while you understood the article, you don't have enough information (yet) to confidently say that you understood it correctly.
Over time you gain domain knowledge, and it becomes easier to verify assumptions of new things you read, or to question and correct your own apparatus of understanding.
There's an important observation to be made here, though, with regards to this behavior. Whenever subject field outsiders want to discuss a matter in my field of study, they invariably simplifies what they've read to childish levels and relate some personal property or recent event in their own life. I recognize they're simply being social, and appreciate the interaction for what it is, rather than getting annoyed by what it isn't.
Human beings are social beings, and many internet comments (including of own) are just expressions of individuality and basic human need to partake rather than thoughtful arguments in an actual effort to discover something new.
That said, I do believe e.g. Einstein's Relativität was written for the larger non-expert audience, so I would expect it to safeguard against most of the interpretative traps that would entail.
1. Doesn't understand how typological classification works
2. Kind of offhandedly acknowledges, but doesn't actually cite the PPNA plaster dating that Dietrich and Schmidt did 6 years prior, negating the entire fill argument.
3. Starts comparing things to Natufian and other levant material cultures.
4. Just randomly starts assuming his urban planning hypotheses, which are neither well-accepted in the field nor well-regarded by people who specialize in that stuff as it applies to the ancient near-east.
All of this is fine because he's essentially retired and simply getting into internet fights to avoid boredom. Nothing wrong with that, but let's avoid bringing him up as an authority.
Picking a case you think supports your claim without checking the rate at which unknown author claims turn out to be true likely only undermines your claims.
The proper metric is: is the rate at which unknown authors making big claims that stand up to further scrutiny higher than the rate for well established experts in a field?
The answer is no. Crackpots litter all fields, and rarely is anyone at that level correct when the experts are not.
As to Einstein, he was published in top physics journals before he became a patent clerk, and he published at least 16 papers (some incorrect) before his big 1905 paper, which was a few years into his patent clerk job. He was certainly not some unknown. Your case is nothing at all like Einstein's case.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257961716_Establish...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258182967_Radiocarb...
Apparently, the plaster on the walls (which contain lime, which I believe is thought to have come from fires) was one of the main pieces of evidence presented by Schmidt. But plaster can absorb carbon from the fill. This is plausible given both age (at least thousands of years) and the fact that plaster only occurs on the surface in direct contact with the contaminating fill.
AFAICT, there as been no enclosed space from which samples have been dated. It all comes from areas that were directly exposed to fill, or the fill itself.
The author of the review also notes something that should be obvious to those outside the field, but for some reason doesn't get discussed much inside:
> Thus, in questioning the claim about Gobekli Tepe’s date (of PPNB, possibly earlier) one might think that the one who does the questioning must have extraordinary and abundant as well as “almost beyond reasonable doubt” convincing evidence to counter what the archeological establishment has claimed about Gobekli Tepe. In effect, it seems it is no longer asked that the agency who makes the extraordinary claims about Gobekli Tepe provides the extraordinary evidence. But instead, the burden of proof has shifted to those who tend to counter the claims. Be that as it may, the paper will proceed as if the burden of proof is on the counterclaim. The paper will be setting the most stringent of all arguments and criteria in an attempt to support the counter arguments, although it doesn’t have to do so.
As Sagan famously said "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." But the evidence on the dating of this site seems pretty weak.
[1] Project Web-site (in German): https://botanik.uni-hohenheim.de/dendro_hoh-jahrringkalender
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10075318/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gift_(Turkish_TV_series)
p.s. Bir Başkadir (aka Ethos, 2020-) and Fatma (2021-) are another two excellent Turkish Netflix series.
Anyway, the Turks and the Greeks are much more similar to each other than let's say, the French or the British. When a Turk and a Greek meet in western Europe they find relief as they understand each other much better than anyone else. Turks and Greeks are huge frenemies, in a sense that on state level they have never ending disputes over territories and things can quickly heat up but on social level they are almost like the same people and they love each other. When a disaster strikes, Greeks would be among the first to help the Turks and vice versa.
In Turkey, there's also Left&Right but the leftist were slaughtered during military coups(which happen every 20 years!) in the past, there's no sizeable movement by the left. Instead, the society is divided by many other things like ethnicity(Kurds vs Turks) and religion(sunni muslims and alawi muslims), cultural alliance(west v.s. russia among the seculars), values(liberals v.s. nationalists) or any other thing, including even cuisine!
From the west coast of Alaska to the east coast in Maine it is about 5500 miles. Moving 10 miles a day it only takes 18 months. Even if you only lived for 30 years back then there is plenty of opportunity for a single individual to have made the entire journey on foot allowing lots of opportunities for seasonal pauses or to delay progress because they liked the new digs better than the last place they stopped.
A reasonably adventurous person could easily have seen most of the continental US in a lifetime especially when you consider that boats were part of their skill sets. Even moving as a group you could easily traverse the continent settling for short periods wherever things looked promising.
I will have to look up the Vail site as I am not familiar with that one. I know there is the Buttermilk site in central Texas (Gault site) that has yielded dates in the 16000-21000 yr range as near as I remember.
Note, this isn't generally true. The low average life expectancy in those ages is skewed down by infant mortality and conflict. In a way, human life span follows a bathtub curve so reducing infant mortality in our (modern) age has massively increased the average life expectancy, but it doesn't mean people in those days didn't live past 40.
Or, exaggerating mildly: nobody lived for 30 years back then; half the population didn't make it past their first birthday, the other half lived for 60 years.
There has been a misconception amongst laymen that our lifespans have become longer for a number of reasons because it is usually framed in a way that bolsters the notion that all those who came before had shorter lifespans than we are likely to enjoy.
That isn't really the case because obviously if someone mentions an average lifespan or a median lifespan then that is the number that sticks in the memory and most people whiff on the fact that with any average or median, around 50% of the people lived longer and 50% of the people did not live as long. No upper bound is given and the lower bound is intuitively occupied by those who didn't survive infancy.
In hindsight, I should've framed that differently. I was attempting to illustrate that it doesn't take much time at all to cover a lot of ground and if you are motivated by the need to feed yourself or your family or if you just feel the unshakable need to see what is over that distant hill then a short lifespan still offers plenty of opportunity to see the world and scratch those itches.
I spent several months when I was younger living on the road and in the back-country. I knew every morning that my primary goal needed to be locating drinkable water for myself, my traveling partner, and our horses and my secondary goal was finding food. We carried our shelters and implements that we would need to keep all our gear in order but water and food were paramount concerns. We were young and totally not clued in to all the planning that would normally be involved in undertaking a multi-week, multi-state trip so inaccurate assumptions were made about accessibility, cost, and availability of necessities. We had fun, we survived our own incompetence and we moved on with new skill-sets and an enhanced appreciation for how the real world really works.
However, I am not sure it was that easy. - It will be easy if the map was laid out, they unlikely had any sense of where they were going those days, so to cover a hypothetical straight-ish line distance of 5500 miles they probably had to travel 10000 or maybe many many more miles - It will be easy if there were roads like now, they unlikely had very rough terrain - much denser forests, way uneven land, wild animals - They probably had to fend for food on a daily basis which would distract from an orderly journey of 10 miles a day
This is not to say it could not be done, obviously it seems like it was done, and the journey probably took closer to the higher end of the extremes mentions (18 months vs 30 years) and that too mostly by happenstance.
I don't think this is true, there were lots of good reasons to move into the Americas, notably the presence of many large species of game animals that evolved without natural defences against humans (which were all quickly hunted to extinction or out-competed). Maine would have been on the fringes of habitability at the time, but other areas like Mexico and Peru were ideal climates for humans to move to, much better than the Siberian wilderness their ancestors travelled through.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeveryt...
Gobekli Tepi is used as one of many examples of how nowadays the evidence is stacked against the idea of agriculture being an inevitable and necessary step on the road to civilisation and all its concomitant ills. Rather the picture is far less linear, indeed it would seem that many societies both knew and had the ability to farm, but actively chose not to.
I haven't finished it yet, but personally it's bringing "modernity" down a peg or 10. It seems that all the possible forms of social organisation that we can imagine, and more, have already been experimented with, multiple times even. What's unique about our version, isn't so much its innovation, but merely its scale. And if we consider this current scale as, encompassing-all-the-lands-we-know-of, then that too has already been and, crucially, gone. What if there have already been societies that, not only witnessed that ultimate jeopardy of the complete collapse of their all-encompassing civilisation, but also went beyond and innovated a post-civilisation society? In some ways that would make them more "modern" than us.
And basically, if you have capitalism/individual property rights then the answer HAS to be cattle, plus a lot of fossil fuel inputs.
But at the systemic level is it better? It’s probably worse. So does that mean we’re just waiting on culture to invent the right social structures so we can return to hunting?
Homo sapiens is 300k-350k years old.
We'we known 3-4 interglacials... how can we be sure the previous ones didn't have civilizations ?
(Because we didn't get out of Africa before roughly the middle of the last glacial ?)
All of these different lines of evidence greatly constrain the types of 'civilizations' that were possible to highly localized ones with small populations, or that were completely and utterly wiped out with no surviving material culture, technology, or descendants.
That's to say it's not impossible, but highly unlikely. Any explanations all those lines would have to be parsimonious and no one's brought forth good evidence for such a narrative.
At one point in our history, humans developed language and could tell each other stories about major events in their lives. If developing an oral legacy is your definition of having "civilation", your question is unanswerable because there's no way we can prove conclusively which ancient humans had those capabilities and which didn't.
At some later point, we developed writing. Mural inscriptions and stone tablets are the first examples we have of humanity's communicative abilities. Is using the written word enough to have "civilization"?
Taking the other extreme, it's pretty much assumed that until the European exploration phase in the 15th-16th century, humans lived within their own local/continental society. Is being in contact with people on the other side of the globe a prerequisite to have "civilization"?
We also find tons of tools and fossils such dating back to 200k years ago and there's no evidence of civilization there too. Rather the evidence is pretty clear on how primitive those people were.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-di...
and the NYRB-standard exchange of letters
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/01/13/the-roots-of-ine...
It feels like one of the most important books I’ve read in a long time.
I wish HBO would adapt it into a fictional series, as a way to ignite our imagination about our ancestors.
We have choices about how we organize civilization. Neither Rousseau nor Hobbes depicted destiny, just choices.
(those that follow are just wild conjectures)
A thing that I always thought is that around that era the sea level was rising since some thousand years and kept rising for some thousands more [1] to a total of 130 meters. Humans always tried to live near the sea, fishing was easier, we need iodine to be healthy, better and more stable climate, etc... so my take is that our first settlements will never be found, they are 100 meters underwater, eroded and covered by sand.
The cities we find are the ones that humans built after they got pissed of by the ever rising sea and one day decided "fuck it, I'm going way up now". So those ancient fellas already had lot of experience building cities by then.
[1] https://sealevel.nasa.gov/faq/13/how-long-have-sea-levels-be...
14 000 year old sites have been found inland.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/earliest-sign-of-human-habit...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/one-oldest-north-a...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/ancient-bc-f...
Obviously there’s a good chance a lot of significant sites were flooded by rising sea levels, but no reason to expect all of them were.
edit: by the way it is even harder since, of those rivers and lakes, most dried up or changed course, especially in the Near East.
Ephesus was founded 3,000-4,000 years ago.
The sea level rise occured over a period of 21,000 to 3,000 years ago.
Obviously there was history before then and we can really only see evidence of this from surviving archaeological evidence (as per this article). So another 2,000 years before Msopotamia we've found remains of Neolithic villages that are now under the English Channel.
And yet we're still 4,000 after the ruins from this article. It's wild. Stonework has a tendency to last. Wood obviously wouldn't. You really wonder how long humans have really been in permanen tsettlements and we can only imagine what life was like then, what language they had and what they believed.
And to put it in even more perspective, if the entire history of Earth as a whole year, all of the above happened in the last 83 seconds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
There's a fair bit of things that may be far under the ocean now, but were dry land during the last glacial maximum.
I mean, that's the Metaverse, right?
* cold + dry: earth
* cold + wet: water
* hot + dry: fire
* hot + wet: air
These were not states of matter. They were the base components of matter - everything was made by some combination of these 4 elements, and everything could be broken down into some proportion of these 4 individual elements.
A big part of what caused humanity to stagnate for 2000 years post-Aristotle was the tendency to back-propagate discoveries and attribute new knowledge to the ancients. Aristotle was wrong. The Greeks were wrong about most things. That’s fine - we are too. Even if you can twist their conclusions in an attempt to reconcile them with modern constructs - their methods used to reach their conclusions very much missed the mark. Trying to give them more credit than what is due is how you cause society to stagnate for another 2000 years.
In the 1600s a spin off of Alchemy proposed the 3 element theory - and found quite a bit of success using it for medicine: Quicksilver, Alchemical Mercury, and Alchemical Salt. A lot of people were really upset about this theory. They’d never really had to defend ancient wisdom before - they’d spent 2000 years assuming ancient wisdom was complete. They went to work attempting to disprove the 3 element theory, which they successfully did. But, in their attempt to disprove the 3 element theory, they accidentally laid the groundwork for disproving the 4 element theory.
For a concrete example. It turns out the alchemists were correct: transmutation is possible. When you split an atom (I.e. in a nuclear reactor) you transmutate the element. That’s not the same as saying the Alchemists were right - they were looking for a red dust made from a pulverized piece of pure earth that could turn copper into gold. They were correct for the wrong reasons - that is not the same as being right. They were lucky in their conclusion and wrong in their methods.
I disagree. Not that ancients can be wrong, but the idea that appreciating their knowledge held back society for 2000 years (I think it is just the opposite, as seen by how the rediscovery of Plato, Aristotle and Hermes catalyzed the enlightenment). If you understand Plato, you appreciate that it is a dialectic—there isn’t a singular truth presented, but provocations for thought. Now, Aristotle doesn’t leave so much room for that, but I’m less an expert on Aristotle than the Pythagoreans— who originated the four element theory, heliocentrism, emergence from a singularity and the notion that the world is composed of math, not matter.
For instance, the idea of the 5 elements came from the idea that there are only 5 simple Platonic solids. The simplest mathematical 3D shapes should be the simplest physical forms, right? And the geometry of their construction should lead to their material properties, right? They got this right— except that it took nonEuclidean geometry— atoms are composed of the simplest geometries (spherical harmonics in the electron shells) and their geometric properties do govern their material properties.
And, the universe did come from an ineffable oneness or singularity.
And the harmonies in the cosmos do derive from harmonies in basic mathematics.
It was precisely these ideas, when rediscovered, that led to Kepler’s discovery of the laws of planetary motion, kicking off the scientific revolution.
Their core method was dialectic. Their conclusions are modern science. Many other issues stagnated science — dictatorship, religion, economic collapse, war. Appreciation for ancient philosophy was almost always a basis for advancement of the dialectic, not dogmatism.
What you said about the language reminded me of this video about PIE language, I speak some European languages and it's amazing that many words feel so familiar. And it's even nicer to read the comments, all that people from around the world finding stuff so close in their native modern language!
I'm no expert… please correct me if I'm wrong.
"New insights from several deep soundings excavated... have exposed the weaknesses of the temple-narrative, meaning that a revision of the popular scientific view is now unavoidable (Fig. 1). Specifically, the latest observations relate to the existence of domestic buildings and the harvesting and distribution of rain-water at Göbekli Tepe."
https://publications.dainst.org/journals/efb/article/view/25...
- There's some evidence that various people in history have been seasonally permanently settled, and foraging without a fixed home part of the year.
- Other people settle for a few years and then move on, doing small-scale growing of crops when they are settled.
- Yet others encourage wild growth of food crops, and generally move around and forage in a large area that has been lightly tended to in that manner. (Meaning they don't build homes that last for centuries, but they also permanently inhabit a large area.)
- And in some societies, there are classes of people that are permanently settled but live in symbiosis with more mobile foragers, who live in the permanent settlements only a little at a time.
The concept of a hunter-gatherer roaming the endless steppe is romantic, but it does not seem to occur that much in known history.
It's one of my favorite series and was well researched by the author before writing. It tells the story of a young human who travels across Europe.
The rest had quite a soap opera / "housewife porn" elements, but also some interesting bits surrounding toolmaking, hunting, etc.
I recall years ago when they discovered that a 'ziggurat on a hill' was in fact not on a hill, the jungle was just doing an excellent job of burying it.
They had milder weather than Germany to be sure, but I don’t know if you can definitively say they saw less precipitation.
https://palladiummag.com/2021/05/17/why-civilization-is-olde...
Some interesting quotes:
> When we find remains of beavers, we assume they built beaver dams, even if we don’t immediately find remnants of such dams. > [...] > When we find Homo sapiens skeletons, however, we instead imagine the people naked, feasting on berries, without shelter, and without social differentiation.
Secondly the development of evolved instinctive behaviour is in no way comparable to human learned cultural behaviour, such as technology. That should be so obvious I’m at a loss that I have to even point it out.
> Along the way to the site, a forgettable visitor’s center greeted me with animations and music evoking primitiveness. Such art is a window into our modern shared subconscious rather than into the culture of a people who erected buildings 11,500 years ago.
I discovered it’s more of a political website, not one typically about archeology, and it made more sense in that context. They seem to have a chip on their shoulder about the perception of older cultures. Which also explains the opening about Turkey’s development.
That said it’s a good read and later on has some interesting history on the development of archeology.
Heh. A much less prosaic version of the story with the mulberry bush in OP's article.
He doesn't know why, but he just keeps living.
What I think about every time I think of this movie is, "Okay, so he was 12,000 years old at the time of Christ". He lived then - now 6 times, and then then-now again.
He was 8,000 years old in Mesopotamia..
Now I can imagine this beloved character in this new, very old, civilization
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_Earth
A couple interesting details I learned while looking up that link:
- They released a sequel 10 years later.
- The author also wrote the Star Trek episode "Requiem for Methuselah", which has a similar theme.
There he mentioned how when the romans were conquering Babylon, it had already had a 3000 year history. So its like similar time from us to the romans, as the relative starts of those two civilizations. Babylon was _old_ and they knew it - who was this young upstart trying to recklessly mess with the natural order?
I can’t even process things like 12-14 _thousand_ years of human civilization…
On the other hand, one could argue the cultures around the North Atlantic are close enough to Roman culture and jurisprudence that we are to ancient Rome what later Babylon was to earlier Babylon?
In the movie he claimed to have been Christ, which that experience put him off trying to do anything really public to try to help people.
By the way it was written by Jerome Bixby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Bixby who also wrote the Star Trek episode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requiem_for_Methuselah which had to some extent the same premise (although a much younger immortal)
on edit: oops, I see diggernet https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31454792 already mentioned the Requiem for Methuselah.
What's more; it's on YT for free.
"The doctor working on the mummy suggests trying to see if the man could be revived..."
But if not, no biggie
As more and more evidence accumulates about some topic, we can use a Bayesian process to continously update our priors, but it is common to disagree about what constitutes enough evidence to conclude.
This is partly due to us having different priors, but also often due to our tendency to not trust evidence that is in conflict to our priors.
For both of these reasons, sufficient evidence for a new proposition for it to be logically more likely than the pre-existing consensus typically exist for quite a while before it becomes the new consensus.
In many cases, what is required for the paradigm shift to eventually happen, is not so much more evidence, but rather for the old guard to retire. In the interrim, it can be 'obnoxiously obvious' for some that the evidence is already there.
Besides these sites in Turkey, are there any places in the world where huge amount of rock was carved supposedly without agriculture to fuel the workers? The Stonehenge builders had agriculture, as did those who made the Easter Island statues. Agriculture built Egypt.
The article mentions this fellow 5 times exactly like this. His discovery launched the careers of hundreds, generates millions in tourism, and transforms our understanding of Paleolithic human history.
Why not write his name? Does he not deserve historical mention by name like Necmi Karul and Klaus Schmidt?
If you want to read more about him, you can check out the article below.
https://www.dailysabah.com/history/2018/03/27/security-guard...
I find these incredibly ancient and basically unknown civilisations fascinating. Recently there has been evidence of attempts of cultivation in 21,000 BCE[2] by hunter-gathers. Some of the first semi-permement dwellings were near this in Syria, and believed to be the start of a transition from hunter-gathering to agricultural populations.
By contrast, I think these sites in Turkey are still believed to be ceremonial in nature rather than places people lived.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
[2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
"At the end of its uselife, the megalithic enclosures of Göbekli Tepe were refilled systematically. This special element of the site formation process makes it hard to date the enclosures by the radiocarbon method, as there is no clear correlation of the fill with the architecture. Several ways have been explored to overcome this situation, including the dating of carbonate laminae on architectural structures, of bones and the remains of short-lived plants from the filling. The data obtained from pedogenic carbonates on architectural structures back the relative stratigraphic sequence observed during the excavation. But, unfortunately, they are of no use in dating the sampled structures themselves, as the carbonate layers started forming only after the moment of their burial. At least these samples offer a good terminus ante quem for the refilling of the enclosures. For layer III this terminus ante quem lies in the second half of the 9th millennium calBC, while for layer II it is located in the middle of the 8th millennium calBC."
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258182967_Radiocarb...
Is it jargon for "the duration of its use by humans?"
In the above quote that's how I read it: "When Göbekli Tepe was no longer used by humans, the megalithic enclosures were refilled systematically." Correct?
But in that case it seems like the refilling determines EOL and not the other way around. What am I missing?
Anyway according to other comments apparently they used a few means of dating already.
edit: looks like someone posted from another source that it was with radiocarbon dating - no reason to think that's incorrect, it just would've been a nice extra sentence or two to include to avoid this very hang-up that at least two people had..
I posted an extract from link earlier in this thread about the other site, which explained that they were dating the laminae on the structure that started forming after the fill, or sampling organic material tossed in with the fill, but neither really gets at how old the structure itself it. Curious to understand more if people find it.
https://palladiummag.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/gobekli-...
If you have the time to do something like this and the imagination then I'm sure you could produce these carvings using things you found on the ground pretty easily.
Anyone know any six fingered Turkish people we can ask?
First Çatalhöyük, which was a real town, then Göbekli Tepe, which was an artificial cult center at the top of a mountain, and several other Anatolian (Kurdish) neolithical cities.
It's nearby but it's a different site
Make foraging plans, tell stories, bicker, gossip, predict weather, teach toolmaking and clothesmaking, discuss fair allocation of resources, arrange parties, celebrate relationships, make gifts, design song performances, learn dance moves, coordinate construction, agree on repairs for criminal damages, learn local and exotic flora, plan long travels to faraway lands, and the list goes on.
- They are able to stand on the shoulders of a far broader range of giants, thanks to writing; and
- They have access to far more tools of reasoning (arithmetic with Roman numerals is just the start!) that those in the past did not have.
So while there may well have been intellectual equals to the geniuses of today also back then, they would not have been able to perform the feats of geniuses today. Again, for lack of tooling, not wit.
and be sure to knock them in the head (and everyone that you want to bring with them) so they won't remember anything. I doubt they are any different than a hairless monkey. One thing that we got going for us is the written/oral knowledge that we have accumulated.
Naturally every adult knows that those stories are just ways for the grandparents to ease kids into their sleep, who would believe in such nonsense, given the current state of the planet in 13k years.
In Yuval Noah Harari's book 'Sapiens - a Brief History of Humankind' he posits that there was a 'cognitive revolution' about 70k years ago, during which our cognitive & language capabilities moved beyond the purely physical observations, to the more abstract & metaphysical.
This allowed for a shedload of cultural changes -- larger societies, the birth of religions / mythologies, money, etc. All those abstract concepts that work when we all agree they exist even if they actually don't.
To your question - yes, we necessarily only have written history from civilisations that wrote things down (and those things survived), but it seems like there was an evolutionary change that meant we could finally leverage our one distinctly useful skill, coordinating large groups of people at scale, by getting us all to adopt a shared reality that didn't exist yet. (This kind of explains why we adopted agriculture, despite it clearly being a bad idea at the time.)
“Another unnerving oddity is the curious number of carvings which show people with six fingers. Is this symbolic, or an actual deformity? Perhaps the mark of a strange tribe? Again, there are more questions than answers. Crucially, however, we do now have tentative hints as to the actual religion of these people.
In Gobekli Tepe several skulls have been recovered. They are deliberately defleshed, and carefully pierced with holes so they could – supposedly – be hung and displayed.
Skull cults are not unknown in ancient Anatolia. If there was such a cult in the Tas Tepeler it might explain the graven vultures pictured ‘playing’ with human heads. As to how the skulls were obtained, they might have come from conflict (though there is no evidence of this yet), it is quite possible the skulls were obtained via human sacrifice. At a nearby, slightly younger site, the Skull Building of Cayonu, we know of altars drenched with human blood, probably from gory sacrifice.”
Sorry to jump in half way and mostly uninformed, but maybe that's an early form of sky burial? Burial by carrion birds is still practiced today.
https://neurosciencenews.com/language-imagination-evolution-...
One of the many notions from Lingua ex Machina [2001] is the evolution from protolanguage to proper language. From nonrecursive verb-noun clauses to recursive subject-verb-noun clauses.
https://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Machina-Reconciling-Darwin-Cho...
That book had so many intriguing open ended questions, before we had the tech (ability) to verify stuff. IIRC, others were:
the way the neocortex is organized into hexagonal columns, which I think is what Jeff Hawkins (et al) is working on;
how notions compete inside our head using Darwinian processes;
how thinking (consciousness) may be like resonance across our brains, like a song.
Thanks again for the link. Am noob, so just barely grasp this stuff, but am excited nonetheless to learn about more recent findings.
We live in an age of miracles.
--
Summary copypasta from Amazon:
A neuroscientist and a linguist show how evolution could have given rise to structured language.
A machine for language? Certainly, say the neurophysiologists, busy studying the language specializations of the human brain and trying to identify their evolutionary antecedents. Linguists such as Noam Chomsky talk about machinelike "modules" in the brain for syntax, arguing that language is more an instinct (a complex behavior triggered by simple environmental stimuli) than an acquired skill like riding a bicycle.
But structured language presents the same evolutionary problems as feathered forelimbs for flight: you need a lot of specializations to fly even a little bit. How do you get them, if evolution has no foresight and the intermediate stages do not have intermediate payoffs? Some say that the Darwinian scheme for gradual species self-improvement cannot explain our most valued human capability, the one that sets us so far above the apes, language itself.
William Calvin and Derek Bickerton suggest that other evolutionary developments, not directly related to language, allowed language to evolve in a way that eventually promoted a Chomskian syntax. They compare these intermediate behaviors to the curb-cuts originally intended for wheelchair users. Their usefulness was soon discovered by users of strollers, shopping carts, rollerblades, and so on. The authors argue that reciprocal altruism and ballistic movement planning were "curb-cuts" that indirectly promoted the formation of structured language. Written in the form of a dialogue set in Bellagio, Italy, Lingua ex Machina presents an engaging challenge to those who view the human capacity for language as a winner-take-all war between Chomsky and Darwin.
However, our genetic form may have been very different. It seems that lactase persistence[0] was not wide spread in nearly any human population until the domestication of animals.
I know that comes off as a bit pedantic, but sometimes those little genetic variations matter quite a bit. I won't cop to being well read in paleogenetics, but I have a feeling that there's been a lot of evolution between them and us.
What characterizes civilizations is the emergence of stratified societies in those settlements, with specialized classes of people such as priests and metalworkers, who relied on others to provide them with food.
_pass the salt_
[x] Earliest known example
[x] Giant penises
Second Life will one day become a digital archeologist's incredible discovery
Not really a criticism (ok maybe a little), but perhaps more of an indication that these discoveries are truly novel and baffling.
I think it'd be rather hard for a hunter gatherer society to realistically cover such a large area under tons of rubble. It makes me wonder if this covering with rubble is somehow related to the Black Sea deluge hypothesis [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis]:
> "In 1997, William Ryan, Walter Pitman, Petko Dimitrov, and their colleagues first published the Black Sea deluge hypothesis. They proposed that a catastrophic inflow of Mediterranean seawater into the Black Sea freshwater lake occurred around 7600 years ago, c. 5600 BCE .
> As proposed, the Early Holocene Black Sea flood scenario describes events that would have profoundly affected prehistoric settlement in eastern Europe and adjacent parts of Asia and possibly was the basis of oral history concerning Noah's flood. Some archaeologists support this theory as an explanation for the lack of Neolithic sites in northern Turkey. In 2003, Ryan and coauthors revised the dating of the early Holocene flood to 8800 years ago, c. 6800 BCE."
I think there's a poetic feel to it (which makes me wholly question it); the start of agriculture, Babylon, The Garden of Eden, Noah's ark, all wrapped in one, discovered by a shepherd in the hills and filled with penises.
As for the poetic feel, the term of art is a 'just-so story'.
Similar to [https://www.amusingplanet.com/2018/02/why-is-water-pouring-o...] (just a quick Google search, maybe not the best article):
> "In the Estonian village of Tuhala, there is a well that starts spouting water after a heavy downpour. The well happens to be placed just over an underground river. After rain water floods the river, water pressure builds to the point that it shoots up out of the well, sometimes up to half a meter high. This continues for a few days. During this time, more than 100 liters of water can flow out every second."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe#Architecture
We should be careful about underestimating the capabilities of predecessor cultures. We don't even know to what extent these sites were hunter-gatherer societies, right? Isn't a good part of its significance that it's pushing the clock back on our assumptions?
This is surely true, however allowing oneself to imagine and dream, especially when not in a position of authority in the matter can't be that bad, can it? I'm wholly open to any and all possibilities and rebuttals.
> We don't even know to what extent these sites were hunter-gatherer societies, right?
I think the article mentions this is a theory they have.
> Isn't a good part of its significance that it's pushing the clock back on our assumptions?
It is! I hope I'm not detracting from it by entertaining a wild thought.
People didn't think hunter gatherer societies were able to build such structures and complexes in general. It seems a lot less likely that the Mediterranean flooded an area that far from the Black Sea that also happens to be 700m above sea level.
> I think it'd be rather hard for a hunter gatherer society to realistically cover such a large area under tons of rubble.
I'd also be interested in knowing how they know the creators of Gobekli Tepe where the ones who buried it. Maybe their neighbors didn't like them, or maybe it was their now-farming descendants moving the temple to somewhere better suited to growing their crops. These sort of sites tend to have several generations of societies using them, often hostile to the previous cultures (eg. the vandalism of Egyptian temples by their later occupants).
Honestly, he didn't need vindication, but I'm glad for everything Graham has had to put up with his entire career as a JOURNALIST, not and archaeologist, that he finally gets the funding he needs to keep doing his work.
I've been reading America Before on long trips and the way he describes his work on podcasts like JRE make me realize just how terribly ossified academia has become--it's heresay to question the per-established POV. It's no longer, or perhaps never has been in my lifetime, about genuine curiosity and the leap into trying to explain the unknown with the most rigorous and methodical practices (scientific method) when careers are made and lost on parroting and upholding Conventional wisdom above all else. His investigative work in Egyptology was eye opening to me as it reminded me so much of my work in Biology/Chemistry.
I remember sitting in my Biohem lass listening to my professor (who I now consider a friend) describe Walter and Cricks work, and the infamous LSD trip, and telling us of all the women Radio Crystolgraphers (Lindsay, Broomhead, Franklin) who contributed to the ability to arrive to the double helix structure---he too was a crystolographer and used their work for his research. It also entered my mind how Madam Currie is seen as the discoverer of Radioactive particles, while her husband Pierre who also died, is almost never mentioned.
What I'm saying is that narratives are not drawn on division of sex, but rather a seductive and captivating narrative that help lend authority to a specific origin of something, instead of the messy reality that we really have no idea what most of what or where we've come and that things are oftendiscovered by accident (Phleming with penicillin being the most commonly told). And that having a cohesive and seemingly palatable story told from authoritative voices about 'how things really are' gives us a false sense of confidence that lets us accept things as they are.
Graham put's it incredibly eloquently when he says 'we are a Species with amnesia.'
Also worth noting is that Asia Minor, modern day Turkey, is also where the first traces of agriculture are found, which is a pre-requisite for a division of labour and a surplus of food in order to create this kind of specialization to create such immense monoliths.
Gunung Pedang in Indonesia is another mega monolith site that may be even older than this site which is really intriguing, because it makes more sense given that the Indonesia is mainly comprised of so many Islands but still has one of the largest populations in all of the World.
Im curious how true that is, but there is a trend.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDoM4BmoDQM
Let's be clear it's completely wrong about nearly everything, but it was entertaining and I think would be quite persuasive to a lot of people.
The Turkey archeological digs is the factual underpinning of all these theories, so it goes to show how important it is and how much more of our models we need to clarify.
> "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." ... It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
> no mention of Armenia and/or ancient Armenia
Mmm…kay
For the curious, this is what Armenia used to look like on a map before that whole ‘genocide’ thing: https://www.gampr.org/historicaltimeline
/s, but I wonder what the A/B on a headline like that would be.
To seal it off again
No human remains and intentionally sealed off, take the hint
Civis (citizen) is Latin (civil etc) which is only around 2500 years old give or take a bit. We also have polis (city) related words from old Greek for politician, police polite etc.
We clearly need some words derived from really old Anatolian languages or perhaps there are some already.
>Civis (citizen) is Latin (civil etc) which is only around 2500 years old give or take a bit.
Do we need a new word for yeet? Seems like that might be outdated too!
Maybe they realized that civilization is a miserable slog and they should just go back to hunting and gathering.
OK - not really "literally" unless the nobs have learned to write or have been written/drawn or I've messed my vowels and got litorally confused with literally (litor is shore as in seashore or river bank in Latin). Oh and they are not bloody either unless rubbed too hard. Nob, is of course: en_GB (slang) for an upper class person or a penis.
Back to the article. This archaeological site seems to be extremely important. It seems to show that our ideas of when people started to put down roots ie build stuff and become fixed to a location (Latin - locus) started to happen earlier than we thought it did.
edit: I'm not sure why the downvotes, trying to clarify that this does not add credence to pseudohistorical narratives about long-lost advanced civilizations.