I totally agree that the tepes challenge our timeline of when humans made cities and whatnot, but so much of their arguments is the perfect fit of stones or how flat stones are and saying it _must_ be done by modern tools.
I think they have left out how much you can get done from a construction standpoint when you have forced labor or no labor rules like we have had for some time now all over the world and especially in the West.
When I was first in Delhi and went to the Red Fort, I was shocked when they said they built the whole thing 100s of years ago in 9 years. Think about how long it would take us to build something like this now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Fort
So, I really want the ancient atlantis civ in the Sahara to be true, but the guy's I've seen promoting this are too removed from the scientific method to really be taken seriously.
This guy does some good debunking of a lot of the Netflix/Youtube Alt Archaeology people -- https://www.youtube.com/@miniminuteman773
Do they? We know non-sedentary people in the Americas sometimes built large mounds and extensive fish works.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Archaeology/comments/kxquwx/is_gobl...
I imagine a culture that realized the land couldn’t support them in concentrations, picked a spot to meet every spring equinox to party and maybe make romantic matches and then dissolved back into the surrounding countryside.
Maybe this was their Burning Man.
Essentially someone had to figure out the civilized part of civilization and the density part of civilization. It’s a chicken and egg problem, and who is to say they did at the same time?
As GP mentioned, there were somewhat similar arrangements in North America not so long after this time period.
Links?
The one that got me was a supposed foundation legend from Sumer that a handful of strangers came and taught them civilization.
The idea of a remnant people floating down a river to escape some sort of societal collapse and then being adopted into a new tribe for their usefulness has a certain something as a hypothesis goes. It’s the “strangers” part that’s a bit suspect since how would you not meet neighbors like that. Unless the river was the end of their journey and not the start.
But what is your own opinion?
The one that got me was a supposed foundation legend from Sumer that a handful of strangers came and taught them civilization.
Sumerians essentially saw themselves as the first civilization. When they reference a prior civilization, what they're referring to is literally the gods themselves because being civilized is very literally the spark of divinity inside humans that separates us from animals. It's the gods who taught humans to be civilized, sending their representatives the seven apkallu (basically everything related to the heavens comes in sevens) to raise humanity from the among the beasts to serve the gods, as we were designed to do when the gods imbued us with their blood. This is referenced again in the epic of Gilgamesh when enkidu is made like a god by a prostitute who teaches him how to be civilized. Other near Eastern religious traditions carried this on as well. You're probably familiar with Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, when they eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and become like gods themselves, i.e. are raised from among the animals and are cast out from the garden where the animals reside. This all gets a bit mixed up with the Sumerians having a bunch of ancestor cults going on as various human god-kings tie themselves to powerful lineages and so the gods/apkallu are seen as the ancestors of humanity.
I assume it was a limited number of people how knew how to make things and they kept roaming around setting new sites etc. Similar to bridge engineers etc. most of what they make just disappears in the background but they keep building things that makes our modern life possible.
If we weren’t too worried about things falling down and killing people, or about damaging peoples conception of the vibes in a city, we could have the kinds of developer/architect/engineer/foreman outfits that used to build this kind of thing.
It just wasn't a good design.
We have a lot more infrastructure around now, so much that we don't even see the wonders that tame the nature and make it comfortable for us.
Like, "why are more people not building impractical fire hazards? It must be because people these days are incompetent" is a pretty weird take.
I saw a video where as a stunt a residential construction crew went from a vacant lot to a complete single-family house ready to occupy in less than two days. And that wasn't a prefab house, it was a regular wooden frame suburban house built using all the usual construction methods. They did it by staging all the materials right there and having all of the carpenters, roofers, painters, electricians, plumbers, etc standing around ready to jump in as soon as they were needed. Granted that was a small project, but the point is that with a sense of urgency construction can proceed quickly, and it doesn't require sacrificing worker safety.
People will always find a way to get their dopamine, be it video games, reading, watching stuff, etc.
Don’t pick out a single thing and make it the boogey man.
definitely sedentary neolithic people had forced labor. all the Sumerian legal texts that were some of the first writings ever included legal definitions of slaves, for example. but the pre-neolithic Anatolian people were nomadic animistic people with no social hierarchy.
Also hierarchy doesn't mean that there is a single individual that's at the top. There could be a series of caste hierarchies, where groups of people were considered "better" than others.
We don't know if everyone from the tribe was in the common grave or a select group of people.
You're building a narrative based on your knowledge of other civilizations histories and understanding of modern day social structures, and assuming those traits must apply to this civilization. The truth is, we don't, and likely won't ever, know how their social hierarchy was built. Anything said is speculation. This isn't the case where you can be 80% confident something is true, more like 2% confident based on the discovered evidence.
If that's an accepted idea in the field, hopefully it comes with a lot more evidence than bones being mixed, as future archaeologists might find in many of our cemeteries of today.
The above comment also illustrates their biases. They map their knowledge to history that came much later to the Tepe sites. Stating that it was "was likely only the craftsmen or shamans" is a prime example of that.
To know that, we'd have to identify the bones of an important leader in a mass burial site.
We don't know that.
There is even a small amount of hierarchy at our 15 person Thanksgiving family dinner.
The truth is, we don't have much but speculation and narrative about the people of Gobekle Tepe, and even assumptions about them being hunter gatherers at all are based on centuries of bias and assumptions, with a whole lot of cultural chauvinism and religious nuttery baked in for good measure.
We're going to have to start analyzing humans more skeptically and rationally, as opposed to taking most of the modern historical narratives as gospel.
Modern humans have existed genetically for 300k+ years. At one point about a million years ago, the Early Pleistocene bottleneck had the population of human ancestors under 2000 individuals. 700k years later, the first modern humans were born, and the first situations in which we had the opportunity to establish culture.
We know from the great north american megafauna die off, climate records, and archaelogical evidence that something happened around 13k years ago to basically reset whatever human civilization there was. It took around 3000 years before the "neolithic revolution" , cultures demonstrating mastery of stone tools, pottery, more sedentary lifestyles, specialization, and so forth. It took another 4,000 years to reach the point where we had started creating written records again, started creating monuments and technology sufficiently durable to last to modern days, and then so on and so forth, with relatively uninterrupted and steady progress to the present day, each culture and age building upon the previous.
I think it's silly to think that it's only in this last 12-13,000 year period that we reached any of the cultural and technological milestones, and that every culture previous to that must have been hunter gatherer, because hunter gatherer are the default "feral human" prototype culture.
We bred dogs from wolves successfully around 45k years ago. That would have taken a generation or two in a nomadic context, or one really spectacular single lifetime for a sedentary person. Even so, you think that for the 250k years prior to that, not a single culture developed writing, wheels, pumps, discovered metal forming, or other technologies?
The human population was scarce, and because of that scarcity, the majority stayed in the absolute best, premium locations - beachfront. A vast proportion of settlements would now be well off the coast, and we have indeed discovered artifacts and evidence of such in various places where researchers have looked.
I'd be willing to bet good money that over the last 300k years there are many 10,000 year cycles and catastrophes where civilizations have risen and fallen, many achieving high levels of technology, perhaps even discovering electricity, advanced chemistry, medicine, and so on, but due to catastrophes, small populations, they got reset back to baseline. I'd bet that it didn't happen 30 times, as often as possible during the course of events, but I'll also make the claim that our current peak of civilization isn't the only good run that human race has ever made.
We are probably the only ones that made it to mass production, definitely the only ones that succeeded in scaling up resource extraction to the levels we saw back in the 1800s. I think there are probably caches of artifacts, evidence left out offshore that technology will make visible to us, that will show a much richer tapestry of events and cultures and history than the somewhat limited and biased narrative that modern historians have put forth as definitive.
and even assumptions about them being hunter gatherers at all are based on centuries of bias and assumptions, with a whole lot of cultural chauvinism and religious nuttery baked in for good measure.
Archaeologists are much better about recognizing the complexity of forager lifeways than they were 50 years ago.
It is absurd to claim "hunter-gatherers were fairly egalitarian" and "had no hierarchy." We know that tribes in north west of the Americas, pre European contact, did not practice agriculture and had slaves. What evidence exists counter to this that supports your view? I assert it is literally impossible to make your assertion. Just because burial perhaps didn't differentiate or demonstrate a hierarchy, that doesn't support that the living didn't.
sedentary life and agriculture developed in the Americas around the same time it developed everywhere else in the world outside of the Near East (3000 BC). and this roughly correlates to the beginning of the Meghalayan geological age that continues today - which is when the ~10,000 year old original civilizations collapsed and Neolithic cultures became ubiquitous around the world and not just in Mesopotamia and the Yangtze river
While "sedentary life and agriculture developed in the Americas around the same time it developed everywhere else in the world," it was not the case for the coastal Salish and other tribes who lived on the resource abundant Pacific Northwest.
Citation required.
It's time to kill the "slaves built the pyramids" myth. "Aliens built the pyramids" has exactly the same amount of evidence.
Unless you're referring to wage-slaves, who definitely were the middle-management of the crews. We've found graves of Jewish construction bosses.
funnily enough, the lack of neolithic culture, social hierarchy, or permanent sedentary lifestyle (all hallmarks of "civilization") and all archeological evidence suggests they were much healthier and more peaceful than neolithic humans. that's why people link "Garden of Eden" mythology originating in ancient Sumeria to the ancient peoples' observation that people became "civilized" but at what cost since it made humans less healthy, more violent, and presumably less happy due to the novel concept of social inequality
There seems to be an issue with how archeology is taught at schools, where these conclusions are stated as facts, or theories with a high amount of proof, when in reality, they have very little evidence supporting them.
If you mean to say and advanced civilization, then no this isn't really upsetting any orthodoxy.
You would have thought that in a world with curious billionaires someone would pay for a ROV submersible to explore that, I certainly would if I were one.
Before the last glacial period == 100,000 year ago. This is 12,000 years ago. If we assume (big big assumption here) that there's only really a single unbroken line of civilization, and also assume (big big assumption) roughly exponential growth till now, then no, 100kya would be too long ago.
But those two assumptions are not really safe to make. It's just that we _can't_ know yet.
I suspect that the Sphinx water erosion thing is real and correct, and the Sphinx much older than ancient Egypt.