12,000-year-old Göbeklitepe burials explain scattered bones | Hacker News Reader

12,000-year-old Göbeklitepe burials explain scattered bones

archaeologymag.com

170 pointsyusufaytas55 comments

More evidence for David Graeber and David Wengrow's reading of the site.

Between Göbekli Tepe, Poverty Point, Cahokia, and other sites we have pretty good evidence of complex urban societies that did not rely on agriculture. And even in these few sites we have abundant evidence of diversity of social structures from radically egalitarian to hierarchical

The linear narrative of the evolution of human societies is dead

Out of curiosity couldn’t this also mean that we are missing the agriculture? Or that the practices they used were very different from today.

At a large enough scale and a short enough time horizon, you're not going to miss it.

I don't think anyone is saying they FOR SURE didn't cultivate a couple flowers and magic mushrooms.

If they were an agricultural society resembling anything like the ones we see later, there are several things you'd expect to find.

Earliest fossil for homo sapiens is 315000 years old, earliest neanderthal fossils are 430000 years. Keep in mind these are fossils and they need certain conditions to fossilize to begin with.

That's a huge range of time. And the evidence that we can find is very limited. This has nothing to do with what we expect to find when we have so thoroughly documented that humans were exceptionally capable of reusing pretty much anything.

So I don't buy the certainty that there was no agricultural society. We simply cannot know that anywhere past 100k years. We can say there were no globally spread agriculture, because that would have had a much higher chance to leave some evidence, but that isn't the same thing. An agricultural society doesn't have to be global or be dominant to exist.

"The Dawn of Everything"'s interpretation of this is that we only relied on (sedentary) agriculture when we were forced to because of climate change, overpopulation, or threat of violence from other local peoples, so there are several thousand years between evidence of capability and necessity.

I don't think so.

We have a good idea of when and where the crops were domesticated.

10kya on was a time of climate change. It is plausible that they were just so blessed in terms of food that they could waste their time creating new problems for themselves.

> Grg in all his evil has amassed 8000 wild wheat berries but I myself have only gathered 400. Is this fair? How about everyone provides 100 berries to the one that goes to beat him in the head for the common good?

That was more likely a protection racket.

The neolithic revolution also caused a bottleneck in the diversity of the Y chromosomes.

9 out of ten men at the time didn't have the opportunity to reproduce, while the happy fews were highly polygynous.

This can't have happened peacefully.

The population bottleneck was far less dramatic, as it happened over centuries.

When population growth is effectively 0, the size of the male lineage of the average man is approximately 1 in each generation. But random variation means that the male lineages of most men don't survive that many generations.

Now imagine a stratified society, where elite men have more children than commoners and social status is largely hereditary from father to son. The average elite man will have >1 sons surviving into adulthood, while the average commoner will have fewer than one adult son. Repeat that over many generations, and lineages that started from an elite man will likely spread, while lineages starting from a commoner will likely go extinct.

I agree, but I think you too underestimate how random it is. The impact of being "elite" is probably tiny compared to the impact from chance, and at least historically, those in the "elite" genetically speaking weren't the ones at the very top. Kings live risky lives, as do sons of kings. A successful merchant able to provide a trades education to each of his 8 sons, would probably have far more Y-line descendants than a contemporary king.

And in the last couple of hundred years, even that "elite" (middle class) had a huge "disadvantage" in getting Y line descendants: they were early into the demographic transition, when everyone started having far fewer kids. Going from 11 kids to 3 kids 2-3 generations earlier meant that a lot of our elites (in the traditional sense) basically missed the population explosion in the last 150 years!

It's much smarter to ask, "where were they when the population explosion happened" than to prematurely imagine harem slaves.

We have evidence of crop cultivation going back much further than 10kya. I would imagine they just used a different cereal than wheat. The Ohalo II site in Palestine shows cereal cultivation (Barley and Millet) 23kya. While it would certainly be interesting to have evidence of a non-cereal-cultivating metropole, the evidence doesn't quite bear that out.

There was a long period of time that people engaged in _accidental_ agriculture, where they collected seeds and foods to eat and sort of accidentally spread them around along migration pathways, so they probably had "fields" of edible plants around to some extent, but they probably wouldn't show up in the archeology.

> More evidence for David Graeber

What little I know of the disputes around Graeber suggest this is not going to end his isolation in the wider community of archeologists, economists, sociologists.

Well other than being dead, I'm not sure what you mean. Graeber is the anthropologist (and the guy who organized Occupy). Wengrow is the archeologist.

My take on the different fields:

- anthropology: a central figure. Like all central figures, he can be polarizing

- archeology: a big collaborator but has never pretended to be an archeologist

- economics: celebrated by behavioral economists, rejected by neoclassical ones

- sociology: pretty widely celebrated and cited

Do you think any of the fields above will change their opinions on Graeber based on this kind of re-appraisal of the ground at Göbeklitepe? That's my point. What people think about his work is not an even field, it depends on the context and your stance in things like economics.

being dead doesn't alter how people feel about the work of an academic. If you reject their premises, the extent to which new work validates them or not is often moot. Fred Hoyle was isolated in his lifetime and taken "not seriously" as an astronomer by many because he did a lot of science popularisation and because he held outsider-views on things close to panspermia. Subsequent work which suggests his view that a lot of earths water could come from cometary sources hasn't really significantly altered how people feel about him, because it's grounded in him being irascible, hard and complicated. I would suspect the same is true of Graeber. BTW these people are often adored (rightly so!) by their students because they take time to treat them well, talk to them as people, validate them. It's not that they're inherently bad teachers, bad sources it's that they become isolated inside their fields because they take polemical positions, or are off the main path.

He's been dead for years now.

Isolation in the sense of "is not held in high regard in his community" which works dead or alive. I see now that it's more nuanced (from another comment), Graeber was in several communities, and is viewed differently depending on context. Maybe I should have stuck to "is a polarising figure"

>The linear narrative of the evolution of human societies is dead

This is I guess one of the bigger problems with Graeber, like when he was attacking Silicon Valley he demonstrated he had absolutely no idea what he was arguing against.

Likewise, armchair reading of human social development has never appeared to be linear to me. Palace Economy > Crash > Temple Economy > Crash seems pretty damn standard. I was watching an old documentary on the socioeconomic development of Egypt and it looks like they discovered and rediscovered several important social and economic reforms, that were then lost and rediscovered by themselves and other societies over and over again.

The question is, was Graeber an idiot and just didn't know what he was talking about or was Graeber just another grifter like Hancock who relies on misrepresenting other peoples arguments for financial gain.

"linear" here means that the usual narrative is

hunter-gatherers → agriculture → permanent settlements → cities → states → civilization

the usual reasoning is

agriculture → surplus → settlement → religion/monumental architecture

it's not at all about civilizations and/or empires collapsing and being reborn in different shapes or social and economic reforms being rediscovered, that already implies some highly sofisticated form of society, while places like Göbekli Tepe predates the pyramids by 5.000 years

Again I don't see the comparison being made?

Like we known hunter gatherers had social hierarchy, settlements and crafts.

https://www.heritagedaily.com/2023/01/preserved-10500-year-o...

“These aren’t people that were struggling to survive. They were people confident in their understanding of this landscape, and of the behaviours and habitats of different animal species that lived there,” added Gray.

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020ArchP..27..329T/abstra...

"Their social organization was complex and can even be compared with that of the Levantine Early Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) farming society."

It seems like Graeber was fighting a strawman?

The book is Wengrow and Graeber. Your references post date their work - Graeber has been dead for years. Much of the material under discussion is in this 2015 essay.[^1] In fact of course settled hunter gatherers, so to call them, have been known for decades, e.g. Jomon Japan; this isn't the issue anywhere.

Some of the spectacular phenomena and constructions they attempt to explain depend on non-settlement for much of the year. But in temperate regions even in the eurasian ice age we find seasonal congregation of huge populations in conditions of temporary abundance e.g. salmon runs, seasonal migration of game through narrow alpine chasms, etc. A leading motif is that in these congregations surprising phenomena can emerge e.g. insane stone works, temporary political structure, etc. Thus also the discussion of ice-age burials like that in Sunghir Russia 30,000 years ago a couple boys buried with "10,000 hand-carved mammoth ivory beads, fox teeth pendants, and finely crafted mammoth ivory spears"

[^1]: https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/62756/1/__lse.ac.uk_storage_LIBRAR...

>Graeber has been dead for years.

Yeah I have been trying to "was" him as much as possible.

>Your references post date their work

Yep but theres no conspiracy to hide these facts that only the brave Graeber can explain through the medium of book sales.

>Jomon Japan

Yeah I am faintly remembering something about their giant burial cairns or something.

I don’t disagree with your overall point but I’m confused what the evidence is in this case, could you explain?

The story of that place has changed so much. Almost everything that was claimed first is now 180° different. Such is progress, but maybe they shouldn't tell so many stories when they have incomplete data.

Some people were quick to jump on the gun and call it a human sacrifice site, I’m glad that they’re all proven wrong now.

The phrase is "jump the gun" or "jumped the gun" as in a fault start in a race started with a gun.

The phrase is “false start.”

"False start" refers specifically to races, or an effort that was not sincere or well thought out. "My jumping the gun" is also a race term, but also means coming to an incorrect conclusion based on insufficient evidence (when it's insufficiency is apparent).

I always thought that 'ceremonial room' looked more like a sauna than a sacrificial pit. It reminded me of the Roman ruins at Bath more than anything else.

"I’m glad that they’re all proven wrong now."

Where exactly did you see that proof?

"The new study points to a different process for much of the assemblage." "The match offers an explanation for why the fragments appear so widely scattered."

This is the language in use here. We are talking about bones that were buried 12 000 years ago, got chewed partially by rodents, crushed by earth pressure and moved around with the soil. So no indication that there was human sacrifice, but also no definite proof otherwise.

Was subfloor burial common in Neolithic?

Estimating "common" is quite difficult, but given that there are pre-colonial aboriginal australian burial sites, we can estimate that it either can be traced to Africa or is sufficiently common to not be surprising. There is even evidence (not proof) of neanderthal burial rituals, fwiw.

I suspect it has to do with our advanced capacity for emotion. The death of a loved one is so difficult to bear, having their body sitting out in the open in a rotting state would be horrific. Burying serves the dual purpose of hiding their decomposition and keeping them close to the community.

I think it's likely associated with desert cultures since vegetation nucleates around burial sites due to access to organic material.

Fun fact: forensic teams locate buried bodies by looking for vegetation that grows above them. There's a lot of fertilizer there.

Also, disposing of corpses means less diseases around. It's possible that communities that carelessly left the dead around unwittingly opted out of the genetic pool.

Unless you're going to eat your loved (or hated) one you need to get rid of the body before it starts rotting, for health reasons.

Burial is the standard way for very good practical reasons. Having somewhere to put a flower is also nice.

> Burial is the standard way

(Assuming you mean the obvious and immediate semantics of digging a hole and placing the corpse within it...)

It may be now, but there are many ways to provide corpse disposal without risking health. Sky and tree burials are clear evidence of other corpse disposal methods. I imagine cremation is pretty obvious to humans too.

Some people even exhume the bodies and perform rituals with it. I find this nauseous but it wouldn't be a thing if societies were being eliminated from its effects.

You're of course right, but note that I said "standard", not "only".

What the "alternate" methods all have in common is they don't leave a rotting corpse around. I imagine populations who did this did not tend to survive :)

I looked it up, and sky burial is/was done in places like Tibet, where the ground is either rock or frozen, so you often physically can't dig a grave.

Seems like you'd quickly run out of floor and/or end up with a lot of bodies in one place. And are you chipping up your plaster floor every time someone dies? I'm pretty skeptical that this makes sense as a practice. Seems far more likely that a building was built over a forgotten grave.

We know of many, many cultures that have buried remains under house floors as ritual practice. Sometimes our "common sense" isn't a reliable guide to distant cultures.

Including many Christian churches. Though there it is limited to people of particular importance to the church, faith or public community because of the practical concerns mentioned above. A lot of churches are many centuries old, and having a couple bodies buried under the floor over that time seems not that uncommon (at least in Europe)

We don't bury everyone under churches, however as we would quickly run out of room.

The floor of most houses for most of history was made of dirt.

Currently, while not a majority of cultures buried people under their homes, it was common enough.

Çatalhöyük

Non-royal Sumer and Babylon

Poorer Mayans (from what can be found, there's much of the ancient Maya unexplored)

The LoWiili culture and some other West African cultures

The Tikopia until the arrival of Christianity

Some neolithic sites in Europe, but not believed to have been too common there

Also in Neolithic Yellow River it was pretty common to bury infants in jars/pots underneath the floor from what I remember.

It's not really clear to me what's so (figuratively) groundbreaking about this, especially given that Catalhuyuk already shows similar care for the dead not much later.

Always assumed those scattered bones were just, well, scattered. It's cool how a new understanding of burial practices provides such a neat explanation.

That's a much less romantic explanation than the skull cult stuff

The point of naming it a "skull cult" is really just pointing out people found human remains to be important—something largely true today too, and hardly more romantic than our own understanding of burial.

We tried penis cult but there were complaints

I think this is just roman society lol

Phallic symbolism was common in many religions. The Abrahamic religions are kind of unusual for their hangups in that regard.

I can’t tell if this scientific article summary is bad AI writing or bad human writing.

the scattered bones being explained by erosion is more interesting than assuming they all came from an unusual burial ritual.

i also like the distinction between ordinary burials and the cases of deliberate skull treatment. it shows how complicated the burial practices at Göbeklitepe may have been.

And how is this going to help a team of crack scientists at The Smithsonian solve a modern day murder while also navigating the difficulties of having an intimate social life as a professional in DC?

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