[HN Gopher] Ancient civilisation under eastern Turkey estimated ...
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Ancient civilisation under eastern Turkey estimated to be 11k-13k
years old
Author : benbreen
Score : 166 points
Date : 2022-05-20 21:01 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.spectator.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.spectator.co.uk)
| h2odragon wrote:
| The excessively phallic architecture was buried with great
| prejudice, apparently. making it the first known triumph of
| matriarchal justice and an example for the modern feminist
| movement, surely?
|
| /s, but I wonder what the A/B on a headline like that would be.
| [deleted]
| TeeMassive wrote:
| DrBenCarson wrote:
| > extensive article about 'ancient eastern Turkey'
|
| > 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
| [deleted]
| thriftwy wrote:
| Every nation has such a map and we probably need three earths
| to satisfy all of these.
| hrdwdmrbl wrote:
| There's an old saying about online headlines: If the headline
| asks a question, the answer is always no. If the answer were yes,
| the headline would say so.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| not all questions have binary answers
| ergonaught wrote:
| And yet the answer is yes.
| runesofdoom wrote:
| Only if we count 35 years of archeology at Gobekli Tepe as
| 'unknown'.
|
| I find this particular set of archeological investigations to
| be amazing, and I'm glad to see larger awareness of them. But
| I think there's a good argument that Betteridge's law of
| headlines still applies.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge_law_of_headlines
| SemanticStrengh wrote:
| A 2016 study of a sample of academic journals that set out to
| test Betteridge's law and Hinchliffe's rule (see below) found
| that few titles were posed as questions and of those, few were
| yes/no questions and they were more often answered "yes" in the
| body of the article rather than "no".[12]
| ksaj wrote:
| This is similar to:
|
| - Look before you leap - He who hesitates is lost
|
| Studies and adages aren't all that different, it seems.
| ksaj wrote:
| This time, the answer seems to be yes. It's really quite
| impressive if these were created by hunter-gatherers before the
| invention of written language.
| capableweb wrote:
| Betteridge's law of headlines:
|
| > "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...
| notacoward wrote:
| Betteridge's Law from 2009, arguably repeating offline
| antecedents all the way back to 1991. If that seems old, maybe
| archaeology isn't for you.
| jscipione wrote:
| -1 on this article and its abundant phallic references. +1 on
| Gobekli Tepe being evidence of a pre-literate advanced
| civilization.
| mysecretaccount wrote:
| As far as civilizations go, Gobekli Tepe is not really
| "advanced".
|
| 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.
| pjscott wrote:
| That really depends on what you mean by "advanced". It's
| evidence of a larger, more organized, more hierarchical
| civilization than archaeologists had expected to see anywhere
| near its time period. This is either evidence that they had
| agriculture way back then _or_ that these things that we
| normally associate with sedentary agricultural civilization
| are separable from it. Either one is surprising!
| Barrera wrote:
| A lot hinges on the dating of this site. How was it done?
|
| 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...
| hrkucuk wrote:
| This was apparently a brothel of some sort that's why nobody is
| buried there for gods sake
| [deleted]
| maegul wrote:
| I'm not sure I've seen such superficial commentary here (it feels
| more like Reddit frankly) for such a popular thread.
|
| Not really a criticism (ok maybe a little), but perhaps more of
| an indication that these discoveries are truly novel and
| baffling.
| [deleted]
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| This is fairly typical for HN links that touch on ancient
| archaeology, especially anything tangentially related to
| popular alt-history figures like Graham Hancock. However,
| metadiscussion about the quality of other comments feels like
| it goes against a few of the rules. It's better to explain the
| issues directly in replies.
| SemanticStrengh wrote:
| [deleted]
| vmception wrote:
| Return the slab
|
| To seal it off again
|
| No human remains and intentionally sealed off, take the hint
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| Why do you say this, are you implying there is some danger?
| jonny_eh wrote:
| They're making a joke.
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| What's the joke, is it an allusion?
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Every movie where they open something they shouldn't and
| something dangerous escapes. The most popular being when
| the Nazis open the ark of the covenant and their faces
| melt (apologies for the spoilers).
| tpmx wrote:
| Somehow uncovering very old novel virus strains
| compatible with humans was my first thought.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jonylaw wrote:
| klyrs wrote:
| It's a coverup!
| [deleted]
| robonerd wrote:
| I eagerly await the admission from mainstream historians that all
| these tons of rock were not carved by semi-nomadic hunter
| gatherers. The scope of the stonework is evidence of agriculture;
| it's obnoxiously obvious yet still fringe to say it.
| throwyawayyyy wrote:
| Graeber spends a lot of time arguing against exactly this
| assumption in The Dawn of Everything. I.e. that agriculture
| must come before civilization. Pretty persuasively, IMHO.
| gobengo wrote:
| 'eastern Turkey' aka Armenia
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide
| hereforphone wrote:
| Nice try
| [deleted]
| alephxyz wrote:
| It's actually in southeastern Anatolia, not a region with a
| historical Armenian presence
| gobengo wrote:
| maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Armenia_(antiq
| uity)...
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Urartu is a little north of here
| 5cott0 wrote:
| Highly recommend THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING
|
| https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeveryt...
| tombh wrote:
| Me too. It's essentially a polemic of the common idea that
| modernity "fell" from Eden, or more conventionally, "fell" from
| Rousseau's State of Nature.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| gerdesj wrote:
| We need an older word than civilisation in English.
|
| 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.
| Tagbert wrote:
| "Civilization" Congress from an Indo-European root "kei"
| meaning "to lie" as on a surface. That takes it back about
| 4-5000 years. That PIE root certainly had an older ancestral
| word. Since PIE is from just north of Anatolia it is possible
| that PIE is descended from a language of Gobekli Tepe.
| Bjartr wrote:
| Why is the age of the word or its roots significant here?
| imbnwa wrote:
| Take a swing at it, but I wager the idea is that the Latin
| and Greek words presume a state of human community that
| doesn't exhaust these even older configurations, premised as
| they are on erected physical barriers between inside and
| outside, state and nature, whereas a hunter-gather group
| building something like Tepe defies this difference.
|
| Aristotle asserted that human communities form no less
| naturally than a hive of bees or an ant mound (something
| Spinoza will echo thousands of years later), in contrast to
| say Hobbesian theory of community, but he jumped right to the
| configuration of the city straight from there when we have
| glimpses of stranger possibilities that arose before, and
| labeled all other configurations defective.
| bobkazamakis wrote:
| >We need an older word than civilisation in English.
|
| >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!
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| So the Proto Indo Europeans have finally been found.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Could be the proto-Vainakh/Chechens for all we know
| danans wrote:
| What makes you think the site is Indo-European? There's no
| obvious link mentioned in the article, and the site predates
| earliest known Indo-European migrations by 4000 years.
| [deleted]
| smoothsnake5 wrote:
| Mo3 wrote:
| Some day, they'll find us too.
| jonylaw wrote:
| travis_brooks wrote:
| Right, the future archeologists will find some old parking
| meters and assume the primitive ancients had some sort of steel
| penis cult.
| lovemenot wrote:
| >> I am staring at about a dozen, stiff, eight-foot high, orange-
| red penises, carved from living bedrock, and semi-enclosed in an
| open chamber. A strange carved head (of a man, a demon, a priest,
| a God?), also hewn from the living rock, gazes at the phallic
| totems - like a primitivist gargoyle.
|
| [x] Earliest known example
|
| [x] Giant penises
|
| Second Life will one day become a digital archeologist's
| incredible discovery
| [deleted]
| jonny_eh wrote:
| I skimmed the article but didn't see how they determined its age.
| its_ethan wrote:
| I was looking for this too -- 11,000 years is sort of the
| benchmark for earliest civilization, so having that be the
| bounding side for how "young" this place could be struck me as
| some equivalent to click bait?
|
| 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..
| aksss wrote:
| But I think the question is radiocarbon dating of what..??
| Saying they dated a lithic archeological site with
| radiocarbon measurements doesn't tell us anymore than they
| measured something with a given method. What was the
| something??
|
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| Radiocarbon dating:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobekli_Tepe#Chronology
| aksss wrote:
| From Gobekli Tepe, but probably similar:
|
| "At the end of its uselife, the megalithic enclosures of
| Gobekli 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...
| mftb wrote:
| Glad to see work continuing in this area. I've been keeping an
| eye out, since first reading about Gobekli Tepe (related site
| nearby) several years ago. If they're truly as old as purported,
| that's interesting.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Is there any serious scientific source for this story? A report
| in a journal?
| ThalesX wrote:
| > But I do definitely know this: some time in 8000 BC the
| creators of Gobekli Tepe buried their great structures under tons
| of rubble. They entombed it. We can speculate why. Did they feel
| guilt? Did they need to propitiate an angry God? Or just want to
| hide it?' Klaus was also fairly sure on one other thing. 'Gobekli
| Tepe is unique.'
|
| 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.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| It's worth noting that Karahan Tepe, Gobekli Tepe, and most of
| the other PPN-A/B sites in Southern Anatolia are on top of
| hills and mountains at fairly high elevations. They're not
| really candidates for any sort of flood event.
|
| As for the poetic feel, the term of art is a 'just-so story'.
| ThalesX wrote:
| Just for wonder's sake. Do you think it could be possible for
| a system of underground waterways to basically be pushed
| uphill by a natural dam breaking and the pressure of the
| Mediterranean sea forcing the water to sort of gush uphill?
|
| 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."
| pvg wrote:
| _I think it 'd be rather hard for a hunter gatherer society to
| realistically cover such a large area under tons of rubble_
|
| 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.
| aksss wrote:
| > it'd be rather hard for a hunter gatherer society to
| realistically cover such a large area under tons of rubble
|
| 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?
| ThalesX wrote:
| > We should be careful about underestimating the capabilities
| of predecessor cultures
|
| 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.
| user3939382 wrote:
| In response to which Graham Hancock slowly sits back in his chair
| and breathes a sigh of victorious relief.
| [deleted]
| poundtown wrote:
| is this the same thing graham hancock(Gobekli Tepe) has been
| going on about for sometime or is this different?
| pvg wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karahan_Tepe
|
| It's nearby but it's a different site
| haspoken wrote:
| https://archive.ph/ER5d9
| tsunamifury wrote:
| There have been a few articles written about Turkey attempting to
| derive its current power legitimacy narrative by creating this
| story of an ancient civilization being founded within their
| borders. They have pointed out that this is a common trend among
| dictators that often stretched credulity to the limit (Sadam and
| Babylon, Mogabe and ancient southern Egypt, Mussolini and the
| Roman Empire etc) and many attempt to build up their propaganda
| with such connections.
|
| Im curious how true that is, but there is a trend.
| hereforphone wrote:
| Those borders didn't exist at the time the "ancient
| civilization" was constructed. So what's the point?
| DrBenCarson wrote:
| It inspires nationalism which enables dictators
| hereforphone wrote:
| Erdogan is a dictator propped up on Islamic sentiment and
| tradition. He is not a nationalist.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| And Zimbabwe was no where near the Egyptian Southern Kingdom,
| and Mussolini came ~1800 years after the height of the Roman
| Empire. There is no point other than attempting to create a
| narrative of ancient power & nationalism and aligning it with
| yourself. Propaganda doesn't operate with logic.
| nyolfen wrote:
| the 'point' is being able to say that turkey is the world-
| historical nexus of civilization, with the earliest urban
| civilization, which feeds nationalist narratives. every
| country likes to think they're special.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Another archeological propaganda technique is to omit from the
| history the people you don't like and/or who you don't want to
| have any claim to the territory. Without naming names, one
| country likes to skip back thousands of years.
| jonylaw wrote:
| pvg wrote:
| What are some such articles?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
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