[HN Gopher] Ancient civilisation under eastern Turkey estimated ...
___________________________________________________________________
Ancient civilisation under eastern Turkey estimated to be 11k-13k
years old
Author : benbreen
Score : 654 points
Date : 2022-05-20 21:01 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.spectator.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.spectator.co.uk)
| yesenadam wrote:
| Related: I recently watched the amazing Turkish Netflix series
| _Atiye_ (2019-21), in which Gobekli Tepe features centrally. The
| main character, Atiye, is a painter who 's painted the same
| symbol all her life, and one day sees it in a news story about
| Gobekli Tepe, and feels compelled to travel there immediately.
| The epic story involves time travel, alternate realities,
| spirituality/mythology, archaeologists, academics, history,
| family, love etc. Also you get to see a lot of the Turkish
| countryside. I and the SO thought it really wonderful, highly
| recommended. (Warning: Season 3 is a kind of new story and loses
| the addictive watchableness of the first 2, but is not terrible.)
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10075318/
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gift_(Turkish_TV_series)
|
| p.s. _Bir Baskadir_ (aka _Ethos_ , 2020-) and _Fatma_ (2021-) are
| another two excellent Turkish Netflix series.
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11301642/
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11961378/
| wdutch wrote:
| Tangentially, I wasn't aware of Turkey as an exporter of TV
| until I recently traveled in Cambodia and everyone I spoke to
| went on about the Turkish dramas they were watching. Thanks for
| the recommendation! this sounds like a good starting point for
| me to get into Turkish shows.
| yamrzou wrote:
| I second Bir Baskadir (Ethos). Deep and moving. One of my all
| time favorite series.
| Thorentis wrote:
| Sounds like something copied from Battlestar Gallactica. One of
| the characters paints the same symbol her whole life and
| eventually discovers it means something significant for her and
| all of humanity.
| [deleted]
| onion2k wrote:
| Which in turn sounds a bit like the Star Trek:TNG episode
| "The Chase" where a symbol seen all over the universe brings
| four alien species together to find a message from an ancient
| race they all descended from.
| ido wrote:
| The original BG is older than TNG, not sure if that story
| came from the original or the remake though.
| anon_123g987 wrote:
| Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) has a similar
| element: several people obsessing over a mountain-like
| shape, they paint it, sculpt it, etc, and want to travel
| there. Later it turns out to be the place where the UFOs
| arrive.
| mulderc wrote:
| That plot point was the remake.
| adastra22 wrote:
| This sounds right up my alley, thanks!
| bsnnkv wrote:
| I'm going to check this out based on your recommendation!
| devilbunny wrote:
| Thank you for the recommendations.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| Season three always is so disappointing. Barry's doing what
| now??
| atmosx wrote:
| I enjoy ethos greatly. I saw Atiye as well. Enjoyed both, but
| ethos to me was a eye opening and pretty deep. I knew about
| Kemalists (seculars) vs Muslims (supported by Erdogan) and was
| kinda fascinated by the division and how different is from
| Greek division (left vs right) but also by similarities.
| eruditely wrote:
| Can you point me to where you find that the left/right
| division comes from Greece?
| atmosx wrote:
| There is a Greek paper around this topic which I came
| across long time trying to answer this very question: https
| ://www.academia.edu/2582910/%CE%91%CF%81%CE%B9%CF%83%CF...
| mrtksn wrote:
| In Ethos, the seculars are a caricature of what is known as
| "White Turks", i.e. the well educated middle class Turks with
| Western values who live in affluent neighbourhoods. Many
| people felt offended by it because it's also a political
| message from the conservatives about the "elites" being
| disconnected from the rest of the population. There was a
| culture and class war and the conservatives won, only to
| reduce their conservative values to clothing and alcohol,
| becoming the new "White Turks" who are detached from the rest
| of the society.
|
| 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!
| mda wrote:
| Funny, because when I watched Ethos I thought the people
| with conservative background were portrayed as a caricature
| of reality.
| 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:
| 01acheru wrote:
| Gobekli Tepe and others in it's surroundings are surely a great
| archeological discovery that brings the date of what we call
| civilization back some thousand years. Anyway let's not forget
| that Jericho is 11k years old or even older and probably there
| are many many other ancient cities buried deep under the
| thousands of tells in the Near East.
|
| (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...
| moistly wrote:
| Archaeological sites have been found off the shore of British
| Columbia.
|
| 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...
| Razengan wrote:
| That would tie in nicely with the myth of Atlantis. :)
| simonh wrote:
| We do tend to build near sources of water, but rivers and lakes
| have always been popular. I see no reason to believe they would
| have been less popular back then than at later periods.
|
| 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.
| 01acheru wrote:
| If we keep digging tells (or other areas of interest) we will
| find one of those lucky cities you are referring to, I really
| hope to witness this one day :)
|
| 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.
| sfifs wrote:
| So yeah one hypothesis is there was an advanced pre-historic
| culture that's now buried under the Persian Gulf and the fairly
| rapid filling of the Persian Gulf dislocated and drove
| dissemination of culture and common mythological elements we
| see in many cultures today in all directions.
|
| https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/657397?seq=1
| [deleted]
| davedx wrote:
| Yeah, the sea level rise thing is one explanation for why
| Sumerian is a language isolate. This YouTube series is a great
| deep dive into it all:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2lJUOv0hLA&t=959s
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Ephesus, an ancient city in Western Turkey, was a coastal city.
| Now it is 6 km inland.
| x3iv130f wrote:
| Ephesus was founded after this rise in sea level.
|
| 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.
| 01acheru wrote:
| Ephesus is far more recent, anyway it is now inland because
| of river silting. The sea didn't went nor up nor down, it was
| pushed further away over the centuries.
| jl6 wrote:
| I believe fishermen in the North Sea occasionally drag up
| artifacts from the sea bed that was the former Doggerland.
| jl6 wrote:
| What gets me about prehistory is that even before _civilization_
| (the development of permanent settlements), humans existed in
| anatomically modern form, and even if they never wrote anything
| down, would surely still have used language. What did they talk
| about? We know that illiterate people today are perfectly capable
| of forming complex thoughts and reasoning. When did those
| thoughts first emerge? Somebody must have been the first to look
| up and the stars and wonder. They could have done more than just
| wonder. There could have been geniuses and villains and poets and
| master storytellers, long before they had any capability to
| preserve their culture through writing. And this was probably
| tens or even hundreds of thousands of years before the earliest
| stone remains that we call civilization.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Here are some conversational talking points:
|
| "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."
| kqr wrote:
| The prevalence of human sacrifice throughout history baffles
| me. I know it's just my cultural heritage to see humans as
| unique individuals with brains full of original ideas, but it
| still shocks me every time I hear it that someone would
| willingly, without being threatened, extinguish a human life.
| staticman2 wrote:
| They might have believed in the afterlife, so from their
| point of view they weren't really extinguishing anything,
| just converting it from flesh to spirit.
| kqr wrote:
| There are two reasons I doubt this:
|
| (a) is such a belief really compatible with what we think
| is the selective force of evolution, i.e. stay alive long
| enough to make sure your children have children? In other
| words, is this something people truly feel when it comes
| down to it, or is it just a story they tell each other in
| low-stakes situations? and
|
| (b) even if I believed in this, that's orthogonal to my
| belief that every human has a valuable role to play in
| this, current-life society!
| ellopoppit wrote:
| >i.e. stay alive long enough to make sure your children
| have children? In other words, is this something people
| truly feel when it comes down to it
|
| The Aztecs sacrificed an estimated tens of thousands of
| people a year, because they believed it would postpone
| the next apocalypse in which everyone would die
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| It would be mind blowing to watch and many were watching.
| Big theoretical benefits for social cohesion for culturally
| disparate people. Whole is greater than the parts.
| gammabetadelta wrote:
| we aint nothing but mammals
|
| incentives drives us
|
| overpopulation was controlled by sacrifice and infanticide
| kqr wrote:
| I don't buy this whole "overpopulation" thing people keep
| talking about in more or less appropriate concepts.
|
| Through virtually all of history, there's a strong
| correlation between "more people" and "better living
| conditions".
|
| We are a social species. We're practically made to
| effectively make use of as many of us as possible to
| preserve ourselves.
| relaxing wrote:
| Broadly true, but shorter periods of food deficit leading
| to decline in population are still possible.
|
| The last agricultural famine in England was only in the
| 17th century.
| pid-1 wrote:
| > Through virtually all of history, there's a strong
| correlation between "more people" and "better living
| conditions".
|
| That's survivorship bias. Populations always try to grow,
| not to shrink. However, growth will only occur when
| possible (due new technologies or more resources being
| available).
| towaway15463 wrote:
| You've just never lived through a famine.
| medstrom wrote:
| More effort into your posts with less dramatic world-
| view, please.
| Balgair wrote:
| > If there was such a cult in the Tas Tepeler it might
| explain the graven vultures pictured 'playing' with human
| heads.
|
| 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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial
| towaway15463 wrote:
| Maybe the complex was buried after its builders were finally
| defeated by the peoples they had subjected to ritual
| sacrifice and cannibalism.
| philipov wrote:
| Civilization is usually defined as more than just the
| development of permanent settlements. Permanent settlements
| existed in the fertile crescent during the neolithic for
| thousands of years before civilizations emerged in that region
| during the early bronze age.
|
| 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.
| dieselgate wrote:
| Yeah it's interesting to think about humanity living without
| any "permanent" settlements and what the conversations were
| like..
|
| _pass the salt_
| kqr wrote:
| A useful heuristic as far as I know is to imagine "what would a
| modern human do in that environment?"
|
| 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.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| All creditable goal. What about warefare?
| raffraffraff wrote:
| Fart jokes. I absolutely guarantee you, the were fart jokes.
| [deleted]
| danschuller wrote:
| I guess for now we can't know - but were they truly modern
| humans? They might have had the same hardware but the
| cultural/consciousness software may have been far different
| than what we have today. It's fun to think about, books like
| The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral
| Mind or the Sapiens both explore some version of this.
| kajaktum wrote:
| >what would a modern human do in that environment?
|
| 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.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| This is probably closer to the truth. We don't notice the
| benefits of modern society and institutions because they
| are the water that we swim in, they have "always" existed
| since we were born into them. We are blissfully unaware
| that a few short centuries ago people often behaved in much
| more depraved ways as soon as they were far enough away
| from the tenuous rule of law. I believe the reasons why it
| took us a hundred thousand years to escape a subsistence
| lifestyle were more to do with man's inhumanity to man than
| it was a reluctance to leave some imagined eden.
|
| A George Carlin quote comes to mind:
|
| Think of how stupid the average person is and then realize
| that half of them are stupider than that.
| kqr wrote:
| > We are blissfully unaware that a few short centuries
| ago people often behaved in much more depraved ways as
| soon as they were far enough away from the tenuous rule
| of law.
|
| What makes you think this is true? I have plenty of
| experience of people who play very nicely with each
| other, even when they are for all practical purposes not
| bound by law to.
|
| > why it took us a hundred thousand years to escape a
| subsistence lifestyle
|
| You use the word "escape" as though we are _universally_
| better off now than when we spent a few hours a day
| foraging. Do you have evidence for this? What if people
| preferred to live their lives the way they did -- much
| like, I suppose, you prefer to live life the way you do?
|
| (No doubt do many people now have it better than many
| people then, but it sounds like you're asserting that the
| opposite is not the case too.)
| kqr wrote:
| As far as geniuses go, many of the people we would think of
| as geniuses today have two things the people we are
| discussing here had not:
|
| - 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.
| eropple wrote:
| _> arithmetic with Roman numerals is just the start!_
|
| Arabic, I think you mean. Arithmetic with Roman numerals is
| awful.
| laxmin wrote:
| Hindu numerals if we have to be precise, transmitted to
| the west by Arabs
| eropple wrote:
| Right, true--the term I've most often heard in Western
| circles these days is "Hindu-Arabic" numerals, but I
| didn't want to confuse.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| I've also heard the term Western Arabic, contrasted with
| Eastern Arabic.
| Jedd wrote:
| > Arabic, I think you mean. Arithmetic with Roman
| numerals is awful.
|
| Hindu numerals, do you mean?
| earth_walker wrote:
| Why Hindu (the religion) and not Hindi (the language)?
| Jedd wrote:
| I really don't know. It's generally phrased as Hindu-
| originating - I can only speculate why it's now attached
| to a religious / social group rather than a language.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Hindu%E2%80%
| 93A...
| kqr wrote:
| ...of course. Roman numerals held us back for centuries.
| Sorry about that embarrassing brainfart.
| macleginn wrote:
| Very close similarities between mythological narratives in very
| different parts of the world (e.g., South Africa and Australia)
| show that some of them should have appeared tens of thousands
| of years ago. The earliest motifs seem to be about the origin
| of death.
| https://folklore.elpub.ru/jour/article/view/28?locale=en_US
| kqr wrote:
| Humans are amazing at recording facts through narratives
| passed down through generations. Geography that has long
| since disappeared can be preserved through thousands o years:
| https://www.sapiens.org/language/oral-tradition/
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| EnKopVand wrote:
| Sapiens by yuval noah harari deal with a lot of the things
| you're pondering.
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| Humans in 13k years will look back and wonder at us too.
| Somebody must have been the first to upload to the
| HyperBrainSuperXL10000 and feel one with the solar system.
| pjmlp wrote:
| The way things are going, we will be the next dinosaurs, and
| that civilization in 13k will be digging artifacts from our
| time, while telling legends of a civilization that supposedly
| went to the stars, could travel across the globe in hours,
| being able to talk with anyone across the globe, cure most
| desease, designed machines that could see bodies at molecular
| level.
|
| 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.
| Luc wrote:
| Are you talking about global warming? Because that's going
| to make a lot of people miserable but is far from a global
| civilisation destroying event.
| gigglesupstairs wrote:
| I used to think like that. But Covid has really humbled
| me. Not to mention the possible release of ancient
| viruses due to melting permafrost.
|
| https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/05/the-deadly-
| diseases-b...
| simonh wrote:
| COVID was a minor speed bump, in the grand scheme of
| things. I'm not playing it down in a "it's just the flu"
| Trump kind of way, but it was no worse than the Spanish
| flu or many past pandemics. It didn't even cause a
| recession really, most of the economic issues we have at
| the moment are self inflicted.
|
| We're just not used to dealing with a disease like this.
| It was a serious problem, but the idea that it was any
| kind of existential threat is absurdly hyperbolic.
|
| The Spanish flu was similarly dangerous and virulent,
| it's impact was vastly greater, yet for most people it's
| a forgotten historical footnote.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| > It didn't even cause a recession really, most of the
| economic issues we have at the moment are self inflicted.
|
| It did, it was central banks by pressing money, who held
| the faith in economy high. There would, and time will
| tell, should have been some more companies default.
| monkeynotes wrote:
| COVID was mindblowing. For the first time in recorded
| history the entire planet coordinated a response to an
| existential threat. And we survived.
|
| In a matter of just three years we rethought how we work,
| live, travel, and socialize. The global community came up
| with a vaccine in an extraordinarily short amount of
| time, and then coordinated a roll out.
|
| We've seen how humanity can adapt at scale when we are
| motivated. I don't know what answer we will have to the
| ecological ruin we have layed out. Maybe we don't have an
| answer to it, that will be a truly humbling moment.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| We were already shifting to different working patterns
| before COVID hit. Had it been 10 years earlier it would
| have been much more impactful but the concept of working
| from home wasn't novel in a great many industries before
| COVID. And those that couldn't function remotely
| continued operate largely like they did before the
| pandemic.
|
| Also it's worth noting that the vaccines were already
| years into development before COVID hit. We knew there
| was a risk of a Coronavirus outbreak (by virtue of the
| fact that we had dodged two Coronavirus pandemics a
| decade earlier). Granted the increased funding and
| urgency of COVID helped speed things along; but they
| weren't exactly starting from scratch.
|
| So it's still not really clear how we would cope with a
| more dramatic or unknown situation.
|
| What I did learn about the pandemic was normal folk will
| completely disregard their own safety just to stick a
| middle finger to the government. Which is not only
| concerning for the future survival of our species but
| also a direct contradiction to your point about
| civilisation banding together.
| [deleted]
| gigglesupstairs wrote:
| I agree with all that you said. It is a great feat to
| witness. But just imagine, multiple viruses like Covid-19
| cropping up all at once. That's where we will fail.
| lebuffon wrote:
| "For the first time in recorded history the entire planet
| coordinated a response to an existential threat"
|
| Umm... - Smallpox eradication was a global effort. -
| Polio eradication was a global effort.(unfortunately
| delayed by religious fanatics in a small number of
| countries)
| trashtester wrote:
| I tend to be labeled a pessimist. When covid came, I was
| not surprised. If anything, I was surprised that it was
| not more deadly. At the same time (March 2020), I
| expected that Covid would lead to supply chain
| disruptions, nationalizatoin of industry and
| international conflict.
|
| The way I see it, the period from 1945 to 2020 was the
| exception, not the norm. Apart from that period (in the
| Western World), humans have been facing more difficult
| times than 2020-2022 through most of history. Still we
| have surivived, and at times, prospered.
|
| In the future, we may face disasters (climate change,
| pandemics, wars) that are hundreds of times worse than
| covid. Still none of those (except possibly nuclear war
| at some point) are likely to be the end of humanity, or
| even set us back so much that we are completely unable to
| record history. (A big nuclear war today would perhaps be
| a setback for human knowledge of history comparable to
| the loss of the librariy in Alexandria)
|
| There are still existential threats. One may be if we
| build millions of new nukes and use them all at once.
| Others could be technological (AI, nanotech), yet other
| could come from space (asteroids, aliens).
|
| But for humanity to be wiped out by pandemics or climate
| change seems highly unlikely.
| ragingrobot wrote:
| > The way I see it, the period from 1945 to 2020 was the
| exception, not the norm. Apart from that period (in the
| Western World), humans have been facing more difficult
| times than 2020-2022 through most of history. Still we
| have surivived, and at times, prospered.
|
| Now you got me thinking about this. Perhaps that period
| was a technological "sweet spot." Technology assisted us
| in our tasks. It wasn't too primitive where it hindered
| us like the periods prior. On the flip side, we were not
| overly reliant on that assistance like perhaps we are now
| (think chip shortages disrupting nearly every facet of
| life).
|
| Also, population growth. The planet is significantly more
| populated. For example, had this baby formula shortage
| happened during a period of less population, could it
| have had less of an impact? Even if the same proportion
| of the population were, it may have been not so great of
| a stress as supplies may have stretched longer.
| trashtester wrote:
| > Now you got me thinking about this. Perhaps that period
| was a technological "sweet spot."
|
| Maybe, but I really doubt that. I find it much more
| likely that it was a combination of luck and culture. (Or
| rather of a culture that had not yet been corrupted.)
|
| Anyway, even Corona was an extremely minor disaster, in
| the grand scope of things. In terms of years of life
| lost, the average per capita number is in the order of
| between a few days and a couple of weeks. Had corona been
| spreading in 1946, it would hardly have been noticed.
|
| By comparison, the Black Death probably caused average
| life expectancy to fall by something like 20 years,
| globally for those alive when it started to spread. In
| other words, Covid was less than 1% as serious as the
| Black Death for the average person.
|
| > Also, population growth. The planet is significantly
| more populated. For example, had this baby formula
| shortage happened during a period of less population,
| could it have had less of an impact?
|
| Most people througout history would be completely unable
| to grasp why we make a fuss about things like the baby
| formula shortage. They were used to child mortality in
| the order of 50%, even in peacetime. Lack of baby formula
| in the US may perhaps cause the child mortality rate to
| go up by 0.000001%.
|
| If I have a concern, it is not that we are living through
| difficult times now. We are not, these are still some of
| the best time in human history (for the average person,
| even in most developing countries). Rather my concern, is
| that most people have NO CLUE how much worse it can get.
|
| I don't mean the semi-religious concern that you can find
| surrounding climate change, or a fatalist view on nuclear
| war. This kind of fatalism tends to just passify people,
| make them shrug, and say "if it happens, we're all dead
| anyway".
|
| I mean for people to actually imagine living in a world
| where it is normal for your children to die from
| starvation, where there are no medicines. Where the
| infection in your thumb that you got from working in the
| fields until your hands were bleeding can actually kill
| you. Where packs of wolf-dogs roam the cities to feed on
| human corpses, many of them carrying rabies.
|
| I mean in particular the willingness so many people seem
| to have to tear down our institutions that work very
| well, because they identify some minor flaw. Their
| willingness to polarize politically, the re-emergance of
| both facist and communist ideas to conveniently place the
| blame for our small problems on the "Others". And finally
| the signs that countries once again seem to be willing to
| use military force to annex other nations, for no other
| reason than nationalism.
|
| I don't predict that any of this will lead to human
| extinction, but I'm worried that within 100-200 years we
| will see a conflict that will completely eclipse WW2,
| with 500million or more deaths.
|
| THIS is why I call myself a pessimist, because I see it
| as likely (or not as unlikely as I would like) that
| humanity will return to a state that is, in fact, more or
| less the average of what humanity has experienced up
| until now, while most people seem to take it for granted
| that the near-Utopian (EDIT) situation we have now will
| remain mostly as it is.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| > Maybe, but I really doubt that. I find it much more
| likely that it was a combination of luck and culture. (Or
| rather of a culture that had not yet been corrupted.)
|
| I really think it was all the aftermath of WWII. That was
| such a catastrophic event with all that "never forget",
| that instead of going for war, peace was the better
| solution at any cost (for west and central Europe). Now
| as the remembrance is waning, military options become
| increasingly an option. The germans shipping heavy
| military equipment? Unthinkable 10 years ago.
| trashtester wrote:
| WW2 was probably the main ingredient, but without
| Mutually Assured Destruction, a common enemy in the
| Soviet Union, a booming economy as well as the lessons
| learned in the 20's and 30's about not living beyond your
| means, the effect might have ended sooner.
|
| In other words, the 1945-2020 period required "luck" in a
| number of dimensions, and should be considered a fluke,
| not the norm.
| polotics wrote:
| Second order effects from global warming striking in
| synchrony with resource depletion and biodiversity drop
| looks pretty consumption -civilization destroying to me.
| Definitely 10 Billion humans don't have a happy life in
| 2100. Then again if you ask a 4th Century AD farmer about
| the Roman Empire they would probably give you a shrug.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| They'd probably say "as long as they don't debase the
| denarius we should be ok" good thing we learned that
| lesson.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Global warming, nukes, pandemics, you name it, we are
| quite good destroying ourselves.
| Luc wrote:
| None of those are destroying our civilizations, in fact
| we are better off now than 10 years ago on all those
| issues.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Just wait for it, specially if we really get into WW III
| with nukes.
| Luc wrote:
| The nukes prohibit their own use. Besides, there's been
| more than 2000 nuclear bombs exploded, >500 of which in
| the atmosphere, and I bet you didn't notice.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I also expect not to notice when the real ones explode
| close to Europe, much better than deal with the fallout
| thereafter.
| emj wrote:
| I feel a bit hopefull because globally we really did try
| to get Covid right, most people tried in their own ways.
| That goes for all parts of the political spectrum. That
| of course led to conflicts and group think, which is the
| part that will destroy us. The issue with global warming
| is not the temprature, it's how we will all be affected
| and how we act because of that. History says we can not
| handle external stress, civilizations fall easily. Yes we
| are global now, that will mean a global civilisation
| destroying.
| __alexs wrote:
| Where I'm from we call that the Total Perspective Vortex.
| WHA8m wrote:
| I only recently have heard about the 'stoned ape theory'. It
| basically plays with the idea, that drugs (in this case
| mushrooms) must have played a crucial role in the development
| of thinking, thought and consciousness (as we humans know it).
|
| https://www.inverse.com/article/34186-stoned-ape-hypothesis
| Jedd wrote:
| Well, yes - anatomically (and to a large degree,
| intellectually) we're probably indistinguishable from homo
| sapiens of 300k years ago.
|
| 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.)
| Balgair wrote:
| > humans existed in anatomically modern form
|
| 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.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence
| simonh wrote:
| There's a fascinating hypothesis about the development of
| recursive reasoning that's worth a read. Obviously we don't
| have access to the actual language and verbal culture of people
| back then, but it looks like we might be able to map out some
| of the cognitive functions they had available to them, and
| correlate that to the development of material culture,
| including artistic expression.
|
| https://neurosciencenews.com/language-imagination-evolution-...
| specialist wrote:
| Nice. Will read.
|
| 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.
| uwagar wrote:
| writing is not all that important. oral transmission is
| effective when the immediate community is just a huddle.
| 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
| trentearl wrote:
| Why would it mention Armenia? If I'm reading your map correctly
| this site wasnt in Armenian control for 700 years. I visited
| the region before, if I remember correctly this region is more
| geographically in the center of the Assyrian empire than
| Armenian.
| [deleted]
| ascari wrote:
| That map look like one extremely nationalist view from
| Armenians. There were a billion other
| civilization/dynasty/kingdom that controlled the region what is
| so called as "Greater Armenia".
| 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.
| Emma_Goldman wrote:
| Apparently, new evidence discredits the idea that the site was
| built by hunter-gatherers:
|
| "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 Gobekli Tepe."
|
| https://publications.dainst.org/journals/efb/article/view/25...
| kqr wrote:
| Note that the dichotomy between "hunter-gatherers" and
| "permanently settled" is a bit overstated.
|
| - 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.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Yes, for example the Yanomamo hunters-gatherers in the Amazon
| basin stay in approximately one place for years or decades,
| in jungle clearings they build semi-permanent "shapoons", a
| structure from wood and leaves that obviously does not
| survive in the archeologic records (nothing survives in the
| Amazon; there is a lack of stone there and organic structures
| decompose soon), plus they cultivate a lot of plants locally.
|
| The concept of a hunter-gatherer roaming the endless steppe
| is romantic, but it does not seem to occur that much in known
| history.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| TFA itself talks about this, but not to disparage the hunter-
| gatherer aspect but rather to claim that there was an actual,
| ~permanently inhabited city here, that was still nevertheless
| pre-agrarian. That's part of the mystery and importance of
| these sites: they upend what we thought we knew.
| 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!
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| When some people say advanced they mean at least roman
| level civilization, cities with hundreds of thousands of
| people etc. Some of them mean things like space-faring
| level advanced. https://www.reddit.com/r/AlternativeHistory
| /comments/ed5gd1/...
| mysecretaccount wrote:
| "Advanced" is presumably used to disambiguate less advanced
| civilizations. This was among the least advanced
| civilizations.
| gerdesj wrote:
| What is wrong with referring to the physical evidence? The
| bloody things are literally sticking up out of the ground.
|
| 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.
| cletus wrote:
| A little over 2,000 years ago was the height of Rome. 2,000 years
| before that the dominant empire not that far from there was
| Assyria. 2,000 years before that it was Mesopotamia and woolly
| mammoths still roamed the Earth. This is about our limit of
| recorded history as the earliest surviving writing (actually
| pictographs) is from ~3500 BC.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| 01acheru wrote:
| It's fascinating to think about the past in this fast backwards
| fashion, I love it (and also fast forwarding from past to
| present).
|
| 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!
|
| https://youtu.be/FD2yPqODlBA
| rosetremiere wrote:
| Are you sure your timeline is correct? Assyria as an empire is
| closer to -1400 to -700, with the dominant part coming after
| -1000. Similarly, there was no "Mesopotamian empire" in -4000
| that I'm aware of: before -2000 I think it was mostly city
| states all around the near east.
|
| I'm no expert... please correct me if I'm wrong.
| C6JEsQeQa5fCjE wrote:
| Their timeline is definitely incorrect beyond Rome. "2000
| years before Rome" was the period of dominance of the
| Akkadian Empire of Sargon, and right afterwards of the
| Sumerian Third Dynasty of Ur. You are correct about Assyria
| and the Mesopotamian warring cities.
| walrus01 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogger_Bank
|
| 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.
| adictator wrote:
| You are ignoring the extremely detailed recording of history in
| the Indian subcontinent. Events, including the kings/queens
| that ruled over the Gangetic plains, their sons & lineage,
| wars, migrations, volcanic eruptions, weather changes (floods,
| earthquakes etc) have been VERY meticulously recorded as
| Itihasa - Sanskrit for "It so happened". This goes back to at
| least 27,000 years before present - firmly placing the Indian
| subcontinent as the root of all of current human civilization.
| Why would you ignore such a vast & undeniable evidence, unless
| your "recorded history" is deemed to be Greek centric and not
| universal? That is hardly history!!
| lolc wrote:
| Source? Wikipedia dates Sanskrit to 1500 BCE earliest. That's
| 3500 years.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| To put that in perspective, 2000 years is roughly how long it
| took humans to question/revisit Aristotle's 4 element theory -
| captured in the The Sceptical Chymist: or Chymico-Physical
| Doubts & Paradoxes. That was written less than 400 years ago.
| It's amazing how slow things moved until the 1600s and the
| explosion of progress that's followed.
| erikpukinskis wrote:
| And things are only accelerating. Within 50 years people will
| be able to grow tiger paws or retire into a jar.
| biztos wrote:
| > retire into a jar
|
| I mean, that's the Metaverse, right?
| trashtester wrote:
| If you do a full upload of your mind, you may not need
| the Metaverse layer. You could potentially experience
| digital reality directly.
| [deleted]
| reactspa wrote:
| Does anyone know how something like this could have been carved
| back in the stone age, without metal tools?
|
| https://palladiummag.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/gobekli-...
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Harder stone?
| doodlebugging wrote:
| The hardness of a rock is related to its diagenetic history and
| mineral content. These rocks are sedimentary rocks - limestone,
| sandstone, etc. If one has a source of metamorphic or igneous
| rocks from which to fashion tools then carving these figures is
| simplified. Even a tightly cemented sedimentary rock can be
| used to grind or carve and flint is a sedimentary rock that has
| multiple documented uses as a tool. Needles, awls, spear and
| arrow heads, axes, hammers, etc.
|
| 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.
| vlz wrote:
| You would need a rock that is harder than the rock you carve
| into. Possibly a ,,Hand axe" made from flint would suffice:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_axe
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Flint chips very easily though. I always assumed it was more
| for cutting meat. I guess I could see a really thick "hand
| axe" being used for very primitive wood carving.
| 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...
| oa335 wrote:
| According to this publication [1] by the "rediscover-er" of
| Gobeklitepe, they found and dated an animal tooth that
| confirmed their original dating of the site to somewhere around
| 9000 BCE. It doesn't look like the critical review that you
| linked in your comment addresses that.
|
| [1]
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257961716_Establish...
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Note that the infill dates to the Black Sea Deluge period (8000
| years ago), when there would be massive population upheavals in
| the area.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Things rarely depend on any single form of evidence. The
| prevailing interpretations are usually based multiple forms of
| corroborating evidence. For example, there are plenty of other
| neolithic sites in the same region, and many of them share the
| same art style as Gobekli Tepe. The overall timeline is rather
| well established based on evidence such as human / animal /
| plant remains, art, tools, and genetics.
|
| 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.
| Barrera wrote:
| Things rarely depend on any single form of evidence.
|
| 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.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Einstein had already published several papers in physics
| and he was about to receive his PhD when he made his major
| discoveries in 1905. The idea that he was just some
| outsider patent clerk is an urban legend that needs to die.
|
| 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.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| refulgentis wrote:
| Idk, I read it as a humble, even self-effacing,
| comprehensive, yet concise, explanation of how to
| evaluate claims in common scenarios, as well as an
| explanation of interesting observations you gain from
| looking outside your discipline regularly.
| Stevvo wrote:
| "doesn't fit architecturly" is not a good argument. We have
| _never_ built temples in the same style as houses. The
| dating is rejected only because it doesn 't fit the
| author's worldview. I laughed out loud at the caption of a
| photo of a much younger site; "structure more primitive
| than Gobekli Tepe, thus older."
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| >Einstein was a patent clerk.....
|
| 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.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Dendrinos is a moderately well-known guy by ancient near-
| eastern peeps and he's not regarded well. He doesn't really
| know what he's talking about and his paper makes that
| pretty obvious. Here are some random issues I can quickly
| point out from a skim:
|
| 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.
| dataflow wrote:
| I'm confused, why wouldn't they date some tiny piece from the
| structure itself? It seems like an obvious thing to do, is it
| not?
| jandrese wrote:
| There are probably no organic parts of the structure left,
| just rocks.
| twelve40 wrote:
| didn't they also find skulls and bones and stuff? anyway,
| I'm sure they will figure it all out eventually.
| ska wrote:
| That sort of assumes you have a structure containing elements
| that were a) made by hand that b) survived. A pile of stone
| laid by hand doesn't help, for example.
| Barrera wrote:
| The review I linked has a remarkably readable discussion of
| this. In a nutshell, the filling of the site rendered
| everything that has been tested liable to contamination by
| the fill.
|
| 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.
| DataDaoDe wrote:
| As someone who knows nothing about the field of archeology, it
| would interst me to know, what are other methods of dating they
| coud use to improve the estimate, or address to some degree the
| concerns you raise?
| IAmEveryone wrote:
| We have an unbroken timeline of tree rings that goes back a
| few millennia.
| nl wrote:
| this goes much older than that.
| pilom wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology for those
| interested in learning more.
| Archelaos wrote:
| Depending on the site, the situation can be quite
| different. The curves are specific for a certain type of
| tree in a certain region. Very long unbroken curves are
| still quite rare. The "better" ones go back about 5,000
| yrs. The longest one is the Hohenheimer Jahrringkalender,
| based on oak and pine trees from Southern and Eastern
| Germany. It goes back about 12,500 yrs (researchers work to
| extent it to 14,400 yrs before now).[1] To my knowledge,
| this is the only curve that goes back to the Gobekli Tepe
| area, but it is from a different region and therefore not
| helpful here.
|
| [1] Project Web-site (in German): https://botanik.uni-
| hohenheim.de/dendro_hoh-jahrringkalender
| SamBam wrote:
| When other known and nearby civilizations are around at the
| same time, you also date by the foreign goods you find --
| Greek coins, or pieces of Bronze-age armor, for instance. In
| this case, I'm not sure whether that stuff exists or is
| easily dated.
| blacksqr wrote:
| "The last intrusions in the big enclosures can be dated by a
| charcoal sample taken from under a fallen pillar fragment in
| Enclosure A to the middle of the 9th millennium."
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258182967_Radiocarb...
| 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.
| yung_steezy wrote:
| I would guess comments are more insightful when the topic being
| discussed is less niche.
| [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.
| whats_a_quasar wrote:
| If people are interested in pre-history and archaeology, the
| podcast Tides of History is doing a great series on the emergence
| of humans and states: https://art19.com/shows/tides-of-history
| 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.
| SllX wrote:
| Or the Flood.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Don't forget the statues at the site have 6 fingers. No
| one has explained that yet.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jonylaw wrote:
| klyrs wrote:
| It's a coverup!
| [deleted]
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| I wasted about 30 minutes recently watching some pseudo
| historical videos on youtube with millions of views like this one
| about atlantis:
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| pwndByDeath wrote:
| I'm not sure how comfortable we should be 'knowing' anything we
| can't make predictions on. There is certainly a spectrum of
| quality in scientific knowledge and things like psychology and
| archeology seem on the weak end
| 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.
| stubish wrote:
| To this layperson, the narrative on Gobekli Tepe seemed fairly
| compelling. Here is a site situated at roughly the time and
| place grains first started being cultivated (per previous
| studies on ancient grains). A site where large amounts of meat
| was consumed, but animals not slaughtered on site. The animals
| where killed elsewhere and only the desirable bits transported
| there. And earthenware troughs believed to have been used to
| ferment beer. So a gathering site for nomadic hunter gatherers
| to gather at (festival? winter? just hang out?), at the point
| in time where we were starting to actually cultivate grains and
| stop being hunter gatherers and start being farmers. Other
| sites found dating later were definitely agricultural, with
| equipment for farming grains and animals and human remains
| showing the poor health associated with early agricultural
| settlements and the dense populations they allowed.
| pvg wrote:
| The standard for these things is usually something like
| 'evidence' rather than 'obnoxiously obvious'.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| We need more funding for experimental archaeology to provide
| evidence of whether it's possible to live a hunter gatherer
| lifestyle while constructing large stone temple complexes.
| robonerd wrote:
| The evidence is the stonework and the dietary requirements of
| doing that sort of labor.
| pvg wrote:
| These are claims, not evidence. Your claim appears to be
| you can't carve a big stone if you're a hunter gatherer
| although It's not clear why you think that.
| robonerd wrote:
| > _although It 's not clear why you think that._
|
| I think I've made that clear. Where else in the world has
| a hunter-gatherer lifestyle afforded the caloric surplus
| necessary to do this much manual labor?
| alophawen wrote:
| A meat based diet for one.
| Maursault wrote:
| > A meat based diet for one.
|
| Yup, without any doubt, because a society can not
| possibly work stone without eating meat. Just look at the
| the lack of stonework in the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain
| cultures. Oh, wait...
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Hunter gatherers didn't exactly live in a state of
| deprivation. We also a lot of examples of cultures that
| didn't farm building giant earth works, like those found
| at Poverty Point in Louisiana[1]. We know that a number
| of pre-Colombian societies shunned agriculture and
| developed quite complex societies like the people along
| the gulf coast, or the Coast Salish to name to areas of
| interest. Pre-agricultural forbears of the Iroquois were
| probably mining copper. Agriculture doesn't seem to be
| necessary for organization or communal work.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_Point
| mjh2539 wrote:
| Caloric requirements in humans plateau. Certain genes are
| expressed that regulate how efficient the body has to be
| based on how active it is.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4803033/
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| Exactly how many calories does one need to do this? What
| is the cutoff? What papers are researchers are you
| building your claims on?
|
| How long can they work on such tasks? Maybe, if they
| build slowly, then one needs almost no "caloric
| surplus".... There's so many holes in such a wild and
| absolute claim that I don't see it as much of an argument
| against the experts that have built on previous knowledge
| and have published peer reviewed papers on this topic.
|
| Hence you need evidence.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| I thought it was well established that the transition to
| agriculture caused a decline in general health and
| nutrition for most humans, shorter, smaller brains, etc.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| Edit: I should say coincide with a decline not caused a
| decline, as the casual relationship is not definitive.
| astrange wrote:
| It's the airplane with holes in its effect again. It does
| do that, but because the sicklier people stay alive
| rather than starving to death.
| medstrom wrote:
| Suppose that their diets are equally good for health
| (which is a big supposition). Suppose a hunter-gatherer
| and a farmer both get sick with the same thing. Why would
| the first die and the second not?
|
| Having access to an excess of calories? Doesn't make
| sense. Yes, agri societies make more food, but people are
| always starving all the same, because the count of people
| goes up until you once again have food scarcity.
| astrange wrote:
| I'd think agricultural diets were less healthy insofar as
| they didn't have nutrition science (even we barely do)
| and would have to rely on what they could get to grow,
| mainly grains. Most likely they weren't actually fully
| agricultural and were using the farms to make beer or
| feed their animal herds.
|
| But I was just thinking that hunter-gatherers need more
| active participation and can't provide a surplus to feed
| as many idle hands.
|
| The population growth problem is the purpose of religion
| whose main thing has always been telling people to not
| have sex.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| trashtester wrote:
| Evidence is not the same as proof. Evidence can often be
| interpreted in different directions.
|
| 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.
| pvg wrote:
| If someone says something is 'obnoxiously obvious', nobody
| needs to retire for them to explain what they mean by that.
| trashtester wrote:
| In the late 80s, I (a teenager at the time) was
| discussing the topic of airplanes being flown by
| computers. I was convinced that computers would be able
| to fly airplanes within my lifetime, and would even
| replace pilots in figher planes at some point. For me,
| this was 'obnoxiously obvious'.
|
| The first time, I discussed it with an engineer/hobbyist
| pilot. He claimed that flying an airplane was an
| impossible task for a computer. His argument was from
| chaos theory; a computer would never be able to calculate
| all the variables involved in turbulent airflow, so they
| would not be able to fly an airplane. Clearly, he ignored
| that humans do not do those calculations either, but I
| was unable to make my point.
|
| The second time, it was a former figher pilot, then
| airline pilot. He did not in principle object to a
| computer flying an airplane, but he completely dismissed
| the possibility of a computer flying a fighter plane into
| combat.
|
| Both are now retired. I still think it is obnoxiously
| obvious that computers can fly planes, and that within my
| lifetime, even fighters will be unmanned. Clearly, there
| is more evidence now, but I think that today, the
| evidence from the 80s would have been considered
| sufficient by most people my age or younger.
|
| (Now, I'm almost 50, and maybe this time I'm the one
| being obnoxious, as indicated by my previous post being
| downvoted.)
| pvg wrote:
| There was plenty of evidence for this in the late 80s,
| from cruise missiles to the space shuttle and many other
| systems. It's just that 80s arguments didn't have the
| benefit of the internet and the web in everyone's pocket.
|
| The thing we're dealing with here is the extraordinary-
| sounding claim that it was just about biochemically
| impossible for pre-historic hunter-gatherer societies to
| have carved some bigass stones. The person making it
| seems to have the boon of internet access to help them
| buttress their argument.
| 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.
| robonerd wrote:
| I haven't read that book [yet], but I'll say that
| 'civilization' is not the same thing as carving up tons of
| rock. That you can form a civilization without agriculture
| doesn't surprise me. That a civilization could support
| megalithic stone carving endeavors without agriculture
| beggars belief.
|
| 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.
| alophawen wrote:
| You are clueless and should read that book instead of
| speaking out like this.
| robonerd wrote:
| I'll say what I like about anything I like. If the book
| is so great than those of you who've read it should be
| able to present the arguments from it. It sounds like it
| left all of you with an impression of having learned
| something, but unable to convey much of anything that you
| actually learned. Did _you_ actually read that book?
| I-M-S wrote:
| You _really_ should read the book to make informed takes on
| this topic
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| I did not get the impression that the carvings at this site
| were anywhere near as large as StoneHenge, Easter island,
| or Giza: they mention a life-sized man statue, large
| pensis, and friezes.
|
| And if the site was occupied for hundreds of years, they
| could have been carved over time, spreading out the caloric
| requirements.
| qiskit wrote:
| What other way was there to feed a city full of people?
| Certainly, you could have culture within a hunter-gatherer
| society, but not civilization. How could hunter-gatherers
| provide enough food to sustain a city? Unless we redefine
| civilization by removing cities/urban centers from its
| definition.
| stubish wrote:
| IIRC there is evidence that Gobekli Tepe was not fully
| occupied year round, so more of a festival site or
| wintering ground. Maybe in the later stages it did have a
| more permanent population, and if so they could have been
| some of the first people to invent actual farming. This is
| around the time and place we think Einkorn was first
| domesticated, and a bunch of people growing it near a
| festival site to brew booze to supply a bunch of nomads
| when they come around to party makes a good narrative on
| how we transitioned from hunters to farmers.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Read TFA. They're finding the towns with permanent abodes
| less than 50km away.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Go read the book!
|
| Even the idea of a hard binary between 'agricultural' and
| 'hunter gatherer' societies is put to the test, with
| evidence of civilizations that changed both locations and
| whole modes of culture and caloric intake seasonally.
| Bayart wrote:
| Obvious based on what ? Assumptions we make about history ? The
| idea that there's a linear, idempotent path of progress has
| been challenged for good reasons : discoveries such as these.
| robonerd wrote:
| Based on experience with physical labor? Bang some rocks
| together for an afternoon, see how much progress you've made
| and take note of how tired it made you. Whig history has
| nothing to do with it.
| biztos wrote:
| Sorry if this is a dumb question, but why would ancient
| sculptors necessarily have to work fast?
|
| Bang some rocks together for half an hour, come back later;
| you have a perceptually infinite supply of half-hours;
| eventually you'll get it done.
| 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
| astrange wrote:
| I was hoping to learn something about the six-fingered statues
| here, but no comments about it.
|
| Anyone know any six fingered Turkish people we can ask?
| 5cott0 wrote:
| Highly recommend THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING
|
| https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeveryt...
| superultra wrote:
| It's so good. So glad someone mentioned this.
|
| 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.
| pvg wrote:
| An interesting review in NYRB
|
| 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...
| 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.
| erikpukinskis wrote:
| This debate is raging right now. Is it better in North
| America to eat domesticated cattle, which basically destroy
| any chance at a healthy ecology, or just go shoot a bison
| when you need food? The bison can support a mature ecology.
|
| 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?
| ido wrote:
| You can also switch to a vegetarian or vegan diet, or eat
| only less ecologically intensive meat such as chicken (and
| eat less of it).
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| One question that has been bugging me for years :
|
| 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 ?)
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| We have tools that don't require us to find sites that may
| have been destroyed. For one, genetic studies constrain
| human population levels assuming any descendants were
| related to either living people or sampled remains. That
| constrains population levels quite a bit. Moreover, we can
| roughly track human habitation on landscapes by how much
| fire they used as well as changes in flora and fauna.
| Recent results have even demonstrated direct detection of
| ancient humans from environmental DNA they left behind in
| skin cells and such, but that's quite new.
|
| 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.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| Basically it comes down to lack of archeological evidence.
| We have lots of cave paintings (and many other things) from
| 50-100k years ago and they depict a caveman lifestyle not
| 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.
| kqr wrote:
| Note that advanced, wide-ranging social relationships
| (i.e. civilisation) do not leave obvious archaeological
| traces.
|
| We only think it does because we conflate civilisation
| with technologies of violence and bureaucracy, and
| _those_ indeed leave clear archaeological traces.
| astrange wrote:
| They leave genetic traces, and we're fairly sure about
| the migration patterns of all people currently alive on
| Earth through those.
|
| All of us are very closely related as far as species go,
| so there must have been a serious population bottleneck
| at one point. We're all more similar to each other than
| two chimpanzees.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| > All of us are very closely related as far as species
| go, so there must have been a serious population
| bottleneck at one point. We're all more similar to each
| other than two chimpanzees.
|
| Is this true of Africans as well? I would expect there to
| be much more variety in humanity's original homeland than
| in the rest of the world.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Why ? Isn't it typically the animals that get
| disconnected from the rest that are then able to diverge
| ?
| astrange wrote:
| Humans haven't been around long enough for that to
| happen. The most divergent groups outside Africa are that
| way because we met our distant relatives like
| Neanderthals, but it seems in our case they were just
| incompatible enough it didn't add that much.
|
| Africans esp the San have much more diversity than
| everyone else but IIRC it's still remarkably low for our
| current population size.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| "Primitive" is relative, we have evidence of tools and
| tool manufacturing industries more sophisticated than
| what any other animal uses dating back a whopping 2 600
| 000 years ago :
|
| Oldowan, also : ~first (non-sapiens) _Homo_ , ~beginning
| of the current Ice Age (~50 interglacials so far),
|
| and maybe even 3 300 000 years ago (Lomekwian) - also
| note that even going that far back, _Australopithecus_
| *still* doesn 't have other remaining descendants than
| us.
| notahacker wrote:
| > "Primitive" is relative, we have evidence of tools and
| tool manufacturing industries more sophisticated than
| what any other animal uses dating back a whopping 2 600
| 000 years ago :
|
| That's kind of the point though with regard to early
| humans and proto-humans and civilization, isn't it? We've
| found plenty of evidence of basic stone tool manufacture
| and use of fire and intentional burials from _much_
| earlier eras.
|
| But we haven't found evidence of what we call
| civilization - and traces of iron tools and irrigation
| works and cities and monuments ought to be easier to
| discern than small cut flint if early humans flourished
| with them over those periods - until the last 10-15k of
| human existence.
| armenarmen wrote:
| I figured (related to previous poster) that the lack of
| evidence of domesticated animals was a decent indicator
| that there were no big civs in the past interglacials
| [deleted]
| Zigurd wrote:
| It's an excellent "reset" on pop science anthropology. Some of
| which, like that Rousseau and Hobbes oversimplified to support
| their philosophies should be fairly obvious as anthropological
| evidence mounts. Similarly, that hunter-gatherer and farmer are
| points on a spectrum.
|
| We have choices about how we organize civilization. Neither
| Rousseau nor Hobbes depicted destiny, just choices.
| [deleted]
| fantasticshower wrote:
| If you're excited by prehistory and hunter-gatherer society might
| I suggest reading The Earth's Children Series by Jean Auel.
|
| 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.
| trashtester wrote:
| The first one was very interesting, interestingly it included
| interbreeding with neanderthals before neanderthal dna was
| disovered in our DNA.
|
| The rest had quite a soap opera / "housewife porn" elements,
| but also some interesting bits surrounding toolmaking, hunting,
| etc.
| pratik661 wrote:
| I know that's it's established that some of the oldest
| civilizations started in Anatolia/Mesopotamia. Could it be
| because the dry climate there preserves old structures better
| than damp Germany or tropical Southeast Asia?
| hinkley wrote:
| Tropical forests are so aggressive, I don't think we'll ever
| appreciate how rich the civilizations of Central and South
| America were until we've had major advances in subterranean
| mapping technology. Most of the artifacts are likely in
| anaerobic pockets underground, if they still exist at all.
|
| 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.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| The climate of the middle east was different thousands of years
| ago. Arabia and the Sahara were not deserts.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Not to be that person, but Anatolia and Mesopotamia were not
| "dry" even if they approach that description today.
|
| They had milder weather than Germany to be sure, but I don't
| know if you can definitively say they saw less precipitation.
| 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.
| Bayart wrote:
| If we needed to use words as old as the concepts they're used
| for, we couldn't do history.
| 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.
| gerdesj wrote:
| Some parts of "English" deliberately lean on Latin and
| Greek and get no further - I suppose we call it the classic
| influence. I'd like to see English crack on and continue to
| subsume words and concepts from foreign parts.
|
| Now, here we have evidence of a really old civilization and
| I'd like to see English words being extrapolated from the
| languages (lingua - Latin) extant (Latin) of the region
| (Latin - regio).
|
| I think it is time that we start pinching Anatolian names
| and concepts. It's quite a large region and over 10,000
| years it must have had quite a lot of ideas and concepts
| that we take for granted now and given the age of the place
| - probably invented them.
| 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!
| nl wrote:
| I think Gobekli Tepe[1] is the better known of these sites in
| Turkey. As this story mentions that was only discovered in 1994,
| and completely rewrote history.
|
| 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...
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| So the Proto Indo Europeans have finally been found.
| [deleted]
| astrange wrote:
| That's the Yanmaya. They're from the area of approximately
| southern Ukraine and Crimea.
| hemreldop wrote:
| 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:
| dimal wrote:
| > archaeologists in southeastern Turkey are, at this moment,
| digging up a wild, grand, artistically coherent, implausibly
| strange, hitherto-unknown-to-us religious civilisation, which has
| been buried in Mesopotamia for ten thousand years. And it was all
| buried deliberately.
|
| Maybe they realized that civilization is a miserable slog and
| they should just go back to hunting and gathering.
| astrange wrote:
| You'll like hunting and gathering if you like having to kill
| twin children because they'll exhaust the food supply.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Proof that dick humor is as old as humanity?
| [deleted]
| system2 wrote:
| Yet another crazy thing found in Turkey which won't turn into an
| unbelievable tourist attraction. They have the oldest churches,
| Cappadocia, Anatolia etc. None of them are known by foreigners.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| Might blow your mind that the Patriarchate of Constantinople is
| still located in Instanbul.
| thewarpaint wrote:
| Kapadokya is a pretty popular touristic attraction. Source: was
| there in 2018 with a bunch of non-Turkish people.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| The article says it is a tourist trap now with over a million
| visitors a year.
| Mo3 wrote:
| Some day, they'll find us too.
| coffeeblack wrote:
| Or maybe not. Who knows how many large civilizations have never
| been found.
| 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.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| While that sounds funny, it wouldn't be _that_ wrong,
| considering how cars are seen as penis enlargement prosthetic
| by some ;- >
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| See? EPSI hyncaaar! _TSHVANNTZ!_
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| " archaeologists in southeastern Turkey are, at this moment,
| digging up a wild, grand, artistically coherent, implausibly
| strange, hitherto-unknown-to-us religious civilisation, which has
| been buried in Mesopotamia for ten thousand years. And it was all
| buried deliberately."
| 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]
| prescriptivist wrote:
| Off topic from the post but something I find fascinating. I live
| in Maine and recently became aware of the Vail Site in northwest
| Maine, which purports to be around 13000 years old [1]. The
| beringian migration predates that by a few thousand years I
| believe but the actual dispersal of Paleo-Indians to the broader
| Americas hinges on the melting of the ice sheets that covered
| North America up until only a thousand years or so prior to the
| Vail site proper. I know we are talking about a scale of
| thousands of years but it blows my mind that people (without work
| animals) found their way across the continent and set up shop
| here when there was probably little actual reason to come here at
| all since, presumably, game and fish were as robust in all the
| lands they traveled to arrive here and fellow human pressure was
| non-existent.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vail_Site
| mushbino wrote:
| Human footprints were recently found in New Mexico that were
| definitively dated to 23,000 years ago so humans have probably
| been here for much longer than that.
| kibwen wrote:
| FSVO "here"; 23,000 years ago, Maine would have been buried
| under an ice sheet 1.5 _miles_ deep. :P
| doodlebugging wrote:
| When I consider stuff like this I look back on my own
| experiences in life and it is easy enough to see that an
| ordinary person or group of people can cover a lot of ground in
| a short period of time on foot.
|
| 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.
| ema wrote:
| I doubt that fellow human pressure was non-existent. A thousand
| years is plenty of time for even a small founding population to
| swell enough in size to fill every nook and cranny of a
| continent.
| briga wrote:
| >there was probably little actual reason to come here at all
| since, presumably, game and fish were as robust in all the
| lands they travelled to arrive here and fellow human pressure
| was non-existent.
|
| 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.
| krrrh wrote:
| One thing that really blew my mind was learning that
| Beringian civilization lasted thousands years before the ice
| sheets receded enough for people to move into North America
| as Berginia was slowly swallowed by the sea. This is
| sometimes referred to as the "Beringian standstill
| population". By the time people made it down to Mexico they
| were likely another few distinct civilizations removed from
| Siberia.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beringia#Human_habitation
| prescriptivist wrote:
| Sorry, to clarify I mean there was probably little actual
| reason to migrate to the east coast of North America at that
| time.
| medstrom wrote:
| Trajectory, maybe. If generations of moving east-ish (from
| Alaska) always got you to better lands, where do you
| suggest walking next? East!
| 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...
| biztos wrote:
| I'm not an archaeologist and I'm having difficulty looking up
| "uselife" online. What does it mean?
|
| Is it jargon for "the duration of its use by humans?"
|
| In the above quote that's how I read it: "When Gobekli 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?
| ohthehugemanate wrote:
| You're missing that it is dating the material you ise to
| refill, not the refill action itself. You can refill with
| topsoil, which woild indicate EOL as you say. or you could
| refill with dirt from a pit, which could be thousands of
| years older. You could use dirt with dinosaur fossils in
| it, but that doesn't make the site 65 million years old.
|
| Anyway according to other comments apparently they used a
| few means of dating already.
| biztos wrote:
| Sorry, I really didn't get that far. I'm just trying to
| figure out what "uselife" means, not the dating tech.
| FRacevedo wrote:
| 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?
| hsn915 wrote:
| Samo Burja has an excellent essay about why civilization is older
| than we think
|
| 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.
| henriquemaia wrote:
| Thank you for sharing it. I read it and confirm it's an
| excellent essay. Your quote was the perfect teaser!
| simonh wrote:
| Sorry but that quote has convinced me not to read the rest.
| It's absurd. Firstly no we don't just assume beavers made dams,
| we don't need to because we've found plenty of ancient remains
| of beaver dams. We know beavers and dam construction behaviour
| evolved at some point and want to know when and how that
| happened, so we look for evidence linking the two. If we just
| made blind assumptions it would not be possible to figure out
| the developmental timeline.
|
| 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.
| emoII wrote:
| Isn't the point that our ability to learn and develop
| cultural behaviour is pretty much instinctive? Of course
| humans everywhere did things recreationally, it seems part of
| what it is to be human.
| simonh wrote:
| Fair enough, however I'm not making a point about the
| origin of the behaviour, but how the behaviour manifests.
| Cultural behaviour can change very rapidly, and propagate
| through a population in significantly less than a
| generation, whereas instinctive behaviour takes many, many
| generations to develop and propagate. It's not reasonable
| to equate the way they develop and propagate as being the
| same simply because they are both behaviour, and anyone who
| suggests they can clearly isn't a credible source on the
| subject.
| dmix wrote:
| I also noticed this was a thing that bothered them:
|
| > 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.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| > _When thinking about the dating of agriculture it is
| important to remember that Gobekli Tepe was rediscovered rather
| than discovered. In October 1994, the archaeologist Klaus
| Schmidt was reviewing archives of known sites, trying to decide
| where to dig next. A site description caught his attention: a
| hill that had first been excavated in a 1963 survey by the
| University of Istanbul and the University of Chicago, but
| abandoned soon after._
|
| Heh. A much less prosaic version of the story with the mulberry
| bush in OP's article.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Okay, but we don't expect ancient Homo sapiens to have had
| smartphones, surely?
| [deleted]
| uwagar wrote:
| 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."
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| No, this is 700ish meters up. That's a lot of head.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Kipling has a book of "just so" stories that I enjoyed as a
| child. I'm sure I'd find most of it more cringe as an adult.
| I think you're correct though that it fits the poster's
| usage.
| 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.
| speeder wrote:
| Some years ago someone posted here on Hacker News some
| article about a bronze-age battle that had more corpses
| (archeologists found the battle when they stumbled into the
| corpses, some even still holding swords and all) than
| expected, the amount of corpses suggest the calculations of
| the world population at the time was wrong.
| atchoo wrote:
| Probably The Tollense valley battlefield
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tollense_valley_battlefield
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| In this 6-mo-old video [0], Marvin Sweatman reports that
| Gobekli was indeed a settlement, not just a 'temple' (bodies
| have been found buried under floors), that the original
| dating is now being re-evaluated, and there's a theory that
| the 'rubble fill' came from buildings built around it in
| later times.
|
| [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F3qZQRzzA4
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| If bodies have been found, why hasn't radiocarbon dating
| been done on them?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Bodies haven't been found at gobekli tepe, only some
| cranial bone fragments in the fill. They _did_ attempt to
| date them, but there wasn 't enough remaining collagen.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| stubish 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.
|
| 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).
| pharke wrote:
| The force of water capable of pushing such a large amount of
| rubble would have bulldozed the entire structure and there
| would be practically nothing left. Simply look at the
| pillars[0] that are being excavated, there is no way they could
| have survived such a force. The builders of this complex would
| have no technical problems with burying them, filling in a hole
| is much easier than carving and erecting hundreds of stone
| blocks, pillars and structures.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe#Architecture
| op00to wrote:
| Karahan Tepe? More like Karahan peepee, am I right? No? Sorry,
| I'll show myself out.
| user3939382 wrote:
| In response to which Graham Hancock slowly sits back in his chair
| and breathes a sigh of victorious relief.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > In response to which Graham Hancock slowly sits back in his
| chair and breathes a sigh of victorious relief.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| bgroat wrote:
| My favourite movie is called "The Man From Earth", about a man
| who was born 14,000 years ago and hasn't died.
|
| 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
| rapind wrote:
| He was a Neanderthal which was supposed to be why he didn't age
| (not that that makes sense). I really enjoyed that movie too.
| bgroat wrote:
| He was a Magdalenian (so a homo sapien), no reason was ever
| given for his agelessness. And his tribe (who presumably were
| all related to him) lived natural lives
| vishnugupta wrote:
| I've done a few re-watch of The Man From Earth. Very well made.
|
| What's more; it's on YT for free.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAX2RuZm-Fk
| diggernet wrote:
| That is really a great movie.
|
| 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.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I like that movie too. You might be interested in Heinlein's
| novel Time Enough For Love. It's set a couple thousand years
| in the future and centers on a guy who was born in the early
| 1900s and is still alive, due to rejuvenation technology and
| perhaps other reasons :). Other people in the story live long
| lives as well, but the main character is by far the oldest
| known in the world. It's a bit sprawling and weird (even off
| putting) in some parts, but I found it to be excellently
| written and very easy to fly through the pages.
| uranium wrote:
| I hadn't known about the sequel; thanks for mentioning it!
| x3n0ph3n3 wrote:
| Honestly, you're better off skipping it.
| mrtksn wrote:
| People say these things for almost all sequels, is it
| that bad really?
|
| The sequel of 2021 Space Odyssey for example, is nowhere
| near as good as the original but it gives a closure so I
| like it.
|
| The Matrix 4, definitely not in the same league as the
| first ones but it's still good to have IMHO. It's a nice
| wrap up.
|
| Is the sequel of this movie really bad? Like ruining the
| first one bad?
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| This particular sequel is really bad. Plenty of issues
| with the script and cast but to me the disconnect between
| a character that doesn't age and the actor that does made
| it really hard to watch
| dflock wrote:
| IMDb: The Man from Earth: Holocene
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5770864/
| bgroat wrote:
| It's very different.
|
| The first movie takes place in a single room as the
| character confides in a group of professors about
| who/what he is.
|
| The sequels is much more conventional (multiple scenes,
| multiple sets), and features a group of students who
| independently discover who/what he is.
| hcrisp wrote:
| There is also a character, a wanderer possibly called
| Lazarus, who appears across the three ages of the book _A
| Canticle for Liebowitz_.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I took way too long to find this book. If you like Sci-fi
| and haven't read it, it's well worth a try.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz
| jiggawatts wrote:
| If you're into this kind of thing, The Hydrogen Sonata by Ian
| M Banks also has a main character that is very long lived.
| carlisle_ wrote:
| I also often think of this movie. It was really quite excellent
| at being through provoking in interesting ways like this.
| trashtester wrote:
| Fun fact: If you believe in the Everett interpretation of QM
| (Also called Many World), there may be one "world" for each of
| us where we become thousands of years old.
| bgroat wrote:
| I choose to believe I'm in that one.
|
| But if not, no biggie
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >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.
|
| 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.
| bgroat wrote:
| I wanted to avoid spoiling that
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Ok I didn't think that was a spoiler, pretty common for the
| genre, the immortal guy has been someone important in the
| past. I think there would be only one real spoiler plot
| wise that you don't see coming.
| seer wrote:
| I remember having similar thoughts of awe about how _old_ are
| things in this region of the earth, when I was listening to one
| of the famous Dan Carlin hardcore history series.
|
| 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...
| kqr wrote:
| What's even nuttier is that them invading something with a
| 3000 year history would be a little like us stumbling over
| ancient Rome _today_ it having been a thing for that long.
|
| 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?
| internetvin wrote:
| This looks awesome, ty for sharing <3
| davedx wrote:
| Another great book along the same lines is SUM VII:
| https://www.amazon.com/Sum-VII-novel-T-Hard/dp/0060117028
|
| "The doctor working on the mummy suggests trying to see if the
| man could be revived..."
| poundtown wrote:
| is this the same thing graham hancock(Gobekli Tepe) has been
| going on about for sometime or is this different?
| mkl wrote:
| I suggest you read the article, which is fascinating and based
| on archeological research at Gobekli Tepe and other nearby
| sites. Hancock seems to incorporate real archeological sites
| into pseudo-scientific narratives.
| pvg wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karahan_Tepe
|
| It's nearby but it's a different site
| zarmin wrote:
| Hancock has talked more than a few times about Karahan Tepe
| too.
| pvg wrote:
| His crank fancies are, indeed, broad.
| haspoken wrote:
| https://archive.ph/ER5d9
| rendall wrote:
| > _The shepherd who discovered Gobekli Tepe_
|
| 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_?
| [deleted]
| mavci wrote:
| I thought about that too while reading. His name is Mahmut
| Yildiz.
|
| 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...
| rendall wrote:
| Thanks!
| 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?
| stubish wrote:
| The sites and their importance were known before the current
| issues in Turkey. Some of the publicity now may well be to
| encourage nationalism, but the reality is we probably would
| have been hearing about it 10-20 years earlier if the site
| hadn't been in a war zone.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
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