[HN Gopher] Bronze Age mega-settlement in Kazakhstan has advance...
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Bronze Age mega-settlement in Kazakhstan has advanced urban
planning, metallurgy
Author : CGMthrowaway
Score : 106 points
Date : 2025-11-21 17:06 UTC (8 days ago)
(HTM) web link (archaeologymag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (archaeologymag.com)
| mitchbob wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20251119171014/https://archaeolo...
| varenc wrote:
| Strangely this gets caught in an infinite refresh loop for me.
| I assume it's the result of some JS on that page not liking the
| new domain it's on.
| noiv wrote:
| Looking at properly aligned buildings I realized school never
| prepared me into thinking city planner might have been a bronze
| age job. How come we call mobile phones progress?
| altairprime wrote:
| Mobile phones generate GAAP revenue for corporations beyond the
| initial sale; architecture and city planning do not.
| einsteinx2 wrote:
| I have no idea how this sentence:
|
| > Looking at properly aligned buildings I realized school never
| prepared me into thinking city planner might have been a bronze
| age job.
|
| Is related at all to this sentence:
|
| > How come we call mobile phones progress?
| cryptonector wrote:
| I think u/noiv might be saying that ancient cities were
| better than ours.
| bcraven wrote:
| If humans were so advanced to have city planning at that
| point, how do we only have mobile phones by now?
| cortesoft wrote:
| Because city planning doesn't require the same
| technological advancements that a cell phone does?
|
| Human sophistication and intelligence is not the same a
| technological advancements.
| afavour wrote:
| And sometimes offhand lighthearted comments are not the
| same as serious questions!
| anon84873628 wrote:
| There is a reason we name eras after materials - the bronze
| age, iron age, etc. Currently we're living in the silicon
| age.
|
| Progress in fundamental materials science tends to unlock
| whole new technology paradigms.
|
| You can do city planning with sod and stone. Mobile phones,
| on the other hand, require a nearly incomprehensible level
| of materials innovation. It is everything from the battery
| to conductive touch screen glass to plastic casing to
| silicon microchip... Not to mention all the science of
| satellites and rockets and radio waves that make them
| useful...
|
| By the way, the show "Connections" by James Burke is
| brilliant. A must-watch for any tech curious nerd.
| Razengan wrote:
| Maybe they did but became enlightened and destroyed their
| phones after versions of Facebook and Twitter cause their
| civilization to collapse?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| You have to remember this is rediscovering the past in ways
| that previous cultures only had mythology around. The fact that
| this paper is basically "Stone Age people aren't less
| sophisticated" is a relatively new idea since levi strauss
| reinvented anthropology in the 1950s and 1960s
|
| Hindu, then Greek then confuscian theologian-philosophers laid
| the foundations for the idea that their group had left behind
| simply being "animals" and sought out to distinguish human form
| (in their specific form) from all other forms of life.
|
| Humans also approach things linearly and it fights intuition
| that regression is not just possible but the norm.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Ancient Greeks attributed Mycenaean remains to the "Age of
| Heroes". They were amazed by the scale and engineering
| quality of the work and thought it was done by gods and
| mythical creatures such as Cyclopes. They didn't approach
| progress linearly or mono-dimensionally.
|
| Heinrich Schliemann was probably the first to connect the
| myths with tangible proof through archeology in late 19th
| century. While Levi-Strauss work was much later and more
| political and polemical rather than scientific.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Glorious ancient people of Kazakhstan had internet over wires
| made of copper and tin, powered by steam energy from the
| puffs of llamas. Very nice!
| jb1991 wrote:
| Sounds like things really went downhill by the time Borat
| arrived.
| rrdharan wrote:
| TIL, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_anthropology
| founded by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_L%C3%A9vi-
| Strauss, not to be confused with
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levi_Strauss.
| monospacegames wrote:
| Is this the culture referred to as BMAC? I've recently heard that
| both them and the Indus Valley Civilization remain fairly
| unresearched, which was surprising to me.
| neom wrote:
| Wow their art was fantastic:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bactria%E2%80%93Margiana_Archa...
| jb1991 wrote:
| Those are indeed some very nice photos, though it is clear
| that a couple of them were made by aliens.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| The BMAC is pretty far from Kazhakastan. It's likely that they
| traded with these folks though
| cpursley wrote:
| Interesting book on this topic:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1831667.The_Horse_the_Wh...
| mkoubaa wrote:
| The use of "has" in the title instead of "had" caused to imagine
| that this was about a modern community like the Amish
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(page generated 2025-11-29 23:00 UTC)