"Predating Stonehenge by 6,000 years, Turkey's stunning Gobekli Tepe upends the conventional view of the rise of civilization"
Ha! It is hilarious to see west measure 'rise of civilization' against some dumb set of stones wedged by people who probably didn't know how to write. Plain fodder for insular minds.
Civilizations in the middle east (such as the now broken Syria) and even Indo-Srilankan subcontinent have been known to have practiced and even have written transcripts of things like heat sensing weaponry, a "nuclear standoff" and an equivalent of what we call theory of atoms -- read about brahmastra or brahmand, for example, in Mahabharat[1].
How about a simple infographic timeline of estimated, claimed and measured history? Measure it along time and not some myopic view held by the west (or east).
If we're going to argue that the Mahabharata is an account of nuclear war, we need to remember that it's extremely similar to the Irish Cattle Raid of Cooley. It's not an account of ancient Indian greatness; it's an account of the death of a previous civilization, which Proto-Indo-European-speaking peoples witnessed from the periphery, recording it in forms that became the garbled accounts surviving in India and Ireland.
> If we're going to argue that the Mahabharata is an account of nuclear war, we need to remember that it's extremely similar to the Irish Cattle Raid of Cooley.
Correct! I would rather measure up 'rise of civilization' against both texts than a stupid set of stones with nothing written on them -- which at best seems like a partial rise of civilization. Hence, the hilarity.
Could be a great start for a Civilization game cheat/conspiracy theory edition with secret techs like neolithic atomic bomb or ancient aliens spacecrafts
We're not... comparing? We're trying to put every event in history into a context, to understand and track humanity's slow trajectory. This isn't about India vs. West (and you're getting downvoted because you're putting it in that context). This is about our earliest roots.
"known to have practiced and even have written transcripts of things"
While I agree with your disdain of the overly western attitude that "civilization" didn't arise until agriculture and other myopic views, I also think you should not be so quick to use their myopia to justify your own, and in that sense, I think your use of the word known is too strong.
I think language and writing are a particularly strong indicator of "civilization", whatever the various definition. Now, the problem with the gathas you refer to is that they are supposedly the written version of an oral tradition that is much older, but like the hebrew torah, the veracity of how old that spoken tradition really is, is very much hard to verify and dubious. It is known that many of the spoken word traditions often claim to be older than they really are, for various reasons. The old avestan, which the first gathas were written in, only date to not much before 1000 BC. That doesn't inherently mean the claims of being more ancient are wrong, but it's something to take into consideration, and to be fair, indus-script, the proto-writing in the indus valley (including the proto-elamite) have been dated to ~3500 BC.
The point is that I have heard these types of claims, mostly from Indians, that the veda's, etc, are simply the written traditions of 12k+ year old oral traditions, and I find such claims to not be backed up by evidence and are often used as some sort of national pride instead of based on the science. So be careful about wanting to have a claim to the oldest writing which offers some great insight into the ancient world when that isn't verified or verifiable.
Because if you wanted to go there, the oldest proto-writings aren't from the indus valley civilization (including the only ~3000 BC sumerian/egyption), but from 7000 BC China, 6000 BC Central/SouthEastern Europe, and 6000 BC Greece, in the Jiahu, Vinca, and Dispillo respectively.
So, to summarize, I am just as skeptical of stories about indus valley vedas actually knowing about nuclear war as I am about cannanite stories about the time of the angels who mated with man to produce giants (which they mostly stole from the sumerians anyway).
Now, if you just want to talk about erected structural dating, thats a different discussion, which is still why Gobleke Tepe is so unique, because imagine that if the oldest proto-writing is in China around 7000 years ago, Tepe was built roughly twice as long ago as that (14000 BC)!
That's why I really like the research on Gobleke Tepe. I have yet to see any really good sources on any older human structures than that.
Now, my personal and unverifiable conjecture is that Gobleke Tepe was a temple, but not the kind imagined, and instead was a temple of death or temple of the underworld, but how I came to that conclusion is a story for another time.
The most impressive part of Gobekli Tepe is that the site was built by hunter-gatherers -- people with no granaries, no specialists, no taxes or central authorities. This was a very impressive display of community will, and reveals that hunter-gatherer societies were potentially capable of much greater accomplishments (while remaining hunter-gatherers) than we'd previously known of or imagined.
I'm reminded of MFAC -- the Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilization hypothesis -- which argues that Peruvian/Incan civilization began with fishing instead of agriculture: another of those things that supposedly can't happen. Granaries are very important, but perhaps less so than we think...
Regardless of your viewpoint, the way you express yourself makes you sound like one of those conspiracy theorists that pats other people on the shoulder saying "don't worry, you'll figure it out some day". Does not help with credibility at all.
What proof is there that they were hunter and gatherers (aside from an assumption based on timeline)? Isn't building an extensive permanent structure a signature of settled people?
That it's the only permanent structure of its kind from that period, and that every other type of artefact from the era we have found so far is very different.
But the amount of resources required to build that type of structure is not present in a H&G society. Those societies tend to be small groups. Quarrying large stones requires a lot of resources, which is only present in a settled society.
That's one of the things discussed in the article:
"To Schmidt and others, these new findings suggest a novel theory of civilization. Scholars have long believed that only after people learned to farm and live in settled communities did they have the time, organization and resources to construct temples and support complicated social structures. But Schmidt argues it was the other way around: the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths literally laid the groundwork for the development of complex societies."
While I agree with your general sentiment—I would also be skittish to refer to them as H&G—I think a few things are clear that we can all agree on:
1. The site well pre-dates current archeological evidence for sustained agriculture.
2. The site clearly supported a lot of people with similar aims and (most likely) religious significance.
3. The site is quite impressive to build on both a physical and organizational level.
The question I've heard posed around the site is: did the social/religious element help bootstrap sustained agriculture, or did the agriculture allow the gathering to form when it couldn't be sustained before, or did they form in unison? I don't think the archeological record is anywhere near answering that question; I don't recall much evidence of agriculture, and the only other model of clearly pre-agriculture society we have is H&G societies.
Long-winded; apologies. But I think we can have a more nuanced discussion than H&G vs Settled.
This is overly simplistic imo. We know that H&G groups periodically congregated and cooperated in groups far larger than a single band, such as to share in hunting the seasonal peak of herds. It's not that much of a stretch to believe they'd periodically congregate to advance a construction.
Umm...Id say it's a stretch. Wanna hunt together? Wanna quarry some stone and build a temple? I don't think we are talking about apples and apples here.
I disagree. I think it's entirely likely things started along the lines of "We gather here every year this season to share in the peak hunt festival. Let's make a mark upon this place" and over a few centuries that grew motivating enough for people to incrementally build more elaborate megalithic structures. This is just my view, and I'm certainly no anthropologist. But I would point out this narrative exactly matches what we see at Gobekli Teki: layers of megalith construction, each covering and supplanting the previous.
Some hunter-gatherer groups lived in areas with much greater resources than others, for instance in the Pacific Northwest where they had the potlatches. From what I've read, the Fertile Crescent was such an area. (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedentism#Historical_regions_o...)
It's the only permanent one that has remains we can find. But if they built somewhat-permanent structures using only wood and other perishable materials, wouldn't there be no trace of those?
If the wooden structures eventually became covered in earth, or if they had foundations going into the ground, then archaeologists can identify them. Often wood posts that have been driven into the earth will crumble and rot, _but it still leaves a hole_ that's filled with water/sludge and it eventually looks like a column of dirt very different than all the dirt it's next to.
Archaeologists were able to use this technique at pompei, to learn exactly how vines & vineyard fenceposts were placed in ancient vineyards.
Interesting, but do those holes and such survive the 11,000 years we are talking about here (as opposed to 2,000)? That's so much time it's hard to even imagine. Aside from gradual erosion and settling, wouldn't one major earthquake or flood wipe them out?
I'm just shooting from the hip, but: Unless the posthole was actually on a fault line, there's no reason that an earthquake would wipe it out. The ground all moves together. Erosion & flooding can absolutely destroy them. But there's enough places that have been undisturbed since that time period.
A better example (which I just learned about-- I'm literally trying to google for the oldest post holes found :) ) is Monte Verde: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde
> Radiocarbon dating of bones and charcoal in 1982 gave the site an average age of 14,800 years ago (calibrated), more than 1000 years earlier than the oldest-known site of human habitation in the Americas at that time.[2][8][9]
> In the initial excavation, two large hearths were found and many small ones as well. The remains of local animals were found, in addition to wooden posts from approximately twelve huts.
That's a bit deceptive I think. It's the only lasting permanent structure that we know of from that carbon-dated time period. But different parts of the world advanced at different rates, and central asia is one of the oldest hotbeds of civilization, so it makes since that neolithic structures in this region are older than elsewhere.
There are other structures that seem to have been built by hunter-gatherers. Stonehenge comes to mind. The construction dates of Stonehenge aligns with the absolute dates of civilizations elsewhere in the world, but in the British isles it was still a time of hunter gatherers.
There is also much archaeological evidence for large, permanent "meeting point" structures built with wood columns and dirt fortifications. What makes Gobekli Tepe interesting is that it is stone (albeit a very soft stone that didn't need complex tools to work with) and therefore we have more than just holes in the ground and oddly shaped hills to look at.
This site is a lot older than stonehenge. Taking the oldest and youngest proposed dates for the two sites, and Stonehenge is still closer to the present than to Gobleki Tepeh. Ancient Britons were farmers. They lived in village communities that we can picture forming larger societies with religion, organisation and (fabulously impressive) masonry skills.
Gobleki Tepeh predates known agriculture and permanent settlements. It really is a singular site, with genuine mystery.
I am not sure where it's established that Stonehenge was built by hunters/gatherers. But if it is true, it would be pretty impressive, given the absence of long distance communication and a low population density per mile (you need 32 mi2 to support 100 people). Aligning a population spread over potentially hundreds if not thousands of square miles behind a single goal is mind boggling (not the least being that if you were to get 10,000 people to agree and bring them to build Stonehenge, the land could not support them without some form of farming or agriculture.)
Depends on what you mean by "Stonehenge." The iconic stones are a late neolithic construction, but the site itself is very old. The visible portion today is built on top of a much older ritual structure.
I don't think you'd need 10,000 people to construct a structure like Stonehenge, especially when you consider that these were built over vast intervals of time (hundreds of years per structure, thousands for the entire site).
The idea is that they were "settled" in a sense, they just didn't have agriculture (maybe).
Improving technology (e.g. archery, fishing) could have (albeit temporarily) given hunter-gatherers an overabundance of food which created a demand for increased storage and division of labor which might give you increased communication, trade and domination of nearby groups through force.
Proof that they were hunter and gatherers is essentially proof that they weren't farmers. That's mostly based on a consensus that agricultural societies didn't exist anywhere yet. Proving negative claims is difficult, especially considering the age of the site, 12000 years (at least). Both Gobleki Tepeh & the Neolithic Revolution date to the beginning of the Holocene climactic period. Climactic changes are destructive and evidence can get wiped out be sea level changes or glacial melt.
Gobleki Tepeh is itself does challenge the "neolithic revolution" narrative. Either farming started earlier or stuff historians generally associate with agricultural societies started before farming. It's hard to conceive of how this happened without "specialists, taxes or central authorities" or some functional equivalent. I don't see how our conventional understanding of hunter-gatherer society can explain a site like this.
This is a new-ish site. Singular. It's still not 95% or more is still underground. It's still not fully incorporated into our historical narratives.
The discovery of Gobekli Tepe was completely random and could just as easily not have happened. Our picture of the post ice age period is tenative at best and easily disrupted by new information. I suspect there are many more sites like this lurking under the soil, especially in this region.
I always thought that the neolithic revolution narrative needed friends. It seems entirely possible that other forms of "civilization" existed even if they did not persist and/or spread the way agricultural ones did.
I'm so proud of this as an edessene, and as a human. The assumption was that food civilised us, but Göbeklitepe says that civilisation came first, then we fed it.
I find a couple of the comments to that article posits something interesting - at least to think about:
This site, according to the article, was built by carving these stones, erecting them, then covering them up - the repeating the process on top of the covering, ultimately leading to this "hill". The carvings are of "dangerous creatures". At the bottom of the pits, they found limestone floors (which in the article they speculate it might be a large hunter-gather cemetery). So - why all this effort?
In the comments, a couple of people speculate (and that's all it is - pure speculation with no other reasoning) that this site is a large "do not disturb, do not dig here". These speculation go on to suggest that, much like today we are trying to come up with symbols and/or symbology to denote our burying sites of long-lived radioactive waste - that perhaps something of this nature was done by these ancient people.
Again - pure speculation, with no facts or other understanding to back it up - but the idea is interesting: Is it biological in nature? Some kind of ancient foe entombed to keep it from killing these hunters? Maybe an ancient "natural nuclear reactor" site that killed people with radiation? Cthulhu?
Whatever the truth is (and the truth will likely be very mundane) - the above could easily be interesting fodder for a science fiction or fantasy author!
It's been a few years, but I remember learning about Gobekli Tepe in one of my humanities classes in college. The theory I learned is that it was a non-permanent gathering/ceremonial site (for what reason isn't exactly known), but this article neglects to mention one very interesting thing - there's trace evidence of beer at the site!
Makes you wonder what grains were used for first, beer or bread... Also the role that alcohol plays in the rise of civilization. Would these people be warring or otherwise combatitive if they didn't gather every year to drink and feast?
Since people can get alcohol from palm wine [which is pretty universal in warmer clines] already maybe initially from an accidentally fermented vat, might people use grain primarily for food and only use it for alcohol if they had surplus that would go bad if unused?
Gobleki Tepeh is such a fascinating site. I love the way it both throws a spanner into historical understandings and alludes to them in interesting ways.
It's not just before agriculture, it's just before agriculture, almost moments before. This is also the area where historians think it first happened. That leaves room for curious ideas like agriculture as a byproduct os civilization rather than the other way around.
The next oldest settlements are newer, less ornate and well.. settlements. No one can even figure out what Gobleki Tepeh was. Doesn't seem to be buildings. The next oldest sites are the likes of Ain Ghazal & Jericho. These were proto-cities with dwellings. They come with some pretty weird ancient art, but at least we can imagine what these people were up to. They grew crops, lived in houses, buried dead, made statues. They fit into the narrative mould history. Megalithic outdoor sanctuary on a bronze age scale before known agriculture or settlements, at a time when people were supposed to be living in small bands? Beautiful mysteries.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 89.2 ms ] threadHa! It is hilarious to see west measure 'rise of civilization' against some dumb set of stones wedged by people who probably didn't know how to write. Plain fodder for insular minds.
Civilizations in the middle east (such as the now broken Syria) and even Indo-Srilankan subcontinent have been known to have practiced and even have written transcripts of things like heat sensing weaponry, a "nuclear standoff" and an equivalent of what we call theory of atoms -- read about brahmastra or brahmand, for example, in Mahabharat[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahabharata_(disambiguation)
Correct! I would rather measure up 'rise of civilization' against both texts than a stupid set of stones with nothing written on them -- which at best seems like a partial rise of civilization. Hence, the hilarity.
For reference, Mahabharata is closer in history to the iPhone, than it is to building of Gobekli Tepe. https://www.quora.com/How-old-are-the-Mahabharata-and-Ramaya...
While I agree with your disdain of the overly western attitude that "civilization" didn't arise until agriculture and other myopic views, I also think you should not be so quick to use their myopia to justify your own, and in that sense, I think your use of the word known is too strong.
I think language and writing are a particularly strong indicator of "civilization", whatever the various definition. Now, the problem with the gathas you refer to is that they are supposedly the written version of an oral tradition that is much older, but like the hebrew torah, the veracity of how old that spoken tradition really is, is very much hard to verify and dubious. It is known that many of the spoken word traditions often claim to be older than they really are, for various reasons. The old avestan, which the first gathas were written in, only date to not much before 1000 BC. That doesn't inherently mean the claims of being more ancient are wrong, but it's something to take into consideration, and to be fair, indus-script, the proto-writing in the indus valley (including the proto-elamite) have been dated to ~3500 BC.
The point is that I have heard these types of claims, mostly from Indians, that the veda's, etc, are simply the written traditions of 12k+ year old oral traditions, and I find such claims to not be backed up by evidence and are often used as some sort of national pride instead of based on the science. So be careful about wanting to have a claim to the oldest writing which offers some great insight into the ancient world when that isn't verified or verifiable.
Because if you wanted to go there, the oldest proto-writings aren't from the indus valley civilization (including the only ~3000 BC sumerian/egyption), but from 7000 BC China, 6000 BC Central/SouthEastern Europe, and 6000 BC Greece, in the Jiahu, Vinca, and Dispillo respectively.
So, to summarize, I am just as skeptical of stories about indus valley vedas actually knowing about nuclear war as I am about cannanite stories about the time of the angels who mated with man to produce giants (which they mostly stole from the sumerians anyway).
Now, if you just want to talk about erected structural dating, thats a different discussion, which is still why Gobleke Tepe is so unique, because imagine that if the oldest proto-writing is in China around 7000 years ago, Tepe was built roughly twice as long ago as that (14000 BC)!
That's why I really like the research on Gobleke Tepe. I have yet to see any really good sources on any older human structures than that.
Now, my personal and unverifiable conjecture is that Gobleke Tepe was a temple, but not the kind imagined, and instead was a temple of death or temple of the underworld, but how I came to that conclusion is a story for another time.
I'm reminded of MFAC -- the Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilization hypothesis -- which argues that Peruvian/Incan civilization began with fishing instead of agriculture: another of those things that supposedly can't happen. Granaries are very important, but perhaps less so than we think...
Hilarious, ha ha ha! And thus fodder continues… It's almost like the western linguists were there only yesterday:
"people with no granaries, no specialists, no taxes or central authorities." :-)
"To Schmidt and others, these new findings suggest a novel theory of civilization. Scholars have long believed that only after people learned to farm and live in settled communities did they have the time, organization and resources to construct temples and support complicated social structures. But Schmidt argues it was the other way around: the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths literally laid the groundwork for the development of complex societies."
1. The site well pre-dates current archeological evidence for sustained agriculture.
2. The site clearly supported a lot of people with similar aims and (most likely) religious significance.
3. The site is quite impressive to build on both a physical and organizational level.
The question I've heard posed around the site is: did the social/religious element help bootstrap sustained agriculture, or did the agriculture allow the gathering to form when it couldn't be sustained before, or did they form in unison? I don't think the archeological record is anywhere near answering that question; I don't recall much evidence of agriculture, and the only other model of clearly pre-agriculture society we have is H&G societies.
Long-winded; apologies. But I think we can have a more nuanced discussion than H&G vs Settled.
I don't know about quarrying stone, though.
Archaeologists were able to use this technique at pompei, to learn exactly how vines & vineyard fenceposts were placed in ancient vineyards.
When I was in Chengdu I visited Jinsha, which has lots of evidence of postholes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinsha_(archaeological_site) http://www.kaogu.cn/en/Chinese%20Archaeology/3/Discovery%20a... Granted, that's only 3000 years old.
A better example (which I just learned about-- I'm literally trying to google for the oldest post holes found :) ) is Monte Verde: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde
> Radiocarbon dating of bones and charcoal in 1982 gave the site an average age of 14,800 years ago (calibrated), more than 1000 years earlier than the oldest-known site of human habitation in the Americas at that time.[2][8][9]
> In the initial excavation, two large hearths were found and many small ones as well. The remains of local animals were found, in addition to wooden posts from approximately twelve huts.
There are other structures that seem to have been built by hunter-gatherers. Stonehenge comes to mind. The construction dates of Stonehenge aligns with the absolute dates of civilizations elsewhere in the world, but in the British isles it was still a time of hunter gatherers.
There is also much archaeological evidence for large, permanent "meeting point" structures built with wood columns and dirt fortifications. What makes Gobekli Tepe interesting is that it is stone (albeit a very soft stone that didn't need complex tools to work with) and therefore we have more than just holes in the ground and oddly shaped hills to look at.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-wiltshire-34156673
And Stonehenge is far from being the only examplar of its kind. There's a big one in Scotland:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callanish_Stones
And another in Brittany:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnac_stones
It seems like back in the Neolithic, there must have some kind of pan-euroasian craze for menhir based construction.
Gobleki Tepeh predates known agriculture and permanent settlements. It really is a singular site, with genuine mystery.
Wooly Mammoths went extinct 4500 years ago.
Ref: https://persquaremile.com/2011/08/17/hunter-gatherer-populat...
I don't think you'd need 10,000 people to construct a structure like Stonehenge, especially when you consider that these were built over vast intervals of time (hundreds of years per structure, thousands for the entire site).
Improving technology (e.g. archery, fishing) could have (albeit temporarily) given hunter-gatherers an overabundance of food which created a demand for increased storage and division of labor which might give you increased communication, trade and domination of nearby groups through force.
Gobleki Tepeh is itself does challenge the "neolithic revolution" narrative. Either farming started earlier or stuff historians generally associate with agricultural societies started before farming. It's hard to conceive of how this happened without "specialists, taxes or central authorities" or some functional equivalent. I don't see how our conventional understanding of hunter-gatherer society can explain a site like this.
This is a new-ish site. Singular. It's still not 95% or more is still underground. It's still not fully incorporated into our historical narratives.
I always thought that the neolithic revolution narrative needed friends. It seems entirely possible that other forms of "civilization" existed even if they did not persist and/or spread the way agricultural ones did.
This site, according to the article, was built by carving these stones, erecting them, then covering them up - the repeating the process on top of the covering, ultimately leading to this "hill". The carvings are of "dangerous creatures". At the bottom of the pits, they found limestone floors (which in the article they speculate it might be a large hunter-gather cemetery). So - why all this effort?
In the comments, a couple of people speculate (and that's all it is - pure speculation with no other reasoning) that this site is a large "do not disturb, do not dig here". These speculation go on to suggest that, much like today we are trying to come up with symbols and/or symbology to denote our burying sites of long-lived radioactive waste - that perhaps something of this nature was done by these ancient people.
Again - pure speculation, with no facts or other understanding to back it up - but the idea is interesting: Is it biological in nature? Some kind of ancient foe entombed to keep it from killing these hunters? Maybe an ancient "natural nuclear reactor" site that killed people with radiation? Cthulhu?
Whatever the truth is (and the truth will likely be very mundane) - the above could easily be interesting fodder for a science fiction or fantasy author!
Makes you wonder what grains were used for first, beer or bread... Also the role that alcohol plays in the rise of civilization. Would these people be warring or otherwise combatitive if they didn't gather every year to drink and feast?
http://www.livescience.com/25855-stone-age-beer-brewery-disc...
[0] http://www.piney.com/BabNinkasi.html
It's not just before agriculture, it's just before agriculture, almost moments before. This is also the area where historians think it first happened. That leaves room for curious ideas like agriculture as a byproduct os civilization rather than the other way around.
The next oldest settlements are newer, less ornate and well.. settlements. No one can even figure out what Gobleki Tepeh was. Doesn't seem to be buildings. The next oldest sites are the likes of Ain Ghazal & Jericho. These were proto-cities with dwellings. They come with some pretty weird ancient art, but at least we can imagine what these people were up to. They grew crops, lived in houses, buried dead, made statues. They fit into the narrative mould history. Megalithic outdoor sanctuary on a bronze age scale before known agriculture or settlements, at a time when people were supposed to be living in small bands? Beautiful mysteries.