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.
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
> "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.
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]
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.
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.
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).
>> 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
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..
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.
"At the end of its uselife, the megalithic enclosures of Göbekli 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."
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 Göbekli 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?
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.
Megalithic raves were getting out of hand, so the priestly class had topsoil and gravel dumped into the underground rave-atoriums in the hope that everyone would go back to quietly contemplating the sky. Similar thing happened at Chaco canyon when younger generations insisted on partying in the kivas and didn’t much care about the sun-dagger or the celestial desert roads to nowhere, anymore.
I read it similarly - as the present article for this post says, these were carved of “living rock”, which I take to mean that rock/dirt was removed from around the megalithic sculptures. In this context, the refill was when these hollowed out areas were covered back up. I read “uselife” similarly to you - the end of their usability vis a vis the refill.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
It's true of Africans as well, but you can divide humans by the little variation we have, and it turns out there are a dozen or so groups in sub-Saharan Africa, and one group pretty much everywhere else.
"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.
> "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.
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
First, define civilization. It's pretty much common sense that human tribes had their own sets of customs and rules, even back then. Is that enough to have "civilization"? Is getting out of Africa a prerequisite to have "civilization"?
At one point in our history, humans developed language and could tell each other stories about major events in their lives. If developing an oral legacy is your definition of having "civilation", your question is unanswerable because there's no way we can prove conclusively which ancient humans had those capabilities and which didn't.
At some later point, we developed writing. Mural inscriptions and stone tablets are the first examples we have of humanity's communicative abilities. Is using the written word enough to have "civilization"?
Taking the other extreme, it's pretty much assumed that until the European exploration phase in the 15th-16th century, humans lived within their own local/continental society. Is being in contact with people on the other side of the globe a prerequisite to have "civilization"?
A layer of systems built by organisms atop their natural biology, where new members of an species are inducted into those systems by “choice” and not biological requirements.
Example: Bees and termites build nests, but that’s part of their natural biology: They can’t practically survive without it.
Humans “choose” to build houses, but a human infant could survive and grow to adulthood without one, albeit with less convenience.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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 Göbekli Tepe.
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.
420 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 357 ms ] threadI 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
> "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...
- Look before you leap - He who hesitates is lost
Studies and adages aren't all that different, it seems.
/s, but I wonder what the A/B on a headline like that would be.
To seal it off again
No human remains and intentionally sealed off, take the hint
[x] Earliest known example
[x] Giant penises
Second Life will one day become a digital archeologist's incredible discovery
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..
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.
"At the end of its uselife, the megalithic enclosures of Göbekli 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...
Is it jargon for "the duration of its use by humans?"
In the above quote that's how I read it: "When Göbekli 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?
Anyway according to other comments apparently they used a few means of dating already.
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.
It's nearby but it's a different site
Im curious how true that is, but there is a trend.
> 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
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.
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.
Not really a criticism (ok maybe a little), but perhaps more of an indication that these discoveries are truly novel and baffling.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeveryt...
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.
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 ?)
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.
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.
We only think it does because we conflate civilisation with technologies of violence and bureaucracy, and those indeed leave clear archaeological traces.
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.
Africans esp the San have much more diversity than everyone else but IIRC it’s still remarkably low for our current population size.
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.
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.
At one point in our history, humans developed language and could tell each other stories about major events in their lives. If developing an oral legacy is your definition of having "civilation", your question is unanswerable because there's no way we can prove conclusively which ancient humans had those capabilities and which didn't.
At some later point, we developed writing. Mural inscriptions and stone tablets are the first examples we have of humanity's communicative abilities. Is using the written word enough to have "civilization"?
Taking the other extreme, it's pretty much assumed that until the European exploration phase in the 15th-16th century, humans lived within their own local/continental society. Is being in contact with people on the other side of the globe a prerequisite to have "civilization"?
A layer of systems built by organisms atop their natural biology, where new members of an species are inducted into those systems by “choice” and not biological requirements.
Example: Bees and termites build nests, but that’s part of their natural biology: They can’t practically survive without it.
Humans “choose” to build houses, but a human infant could survive and grow to adulthood without one, albeit with less convenience.
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?
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.
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...
We have choices about how we organize civilization. Neither Rousseau nor Hobbes depicted destiny, just choices.
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.
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.
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.
>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!