The recent excavations unearthed a painted wild boar statue, a human statue, and a vulture statue. All statues are new gateways to understanding pre-historic art and culture.
Not being snarky but the big deal is we're pushing back the line (read: year / era) dividing pre-history from history. These discoveries became history now, yes?
> Prehistory, also called pre-literary history, is the period of human history between the first known use of stone tools by hominins c. 3.3 million years ago and the beginning of recorded history with the invention of writing systems.
This is one common definition of the term history, but it's not a very good one and largely relegated to outdated encyclopedia entries rather than describing how professionals investigate history. It's very poor as a technical definition. For instance, does "history" in an area start when someone writes something, or does the writing have to survive to the present day? Does only one person need to write, or does it need to be socially widespread? Does it have to be full writing or does protowriting count? Do we have to be able to read the writing? Do partial readings count? These ambiguities weren't issues back when it was being used as a criterion for "civilization" ala childe, but that time has long since passed.
Today, it's best to ignore all these difficult and largely unnecessary questions by simply using a descriptive definition where "history is the human past".
By definition recorded history - as recorded in this art work, which are artifacts of history - is being pushed back.
The big deal is we over-estimated what we thought we knew about the past and that over-confidence is being humbled. And because of that the definition of pre-history needs to be updated.
I take great comfort in trying to figure out why these sites were buried. I believe the current understanding is that that were carefully covered with dirt contemporaneously with usage.
There is a theory that they were not intentionally buried after all, but rather that the deposits were the result of geological processes .. apparently they've found arrowheads in the deposit layers that demonstrate that the filling material was deposited over hundreds, or even thousands, of years ..
That makes a lot more sense to me. Do you have a source for more info. I think that would imply a social collapse that could no longer maintain their infrastructure.
Both the Miniminuteman and "The Prehistory Guys" channels on Youtube have featured more details on an analysis of the covering layers of Goebekli Tepe - you might want to check those channels out for more details.
Yeah I was expecting something like a greek statue with very realistic human features, but I guess this is still astounding since other statues of the time are even less anthropomorphous.
We have a fairly good idea of how sculpture evolved in the past 5,000 years or so. By 2500 BCE, the Egyptians had already mastered realistic sculpture:
Those statues clearly show some development, but I wouldn't say the Egyptians had mastered realistic sculpture. There is clearly still some kouros-like stylized anatomy here, especially visible in the standing figures. Compare to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polykleitos#/media/File:Doryph...
It’s of course difficult to say how much of the perceived non-realism was simply about cultural aesthetic preferences with regard to style. Especially given that the statues that have survived are those with special cultural or religious significance.
The non-realist aspects were definitely tied to cultural and religious signifiers.
There's actually a fascinating case where Egyptian artists were briefly allowed to abandon the established style and adopted a quite different one during the so-called Amarna period:
Much of the art became almost caricatures with elongated features, but there was simultaneously a realist tendency where portraits of royalty were suddenly allowed to have a likeness. The famous Nefertiti bust is from this era.
It seems clear to me that the artists' skills was not the limitation, but the permitted range of expression was quite narrow until this rebel pharaoh unleashed the short-lived style revolution.
It's kind of mind-blowing that we're three times closer to the Romans than the Romans themselves were to Gobekli Tepe. Gobekli Tepe is as much older than the pyramids, as the pyramids are themselves old.
> That's not what I consider a "realistic human statue" ?
the HN title is wrong, TFA says "realistic facial expression". Of course, it's neither a realistic facial expression, so all the comments are still valid. Carry on.
Stick figure cave paintings are paleolithic graffiti. If you think artists find it hard to scratch a living these days, you're not going to find much support for following your passion when there is hunting, gathering and defending against predators to do.
But if a sharman (assuming it is a statue for their deity) has the time, then there's no reason it couldn't be perfectly proportioned. It's not like hand-eye coordination has suddenly evolved; it would more be access to better tools than a piece of flint to bang on some softer rock.
> If you think artists find it hard to scratch a living these days, you're not going to find much support for following your passion when there is hunting, gathering and defending against predators to do.
You seem to seriously overestimate the average workload of prehistoric communities (or underestimating the average workload of present day individuals). Also I don't think the concept of making "a living" transfers to gift economies. Nor do you need to spend 16 hours a day every day "being an artist" to develop remarkable artistic skill. Strict division of labor is a fairly recent development that in its present form stems from industrialisation requiring work to be split into discrete processes to enable automation.
Experimental OSL dates from a wasp nest overlaying a tassel Gwion Gwion figure has given a Pleistocene date of 17,500 ± 1,800 years BP. The academic community generally accepts 5,000 BP for the end of the artistic style. If the date ranges are correct, this may demonstrate that the Gwion Gwion tradition was produced for many millennia.
In that time there is relatively little figurative art of humans. Rarely seen in cave painting, etc. The nearest would be the Venus figurines but they don't typically show facial features or internal anatomical details. It's a major major find bro.
I suspect it’s more a problem about longevity of the artifacts, rather than lack of talent or knowing one can pick up some mud and form a shape.
They had very similar general intelligence and talents as us, at that time, and tens of thousand of years before. Today, it’s not terribly hard to find artistic kids who can mold extremely good faces, ponies, or whatever else they choose, from a lump of play dough. I assume artistic people existed then too, with comparable talent and frequency, unless there was some catastrophic non-artist pruning that happened very very recently.
If they’re “us”, then that statistical review should show similar distributions to what we have now, especially in children. Can we see the artistic child’s work? It’s probably made of mud, so probably not. We only see accidents of preservation, due to the tools and final materials.
I haven't seen much art from that era either and was pretty surprised to see the statue. However looking into it, I'm even more surprised to learn of the Venus of Brassempouy.
I've heard that much of the ruins from Ancient Greeze were likely brightly colored and painted. I can't help but wonder if the Venus I mentioned had been painted as well. It's possible that they did have detailed faces, and that they simply weren't sculpted.
I don't understand why it is so radical though. Even when I was a bored kid I could pick up a stick and whittle out a face not to far from what was in the article with a decently sharp knife and some time. Doesn't seem like a huge jump to do it in stone if the stone is easy enough to shape with a harder stone/mineral...
We're talking anthropology here, not art criticism. It's leagues more realistic than anything we've uncovered. Something like the bronze charioteer which is incredibly vivid and accurate is made nearly 10,000 years later than this one.
As I understand it, in that case it is by dating the age of the materials the wood in question was buried in. The minerals are dated using luminescence dating. That tells you when those particles were last exposed to sunlight.
> Most luminescence dating methods rely on the assumption that the mineral grains were sufficiently "bleached" at the time of the event being dated. For example, in quartz a short daylight exposure in the range of 1–100 seconds before burial is sufficient to effectively “reset” the OSL dating clock
> And the timber is much older than the earliest modern human - or Homo sapiens - fossils, which are about 315,000 years old.
this is what astonished me. I somehow depicted our ancestors or relatives to be purely hunter/gatherers without the means (and will) to build complex wooden structures.
If you're interested in learning more about these incredible Turkish archaeological sites, I can't recommend the YouTube channel Miniminuteman [0] enough. Milo is extremely passionate about his field of study and makes highly entertaining and informative videos about archaeology and anthropology, including a recent series where he became the first real archaeologist ever to be allowed to film a documentary on-site at Karahantepe! [1]
He mentions that people back then lived around 35 years. I recall reading it's a mistaken interpretation of the average age, while many people died infants adults actually easily lived to 70+ yo. Is it true and he made the same mistake or am I thinking about a different period in history?
> Researchers Gurven and Kaplan have estimated that around 57% of hunter-gatherers reach the age of 15. Of those that reach 15 years of age, 64% continue to live to or past the age of 45. This places the life expectancy between 21 and 37 years.[54] They further estimate that 70% of deaths are due to diseases of some kind, 20% of deaths come from violence or accidents and 10% are due to degenerative diseases.
Karahan Tepe is not hunter gatherers, it's a permanent settlement.
But even that aside, it is definitely not what the guy in video literally said, which is quote "their lifespans would have only been around 35 years", 5:22. By the way, I had to sit through 6 unskippable 10-second ads to tell you the timestamp (2 ads every time I scrub around).
No need. I just don't generally watch YT anymore (aside from rare special cases) and I feel better off. Elsewhere ads don't reach my browser and waste my bandwidth.
These statistics regularly make it sound like everyone was dying off around 30.
In reality, it is due to infant mortality rates. Once you make it past a certain age (10-15 years) your life expectancy shoots up into the 40-60's easily. However, when you average the population out, those infant deaths tank the average life expectancy.
I'm not surprised they glossed over this, most researchers do, because they don't want to go into infantile deaths, disease spread during child birth, still births, etc.
Not only is it a complex topic, but it's fraught with political and religious ideology. When my history and anthropology professors started talking about it, certain folks of a particular religious bent almost immediately started trying to correct them about it.
The guy in the video said "their lifespans would have only been around 35 years" which sounds not so much glossing over as being plain incorrect.
I am annoyed by these slips every time because they make it seem as if we live so much longer since hunter-gatherer times... Modern medicine reduced early age mortality, sure, but funny enough it did not do much to increase max lifespan (and especially healthy lifespan).
Ah, yeah, that sounds like it was indeed just incorrect.
To add to your comment about modern medicine. Keep in mind that when you isolate out infant mortality, you get an average life span of roughly 60-ish in ancient times.
Present day mortality is closer to 85+ for the G7 countries and 75+ for other fairly well developed countries. That's a 25 year increase! Given those statistics, I would say modern medicine is actually doing quite a bit to improve life expectancy into your golden years!
IMHO healthy life expectancy should be the thing which is discussed and referenced. Back then you’d likely just die if you were too sick to comfortably live.
I hope I don't regret asking, but I'm genuinely curious about the details here. What religious/political implications are there (in the US, I presume?) for babies and mothers dying a lot in the old times? I've never seen this discussion become polarized before.
As you probably already know, medical science was stifled by the Catholic church for many years. In some ways, some medical practices were more accepted in the Muslim empires of the day. This creates a ultimately pointless but still real "superiority argument" around medieval and ancient times for these faiths.
There can be an ideological bent to try and label Rome (and by relation Catholicism) as being unclean and ungodly because it does not protect its young. Or even more extreme, suggest that their children die regularly because they are godless and that history proved it.
I hope I don't need to explain why this is very much an extremist point of view, but I'll say so regardless so that HN mods or other folks don't label me as being political/religious here.
In my history class, a religious argument of "my children are more godly and history proves it by the deaths" broke out between a group of very devout Orthodox, some Catholic folks, and some Muslim folks. All of them were trying to use the infant mortality rate as proof of some or the other's faith of god in their children. It got very weird, very fast. The professor had to break up the argument.
This happened in Alberta, the "religious zealotry" capital of Canada. Lots of religious conservatism here.
Wow. Never thought of this angle, religion wasn't on my radar concerning this question. Just found it counter intuitive that we live longer but not that much longer... Medicine's great but we have ways to go in our understanding.
>Not only is it a complex topic, but it's fraught with political and religious ideology. When my history and anthropology professors started talking about it, certain folks of a particular religious bent almost immediately started trying to correct them about it.
If you don't mind clarifying just a bit. What types of religious folks would get upset about a professor in a course (for a scientific discipline they presumably want to do well in no less) describing the very real history of terrible infant mortality across pretty much all premodern cultures and societies? Why would this even be a problem for them? Daily life in the past was known to be very harsh, even the bible itself (among other religious texts) alludes to that constantly.
I don't know if they -easily- lived up to 70, but it was possible to live to that age for sure :) . death rate of "at birth" and early years was far far higher than now. they certainly lived longer than 30-35 that I hear slung around though. If you lived to 15 or so you could easily live to 50-60. Although those early corpses almost always show infection by parasites and such and not so pretty healing from injuries.
It makes me happy that it's possible that future humans might live again on an earth 12,000 years in the future which has cooled again after our civilisation has boiled the planet.
Why would it cool in 12k years? We are loading the atmosphere with carbon sequestered over much longer periods. Some of which even happened in a phase of massive
imbalance in the evolutionary "war" between plants and plant consumers: trees had found a way to never rot (be consumed) which is rather tragic for incumbent biological systems but a crazy boost for carbon sequestering.
The problem is not that we produce heat, the problem is that we change the balance point between energy influx from the sun and energy emission to space. That changed balance point will remain changed much, much longer than 12k years. If we don't have a technological miracle, humans 12k in the future will live in tiny habitable zones near the poles.
If you love Goebekli Tepe, you're gonna adore Narwala Gabarnmang, which is theorized to be the worlds first educational institute, and which has extraordinarily interesting ties to Goebekli Tepe, which is believed to be paying tribute to Narwala Gabarnmang with the T-shaped pillars ..
Notice that, although it was a completely alien culture in a very far away time, before agriculture and writing, we still know what a lifelike facial expression looks like.
Many things vary from culture to culture. Facial expressions, at least many of them, are consistent across humanity. If someone stubs their toe or tastes something delicious, you'll know without words.
Look up 'human universals' in anthropology, evolutionary psychology, and in other fields. Donald Brown (see below) gives some opinionated background here, including a literature review (of Brown's own writings, and more):
I don't think any other species has the set of facial muscles humans do. Cats seem inscrutable because they have very few; dogs seem more understandable because they can move their eyebrows.
I think the non-human animal with the most facial expressions is the chimpanzee, but even then it is much less expressive than a human in this regard.
Various mammals have (non-facial) macroexpression somewhat similar to humans, such as excitement, curiosity and fear. Many non-mammals such as birds, fish, and some reptiles can express fear to some extent.
Fear and anger on the face of a human and a wolf are very similar. Include body language in general and the similarities expand. If a mammal drops its head, widens its eyes and its ears pull back (yes humans do that too), its time to look for escape, or a weapon.
I don't think cat faces are all that much less expressive than dog faces. They have a wide variety of facial expressions, including surprise, irritation/anger, happiness, playfulness, anxiety/fear, disgust, and so on - and that's not including at cat body language, especially tail movements.
Our cat has perfected the guilt-tripping innocent stare. She stands beside her food bowl looking almost blank. This somehow communicates a combination of infinite sadness and disappointment, blended with child-like hopefulness.
have you ever owned and been inseparable from a pet? you absolutely can interpret their moods and you can find papers on it if you like, they do have expressions and body language. It may not be the same as humans necessarily but it is there if you care to research it.
As someone who spends a lot of time closely with dogs, and recently raised a little of 6 spaniels - dogs "talk" via their facial expressions and can make sounds beyond just barks.
My pet theory is that women bonded with dogs first through an ability to have a mutual understanding with non-verbal communication, and we most likely observed them and could "talk" to them in their own ways - something that has been lost as we turned dogs from inter-species partners to enslaved commodities.
Probably extrapolating from the debunked pseudoscience of "women were gatherers, men were hunters", which fuels 90% of present evopsych nonsense.
For those unaware: prehistorical "hunter-gatherer" societies likely did not have strong divisions of labor and there is no evidence to suggest such a universal division across gender lines. Quite the opposite, actually. Turns out when you hunt large mammals in a group, the statistical physical advantages men have don't really matter all that much and women in turn aren't inherently better at child rearing (which historically was a group activity shared by the entire tribe).
That isn’t debunked, how ridiculous. It’s true not all men were hunters, but that doesn’t mean that there was an equal share of women among the hunters. They travelled as a group and everyone gathered, but men went out to get the kill.
Anyone making sweeping statements that applies to all of hunter gatherer society is almost certainly wrong about at least a few cultures. We’re talking 1-3 million years worth of human society and cultural evolution.
Anthropological studies of (some of the few remaining) contemporary hunter-gatherer societies don't show the presumed division of labor (or several other presumptions either, like pervasive hinger, or the amount of time spent on food collection) written up by 19th century European naturalists.
To be clear: most of the original claims about historical, prehistorical and then-contemporary indigeneous societies that have survived into the Western cultural canon were written by people who were used to extrapolating from their own cultural and social norms to others and judging everything on a scale that favored them and their social hierarchies. This also bled over into other natural sciences, which is for example why Darwin's theory of evolution was so disruptive.
Another example is how a lot of national mythologies were invented largely out of thin air in the 17th through 19th centuries, e.g. the Scottish clan system with its strict lineages and tartans. Most of the mythology around kilts is pure fabrication.
Even in economics this can be found with the common wisdom that money/currency was preceded by bartering, which we now know to be an oversimplification to the point of being wrong with in-group gift economies apparently having been far more common and bartering being part of diplomacy between separate groups rather than something you'd do with your neighbor.
Arguably this tendency even persisted to the point where the myth of an "alpha wolf" arose based on observations of wolves in captivity that was quickly dispelled after actually looking at wolves able to roam in their natural environment.
If you want to present the Victorian Age as the pinnacle of human development, of course you'll see the "uncivilised" natives as beneath you in every way and after hunting their prey animals for game and destroying their natural resources claim that starvation is just part of their natural experience rather than something you inflicted on them by taking away their livelihoods. Luckily most fields of study have moved away from this antiquated approach but sadly there's a growing call among certain people to "return to tradition" and dismiss this as "woke" nonsense.
> Turns out when you hunt large mammals in a group, the statistical physical advantages men have don't really matter all that much
Even if women and men are equal in their hunting skill, it would still make evolutionary sense for women not to participate in the hunts. Hunting large mammals is dangerous, and men are more disposable than women. If a tribe loses most of its men, it can still survive since a single man can impregnate multiple women. Whereas if a tribe loses most of its women it is far more likely to die out.
As other commenters said, cats are far from inscrutable. But a lot of their expressiveness comes from their tail and ears, two modalities that humans happen to lack.
Some universals are certainly shared with other creatures, and it's not even restricted to mammals. From one article:
Take, for example, social facilitation or the notion that organisms tend to perform better on simple tasks in the presence of observers. Although disagreement about its innate origins exists (Do-Yeong and Junsu 2010), social facilitation has had supportive evidence in humans in a natural setting (Michaels et al. 1982), cockroaches (Zajonc et al. 1969), and macaques (Dindo et al. 2009).
(I don't know about facial expressions, though the fact that I don't know means little - I've just read a bit about it.)
There are other universals among non-human species, not shared with us, such as 100+ discovered for chimpanzees.
Source: Reza Ziai, "Cross-Cultural Universality". In Todd K Shackelford, Viviana A Weekes-Shackelford, eds. Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer (2021)
The article says there were traces of pigment that could be dated. There are other techniques related to the layers of sediment or other clues. I think with a site like this they don't need to date every object. If they can gather enough data points they know when the site was in use. It's technically possible that the statue stone is older and was brought to the site and we might never know, but it's just highly unlikely.
I think the "highly unlikely" part is pure speculation.
If the stone in TFA gets buried when _our_ civilization collapses, the stone would now probably date to 2020 AD instead of whatever it should have been.
There must be so much more underground in that region waiting to be discovered. For instance less than ten miles south is the town of Kisas, about which wikipedia says: "It is built on top of an old archaeological mound (höyük) which has not been excavated because it lies completely under the town."
And what may have been destroyed and will forever be forgotten.
This region is only a couple miles north of Raqqa, which was an ISIS stronghold only a couple years ago, and they destroyed innumerable historical artifacts.
It's nearby a relief that is literally some guy stroking his cock with his other hand resting on his stomach. For all we know this was just the work of a very dedicated and very horny artist.
It's always funny to me how some people will go out of their way to avoid acknowledging that historical people may have liked sex or even been queer.
My favorite example is that of two Roman men apparently living together as a household and having items with very graphic depictions of sexual acts between men. They were obviously two very heterosexual men (maybe brothers) and the depictions of men ravaging each other's buttocks were probably a fertility or sports thing.
I may be wrong but I don't believe that the reason that bathroom stalls are frequently adorned with crude sketches of penises is "fertility stuff" either rather than just "lol dicks" and I don't think it's a stretch to extrapolate from this to prehistory.
There's a very real possibility that this is just a 12,000 year old "realistic human statue" of some bloke double-palming his stiffy (which according to the article is incidentally near a relief of another bloke presenting his stiffy one-handed with the other hand on his stomach). Yes, a two meters tall statue takes quite a bit of effort and suggests more than one person being involved in the process but that shouldn't be surprising.
It is said[^1] that the God of the Jews ravaged Pompeii because of polarized views on the matter of sexuality. A bit later, they won the war for the heart of Western culture. So, yes, those bros had those statues and depictions for the sake of fertility and sports, and our modern occidental brains[^2] will keep glitching when told otherwise.
Your first link is to what seems to be a Christian mythology channel rather than a history channel, so I don't know what that brings to the table.
Your second link just emphasizes what I said: weiners don't universally mean "fertility symbol". I don't think the blokes drawing peckers on bathroom stalls do it either as a fertility symbol nor to ward off evil spirits, so this still doesn't address that other motivations can exist.
Also Pompeii is an actual place that was "ravaged" by a volcanic eruption, not "the God of the Jews". Unless you want to pin actual natural disasters in actual places in actual recorded history on a god of the gaps, I don't think sexuality had anything to do with the volcano.
It would be funny if it was the prehistoric equivalent of the city of Dog River putting up a sign saying "Wullerton Sucks!" It could for instance represent a foreigner with the statue saying certain foreigners are wankers.
Yet more astonishing finds from the PPNA! Contemporaneous or even earlier than the Balıklıgöl statues, but the piece and its expression is far beyond it. Each time I think I won't be surprised by another Turkish find and yet . .
Looking at the oldest finds on a world map, I can't help wondering what sort of finds are in those areas less developed - or more wrought by internal violence - were those places to suddenly be easy to roam for archeologists. If Iran were as accessible as Germany, who knows what the equivalent of the Hohlenstein Löwenmensch would be? The events of the early 21st century (can and will) cast a long shadow in the scholarship.
I wonder how long ago our ancestors forgot about this settlement and it was lost, and how many times it was rediscovered through the ages. I bet Homer knew of or had heard of some ancient sites that were either never memorialized in a poem, or poems never survived to modern times.
It's honestly staggering to think about how much didn't survive because it was made of wood or clay. And the oral history of our species that is forever lost. Just staggering.
I find it more staggering that anything survived (with a gap before being rediscovered). It's just funny to think about the set of circumstances that might lead to things being left, forgotten, and buried, isn't it?
Is there some way that we could "scan the Earth" to find other long-buried sites like Göbeklitepe?
Would it be possible to do something from imaging satellites — something akin to ground-penetrating radar / laser range-finding / ultrasound — that might not be good enough for much, but which would be "just good enough" to find any other gigantic cities with walls built of dense stone, hidden under 10-50ft of dirt or sand?
Yes they've been doing lidar scans throughout central america to detect ancient Mayan pyramids and cities that are hidden under foliage. They've identified thousands of structures but other factors have limited their ability to unearth them (# of archaeologists, funding, politics).
Yes, lidar is great and all for what it does, and will definitely find us many new sites; but lidar just detects structures that cause raised areas (i.e. plants growing up and over the structures) rather than detecting structures hidden within a flat plane of fill-in medium like dirt/sand, the way Göbeklitepe was hidden. Lidar wouldn't have found Göbeklitepe.
> Is there some way that we could "scan the Earth" to find other long-buried sites like Göbeklitepe?
The Brits had started a Lidar survey of most of their country a few years ago, I'd say 2015-2016, but I'm not sure if that information is entirely accurate and, if it is accurate, I'm not sure how far they have got with it (what if all the cuts made to spending money on stuff that is not seen as essential).
I'm jealous in a positive way that the Brits have managed to do that. There was some talk about trying to emulate them when it comes to some archaeological sites here in Romania, but apart from a couple of tries/mappings nothing systematic has been implemented.
GP radar should work, as long as the artifacts are of a material sufficiently different from the earth on top of them for the interface to cause a radar echo. I’ve no idea what exactly counts as sufficiently different" though.
It's almost comforting to know that 12,000 years ago humans were essentially sending random people dick-pics. All the passersby got a dirty little airdrop to the eye holes.
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 442 ms ] thread> Prehistory, also called pre-literary history, is the period of human history between the first known use of stone tools by hominins c. 3.3 million years ago and the beginning of recorded history with the invention of writing systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistory
The big deal is that these art works are far more sophisticated that anything else we have seen so early.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFIYKmos3-s&t=1s
Today, it's best to ignore all these difficult and largely unnecessary questions by simply using a descriptive definition where "history is the human past".
By definition recorded history - as recorded in this art work, which are artifacts of history - is being pushed back.
The big deal is we over-estimated what we thought we knew about the past and that over-confidence is being humbled. And because of that the definition of pre-history needs to be updated.
It's kind of comforting and exciting that we have so much yet to uncover about the past.
https://i0.wp.com/themindcircle.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/...
From the better link someone posted below:
https://themindcircle.com/new-gobeklitepe-and-karahantepe-fi...
https://www.mfa.org/gallery/masterpieces-of-egyptian-sculptu...
But this discovery is a whopping 7,500 years older. It would have been inconceivably ancient to the pyramid builders too.
There's actually a fascinating case where Egyptian artists were briefly allowed to abandon the established style and adopted a quite different one during the so-called Amarna period:
https://artsandculture.google.com/usergallery/amarna-period-...
Much of the art became almost caricatures with elongated features, but there was simultaneously a realist tendency where portraits of royalty were suddenly allowed to have a likeness. The famous Nefertiti bust is from this era.
It seems clear to me that the artists' skills was not the limitation, but the permitted range of expression was quite narrow until this rebel pharaoh unleashed the short-lived style revolution.
the HN title is wrong, TFA says "realistic facial expression". Of course, it's neither a realistic facial expression, so all the comments are still valid. Carry on.
But if a sharman (assuming it is a statue for their deity) has the time, then there's no reason it couldn't be perfectly proportioned. It's not like hand-eye coordination has suddenly evolved; it would more be access to better tools than a piece of flint to bang on some softer rock.
You seem to seriously overestimate the average workload of prehistoric communities (or underestimating the average workload of present day individuals). Also I don't think the concept of making "a living" transfers to gift economies. Nor do you need to spend 16 hours a day every day "being an artist" to develop remarkable artistic skill. Strict division of labor is a fairly recent development that in its present form stems from industrialisation requiring work to be split into discrete processes to enable automation.
They're more than just stick figures, they detail ceremonial costumes quite well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwion_Gwion_rock_paintings
* Dating the spectrum of paintings is broad.
They had very similar general intelligence and talents as us, at that time, and tens of thousand of years before. Today, it’s not terribly hard to find artistic kids who can mold extremely good faces, ponies, or whatever else they choose, from a lump of play dough. I assume artistic people existed then too, with comparable talent and frequency, unless there was some catastrophic non-artist pruning that happened very very recently.
Also, the "they" you refer to is "us".
If they’re “us”, then that statistical review should show similar distributions to what we have now, especially in children. Can we see the artistic child’s work? It’s probably made of mud, so probably not. We only see accidents of preservation, due to the tools and final materials.
I've heard that much of the ruins from Ancient Greeze were likely brightly colored and painted. I can't help but wonder if the Venus I mentioned had been painted as well. It's possible that they did have detailed faces, and that they simply weren't sculpted.
I'm the furthest thing from an expert of course.
https://arkeonews.net/new-discoveries-in-gobeklitepe-and-kar...
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66846772
Question - how can they prove that someone in more recent times didn't notch more ancient wood?
The changes wrought in the material by sun exposure and subsequent changes over time in the dark are strongly repeatable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminescence_dating
Very interesting
I love how in other words you could also say “played with lincoln logs” :)
this is what astonished me. I somehow depicted our ancestors or relatives to be purely hunter/gatherers without the means (and will) to build complex wooden structures.
>I was amazed to know that woodworking was such a deep-rooted tradition
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@miniminuteman773
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EaKFKYPXVk
> Researchers Gurven and Kaplan have estimated that around 57% of hunter-gatherers reach the age of 15. Of those that reach 15 years of age, 64% continue to live to or past the age of 45. This places the life expectancy between 21 and 37 years.[54] They further estimate that 70% of deaths are due to diseases of some kind, 20% of deaths come from violence or accidents and 10% are due to degenerative diseases.
But even that aside, it is definitely not what the guy in video literally said, which is quote "their lifespans would have only been around 35 years", 5:22. By the way, I had to sit through 6 unskippable 10-second ads to tell you the timestamp (2 ads every time I scrub around).
Edited for brevity
Huh, does uBlock Origin not work for blocking ads on YouTube anymore?
In reality, it is due to infant mortality rates. Once you make it past a certain age (10-15 years) your life expectancy shoots up into the 40-60's easily. However, when you average the population out, those infant deaths tank the average life expectancy.
I'm not surprised they glossed over this, most researchers do, because they don't want to go into infantile deaths, disease spread during child birth, still births, etc.
Not only is it a complex topic, but it's fraught with political and religious ideology. When my history and anthropology professors started talking about it, certain folks of a particular religious bent almost immediately started trying to correct them about it.
I am annoyed by these slips every time because they make it seem as if we live so much longer since hunter-gatherer times... Modern medicine reduced early age mortality, sure, but funny enough it did not do much to increase max lifespan (and especially healthy lifespan).
To add to your comment about modern medicine. Keep in mind that when you isolate out infant mortality, you get an average life span of roughly 60-ish in ancient times.
Present day mortality is closer to 85+ for the G7 countries and 75+ for other fairly well developed countries. That's a 25 year increase! Given those statistics, I would say modern medicine is actually doing quite a bit to improve life expectancy into your golden years!
There can be an ideological bent to try and label Rome (and by relation Catholicism) as being unclean and ungodly because it does not protect its young. Or even more extreme, suggest that their children die regularly because they are godless and that history proved it.
I hope I don't need to explain why this is very much an extremist point of view, but I'll say so regardless so that HN mods or other folks don't label me as being political/religious here.
In my history class, a religious argument of "my children are more godly and history proves it by the deaths" broke out between a group of very devout Orthodox, some Catholic folks, and some Muslim folks. All of them were trying to use the infant mortality rate as proof of some or the other's faith of god in their children. It got very weird, very fast. The professor had to break up the argument.
This happened in Alberta, the "religious zealotry" capital of Canada. Lots of religious conservatism here.
If you don't mind clarifying just a bit. What types of religious folks would get upset about a professor in a course (for a scientific discipline they presumably want to do well in no less) describing the very real history of terrible infant mortality across pretty much all premodern cultures and societies? Why would this even be a problem for them? Daily life in the past was known to be very harsh, even the bible itself (among other religious texts) alludes to that constantly.
The problem is not that we produce heat, the problem is that we change the balance point between energy influx from the sun and energy emission to space. That changed balance point will remain changed much, much longer than 12k years. If we don't have a technological miracle, humans 12k in the future will live in tiny habitable zones near the poles.
[0]: https://arkeofili.com/karahantepede-bulunan-insan-heykelinin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabarnmung
I avidly await all news related to these sites, its an immensely fascinating subject.
Notice that, although it was a completely alien culture in a very far away time, before agriculture and writing, we still know what a lifelike facial expression looks like.
Many things vary from culture to culture. Facial expressions, at least many of them, are consistent across humanity. If someone stubs their toe or tastes something delicious, you'll know without words.
Look up 'human universals' in anthropology, evolutionary psychology, and in other fields. Donald Brown (see below) gives some opinionated background here, including a literature review (of Brown's own writings, and more):
https://literary-universals.uconn.edu/2017/06/25/human-unive...
The seminal book is Human Universals by Donald Brown:
https://archive.org/details/humanuniversals0000brow/
(I don't know how fully accepted it is; there seems to be at least some disupte over Brown's theories.)
I think the non-human animal with the most facial expressions is the chimpanzee, but even then it is much less expressive than a human in this regard.
Various mammals have (non-facial) macroexpression somewhat similar to humans, such as excitement, curiosity and fear. Many non-mammals such as birds, fish, and some reptiles can express fear to some extent.
Our cat has perfected the guilt-tripping innocent stare. She stands beside her food bowl looking almost blank. This somehow communicates a combination of infinite sadness and disappointment, blended with child-like hopefulness.
It's very effective.
What's wild is that we're apparently directly responsible for the eyebrow thing in dogs. As in we literally bred the feature into them.
- https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1820653116
- https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/dogs-eyeb...
- https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/science/dogs-eyebrows-evo...
My pet theory is that women bonded with dogs first through an ability to have a mutual understanding with non-verbal communication, and we most likely observed them and could "talk" to them in their own ways - something that has been lost as we turned dogs from inter-species partners to enslaved commodities.
We're slowly starting to rediscover it.
For those unaware: prehistorical "hunter-gatherer" societies likely did not have strong divisions of labor and there is no evidence to suggest such a universal division across gender lines. Quite the opposite, actually. Turns out when you hunt large mammals in a group, the statistical physical advantages men have don't really matter all that much and women in turn aren't inherently better at child rearing (which historically was a group activity shared by the entire tribe).
Another example is how a lot of national mythologies were invented largely out of thin air in the 17th through 19th centuries, e.g. the Scottish clan system with its strict lineages and tartans. Most of the mythology around kilts is pure fabrication.
Even in economics this can be found with the common wisdom that money/currency was preceded by bartering, which we now know to be an oversimplification to the point of being wrong with in-group gift economies apparently having been far more common and bartering being part of diplomacy between separate groups rather than something you'd do with your neighbor.
Arguably this tendency even persisted to the point where the myth of an "alpha wolf" arose based on observations of wolves in captivity that was quickly dispelled after actually looking at wolves able to roam in their natural environment.
If you want to present the Victorian Age as the pinnacle of human development, of course you'll see the "uncivilised" natives as beneath you in every way and after hunting their prey animals for game and destroying their natural resources claim that starvation is just part of their natural experience rather than something you inflicted on them by taking away their livelihoods. Luckily most fields of study have moved away from this antiquated approach but sadly there's a growing call among certain people to "return to tradition" and dismiss this as "woke" nonsense.
Even if women and men are equal in their hunting skill, it would still make evolutionary sense for women not to participate in the hunts. Hunting large mammals is dangerous, and men are more disposable than women. If a tribe loses most of its men, it can still survive since a single man can impregnate multiple women. Whereas if a tribe loses most of its women it is far more likely to die out.
Take, for example, social facilitation or the notion that organisms tend to perform better on simple tasks in the presence of observers. Although disagreement about its innate origins exists (Do-Yeong and Junsu 2010), social facilitation has had supportive evidence in humans in a natural setting (Michaels et al. 1982), cockroaches (Zajonc et al. 1969), and macaques (Dindo et al. 2009).
(I don't know about facial expressions, though the fact that I don't know means little - I've just read a bit about it.)
There are other universals among non-human species, not shared with us, such as 100+ discovered for chimpanzees.
Source: Reza Ziai, "Cross-Cultural Universality". In Todd K Shackelford, Viviana A Weekes-Shackelford, eds. Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer (2021)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating
EDIT: For artefacts made entirely out of stone, you can date objects in the sediment around them to get an approximation.
If the stone in TFA gets buried when _our_ civilization collapses, the stone would now probably date to 2020 AD instead of whatever it should have been.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C4%B1sas,_Haliliye
This region is only a couple miles north of Raqqa, which was an ISIS stronghold only a couple years ago, and they destroyed innumerable historical artifacts.
I wonder if it was deliberately humorous, which would add another dimension.
I know that the Incas had statues that were basically hardcore pr0n. I’m not sure the reason. Probably fertility stuff.
Like this thing - maybe it's mocking someone? Who knows.
[8000 years earlier]
"Man": "Yea, so Gary over there cut down my favourite Olive tree so I commissioned this huge statute of a dick to let him know how much I hate him"
My favorite example is that of two Roman men apparently living together as a household and having items with very graphic depictions of sexual acts between men. They were obviously two very heterosexual men (maybe brothers) and the depictions of men ravaging each other's buttocks were probably a fertility or sports thing.
I may be wrong but I don't believe that the reason that bathroom stalls are frequently adorned with crude sketches of penises is "fertility stuff" either rather than just "lol dicks" and I don't think it's a stretch to extrapolate from this to prehistory.
There's a very real possibility that this is just a 12,000 year old "realistic human statue" of some bloke double-palming his stiffy (which according to the article is incidentally near a relief of another bloke presenting his stiffy one-handed with the other hand on his stomach). Yes, a two meters tall statue takes quite a bit of effort and suggests more than one person being involved in the process but that shouldn't be surprising.
It is said[^1] that the God of the Jews ravaged Pompeii because of polarized views on the matter of sexuality. A bit later, they won the war for the heart of Western culture. So, yes, those bros had those statues and depictions for the sake of fertility and sports, and our modern occidental brains[^2] will keep glitching when told otherwise.
[^1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haP5MoLyWGw
[^2] In case you feel tempted to say those Western values have always been universal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phallus_paintings_in_Bhutan
Your second link just emphasizes what I said: weiners don't universally mean "fertility symbol". I don't think the blokes drawing peckers on bathroom stalls do it either as a fertility symbol nor to ward off evil spirits, so this still doesn't address that other motivations can exist.
Also Pompeii is an actual place that was "ravaged" by a volcanic eruption, not "the God of the Jews". Unless you want to pin actual natural disasters in actual places in actual recorded history on a god of the gaps, I don't think sexuality had anything to do with the volcano.
Looking at the oldest finds on a world map, I can't help wondering what sort of finds are in those areas less developed - or more wrought by internal violence - were those places to suddenly be easy to roam for archeologists. If Iran were as accessible as Germany, who knows what the equivalent of the Hohlenstein Löwenmensch would be? The events of the early 21st century (can and will) cast a long shadow in the scholarship.
Would it be possible to do something from imaging satellites — something akin to ground-penetrating radar / laser range-finding / ultrasound — that might not be good enough for much, but which would be "just good enough" to find any other gigantic cities with walls built of dense stone, hidden under 10-50ft of dirt or sand?
The Brits had started a Lidar survey of most of their country a few years ago, I'd say 2015-2016, but I'm not sure if that information is entirely accurate and, if it is accurate, I'm not sure how far they have got with it (what if all the cuts made to spending money on stuff that is not seen as essential).
Browsable map: https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=TQ7237355141
I'm jealous in a positive way that the Brits have managed to do that. There was some talk about trying to emulate them when it comes to some archaeological sites here in Romania, but apart from a couple of tries/mappings nothing systematic has been implemented.
That's a lifelike penis, at least.