Can I just say that it is fantastic that they have included so many detailed pictures of the obelisk. How many times have you visited an article about a discovery only to have no pictures in the article.
I haven't opened the article yet, since I usually check the top comments to see if it's worth the click, but my first thought when clicking through to the comments was, "this damn article better have pictures for once".
My first exact same thoughts. Every time there is some interesting discovery it’s often with only a single photo or none and a huge wall of text. Pictures speak louder than words in this case.
I kept scrolling though multiple articles as they seem to have a format type for these types of articles where its numbers a small paragraph and a high quality photo. Simply love it.
The Tepe sites are really fascinating. Every discovery leads to so many more questions - how did they construct these sites, what were they using some of the structures for, and so on.
At Karahan Tepe is the pit full of pillars, with the human-face head on the outer rim .. whenever I see this pit, I get a picture in my mind that the entire site was green and fertile, and this pit was filled with water. It would be the ideal device to teach kids to swim - and so on. It's such a fascinating human discovery - the mind serious wanders.
I encourage anyone who is new to this subject to let the imagination run wild. What kinds of people could create these T-shaped pillars, carve them, use them in their building construction .. and then some day, decide to cover it all up with rubble and stone, to be buried for millennia and discovered by some strange, future civilisation.
It makes me wonder what, 12,500 years from now, of our own crazy civilisation might be unearthed, and strange new utility assigned to their purposes ..
To me, it looks like a festival ground, so I imagine people coming from all directions and multiple nomad tents etc. around it.
What makes me wonder is that why did these hills survive, and why are we not finding similar things in north Africa and other civilization cradles.
Maybe these were one off sites with limited use and were later just left alone, while anything in Egypt had continuous settlements so things just eroded over time, with the things like pyramids as exceptions.
We find similarly old structures across Eurasia, like the epigravettian mammoth bone huts. The late PPNA when KT/GT were seemingly built is when we find the first monumental, stone structures that we know of. It's entirely possible that ancient near east is where these kinds of things were first built. There's reasons I can go into why that's thought to be the case, but we can't rule out that there could be a streetlight effect happening. The ANE is where we expect to find this sort of early structure, and it's also one of the most heavily studied areas alongside North America and Europe. North Africa, particularly Tunisia where there's already a number of known epipaleolithic sites, is substantially less accessible for this kind of research.
To directly answer your question though, the Tas Tepler sites survived because they were buried and the locations they're in are pretty bad places for people to live today. They're way up on hills around the urfa/harran plain where there's outcroppings of the stone used to build them, but also without water. People seemingly just carried water up the hills from cisterns farther down. The locations of those cisterns also suggest that there may be further sites we haven't found, because some of them don't correspond to anything we know of.
To what extent is our understanding of this period limited by survivorship? Granite doesn't weather significantly, so we see lots of metalithic stone structures with ambiguous dating. The near east had significant changes in inland climates so we find ancient cities that were not built over there. Soft rock/mud Brick structures can survive in dry climates - so we see evidence of the oldest civilizations in deserts.
Colonial New England barely exists outside of active preservation attempts.
Short answer: it's hard to fully say, but most people believe that the holocene is a lower bound on this sort of thing. I'll try to explain, but keep in mind that I'm trying to massively simplify a huge field of open questions.
The fundamental assumption underlying most archaeology is that changes in material culture broadly reflect people reacting to the world around them in intelligent ways. Most archaeologists therefore believe that Pleistocene people didn't build permanent structures out of stone because nomadic or seminomadic lifestyles were more optimal for the chaotic pleistocene environments happening globally. There's a few people who disagree with the universality of this idea, most famously the authors of Dawn of Everything who argue for a more diverse family of lifeways in early humans, but that's just quibbling about the edges of this overall narrative rather than rewriting it.
And we'd expect to have more evidence than we do if the holocene boundary wasn't the effective start date for this kind of structure. Cave environments are much more stable, and it's where much of our evidence comes from. Gobekli Tepe (GT) and other Tas Tepler sites are made with local limestone, an extremely erosion-prone rock. We have sites covered by existing urban cities like Jericho, the earliest layers of which date from around the same time as GT. We also have older structures, like the epigravittean mammoth huts, and a fairly good idea of the forager->farmer transition in the near east across the natufian culture. GT is actually thought to be part of that transition.
But yes, a lot of organic stuff from the pleistocene is gone. Organics were probably the dominant form of material used, so that leaves a huge gap we're still struggling with. Not really sure where I'm going with this, so I guess I'll stop here?
>What makes me wonder is that why did these hills survive, and why are we not finding similar things in north Africa and other civilization cradles.
In my honest, personally informed opinion, there is much to be said for ignorance of the subject - and I don't mean you personally, just generally - at large - human cultures have a very intractable level of mystery, among our languages and human history, as a whole.
In anticipation of this fact, I personally invest myself in certain mysteries. The Tepe civilisation is one - but the things to be learned at Narwala Gabarnmang, are .. personally, I admit .. astonishing.
We do in fact have tens of thousands of years of human history to comprehend.
The issue is, we rapidly discard a lot of it in the rush to preserve just a bit of it.
it was definitely a festival ground for (relatively) nearby complex semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers to meet up occasionally. I had a professor describe it as a pre-historic UN where these clans would meet up and feast but I think festival ground is an even better analogy
The interesting places to find new archaeological sites are places where we know there were lots of people nearby, and where for some reason human habitation ceased and the sites were preserved.
I hold some hope for new methods of underwater archaeology to uncover sites on the southern coast of the Black Sea and in the Persian Gulf. The latter especially because it was vast, rich floodplain during the last glacial maximum, and the oldest known true cities sprouted into existence on it's northern shore pretty much instantly after it flooded. I like to think that the oldest city ever built lies submerged in mud and water somewhere in there, just waiting to be found.
(Not that there would be necessarily much to find anymore, they probably didn't build out of rock.)
As I understand it, Tepe is local word for tel. Climate in this region makes them easy to distinguish since not a lot of plant cover making it easier to identify potential sites? Fertile crescent floods. Nile floods. Unique geography and climate in Turcep key to this?
The fact that there was a skeleton in one of the rectangular-ish holes made me think it was a burial ground, with the obelisk as the headstone. But I am not an archeologist so idk
These Tepe sites give credence to advanced civilization existing before the last ice age. One example is the mostly dismissed theory of water erosion at the base of the Sphinx, suggesting older civilizations leading up to ancient Egypt. To my understanding, it is mostly dismissed because archaeologists found the idea of something older than the Sphinx to be not possible. Tepe sites challenge this. Wild stuff.
I got pretty into this alt archaeology stuff and eventually had to move away from it.
I totally agree that the tepes challenge our timeline of when humans made cities and whatnot, but so much of their arguments is the perfect fit of stones or how flat stones are and saying it _must_ be done by modern tools.
I think they have left out how much you can get done from a construction standpoint when you have forced labor or no labor rules like we have had for some time now all over the world and especially in the West.
When I was first in Delhi and went to the Red Fort, I was shocked when they said they built the whole thing 100s of years ago in 9 years. Think about how long it would take us to build something like this now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Fort
So, I really want the ancient atlantis civ in the Sahara to be true, but the guy's I've seen promoting this are too removed from the scientific method to really be taken seriously.
I also feel that people then were about as smart as we are now, so they could have solved problems in inventive ways they way we do now. Just because they didn’t have an electric stone flattener, it doesn’t mean that stones cannot be made flat in a fairly repeatable way.
And there were no video games, which I think is a huge source of brain-drain these days. I read somewhere once that people played more solitaire on Windows 95 per year than it took in man-hours to send people to the moon (something like that, I don't remember the original statistic). And that's just a shitty game on an old OS.
just to nitpick: the Tepe sites definitely did not have forced labor. they had no social hierarchy at all. hunter-gatherers were fairly egalitarian.
definitely sedentary neolithic people had forced labor. all the Sumerian legal texts that were some of the first writings ever included legal definitions of slaves, for example. but the pre-neolithic Anatolian people were nomadic animistic people with no social hierarchy.
mostly because all the bones of all the dead were mixed in with all the others. implying no concept of "this guy was THE guy in my lifetime". but they presumably still had a meritocracy because while the bones were mixed in with all others of all generations, not everyone would have their bones were mixed in upon death. it was likely only the craftsmen or shamans that achieved that honor. but being honored is different from the "divinely ordained" hierarchy of god-kings that came later.
Any sort of tribal situation would result in forced labor, and cultures would have formalized notions of slavery, indentured service, arbitrary terms based on religious or traditional ideas. The tradeoff of survival for forced labor is an economic plight that happens frequently throughout history. Chattel slavery is inherently degrading, but it has ranged from ritualistic and formal to downright horrifically malicious - the idea that hunter gatherers were egalitarian and peaceful is basically the whole "noble savage" trope.
The truth is, we don't have much but speculation and narrative about the people of Gobekle Tepe, and even assumptions about them being hunter gatherers at all are based on centuries of bias and assumptions, with a whole lot of cultural chauvinism and religious nuttery baked in for good measure.
We're going to have to start analyzing humans more skeptically and rationally, as opposed to taking most of the modern historical narratives as gospel.
Modern humans have existed genetically for 300k+ years. At one point about a million years ago, the Early Pleistocene bottleneck had the population of human ancestors under 2000 individuals. 700k years later, the first modern humans were born, and the first situations in which we had the opportunity to establish culture.
We know from the great north american megafauna die off, climate records, and archaelogical evidence that something happened around 13k years ago to basically reset whatever human civilization there was. It took around 3000 years before the "neolithic revolution" , cultures demonstrating mastery of stone tools, pottery, more sedentary lifestyles, specialization, and so forth. It took another 4,000 years to reach the point where we had started creating written records again, started creating monuments and technology sufficiently durable to last to modern days, and then so on and so forth, with relatively uninterrupted and steady progress to the present day, each culture and age building upon the previous.
I think it's silly to think that it's only in this last 12-13,000 year period that we reached any of the cultural and technological milestones, and that every culture previous to that must have been hunter gatherer, because hunter gatherer are the default "feral human" prototype culture.
We bred dogs from wolves successfully around 45k years ago. That would have taken a generation or two in a nomadic context, or one really spectacular single lifetime for a sedentary person. Even so, you think that for the 250k years prior to that, not a single culture developed writing, wheels, pumps, discovered metal forming, or other technologies?
The human population was scarce, and because of that scarcity, the majority stayed in the absolute best, premium locations - beachfront. A vast proportion of settlements would now be well off the coast, and we have indeed discovered artifacts and evidence of such in various places where researchers have looked.
I'd be willing to bet good money that over the last 300k years there are many 10,000 year cycles and catastrophes where civilizations have risen and fallen, many achieving high levels of technology, perhaps even discovering electricity, advanced chemistry, medicine, and so on, but due to catastrophes, small populations, they got reset back to baseline. I'd bet that it didn't happen 30 times, as often as possible during the course of events, but I'll also make the claim that our current peak of civilization isn't the only good run that human race has ever made.
We are probably the only ones that made it to mass production, definitely the only ones that succeeded in scaling up resource extraction to the levels we saw back in the 1800s. I think there are probably caches of artifacts, evidence left out offshore that technology will make visible to us, that will show a much richer tapestry of events and cultures and history than the somewhat limited and biased narrative that modern historians have put forth as definitive.
as far as I'm aware, we have no idea other than that they didn't do much at one time. we can only deduce little modifications were done semi-regularly by the ancient pre-historic version of open source contributors. they had to lift 10+ ton limestone blocks and move them into place. but there's ample evidence of them trying to lift those blocks out of the quarry and failing, thus leaving behind broken would-be pillars of limestone for 12,000 years. the best assumption is just that they had tons of wild cereals and gazelle to munch on so these people were able to work on this persistently over many generations. they had no social hierarchy or need for labor at all, so they had all the free time in the world to use stone age tools to build structures that rivaled the greeks 9,000 years later
The Crystal Palace was built and designed in 11 months, 1850-1851. I'm not sure what the key factors making this possible were, but I suspect low wages and complete disregard for worker safety figured.
Yes, some of it is due to lack of safety etc. must I must say the majority of it is the complete lack of competence in modern times because it’s now being built by normal folks.
I assume it was a limited number of people how knew how to make things and they kept roaming around setting new sites etc. Similar to bridge engineers etc. most of what they make just disappears in the background but they keep building things that makes our modern life possible.
It’s not lack of competence. There is an unbelievable weight of regulation in construction now. It would probably take 2 years of planning consultation just to get the idea approved. Then, each facet of the design would have to be coordinated and iterated between several different specialist teams and contractors, with the tree of contractors increasing as each layer of design takes shape. At the end, you also have the labor laws that people are talking about here.
If we weren’t too worried about things falling down and killing people, or about damaging peoples conception of the vibes in a city, we could have the kinds of developer/architect/engineer/foreman outfits that used to build this kind of thing.
I think it pushed back when humans started building large structures together a few 1000 years. Oddly, there is no evidence of agriculture at Gobekli Tepe
If it turns out to be earlier than we thought then the climate may have been different. These sites could be the swan song of a civilization in decay, or a group that had an amicable diaspora and used these places for social purposes.
I imagine a culture that realized the land couldn’t support them in concentrations, picked a spot to meet every spring equinox to party and maybe make romantic matches and then dissolved back into the surrounding countryside.
Maybe this was their Burning Man.
Essentially someone had to figure out the civilized part of civilization and the density part of civilization. It’s a chicken and egg problem, and who is to say they did at the same time?
As GP mentioned, there were somewhat similar arrangements in North America not so long after this time period.
I only watched a little bit of his stuff before I realized people thought he is a kook. But in small doses some of this stuff can sound like sense.
The one that got me was a supposed foundation legend from Sumer that a handful of strangers came and taught them civilization.
The idea of a remnant people floating down a river to escape some sort of societal collapse and then being adopted into a new tribe for their usefulness has a certain something as a hypothesis goes. It’s the “strangers” part that’s a bit suspect since how would you not meet neighbors like that. Unless the river was the end of their journey and not the start.
I wouldn't call these guys civilization. the Tepe sites are more like an ancient UN for semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers than a settlement. they visited seasonally for a feast and then left. the only evidence we have is that they were partying. but they had no social organization at all
funnily enough, the lack of neolithic culture, social hierarchy, or permanent sedentary lifestyle (all hallmarks of "civilization") and all archeological evidence suggests they were much healthier and more peaceful than neolithic humans. that's why people link "Garden of Eden" mythology originating in ancient Sumeria to the ancient peoples' observation that people became "civilized" but at what cost since it made humans less healthy, more violent, and presumably less happy due to the novel concept of social inequality
I find it hard to believe that these peoples had no social organization at all, and even harder to believe that you could state that with such conviction given how little we know about these sites. I’m definitely curious though! Can you share any links or reading recommendations?
I learned about it in school, I took some anthropology and archeology electives. and what I was told was since there were no defensive structures nor evidence of any security apparatus at all (such as an army) there isn't any evidence of a means to enforce a hierarchy
That sounds like a Childe-esque checklist. In general, we wouldn't expect a strongly hierarchical social organization in this time period, in upper mesopotamia. That's more characteristic of lower Mesopotamian early societies a few thousand years later when cities like Eridu appeared. What we see in upper Mesopotamia is a pretty strong continuity with PPN sites like GT all the way through the Ubaid period, both in terms of architecture and infant burials and they're thought to reflect socially egalitarian societies. Many people (myself included) consider upper and lower Mesopotamia two largely separate cultural areas throughout the PPN because they're so different and argue that the traditional definitions derived from southern cities (like Childe's) are inappropriate to apply to northern urbanism.
Or a more boring theory about the sphinx is that it was constructed at the orthodox time, around 2550 BC, and then later on it rained sometimes. This would be mildly surprising, as opposed to very surprising.
You would have thought that in a world with curious billionaires someone would pay for a ROV submersible to explore that, I certainly would if I were one.
>
The face of the beprenese is located at the top of the Dikili stone; its sharp lines, deep eye sockets and blunt shape nose, and a similar style with human statues found in Karahantepe. This discovery reveals not only the technical mastery of Neolithic people, but also the way he expresses himself and the ability to think abstractly.
I don't think we were in any doubt about the ability of people 12,000 years ago to think abstractly.
The age is pretty impressive, also I noticed that Firefox could translate the article without issues using privacy-preserving offline translation. Now nobody will know that I have read the article!
Yes, these are faces, but why do they look like pillars to me? Ornamented and sculpted pillars are pretty common across civilizations and I can imagine sloping tent like roof set up that are held up by these pillars. How does one separate a pillar and a obelisk?
Archaeologists generally aren't that computer-savvy. I haven't seen any indications of paint residues on the pillars, but we know that many of the statues in these enclosures were also painted bright colors that would be missed by a digital reconstruction.
> Archaeologists generally aren't that computer-savvy.
Why throw interdisciplinary shade?
> I haven't seen any indications of paint residues on the pillars, but we know that many of the statues in these enclosures were also painted bright colors that would be missed by a digital reconstruction.
Wouldn’t a digital reconstruction just have whatever textures were selected? If there’s no indication of paint residues, they can look for other clues of course. But, without any other evidence, what’s the alternative, right? Guessing would be bad, don’t want to mislead people.
It's not interdisciplinary. I'm an archaeologist, albeit not practicing these days.
Wouldn’t a digital reconstruction just have whatever textures were selected?
Yes, but the point is that we don't know a lot of the context around these layer III T-pillars to make informed choices in depicting them. For clarification, I'm using the GT stratigraphy because I haven't looked up the KT chart.
But just to highlight some knowledge gaps, it's usually not clear what damage was caused during the backfill process, what the exposure conditions for these pillars were during their lifetimes (e.g. roof or not, though these earlier rectangular rooms are generally agreed to have covered with wooden beams), and even the dating is a bit suspect in this area.
Plus, the relevant team may not even have a LIDAR scanner to do that properly as that's fairly specialist equipment. Etc.
Getting to the point where it's possible and reasonable isn't easy.
What pigments did they have 12 thousand years ago? Only ochre, surely? So rusty red, dirty yellow, nothing else? (Oh, soot black, too.) I'd be interested if there was anything else.
I see the boar statue is painted inside its mouth ... with red ochre.
The boar was painted with red inside the mouth, and black/white on the hide. Black in the ancient Near East was usually bitumen, though later groups like the Egyptians would switch to manganese dioxide. White was plaster. They also had yellow ochre.
From the article: "The arm and hand reliefs on the T-shaped pillars found in and around Göbekli Tepe have long reinforced the idea that these stones symbolized humans. This new find at Karahan Tepe, the first to feature a human face carved into a T-shaped pillar, is considered a turning point in Neolithic research."
Keyword "megalith". We have older carved statues. We have older carved, stone statues. We have older, carved stone statues depicting people, as well as statues from this same site that are full body.
It's from basically the same period and culture as urfa man, but at a site that's been initially dated a few hundred years earlier and is generally understood to have been inhabited first. It's contemporaneous with the famous T-pillars at Gobekli Tepe. The important thing is that this is the first T-pillar discovered with a human face, aside from the one with just a human outline.
Don't take the following as an obnoxious distraction. I've not fully imbibed the featured article yet, but the entire area (region) is verily a bedlam of magnificence and wonder.
Those unfamiliar with Derinkuyu must change this hastily. Do your own research, but please see this image (pardon the url - I've been flagged for... browsing the Internet and can't access it directly):
There is/are video/s available and they are more than worth watching.
I can't remember how to spell the many other regional wonders, so won't try.
Edit: ignore anyone who comes along and tries to dismiss this particular example or the surrounding region as trivial, insignificant etc. Explore for yourself and be rewarded accordingly.
I think he's making fun of historians that have really dumb reasons for declaring human culture is one way or another because of event X but it doesn't pass a sniff test. In this example, mirrors don't need to exist because people can look at other people (or more simply feel their own face). It was a 40% funny joke.
Here at Rockwell automations World Headquarters research has been proceeding to develop a line of automation products that establishes new standards for Quality technological leadership and operating Excellence with customer success as our primary focus.
Work has been proceeding on the crudely conceived idea of an instrument that would not only provide inverse reactive current for use in unilateral phase detractors but would also be capable of automatically synchronizing Cardinal gram meters.
Such an instrument comprised of Dodge gears and bearings Reliance electric motors Alan Bradley controls and all monitored by Rockwell software is Rockwell automations retro encabulator now. Basically the only new principle involved is that instead of power being generated by the relative motion of conductors and fluxes it's produced by the modal interaction of Magneto reluctance and capacitive dirance the original machine.
Great find! and I don’t want to underestimate the discovery by any means, but...
We humans are predisposed to see anthropomorphic shapes in things. I understand why that could be interpreted as a face, but at the same time, it could just be a random shape. It’s just a “T” shape. Sure, it could look like a nose and a pair of eyes, but it could also just be... something.
The T-obelisk things, with their long skinny arms, do seem to represent figures. I wonder why they have to be that stupid oblong shape at all. Dual purpose as roof supports? Or just tradition, tradition causes wacky things. Looking around the various carvings from related sites, it's also evident that they were greatly interested in penises.
The translated article provides some backing to the claim that it's a face in a style that matches other finds in the area:
"The arm and hand reliefs on the T-shaped standing stones found in Göbeklitepe and its surroundings have long strengthened the idea that these stones symbolize humans. This new find, which was unearthed in Karahantepe, is described as a new turning point in Neolithic period research with the fact that the human face was carved on a T-shaped standing stone for the first time."
"With its sharp lines, deep eye sockets and blunt nose, it carries a style similar to the human statues found before in Karahantepe."
Can I just say that it is fantastic that they have included so many detailed pictures of the obelisk. How many times have you visited an article about a discovery only to have no pictures in the article.
I read this comment before clicking, and half expected it to be sarcasm exactly because of how common that is
I believe this site is actually Thai. Look at the intricate carvings. The only people capable of such a feat that far back in time were Thai people.
That's clearly Turkish, which would make sense for an obelisk in an ancient site in Turkey, not Thailand
I haven't opened the article yet, since I usually check the top comments to see if it's worth the click, but my first thought when clicking through to the comments was, "this damn article better have pictures for once".
My first exact same thoughts. Every time there is some interesting discovery it’s often with only a single photo or none and a huge wall of text. Pictures speak louder than words in this case.
I kept scrolling though multiple articles as they seem to have a format type for these types of articles where its numbers a small paragraph and a high quality photo. Simply love it.
The Tepe sites are really fascinating. Every discovery leads to so many more questions - how did they construct these sites, what were they using some of the structures for, and so on.
At Karahan Tepe is the pit full of pillars, with the human-face head on the outer rim .. whenever I see this pit, I get a picture in my mind that the entire site was green and fertile, and this pit was filled with water. It would be the ideal device to teach kids to swim - and so on. It's such a fascinating human discovery - the mind serious wanders.
I encourage anyone who is new to this subject to let the imagination run wild. What kinds of people could create these T-shaped pillars, carve them, use them in their building construction .. and then some day, decide to cover it all up with rubble and stone, to be buried for millennia and discovered by some strange, future civilisation.
It makes me wonder what, 12,500 years from now, of our own crazy civilisation might be unearthed, and strange new utility assigned to their purposes ..
To me, it looks like a festival ground, so I imagine people coming from all directions and multiple nomad tents etc. around it.
What makes me wonder is that why did these hills survive, and why are we not finding similar things in north Africa and other civilization cradles.
Maybe these were one off sites with limited use and were later just left alone, while anything in Egypt had continuous settlements so things just eroded over time, with the things like pyramids as exceptions.
We find similarly old structures across Eurasia, like the epigravettian mammoth bone huts. The late PPNA when KT/GT were seemingly built is when we find the first monumental, stone structures that we know of. It's entirely possible that ancient near east is where these kinds of things were first built. There's reasons I can go into why that's thought to be the case, but we can't rule out that there could be a streetlight effect happening. The ANE is where we expect to find this sort of early structure, and it's also one of the most heavily studied areas alongside North America and Europe. North Africa, particularly Tunisia where there's already a number of known epipaleolithic sites, is substantially less accessible for this kind of research.
To directly answer your question though, the Tas Tepler sites survived because they were buried and the locations they're in are pretty bad places for people to live today. They're way up on hills around the urfa/harran plain where there's outcroppings of the stone used to build them, but also without water. People seemingly just carried water up the hills from cisterns farther down. The locations of those cisterns also suggest that there may be further sites we haven't found, because some of them don't correspond to anything we know of.
To what extent is our understanding of this period limited by survivorship? Granite doesn't weather significantly, so we see lots of metalithic stone structures with ambiguous dating. The near east had significant changes in inland climates so we find ancient cities that were not built over there. Soft rock/mud Brick structures can survive in dry climates - so we see evidence of the oldest civilizations in deserts.
Colonial New England barely exists outside of active preservation attempts.
Short answer: it's hard to fully say, but most people believe that the holocene is a lower bound on this sort of thing. I'll try to explain, but keep in mind that I'm trying to massively simplify a huge field of open questions.
The fundamental assumption underlying most archaeology is that changes in material culture broadly reflect people reacting to the world around them in intelligent ways. Most archaeologists therefore believe that Pleistocene people didn't build permanent structures out of stone because nomadic or seminomadic lifestyles were more optimal for the chaotic pleistocene environments happening globally. There's a few people who disagree with the universality of this idea, most famously the authors of Dawn of Everything who argue for a more diverse family of lifeways in early humans, but that's just quibbling about the edges of this overall narrative rather than rewriting it.
And we'd expect to have more evidence than we do if the holocene boundary wasn't the effective start date for this kind of structure. Cave environments are much more stable, and it's where much of our evidence comes from. Gobekli Tepe (GT) and other Tas Tepler sites are made with local limestone, an extremely erosion-prone rock. We have sites covered by existing urban cities like Jericho, the earliest layers of which date from around the same time as GT. We also have older structures, like the epigravittean mammoth huts, and a fairly good idea of the forager->farmer transition in the near east across the natufian culture. GT is actually thought to be part of that transition.
But yes, a lot of organic stuff from the pleistocene is gone. Organics were probably the dominant form of material used, so that leaves a huge gap we're still struggling with. Not really sure where I'm going with this, so I guess I'll stop here?
>What makes me wonder is that why did these hills survive, and why are we not finding similar things in north Africa and other civilization cradles.
In my honest, personally informed opinion, there is much to be said for ignorance of the subject - and I don't mean you personally, just generally - at large - human cultures have a very intractable level of mystery, among our languages and human history, as a whole.
In anticipation of this fact, I personally invest myself in certain mysteries. The Tepe civilisation is one - but the things to be learned at Narwala Gabarnmang, are .. personally, I admit .. astonishing.
We do in fact have tens of thousands of years of human history to comprehend.
The issue is, we rapidly discard a lot of it in the rush to preserve just a bit of it.
it was definitely a festival ground for (relatively) nearby complex semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers to meet up occasionally. I had a professor describe it as a pre-historic UN where these clans would meet up and feast but I think festival ground is an even better analogy
> north Africa
Possibly covered by the Sahara, or if we're talking along the coast, underwater. Or covered by current settlements.
> other civilization cradles.
Because people still live there and built on top.
The interesting places to find new archaeological sites are places where we know there were lots of people nearby, and where for some reason human habitation ceased and the sites were preserved.
I hold some hope for new methods of underwater archaeology to uncover sites on the southern coast of the Black Sea and in the Persian Gulf. The latter especially because it was vast, rich floodplain during the last glacial maximum, and the oldest known true cities sprouted into existence on it's northern shore pretty much instantly after it flooded. I like to think that the oldest city ever built lies submerged in mud and water somewhere in there, just waiting to be found.
(Not that there would be necessarily much to find anymore, they probably didn't build out of rock.)
As I understand it, Tepe is local word for tel. Climate in this region makes them easy to distinguish since not a lot of plant cover making it easier to identify potential sites? Fertile crescent floods. Nile floods. Unique geography and climate in Turcep key to this?
> why did these hills survive
Because it's low density arid scrubland that is primarily inhabited by Kurdish and Turkish herders, and was a no-go zone during the PKK Insurgency.
The fact that there was a skeleton in one of the rectangular-ish holes made me think it was a burial ground, with the obelisk as the headstone. But I am not an archeologist so idk
These Tepe sites give credence to advanced civilization existing before the last ice age. One example is the mostly dismissed theory of water erosion at the base of the Sphinx, suggesting older civilizations leading up to ancient Egypt. To my understanding, it is mostly dismissed because archaeologists found the idea of something older than the Sphinx to be not possible. Tepe sites challenge this. Wild stuff.
I got pretty into this alt archaeology stuff and eventually had to move away from it.
I totally agree that the tepes challenge our timeline of when humans made cities and whatnot, but so much of their arguments is the perfect fit of stones or how flat stones are and saying it _must_ be done by modern tools.
I think they have left out how much you can get done from a construction standpoint when you have forced labor or no labor rules like we have had for some time now all over the world and especially in the West.
When I was first in Delhi and went to the Red Fort, I was shocked when they said they built the whole thing 100s of years ago in 9 years. Think about how long it would take us to build something like this now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Fort
So, I really want the ancient atlantis civ in the Sahara to be true, but the guy's I've seen promoting this are too removed from the scientific method to really be taken seriously.
This guy does some good debunking of a lot of the Netflix/Youtube Alt Archaeology people -- https://www.youtube.com/@miniminuteman773
I also feel that people then were about as smart as we are now, so they could have solved problems in inventive ways they way we do now. Just because they didn’t have an electric stone flattener, it doesn’t mean that stones cannot be made flat in a fairly repeatable way.
And there were no video games, which I think is a huge source of brain-drain these days. I read somewhere once that people played more solitaire on Windows 95 per year than it took in man-hours to send people to the moon (something like that, I don't remember the original statistic). And that's just a shitty game on an old OS.
just to nitpick: the Tepe sites definitely did not have forced labor. they had no social hierarchy at all. hunter-gatherers were fairly egalitarian.
definitely sedentary neolithic people had forced labor. all the Sumerian legal texts that were some of the first writings ever included legal definitions of slaves, for example. but the pre-neolithic Anatolian people were nomadic animistic people with no social hierarchy.
How are we so certain that they had no social hierarchy at all? I thought that that was the main theory but that very little is certain at this point.
mostly because all the bones of all the dead were mixed in with all the others. implying no concept of "this guy was THE guy in my lifetime". but they presumably still had a meritocracy because while the bones were mixed in with all others of all generations, not everyone would have their bones were mixed in upon death. it was likely only the craftsmen or shamans that achieved that honor. but being honored is different from the "divinely ordained" hierarchy of god-kings that came later.
I don't see why you couldn't have a highly hierarchical society that also has a "in death we're all the same" philosophy when it comes to burial.
Any sort of tribal situation would result in forced labor, and cultures would have formalized notions of slavery, indentured service, arbitrary terms based on religious or traditional ideas. The tradeoff of survival for forced labor is an economic plight that happens frequently throughout history. Chattel slavery is inherently degrading, but it has ranged from ritualistic and formal to downright horrifically malicious - the idea that hunter gatherers were egalitarian and peaceful is basically the whole "noble savage" trope.
The truth is, we don't have much but speculation and narrative about the people of Gobekle Tepe, and even assumptions about them being hunter gatherers at all are based on centuries of bias and assumptions, with a whole lot of cultural chauvinism and religious nuttery baked in for good measure.
We're going to have to start analyzing humans more skeptically and rationally, as opposed to taking most of the modern historical narratives as gospel.
Modern humans have existed genetically for 300k+ years. At one point about a million years ago, the Early Pleistocene bottleneck had the population of human ancestors under 2000 individuals. 700k years later, the first modern humans were born, and the first situations in which we had the opportunity to establish culture.
We know from the great north american megafauna die off, climate records, and archaelogical evidence that something happened around 13k years ago to basically reset whatever human civilization there was. It took around 3000 years before the "neolithic revolution" , cultures demonstrating mastery of stone tools, pottery, more sedentary lifestyles, specialization, and so forth. It took another 4,000 years to reach the point where we had started creating written records again, started creating monuments and technology sufficiently durable to last to modern days, and then so on and so forth, with relatively uninterrupted and steady progress to the present day, each culture and age building upon the previous.
I think it's silly to think that it's only in this last 12-13,000 year period that we reached any of the cultural and technological milestones, and that every culture previous to that must have been hunter gatherer, because hunter gatherer are the default "feral human" prototype culture.
We bred dogs from wolves successfully around 45k years ago. That would have taken a generation or two in a nomadic context, or one really spectacular single lifetime for a sedentary person. Even so, you think that for the 250k years prior to that, not a single culture developed writing, wheels, pumps, discovered metal forming, or other technologies?
The human population was scarce, and because of that scarcity, the majority stayed in the absolute best, premium locations - beachfront. A vast proportion of settlements would now be well off the coast, and we have indeed discovered artifacts and evidence of such in various places where researchers have looked.
I'd be willing to bet good money that over the last 300k years there are many 10,000 year cycles and catastrophes where civilizations have risen and fallen, many achieving high levels of technology, perhaps even discovering electricity, advanced chemistry, medicine, and so on, but due to catastrophes, small populations, they got reset back to baseline. I'd bet that it didn't happen 30 times, as often as possible during the course of events, but I'll also make the claim that our current peak of civilization isn't the only good run that human race has ever made.
We are probably the only ones that made it to mass production, definitely the only ones that succeeded in scaling up resource extraction to the levels we saw back in the 1800s. I think there are probably caches of artifacts, evidence left out offshore that technology will make visible to us, that will show a much richer tapestry of events and cultures and history than the somewhat limited and biased narrative that modern historians have put forth as definitive.
Agree and good point -- do we know how long the Tepes took to build?
as far as I'm aware, we have no idea other than that they didn't do much at one time. we can only deduce little modifications were done semi-regularly by the ancient pre-historic version of open source contributors. they had to lift 10+ ton limestone blocks and move them into place. but there's ample evidence of them trying to lift those blocks out of the quarry and failing, thus leaving behind broken would-be pillars of limestone for 12,000 years. the best assumption is just that they had tons of wild cereals and gazelle to munch on so these people were able to work on this persistently over many generations. they had no social hierarchy or need for labor at all, so they had all the free time in the world to use stone age tools to build structures that rivaled the greeks 9,000 years later
Yeah I love the idea of ancient peoples living in abundance, doing animism, showing up to party at the giant ancient structure every season.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QfsSfhaDVY
The Crystal Palace was built and designed in 11 months, 1850-1851. I'm not sure what the key factors making this possible were, but I suspect low wages and complete disregard for worker safety figured.
Yes, some of it is due to lack of safety etc. must I must say the majority of it is the complete lack of competence in modern times because it’s now being built by normal folks.
I assume it was a limited number of people how knew how to make things and they kept roaming around setting new sites etc. Similar to bridge engineers etc. most of what they make just disappears in the background but they keep building things that makes our modern life possible.
It’s not lack of competence. There is an unbelievable weight of regulation in construction now. It would probably take 2 years of planning consultation just to get the idea approved. Then, each facet of the design would have to be coordinated and iterated between several different specialist teams and contractors, with the tree of contractors increasing as each layer of design takes shape. At the end, you also have the labor laws that people are talking about here.
If we weren’t too worried about things falling down and killing people, or about damaging peoples conception of the vibes in a city, we could have the kinds of developer/architect/engineer/foreman outfits that used to build this kind of thing.
> challenge our timeline of when humans made cities
Do they? We know non-sedentary people in the Americas sometimes built large mounds and extensive fish works.
I think it pushed back when humans started building large structures together a few 1000 years. Oddly, there is no evidence of agriculture at Gobekli Tepe
https://www.reddit.com/r/Archaeology/comments/kxquwx/is_gobl...
If it turns out to be earlier than we thought then the climate may have been different. These sites could be the swan song of a civilization in decay, or a group that had an amicable diaspora and used these places for social purposes.
I imagine a culture that realized the land couldn’t support them in concentrations, picked a spot to meet every spring equinox to party and maybe make romantic matches and then dissolved back into the surrounding countryside.
Maybe this was their Burning Man.
Essentially someone had to figure out the civilized part of civilization and the density part of civilization. It’s a chicken and egg problem, and who is to say they did at the same time?
As GP mentioned, there were somewhat similar arrangements in North America not so long after this time period.
Not defending alt-archaeology, but there is a major difference between precision of construction and volume of construction.
> I got pretty into this alt archaeology stuff
Links?
This guy has a whole netflix show if you're so inclined
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMHiLvirCb0
I only watched a little bit of his stuff before I realized people thought he is a kook. But in small doses some of this stuff can sound like sense.
The one that got me was a supposed foundation legend from Sumer that a handful of strangers came and taught them civilization.
The idea of a remnant people floating down a river to escape some sort of societal collapse and then being adopted into a new tribe for their usefulness has a certain something as a hypothesis goes. It’s the “strangers” part that’s a bit suspect since how would you not meet neighbors like that. Unless the river was the end of their journey and not the start.
not OP but this guy is a fun read, heavy conspiracy vibes, but never going full wacko: https://theethicalskeptic.com/2023/02/02/karahan-tepe-and-th... (that said there are more wacko and less wacko pieces there, you have been warned)
I wouldn't call these guys civilization. the Tepe sites are more like an ancient UN for semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers than a settlement. they visited seasonally for a feast and then left. the only evidence we have is that they were partying. but they had no social organization at all
funnily enough, the lack of neolithic culture, social hierarchy, or permanent sedentary lifestyle (all hallmarks of "civilization") and all archeological evidence suggests they were much healthier and more peaceful than neolithic humans. that's why people link "Garden of Eden" mythology originating in ancient Sumeria to the ancient peoples' observation that people became "civilized" but at what cost since it made humans less healthy, more violent, and presumably less happy due to the novel concept of social inequality
I find it hard to believe that these peoples had no social organization at all, and even harder to believe that you could state that with such conviction given how little we know about these sites. I’m definitely curious though! Can you share any links or reading recommendations?
I learned about it in school, I took some anthropology and archeology electives. and what I was told was since there were no defensive structures nor evidence of any security apparatus at all (such as an army) there isn't any evidence of a means to enforce a hierarchy
That sounds like a Childe-esque checklist. In general, we wouldn't expect a strongly hierarchical social organization in this time period, in upper mesopotamia. That's more characteristic of lower Mesopotamian early societies a few thousand years later when cities like Eridu appeared. What we see in upper Mesopotamia is a pretty strong continuity with PPN sites like GT all the way through the Ubaid period, both in terms of architecture and infant burials and they're thought to reflect socially egalitarian societies. Many people (myself included) consider upper and lower Mesopotamia two largely separate cultural areas throughout the PPN because they're so different and argue that the traditional definitions derived from southern cities (like Childe's) are inappropriate to apply to northern urbanism.
Or a more boring theory about the sphinx is that it was constructed at the orthodox time, around 2550 BC, and then later on it rained sometimes. This would be mildly surprising, as opposed to very surprising.
I think it's really exciting. It seems like we always assume technology advances linearly (even with valid counter examples).
The sphinx weathering is odd but it's the Osireion that is a total anomaly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osireion
You would have thought that in a world with curious billionaires someone would pay for a ROV submersible to explore that, I certainly would if I were one.
> The face of the beprenese is located at the top of the Dikili stone; its sharp lines, deep eye sockets and blunt shape nose, and a similar style with human statues found in Karahantepe. This discovery reveals not only the technical mastery of Neolithic people, but also the way he expresses himself and the ability to think abstractly.
I don't think we were in any doubt about the ability of people 12,000 years ago to think abstractly.
I didn't get english. Just lucky?
https://www-trthaber-com.translate.goog/foto-galeri/karahant...
Thanks, I can't change the url now. Since it is just a gallery with minimal information, I forgot to submit translated url.
You can email the mods to change it if you like!
infiniscroll turkish archiology, which only seems right given the 12k years of human building
It looks just like a giant PEZ dispenser.
or petrified Minecraft villagers
The age is pretty impressive, also I noticed that Firefox could translate the article without issues using privacy-preserving offline translation. Now nobody will know that I have read the article!
Yes, these are faces, but why do they look like pillars to me? Ornamented and sculpted pillars are pretty common across civilizations and I can imagine sloping tent like roof set up that are held up by these pillars. How does one separate a pillar and a obelisk?
I wonder if it's possible to correct for the effects of time to see what it originally looked like
Archaeologists generally aren't that computer-savvy. I haven't seen any indications of paint residues on the pillars, but we know that many of the statues in these enclosures were also painted bright colors that would be missed by a digital reconstruction.
> Archaeologists generally aren't that computer-savvy.
Why throw interdisciplinary shade?
> I haven't seen any indications of paint residues on the pillars, but we know that many of the statues in these enclosures were also painted bright colors that would be missed by a digital reconstruction.
Wouldn’t a digital reconstruction just have whatever textures were selected? If there’s no indication of paint residues, they can look for other clues of course. But, without any other evidence, what’s the alternative, right? Guessing would be bad, don’t want to mislead people.
It's not interdisciplinary. I'm an archaeologist, albeit not practicing these days.
Yes, but the point is that we don't know a lot of the context around these layer III T-pillars to make informed choices in depicting them. For clarification, I'm using the GT stratigraphy because I haven't looked up the KT chart.But just to highlight some knowledge gaps, it's usually not clear what damage was caused during the backfill process, what the exposure conditions for these pillars were during their lifetimes (e.g. roof or not, though these earlier rectangular rooms are generally agreed to have covered with wooden beams), and even the dating is a bit suspect in this area.
Plus, the relevant team may not even have a LIDAR scanner to do that properly as that's fairly specialist equipment. Etc.
Getting to the point where it's possible and reasonable isn't easy.
What pigments did they have 12 thousand years ago? Only ochre, surely? So rusty red, dirty yellow, nothing else? (Oh, soot black, too.) I'd be interested if there was anything else.
I see the boar statue is painted inside its mouth ... with red ochre.
The boar was painted with red inside the mouth, and black/white on the hide. Black in the ancient Near East was usually bitumen, though later groups like the Egyptians would switch to manganese dioxide. White was plaster. They also had yellow ochre.
The boar's arms are long and skinny and curved, and kind of loosely attached. This culture's art style had a consistent theme of noodle-arms.
New guy just dropped
From the article: "The arm and hand reliefs on the T-shaped pillars found in and around Göbekli Tepe have long reinforced the idea that these stones symbolized humans. This new find at Karahan Tepe, the first to feature a human face carved into a T-shaped pillar, is considered a turning point in Neolithic research."
Kind of looks like the Stonks guy meme.
Is that the oldest known carved megalithic stone statue of a person?
Keyword "megalith". We have older carved statues. We have older carved, stone statues. We have older, carved stone statues depicting people, as well as statues from this same site that are full body.
It's from basically the same period and culture as urfa man, but at a site that's been initially dated a few hundred years earlier and is generally understood to have been inhabited first. It's contemporaneous with the famous T-pillars at Gobekli Tepe. The important thing is that this is the first T-pillar discovered with a human face, aside from the one with just a human outline.
Don't take the following as an obnoxious distraction. I've not fully imbibed the featured article yet, but the entire area (region) is verily a bedlam of magnificence and wonder.
Those unfamiliar with Derinkuyu must change this hastily. Do your own research, but please see this image (pardon the url - I've been flagged for... browsing the Internet and can't access it directly):
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
And an underground map here: https://www.lolaapp.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/derinkuyu...
There is/are video/s available and they are more than worth watching.
I can't remember how to spell the many other regional wonders, so won't try.
Edit: ignore anyone who comes along and tries to dismiss this particular example or the surrounding region as trivial, insignificant etc. Explore for yourself and be rewarded accordingly.
The fools! Did they not check between the walls
That's impossible, the mirror wasn't invented until millennia later, so there's no way the sculptor would have known what a human face looked like.
They must think we're stupid.
We’ll, that’s me convinced.
And how!
they have played us for absolute fools
I don't get your joke
I think he's making fun of historians that have really dumb reasons for declaring human culture is one way or another because of event X but it doesn't pass a sniff test. In this example, mirrors don't need to exist because people can look at other people (or more simply feel their own face). It was a 40% funny joke.
don't forget water and maybe oiled polished obsidian?
By "human face" they mean nose and eyebrow ridge clearly indicating a face, and most likely human.
It looks like a Carbot Animations character.
12000 years ago is long, but also not very long. Just a few 500 grandfather's ago. Amazing what we achieved in that short timespan.
How a society which is supposed to be of the hunters gatherers era raised such monuments and set up that site?
pez
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which is just a hallucinated image of a carved face in stone which has no connection to the original besides they both are stones that resemble faces
Great find! and I don’t want to underestimate the discovery by any means, but...
We humans are predisposed to see anthropomorphic shapes in things. I understand why that could be interpreted as a face, but at the same time, it could just be a random shape. It’s just a “T” shape. Sure, it could look like a nose and a pair of eyes, but it could also just be... something.
Other stuff at Karahan Tepe has faces on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karahan_Tepe
And you can look at similar things from the Taş Tepeler sites in general:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta%C5%9F_Tepeler
The T-obelisk things, with their long skinny arms, do seem to represent figures. I wonder why they have to be that stupid oblong shape at all. Dual purpose as roof supports? Or just tradition, tradition causes wacky things. Looking around the various carvings from related sites, it's also evident that they were greatly interested in penises.
>Looking around the various carvings from related sites, it's also evident that they were greatly interested in penises.
Some things never change.
The translated article provides some backing to the claim that it's a face in a style that matches other finds in the area:
"The arm and hand reliefs on the T-shaped standing stones found in Göbeklitepe and its surroundings have long strengthened the idea that these stones symbolize humans. This new find, which was unearthed in Karahantepe, is described as a new turning point in Neolithic period research with the fact that the human face was carved on a T-shaped standing stone for the first time."
"With its sharp lines, deep eye sockets and blunt nose, it carries a style similar to the human statues found before in Karahantepe."
> We humans are predisposed to see anthropomorphic shapes in things.
This was sculpted by other modern humans.
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