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.
Is this good archaeology? I worry it might be something else.
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 ..
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.
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.
Colonial New England barely exists outside of active preservation attempts.
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?
Do you think recent findings about early human sites on other continents (Americas etc) change any of this, or does that still mostly fit with our understanding? My layman's knowledge is that the exact date of when people reached certain landmasses shifts around based on new evidence but I'm not sure if that's an important part of the timeline generally
As someone who grew up there, this isn't really true. It's more that buildings have been upgraded/replaced over time by choice, resulting in a sparse patchwork of old buildings rather than large old cities. Places like the Wayside Inn[0] predate the country by a century, and have been "preserved" only because they have more-or-less continuously operating as an in since 1686.
The New England climate isn't all that different than the original England. I think the cultural and legal climate around old buildings is more impactful here. I would be curious to know about the comparative longevity of 17th-century wooden buildings in Europe.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wayside_Inn_%28Sudbury%29
Cottages like that had a simple timber frame and cob walls, which is only a slight improvement on wattle and daub! Cob is mud and straw and a few binding agents and traditionally: horse piss to act as an accelerant to aid setting or something. Floors are joist and boards. The roof is thatched, often with a "cat slide" and foundations are laughable.
The thatch needs replacing something like every 25-50 years. Cob needs patching, especially if the roof leaks (not replaced on schedule) and it starts rotting. However all this stuff happens gradually and it can be repaired gradually too in most cases, as and when you like and within budget.
A concrete structure ... let's say Charles Cross multi-storey car park in Plymouth ... well hello concrete cancer! OK this is a bit different to the cottage but let's see how the "modern" world has progressed with a building material that was used by the old Romans and likely before.
A concrete beam on its own is "quite" good as a supporting material. Conc is superb in compression and quite good in tension. In a horizontal beam when you put a load on it, the top will be compressed and the bottom will be in tension. Think about a wide thin rectangle and imagine pushing down on it. Imagine it bending into a U shape - the top side will be compressed and the bottom will be stretched (tension). That's a fairly simplified model!
Now, cast your concrete beam around a long steel bar and put nuts and washers on both ends and tighten them so that the entire beam is in tension. There are other methods to do this but this is easier to envision.
Now you have locked in a lot of energy into the system. The upside of "pre-stressed" concrete is that a given beam ("member") cross section can carry a lot more weight than a non pre-stressed member. The down side is that deliberate demolition is really hard and non deliberate demolition is possible.
So, that concrete cancer thing. Conc cancer is caused when salty sea air and moisture (rather likely in Plymouth) permeates conc made from Portland cement. Its more complicated than that but the sea salts are key. The conc gradually degrades in a rather strange way - map cracking and a gel develops in the cracks (I think, I studied this stuff quite a while back). The usual conc matrix ends up with weak lines running through it.
Anyway - you have energy locked up in members and those members are failing. Boom!
There is a lot to be said for old school materials and practices.
I think you meant "compression".
So if you look at Africa it stayed for the longest times with hunter & gatherer cultures until neolithic settlers came back into Africa from modern Turkey.
Moreover Africa in large parts is either moist or desert/savannah, both of which do not help preservation. And there are simply much fewer archaeologists going around Africa.
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.
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.
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.)
So "Göbekli Tepe" literally is "Hill with a belly", "Taş Tepeler" is "Stone hills" etc.
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.
I get it though, it'd be interesting to consider it, but like I said we'd need to forget things first for a long time. But another thing to consider is that the ancient Egyptians had archeologists for ancient Egyptian stuff already, with their history going back from 3000 BC to 30 AD.
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 saw a video where as a stunt a residential construction crew went from a vacant lot to a complete single-family house ready to occupy in less than two days. And that wasn't a prefab house, it was a regular wooden frame suburban house built using all the usual construction methods. They did it by staging all the materials right there and having all of the carpenters, roofers, painters, electricians, plumbers, etc standing around ready to jump in as soon as they were needed. Granted that was a small project, but the point is that with a sense of urgency construction can proceed quickly, and it doesn't require sacrificing worker safety.
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.
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.
We have a lot more infrastructure around now, so much that we don't even see the wonders that tame the nature and make it comfortable for us.
It just wasn't a good design.
Like, "why are more people not building impractical fire hazards? It must be because people these days are incompetent" is a pretty weird take.
People will always find a way to get their dopamine, be it video games, reading, watching stuff, etc.
Don’t pick out a single thing and make it the boogey man.
It's time to kill the "slaves built the pyramids" myth. "Aliens built the pyramids" has exactly the same amount of evidence.
Unless you're referring to wage-slaves, who definitely were the middle-management of the crews. We've found graves of Jewish construction bosses.
Do they? We know non-sedentary people in the Americas sometimes built large mounds and extensive fish works.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Archaeology/comments/kxquwx/is_gobl...
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.
Links?
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.
The one that got me was a supposed foundation legend from Sumer that a handful of strangers came and taught them civilization.
Sumerians essentially saw themselves as the first civilization. When they reference a prior civilization, what they're referring to is literally the gods themselves because being civilized is very literally the spark of divinity inside humans that separates us from animals. It's the gods who taught humans to be civilized, sending their representatives the seven apkallu (basically everything related to the heavens comes in sevens) to raise humanity from the among the beasts to serve the gods, as we were designed to do when the gods imbued us with their blood. This is referenced again in the epic of Gilgamesh when enkidu is made like a god by a prostitute who teaches him how to be civilized. Other near Eastern religious traditions carried this on as well. You're probably familiar with Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, when they eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and become like gods themselves, i.e. are raised from among the animals and are cast out from the garden where the animals reside. This all gets a bit mixed up with the Sumerians having a bunch of ancestor cults going on as various human god-kings tie themselves to powerful lineages and so the gods/apkallu are seen as the ancestors of humanity.
But what is your own opinion?
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.
It is absurd to claim "hunter-gatherers were fairly egalitarian" and "had no hierarchy." We know that tribes in north west of the Americas, pre European contact, did not practice agriculture and had slaves. What evidence exists counter to this that supports your view? I assert it is literally impossible to make your assertion. Just because burial perhaps didn't differentiate or demonstrate a hierarchy, that doesn't support that the living didn't.
sedentary life and agriculture developed in the Americas around the same time it developed everywhere else in the world outside of the Near East (3000 BC). and this roughly correlates to the beginning of the Meghalayan geological age that continues today - which is when the ~10,000 year old original civilizations collapsed and Neolithic cultures became ubiquitous around the world and not just in Mesopotamia and the Yangtze river
While "sedentary life and agriculture developed in the Americas around the same time it developed everywhere else in the world," it was not the case for the coastal Salish and other tribes who lived on the resource abundant Pacific Northwest.
There is even a small amount of hierarchy at our 15 person Thanksgiving family dinner.
Also hierarchy doesn't mean that there is a single individual that's at the top. There could be a series of caste hierarchies, where groups of people were considered "better" than others.
We don't know if everyone from the tribe was in the common grave or a select group of people.
You're building a narrative based on your knowledge of other civilizations histories and understanding of modern day social structures, and assuming those traits must apply to this civilization. The truth is, we don't, and likely won't ever, know how their social hierarchy was built. Anything said is speculation. This isn't the case where you can be 80% confident something is true, more like 2% confident based on the discovered evidence.
If that's an accepted idea in the field, hopefully it comes with a lot more evidence than bones being mixed, as future archaeologists might find in many of our cemeteries of today.
The above comment also illustrates their biases. They map their knowledge to history that came much later to the Tepe sites. Stating that it was "was likely only the craftsmen or shamans" is a prime example of that.
To know that, we'd have to identify the bones of an important leader in a mass burial site.
We don't know that.
Citation required.
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.
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.
Archaeologists are much better about recognizing the complexity of forager lifeways than they were 50 years ago.
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
There seems to be an issue with how archeology is taught at schools, where these conclusions are stated as facts, or theories with a high amount of proof, when in reality, they have very little evidence supporting them.
If you mean to say and advanced civilization, then no this isn't really upsetting any orthodoxy.
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.
Before the last glacial period == 100,000 year ago. This is 12,000 years ago. If we assume (big big assumption here) that there's only really a single unbroken line of civilization, and also assume (big big assumption) roughly exponential growth till now, then no, 100kya would be too long ago.
But those two assumptions are not really safe to make. It's just that we _can't_ know yet.
I suspect that the Sphinx water erosion thing is real and correct, and the Sphinx much older than ancient Egypt.
https://www-trthaber-com.translate.goog/foto-galeri/karahant...
They must think we're stupid.
That's when I realized the guy was a kook and it was all rubbish. He was into it for the money, btw. The "click-bait" of the time. And in my opinion Hancock is Däniken's spiritual descendant.
I don't think we were in any doubt about the ability of people 12,000 years ago to think abstractly.
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.
Wouldn’t a digital reconstruction just have whatever textures were selected?
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.
There’s a good chance you have a LiDAR Scanner in your pocket right now.
There's also an interesting point about phone use in the field. It's surprisingly difficult. I haven't played around with lidar apps because my (personal) phone choice doesn't have the relevant hardware, but I wouldn't take it for granted that they work offline or there's app store access to install them.
I see the boar statue is painted inside its mouth ... with red ochre.
Man we haven't change much, have we? :D
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.
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.
But it does please me that I'm wise enough to treat this place as a den of reptiles. I am right about that much, often enough.
PS: Derinkuyu is amazing, reptiles or not. And so is Turkiye
As for article, imagine, at those times and for thousands years after in most places humans were still hunting-gathering..
In Göbekli Tepe not only human faces, they are also many stone craving of animals or better known as Noah's Beast [3].
Both historical sites Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe, are not very far from Mount Ararat and Mount Judi, they are within a few hundreds of km in Turkey where Mount Judi is the closer of the two.
Mount Ararat is claimed by most Bible scholars as the site of the landing of Noah's Ark after the great flood [4].
According to Quran scholars, however, the actual site of the Noah's Ark resting place is Mount Judi as the word Judi is clearly and specifically mentioned in the Quran in the story of prophet Noah, inside Surah Hud 11:44 [5],[6].
In the Bible however, no exact mention of the name of actual site, and the Mount Ararat is just a mere speculation by the Bible Scholars based on story of legends [4].
[1] Göbekli Tepe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
[2] The Oldest Temple in The World and Its Mistery:
https://archaeotravel.eu/the-oldest-temple-in-the-world-and-...
[3] Noah's Beasts Released on the Hills of Göbekli Tepe:
https://archaeotravel.eu/noahs-beasts-released-on-the-hills-...
[4] Mount Ararat:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Ararat
[5] Mount Judi:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Judi
[6] Surah Hud 11:44:
And it was said, “O earth! Swallow up your water. And O sky! Withhold ˹your rain˺.” The floodwater receded and the decree was carried out. The Ark rested on Mount Judi, and it was said, “Away with the wrongdoing people!”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karahan_Tepe#/media/File:Karah...
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.
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.
Some things never change.
"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."
This was sculpted by other modern humans.
