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?
It feels like the significance of this is lost on many people.
My understanding is that complex things like statues were not supposed to be possible 12,000 years ago. I think it’s supposed to be more like 6000 years ago. The fact that it has been carbon dated to 12,000 tears should means that we have to rewrite the theories on the start of human civilization.
These statues needed to be carved out of tools and the educational techniques for carving it off stone and the social structure to support art were not supposed to exist at this time. This is pretty huge in terms of figuring out the birth of human civilization.
And the fact that the same site also has these huge stone megaliths that also weren’t supposed to be possible and were also dated to 12,000 years so just solidified the idea that our current theories are completely wrong.
> My understanding is that complex things like statues were not supposed to be possible 12,000 years ago.
Huh? The Venus of Willendorf[1] is twice as old, and to my eye displays a higher degree of artistry than the statue shown in the article. Several such Venus figurines have been found in central Europe.
Compared to the intricacy of the Venus' limestone carving, the statue from the article looks downright crude. The idea that it's "not supposed to be possible" to make something like that 12,000 years BP is ridiculous, and I can't imagine where you might have got that impression. Yes, the new statue is life-size, while the Venus is a figurine, but that doesn't necessarily make it any more difficult to manufacture (possibly easier, in fact).
> My understanding is that complex things like statues were not supposed to be possible 12,000 years ago. I think it’s supposed to be more like 6000 years ago.
Recently I keep wondering whether people have thought about this from a statistical perspective.
Like, if I suddenly find a dead rat in my kitchen, what should I think about it? Should I consider that maybe I have had a pest problem for months or possibly years, or should I consider this as "we found evidence for rats existing in my house for at most one day"?
It seems archeology takes the "evidence based" approach and refuses to calculate the expected probability of more stuff being discovered that's older/more impressive using the fact that we are discovering (mostly) random stuff buried in the ground.
What are the chances that the stuff we dug up are not the pinnacle of human civilization back then, and merely an average object? If people 3000 years from now dug up a brick from a rural village, should they infer that we only know how to build brick houses and not skyscrapers? What are the chances of digging up remains of a skyscraper?
We know sculptures and cave-paintings much older than this, some made with great artistic skill, so clearly no archeologist would suggest art was “not possible” at this time. Still a significant find and very fascinating.
Our knowledge of such ancient peoples is so limited and subject to so many filters, that we should hesitate to think of some achievements as impossible. It’s just not that black & white. The general pattern of civilizational development could still be broadly correct, with this site just being a notable outlier.
I think you might appreciate the book The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow [1]. They dive into the archaeological record and argue precisely that: that the common story of how civilization developed is very wrong, and that complex societies existed before the rise of agriculture, longer than is usually assumed. These findings at Göbekli Tepe appear very much in line with their theory.
It is very interesting, that you says about 6000 years ago.
It is "calculated" (in the middle ages) age of The Great Flood.
I've read some opinion, that modern European historians, even atheist ones, still "primed" by this number and it skews all our understanding of history and perception of archaeological finds. It is not some random number, but legacy of pre-Renaissance Biblical studies, haunting us to these modern times.
> My understanding is that complex things like statues were not supposed to be possible 12,000 years ago. I think it’s supposed to be more like 6000 years ago
I think your understanding was just incorrect. Here's a video [0] from Kurzgesagt that explains in a nutshell when the human civilisation started (spoiler: as far back as around 20,000 years ago, but definitely the case 12,000 years ago, though the boundary is very fuzzy). But also note that even before a proper civilisation started to form people already made art.
I don't even understand what are you on about. The same kind of statue up.to the holding of the genital has been found in the same area in 1993 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urfa_Man
Not even talking of the fact that 25000 years before people were making incredible art at the grotte Chauvet or that around the same time, a 30cm statue was carved in Germany representing an anthropomorphised Lion ans
Yup - if you are thinking about what the story was in about 1978...
Since then there's been a big change from the idea cities were the only locus of culture and technology to a view that nomadic peoples were able to create significant ritual art, technical knowlege, and complex cultures. Of course the view from the 19th and early 20th C's was significantly informed by the need to justify all the genociding of nomadic peoples ("it's for their own good").
The idea I've heard recently is that agriculture grew out of nomadic people encouraging the food plants that they would be looking for in a years time by planting selected seeds and then going off to the next area, over time this led to crops that were more and more adapted as food stuff and this then enabled settled agrarianism. Places like Göbeklitepe are thought to be the ritual centers of nomadic cultures doing this sort of per-agricultural precession. I have read (no expert) that are similar sights in the southern united states where (now genocided) nomadic people used to come together and conduct major rituals which required significant communal investment and co-ordination.
Civilization with no cities... who'd have thought?
All those thoughts were going through my head as I was reading it, and I’m not like a history major or anything. Modern humans biologically have been around for a pretty long time so I’ve often wondered if civilizations existed where we simply haven’t found their artifacts, maybe because they didn’t produce or value them at the time.
A common statement was brought up in my history classes:
"humans of the past were often as resourceful, if not more resourceful than we are, they simply had less opportunities than we do today."
If you put yourself in the place of your ancestors. Who you are, you could probably figure out a way to make a statue. It stands to reason that someone a bit smarter (or more motivated) than you or I could also figure it out without our modern day tools.
Human ingenuity is astounding and I love the idea that past humanity was just us without iPhones.
Do you need special tools to do this though? Or just one rock that's harder than the other one?
That said I used to make "tools" out of sticks and rocks as a child playing outdoors. Why do we think people didn't have tools or the capacity to invent them 12000 years ago?
It has been my pet theory that human civilizations had advanced a lot more before a some kind of extinction event pushed humans back to 1. Maybe not as technologically advanced as the current civilization but advanced in its own way.
Has the statue itself been dated? 12,000 yo is the estimated founding date of Göbekli Tepe not it's last use. Humans like to move things about go through many phases of inhabitation of a place.
How is dating as a science faring in the replication crisis? It seems fraught with incentives for those involved. Discover something 2000 years old and no-one cares but 12,000 years old and you've got a TV career and a book deal.
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):
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?
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.
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.
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.
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."
It always sounded strange to me when I learnt in high school that the "earliest" civilization had rock structures, ziggurats, temples and the like. It gives an impression that human suddenly that converged together at some point, decided to have priests and kings, and construct large structures for no practical worldly reason.
Take the discovery of fire. It is not like some ape suddenly discovered fire and suddenly learnt how to cook. It probably took thousand of years of "consistently being able to create fire" before realizing that it can be used for cooking. The ability to create fire also implies that the prehistoric human was already able to think of risk/benefit. Since fire is obviously dangerous it leads me to think that they already have some sort of culture/philoshopy. Critical thinking cannot exist in a vacuum i.e. they have to had to used it for other purposes as well.
This is obviously unscientific and extremely speculative, but I just think that these things cannot exist in a vacuum is all.
People seem to assume that realistic art is a sign of artistic "progress" and sophistication. But is it really so?
People in prehistoric times must have been the most skilled stone carvers ever. This was the technology of the era. What they might have lacked in tooling they surely had in craftmanship and available time.
Is it a case of not being able to carve something more realistic or not interested in doing do?
Maybe confronted with the later artistic fashion of emulating reality (started in Ancient Greece and ended in the early 20th century) they would retort:
Why waste your time reproducing something that already exists?
What freaks me out is how the hands are depicted on the statue. It’s eerily similar to the Moai statues of Easter Island [1]. I’m not sure what to make of it.
[+] [-] mkaic|2 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@miniminuteman773
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EaKFKYPXVk
[+] [-] throwaway290|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6D794163636F756|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] softfalcon|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpsouth|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bluehorizon2|2 years ago|reply
My understanding is that complex things like statues were not supposed to be possible 12,000 years ago. I think it’s supposed to be more like 6000 years ago. The fact that it has been carbon dated to 12,000 tears should means that we have to rewrite the theories on the start of human civilization.
These statues needed to be carved out of tools and the educational techniques for carving it off stone and the social structure to support art were not supposed to exist at this time. This is pretty huge in terms of figuring out the birth of human civilization.
And the fact that the same site also has these huge stone megaliths that also weren’t supposed to be possible and were also dated to 12,000 years so just solidified the idea that our current theories are completely wrong.
[+] [-] p-e-w|2 years ago|reply
Huh? The Venus of Willendorf[1] is twice as old, and to my eye displays a higher degree of artistry than the statue shown in the article. Several such Venus figurines have been found in central Europe.
Compared to the intricacy of the Venus' limestone carving, the statue from the article looks downright crude. The idea that it's "not supposed to be possible" to make something like that 12,000 years BP is ridiculous, and I can't imagine where you might have got that impression. Yes, the new statue is life-size, while the Venus is a figurine, but that doesn't necessarily make it any more difficult to manufacture (possibly easier, in fact).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf
[+] [-] hnfong|2 years ago|reply
Recently I keep wondering whether people have thought about this from a statistical perspective.
Like, if I suddenly find a dead rat in my kitchen, what should I think about it? Should I consider that maybe I have had a pest problem for months or possibly years, or should I consider this as "we found evidence for rats existing in my house for at most one day"?
It seems archeology takes the "evidence based" approach and refuses to calculate the expected probability of more stuff being discovered that's older/more impressive using the fact that we are discovering (mostly) random stuff buried in the ground.
What are the chances that the stuff we dug up are not the pinnacle of human civilization back then, and merely an average object? If people 3000 years from now dug up a brick from a rural village, should they infer that we only know how to build brick houses and not skyscrapers? What are the chances of digging up remains of a skyscraper?
I have so many burning questions lol
[+] [-] bazoom42|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jl6|2 years ago|reply
Our knowledge of such ancient peoples is so limited and subject to so many filters, that we should hesitate to think of some achievements as impossible. It’s just not that black & white. The general pattern of civilizational development could still be broadly correct, with this site just being a notable outlier.
[+] [-] kcyb|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything
[+] [-] blacklion|2 years ago|reply
I've read some opinion, that modern European historians, even atheist ones, still "primed" by this number and it skews all our understanding of history and perception of archaeological finds. It is not some random number, but legacy of pre-Renaissance Biblical studies, haunting us to these modern times.
[+] [-] tralarpa|2 years ago|reply
There is also the Urfa man, dated 9000 BC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urfa_Man
[+] [-] M4v3R|2 years ago|reply
I think your understanding was just incorrect. Here's a video [0] from Kurzgesagt that explains in a nutshell when the human civilisation started (spoiler: as far back as around 20,000 years ago, but definitely the case 12,000 years ago, though the boundary is very fuzzy). But also note that even before a proper civilisation started to form people already made art.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWu29PRCUvQ
[+] [-] poulpy123|2 years ago|reply
Not even talking of the fact that 25000 years before people were making incredible art at the grotte Chauvet or that around the same time, a 30cm statue was carved in Germany representing an anthropomorphised Lion ans
[+] [-] prvc|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sgt101|2 years ago|reply
Since then there's been a big change from the idea cities were the only locus of culture and technology to a view that nomadic peoples were able to create significant ritual art, technical knowlege, and complex cultures. Of course the view from the 19th and early 20th C's was significantly informed by the need to justify all the genociding of nomadic peoples ("it's for their own good").
The idea I've heard recently is that agriculture grew out of nomadic people encouraging the food plants that they would be looking for in a years time by planting selected seeds and then going off to the next area, over time this led to crops that were more and more adapted as food stuff and this then enabled settled agrarianism. Places like Göbeklitepe are thought to be the ritual centers of nomadic cultures doing this sort of per-agricultural precession. I have read (no expert) that are similar sights in the southern united states where (now genocided) nomadic people used to come together and conduct major rituals which required significant communal investment and co-ordination.
Civilization with no cities... who'd have thought?
[+] [-] TheGRS|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] softfalcon|2 years ago|reply
"humans of the past were often as resourceful, if not more resourceful than we are, they simply had less opportunities than we do today."
If you put yourself in the place of your ancestors. Who you are, you could probably figure out a way to make a statue. It stands to reason that someone a bit smarter (or more motivated) than you or I could also figure it out without our modern day tools.
Human ingenuity is astounding and I love the idea that past humanity was just us without iPhones.
[+] [-] mcphage|2 years ago|reply
Your understanding is not correct.
> The fact that it has been carbon dated to 12,000 tears should means that we have to rewrite the theories on the start of human civilization.
It does not. Göbekli Tepe has in general, but I don't think this specific find does.
[+] [-] beezlewax|2 years ago|reply
That said I used to make "tools" out of sticks and rocks as a child playing outdoors. Why do we think people didn't have tools or the capacity to invent them 12000 years ago?
[+] [-] xbmcuser|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asvitkine|2 years ago|reply
Wouldn't it be dating the underlying material (i.e. the stone), which presumably predates the actual carving of the statue out of that material?
Edit: I guess if it was buried, they date the organic material around it.
[+] [-] Fluorescence|2 years ago|reply
How is dating as a science faring in the replication crisis? It seems fraught with incentives for those involved. Discover something 2000 years old and no-one cares but 12,000 years old and you've got a TV career and a book deal.
[+] [-] unsubstantiated|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wolverine876|2 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] verbify|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dghughes|2 years ago|reply
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66846772
[+] [-] an-allen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rokkitmensch|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pelorat|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derefr|2 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] cjohnson318|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quasarj|2 years ago|reply
That's a lifelike penis, at least.
[+] [-] MilStdJunkie|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] imchillyb|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcpackieh|2 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C4%B1sas,_Haliliye
[+] [-] anon-3988|2 years ago|reply
Take the discovery of fire. It is not like some ape suddenly discovered fire and suddenly learnt how to cook. It probably took thousand of years of "consistently being able to create fire" before realizing that it can be used for cooking. The ability to create fire also implies that the prehistoric human was already able to think of risk/benefit. Since fire is obviously dangerous it leads me to think that they already have some sort of culture/philoshopy. Critical thinking cannot exist in a vacuum i.e. they have to had to used it for other purposes as well.
This is obviously unscientific and extremely speculative, but I just think that these things cannot exist in a vacuum is all.
[+] [-] seqizz|2 years ago|reply
[0]: https://arkeofili.com/karahantepede-bulunan-insan-heykelinin...
[+] [-] khole|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nologic01|2 years ago|reply
People in prehistoric times must have been the most skilled stone carvers ever. This was the technology of the era. What they might have lacked in tooling they surely had in craftmanship and available time.
Is it a case of not being able to carve something more realistic or not interested in doing do?
Maybe confronted with the later artistic fashion of emulating reality (started in Ancient Greece and ended in the early 20th century) they would retort:
Why waste your time reproducing something that already exists?
[+] [-] pachico|2 years ago|reply
We don't have many in Spain, despite being quite a religious country, and I'm always intrigued.
[+] [-] potas|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://web.stanford.edu/~siegelr/easterisland/IMG_3485%20le...
[+] [-] solardev|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] victor106|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smilespray|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] theduder99|2 years ago|reply