# Gobekli Tepe: What do we really know? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [August 30, 2018, 6:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobekli-tepe-what-do-we-really-know/820508 "2018-08-30T06:54:44Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Drunky\_Smurf](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/drunky_smurf/32/449_2.png) [@Drunky\_Smurf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Drunky_Smurf)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2018, 6:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobekli-tepe-what-do-we-really-know/820508/1 "2018-08-30T06:54:44Z")
So, there’s this city, that we are currently digging up. That is older than we thought civilization was. But clearly we were humans peoples before we thought we were. Is anyone else excited about this? > **[Göbekli Tepe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe)** > > Göbekli Tepe (Turkish: \[ɟœbecˈli teˈpe\], "Potbelly Hill"; known as Girê Mirazan or Xirabreşkê in Kurdish) is a Neolithic archaeological site in the Southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey. Dated to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, between c. 9500 and 8000 BCE, the site comprises a number of large circular structures supported by massive stone pillars – the world's oldest known megaliths. Many of these pillars are richly decorated with figurative anthropomorphic details, clothing, and reliefs of The s... Here: A video where a guy talks about the Flood Mythos and how it wiped out most of the life, including humans, on the Northern hemispere, https://www.youtube.com/embed/0V0KRIJdh_4?feature=oembed&wmode=opaque&list=PL8PPtxxTQjQvZbyNDqHJyW71XwzVZV_r6&start=0 ( **Sir Cronos** and **Sir Stranger on a Train** I’m looking at you smart bright fellas.) And I checked out this dudes sites: https://www.youtube.com/embed/0V0KRIJdh_4?feature=oembed&wmode=opaque&list=PL8PPtxxTQjQvZbyNDqHJyW71XwzVZV_r6&start=0 and it seems to be real, that humans were pretty advanced, for their time, scientifically and mathematically: more than we give them credit for. Please give me evidence that this is right or wrong, or call me a dingle dongle, so that I may continue forward into finding out the truth about this reality. ---
**Author:** ![Banksiaman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/banksiaman/32/3334_2.png) [@Banksiaman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Banksiaman)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2018, 9:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobekli-tepe-what-do-we-really-know/820508/2 "2018-08-30T09:05:18Z")
> [@](#): > > …and it seems to be real, that humans were pretty advanced, for their time, scientifically and mathematically: more than we give them credit for. > > Please give me evidence that this is right or wrong, or call me a dingle dongle, so that I may continue forward into finding out the truth about this reality. You’re not a Dingle Dongle for wanting to find out about a major prehistoric site that is adding potentially adding a vast chunk of knowledge about the past. You may become one if you fall for the gushy hype in the the Youtube links. The site is real and it’s incredibly early and well-preserved for what it is. Archaeological interpretation is an even slower process than excavation and anything said about Gobekli Tepe needs to take account of: - There are similarities in different sites from around the region, although nothing quite the same. It fits consistently into a broad cultural space, and seems to line up with social practices interpreted from elsewhere over time, so its likely to eventually be understood as part of the normal for that time and place, even though we see it as amazing and unique. - Only part has been excavated, so there is a fair bit of filling in the gaps. We only have some of the jigsaw pieces, and no box cover, so the evidence could describe many different pictures. Even so, that does no mean open slather for making up stories for YouTube. Any explanation of the site has to account for ALL the evidence. You can’t just make up stories from the bits that seem to imply something nice / different / unusual. - Real humans doing real human things do have the power to amaze, although our biased belief is that just because they didn’t have plasma TVs they were somehow morons. They were not and clearly went to lots of effort to create places where they could transcend regular life [my assumption about what the site did]. Imagine you’d never seen a kiva site, or a church, a mosque or Balinese temple until one was dug up. They would be gob-smacking in their intricacy and complexity to us and, if it was well preserved, its richness in art and symbolic decoration. - If I drew a few symbols you would not have any idea about what they meant or why I did them without speaking to me. Imagine how hard it is to accurately guess what the reasons for a person 10,000 years ago did things. But our first port of call should be human emotions and desires, rather than spacemen or plot excerpts from a book written 8,000 years later. If you are genuinely interested in the real stories, also check out Catal Huyuk, a later site also in Turkey which also has the power to amaze - [http://www.catalhoyuk.com/](http://www.catalhoyuk.com/) ---
**Author:** ![senoy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/dbc845/32.png) [@senoy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/senoy)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2018, 11:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobekli-tepe-what-do-we-really-know/820508/3 "2018-08-30T11:57:07Z")
Gobekli Tepe is definitely real and certainly ‘advanced.’ Here’s what is really, really cool about it. It upends the religion/society theories we had previously. There was (and maybe still is) a general idea that organized religion post-dates society. The idea behind it is that there were folk religions, but organized religion arose out of a need to keep larger groups of people functioning smoothly, so large groups of people get together to farm the same land and band together against attackers, and to stop them from killing each other or making widespread nuisances of themselves, religions became more important, better organized and people were better able to coexist. Gobekli Tepe seems to imply the exact opposite. It seems to imply that rather than organized religion being the result of society, society was the result of organized religion. The story that it tells seems to say that religion became organized and this is what encouraged people to band together into large communities. OK, some people may not find that really, really cool, but I do and I don’t give a rip about what you think. 😛 It really is a cool place though that really throws into question a lot of what we thought we knew about Neolithic peoples and the beginnings of societies. ---
**Author:** ![Jasmine](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jasmine/32/2964_2.png) [@Jasmine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jasmine)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2018, 12:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobekli-tepe-what-do-we-really-know/820508/4 "2018-08-30T12:15:09Z")
A popular estimate among scientists is that [**99% of all life that has ever been on earth has gone extinct.**](https://curiosity.com/topics/99-percent-of-the-earths-species-are-extinctbut-thats-not-the-worst-of-it-curiosity/) It follows then that 99% of all the previous human and human-like creatures that ever lived have also disappeared. That implies that there could easily be evidence of several large and impressive civilizations yet to be discovered and may, in fact, never be discovered. Several years back, there was a series on the History Channel called, “Life After People”. It was postulated that, as large and advanced as our civilization may be, there would be no visual evidence left of it after only 1,000 years. Sure, it probably wouldn’t take much digging to find a lot of evidence, but what about after a million years or ten million years? ---
**Author:** ![Xema](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/9de053/32.png) [@Xema](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Xema)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2018, 1:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobekli-tepe-what-do-we-really-know/820508/5 "2018-08-30T13:25:58Z")
> [@Jasmine](#): > > It was postulated that, as large and advanced as our civilization may be, there would be no visual evidence left of it after only 1,000 years. We have reliable evidence that this is silly. Of many possible examples, one is this [modest bridge in France](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont_du_Gard) - around 1900 years old. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2018, 1:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobekli-tepe-what-do-we-really-know/820508/6 "2018-08-30T13:54:24Z")
Could you perhaps summarize the two videos, I’m not giving them my eyeballs until I’m convinced they’re not Graham Hancock-style kooks? As for Gobekli Tepe, it’s doubtless fascinating, but only really a _complete_ gamechanger to people who don’t have other reference points for what sedentary HGs can accomplish given a favourable-enough environment, like the proximal Natufians, early Jōmon Japan or precolumbian Pacific Northwest. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2018, 1:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobekli-tepe-what-do-we-really-know/820508/7 "2018-08-30T13:57:54Z")
> [@Jasmine](#): > > It follows then that 99% of all the previous human and human-like creatures that ever lived have also disappeared. It does _not_ follow. For human-like precursors, sure, but humans? Not at all. We leave too much evidence, everywhere we go. ---
**Author:** ![Jonathan\_Chance](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jonathan_chance/32/701_2.png) [@Jonathan\_Chance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jonathan_Chance)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2018, 1:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobekli-tepe-what-do-we-really-know/820508/8 "2018-08-30T13:58:33Z")
Yeah, I’m not going to buy that. We have - modern industrial society - committed some truly long-term apparent works that change the face of the world. Large quarries, at a minimum, like the ones outside Chicago - will be visible for possibly millions of years. > **[Thornton Quarry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thornton_Quarry)** > > Coordinates: .mw-parser-output .geo-default,.mw-parser-output .geo-dms,.mw-parser-output .geo-dec{display:inline}.mw-parser-output .geo-nondefault,.mw-parser-output .geo-multi-punct{display:none}.mw-parser-output .longitude,.mw-parser-output .latitude{white-space:nowrap}41°34′16″N 87°37′19″W / 41.571°N 87.622°W / 41.571; -87.622 > Thornton Quarry is one of the largest aggregate quarries in the world, located in Thornton, Illinois just south of Chicago. The quarry is 1.5 miles (2.4 km) long, 0... In addition, were there elder civilizations out there, at this point in our scientific knowledge we’d be aware of their existence. Decay products for radioactives, depletion of fossil fuels, concentration of metals where cities used to be and so forth. Even if it were so long back that the cities were on the sea floor due to tectonics there would still be evidence we’d detect. That doesn’t rule it out completely, of course. Another species may have developed intelligence and gotten to hunter-gatherer or neolithic. But if so they didn’t reach an industrial revolution stage. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2018, 1:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobekli-tepe-what-do-we-really-know/820508/9 "2018-08-30T13:59:10Z")
> [@Xema](#): > > > [@Jasmine](#): > > > > It was postulated that, as large and advanced as our civilization may be, there would be no visual evidence left of it after only 1,000 years. > > We have reliable evidence that this is silly. Of many possible examples, one is this [modest bridge in France](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont_du_Gard) - around 1900 years old. Of course in that case, over time people maintained and repaired that bridge. The thousand-year estimate (and I have no idea if it’s valid) assumes no people anywhere keeping up anything. ---
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2018, 2:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobekli-tepe-what-do-we-really-know/820508/10 "2018-08-30T14:01:34Z")
> [@Jonathan\_Chance](#): > > Large quarries, at a minimum, like the ones outside Chicago - will be visible for possibly millions of years. Depends on how many people throw stuff in them. ---
**Author:** ![Jonathan\_Chance](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jonathan_chance/32/701_2.png) [@Jonathan\_Chance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jonathan_Chance)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2018, 2:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobekli-tepe-what-do-we-really-know/820508/11 "2018-08-30T14:04:33Z")
Har har. But that sucker’s half a mile deep. It would take COMMITMENT. Or, to look for others… > **[JANJISLOT: Daftar Situs Judi Slot Gacor Online Gampang Menang Slot88](https://www.losapos.com/desktop/home)** > > Janjislot adalah situs Judi Slot Online Gacor terpercaya yang menyediakan provider slot gacor terpercaya seperti slot88, pragmatic play, slot rtp live dengan kemenangan 97%. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2018, 2:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobekli-tepe-what-do-we-really-know/820508/12 "2018-08-30T14:58:20Z")
> [@Jasmine](#): > > A popular estimate among scientists is that [**99% of all life that has ever been on earth has gone extinct.**](https://curiosity.com/topics/99-percent-of-the-earths-species-are-extinctbut-thats-not-the-worst-of-it-curiosity/) > > It follows then that 99% of all the previous human and human-like creatures that ever lived have also disappeared. That implies that there could easily be evidence of several large and impressive civilizations yet to be discovered and may, in fact, never be discovered. > > Several years back, there was a series on the History Channel called, “Life After People”. It was postulated that, as large and advanced as our civilization may be, there would be no visual evidence left of it after only 1,000 years. Sure, it probably wouldn’t take much digging to find a lot of evidence, but what about after a million years or ten million years? The fact that this hurts my brain makes us different from pre-Homo species. IANAA but I am a member of the Archaeological Institute of America so I get to go regularly to lectures by top archaeologists. They are very open that the bits and pieces we’ve dug up from sites seldom add up to complete narratives. As a field, archaeology has become far more cautious in trying to tell stories that purport to explain ancient societies. In particular, some are getting away from trying to explain everything via religion. See our own [Lynne Kelly’s The Memory Code](https://www.amazon.com/Memory-Code-Secrets-Stonehenge-Monuments/dp/1681773252) for an alternative origin for megaliths. Everything underground is now up in the air. It’s a fun new era. ---
**Author:** ![Ike\_Witt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ike_witt/32/283_2.png) [@Ike\_Witt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ike_Witt)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2018, 3:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobekli-tepe-what-do-we-really-know/820508/13 "2018-08-30T15:09:24Z")
> [@Jonathan\_Chance](#): > > Har har. But that sucker’s half a mile deep. It would take COMMITMENT. > > Or, to look for others… > > [http://www.losapos.com/openpitmines](http://www.losapos.com/openpitmines) Obviously an advanced civilization had terraced the land for farming. ---
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2018, 3:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobekli-tepe-what-do-we-really-know/820508/14 "2018-08-30T15:15:30Z")
The fascinating thing, as I understand it, is that the Gobekli Teki is carved stone. Even the softer carved stones take a lot of work - the general thought is that complex carved stone construction on a large scale is the result of agriculture followed by settled villages, followed by a surplus that allows a collection of craftsmen to dedicate themselves full time for months and years carving the necessary stonework, plus the heavy labour of moving pieces into position - not to mention the administrative structure to make groups work toward a master plan for years at a time. Obviously this should imply a city-state level of civilization. Teki appears to predate settled heavy agriculture, let alone cities. Who organized and paid for the labour done to make this site, and how? All it proves is that we don’t know quite a lot about the transitional stage of agriculture. Our timeline may be way off, social organization might have been far more complex than we believe. Stonehenge, for example, is much much younger, and AFAIK the locals were already settled agriculturalists when they organized mving stones over 200km and setting them up; and the level of stone preparation is much less. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2018, 3:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobekli-tepe-what-do-we-really-know/820508/15 "2018-08-30T15:51:06Z")
It’s no real mystery how their subsistence worked, though. We have all those gazelle and aurochs bones. We know that at that particular time, the Levant was a crazy-abundant environment. But when Klaus Schmidt said [shit like](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2011/06/gobeki-tepe/) > [@](#): > > “These people were foragers,” Schmidt says, people who gathered plants and hunted wild animals. “Our picture of foragers was always just small, mobile groups, a few dozen people. They cannot make big permanent structures, we thought, because they must move around to follow the resources. They can’t maintain a separate class of priests and craft workers, because they can’t carry around all the extra supplies to feed them. Then here is Göbekli Tepe, and they obviously did that.” it becomes no surprise that there’s this air of mystery - if even the people working in the field are that mistaken about how complex HG cultures \*can \*be given sufficient resources, how socially stratified and sedentary, what hope is there for the layperson? ---
**Author:** ![Novelty\_Bobble](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/a3d4f5/32.png) [@Novelty\_Bobble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Novelty_Bobble)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2018, 4:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobekli-tepe-what-do-we-really-know/820508/16 "2018-08-30T16:30:29Z")
> [@Jasmine](#): > > A popular estimate among scientists is that [**99% of all life that has ever been on earth has gone extinct.**](https://curiosity.com/topics/99-percent-of-the-earths-species-are-extinctbut-thats-not-the-worst-of-it-curiosity/) > > It follows then that 99% of all the previous human and human-like creatures that ever lived have also disappeared. That implies that there could easily be evidence of several large and impressive civilizations yet to be discovered and may, in fact, never be discovered. I’ve seen [estimates](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16870579) that perhaps 100 billion people have ever lived with about 7 billion alive right now. I expect that within the last hundred and fifty years or so that we’ve had photographic and film evidence perhaps we’ve had 30-40% of of all the people who’ve ever lived. I suspect you estimates of 99% is far too high but that is because we’ve only been around for a couple of hundred thousand years and we’re only one species. Whereas the 99% covers millions of species and hundreds of millions of years. I do think your conclusion is correct though. There are likely to be wonderful surprises still in store and evidence of early civilisations to uncover that will upend current theories. I really hope so as that’s what keep life interesting. ---
**Author:** ![GreenWyvern](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/greenwyvern/32/2834_2.png) [@GreenWyvern](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreenWyvern)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2018, 4:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobekli-tepe-what-do-we-really-know/820508/17 "2018-08-30T16:51:49Z")
Anthropologists and archeologists are reaching different conclusions these days about the complexity of early human societies, and the agricultural revolution seems to be far less of a ‘revolution’ and less defining than was previously thought. I’ve posted this article before. It’s very long, but well worth reading. You can skip to Part 4 for the essence of new discoveries and insights. [How to change the course of human history](https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/) > [@](#): > > Overwhelming evidence from archaeology, anthropology, and kindred disciplines is beginning to give us a fairly clear idea of what the last 40,000 years of human history really looked like, and in almost no way does it resemble the conventional narrative. Our species did not, in fact, spend most of its history in tiny bands; agriculture did not mark an irreversible threshold in social evolution; the first cities were often robustly egalitarian. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2018, 5:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobekli-tepe-what-do-we-really-know/820508/18 "2018-08-30T17:06:11Z")
> [@Jonathan\_Chance](#): > > Yeah, I’m not going to buy that. We have - modern industrial society - committed some truly long-term apparent works that change the face of the world. Large quarries, at a minimum, like the ones outside Chicago - will be visible for possibly millions of years. > > [Thornton Quarry - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thornton_Quarry) > > In addition, were there elder civilizations out there, at this point in our scientific knowledge we’d be aware of their existence. Decay products for radioactives, depletion of fossil fuels, concentration of metals where cities used to be and so forth. Even if it were so long back that the cities were on the sea floor due to tectonics there would still be evidence we’d detect. > > That doesn’t rule it out completely, of course. Another species may have developed intelligence and gotten to hunter-gatherer or neolithic. But if so they didn’t reach an industrial revolution stage. The Panama canal, too. Certainly they could have gotten to a Gobekli Tepe stage, and even beyond if they used more wood, etc. But yes, not industrial. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2018, 5:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobekli-tepe-what-do-we-really-know/820508/19 "2018-08-30T17:34:27Z")
> [@Jasmine](#): > > Several years back, there was a series on the History Channel called, “Life After People”. It was postulated that, as large and advanced as our civilization may be, there would be no visual evidence left of it after only 1,000 years. Sure, it probably wouldn’t take much digging to find a lot of evidence, but what about after a million years or ten million years? If this was actually what the program said, it is quite absurd. Surely they were aware of the pyramids and many other structures that are much older than 1,000 years and clearly visible? At least in arid areas, ruins won’t be covered by vegetation or erode for millennia. At present, there is probably a layer of microplastic fragments deposited through all the world’s oceans that most likely will still have a distinctive signature millions of years from now, even after the plastic itself degrades. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2018, 6:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobekli-tepe-what-do-we-really-know/820508/20 "2018-08-30T18:17:35Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > At present, there is probably a layer of microplastic fragments deposited through all the world’s oceans that most likely will still have a distinctive signature millions of years from now, even after the plastic itself degrades. Glass will be around for many millions of years, too. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gobekli-tepe-what-do-we-really-know/820508.md?page=2)