To be fair, what Jasmine said or recalled from that program was that there might be no visible evidence of human existence after a thousand years. I think the idea is that things like quarries would be flooded and things aboveground would be covered by trees and other plants.
I understand that. But even that is clearly nonsense. As I said, ruins in arid areas are still visible after millennia.
Plus, the changes in the landscape we’ve made for roads will be around for dozens of millennia (Roman roads are still found in many places). We’ve cut passages through rock, tunnels, mines (as mentioned) The bottom of many skyscraper will still be visible. assorted bridge piers, breakwaters… Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse are carved out of pretty solid rock. They aren’t going anywhere. I’d be surprised if there’s no trace of the Hoover dam or similar. If someone said a million years, I’d believe it - provided we were talking superficial looks, not talking about deep archaeological exploration.
Jonathan Chance has started a great thread over at IMHO about what would last millions of years. Perhaps we could get back to Gobekli Tepe?
What I thought interesting is that all those hypothesis from Archaeologists about how civilization developed are now pretty well down the drain.
Let’s get one thing clear - whatever culture built Göbekli Tepe was *not *a civilization, and may have had little influence on the civilization that *did *develop in the region millennia later (or, it might, but there aren’t any clear cultural traces one can point to). For now, it’s basically sui generis, and while it does have a lot of interesting things to say about the development of religion and community behaviour pre-agriculture, it hasn’t overthrown everything else we know about the PPNA and settlement growth. Nothing’s “down the drain”, that’s rank hyperbole.
For what it’s worth, I have no idea why the OP called me out. I don’t know any more about archaeology than the next guy, and in fact this thread is the first I’ve heard of this particular site. I don’t think that Stranger on a Train knows particularly much about the topic, either, but I can’t speak for him.
Not true.
wiki: Göbekli Tepe is regarded by some as an archaeological discovery of the greatest importance since it could profoundly change the understanding of a crucial stage in the development of human society. Ian Hodder of Stanford University said, “Göbekli Tepe changes everything”.[2][43] If indeed the site was built by hunter-gatherers as some researchers believe then it would mean that the ability to erect monumental complexes was within the capacities of these sorts of groups which would overturn previous assumptions. Some researchers believe that the construction of Göbekli Tepe may have contributed to the later development of urban civilization. As excavator Klaus Schmidt put it: “First came the temple, then the city.”[44]
P*redating Stonehenge by 6,000 years, Turkey’s stunning Gobekli Tepe upends the conventional view of the rise of civilization…
To Schmidt and others, these new findings suggest a novel theory of civilization. Scholars have long believed that only after people learned to farm and live in settled communities did they have the time, organization and resources to construct temples and support complicated social structures. But Schmidt argues it was the other way around: the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths literally laid the groundwork for the development of complex societies.
The immensity of the undertaking at Gobekli Tepe reinforces that view. Schmidt says the monuments could not have been built by ragged bands of hunter-gatherers. To carve, erect and bury rings of seven-ton stone pillars would have required hundreds of workers, all needing to be fed and housed. Hence the eventual emergence of settled communities in the area around 10,000 years ago. “This shows sociocultural changes come first, agriculture comes later,” says Stanford University archaeologist Ian Hodder, who excavated Catalhoyuk, a prehistoric settlement 300 miles from Gobekli Tepe. “You can make a good case this area is the real origin of complex Neolithic societies.”
*Göbekli Tepe was built by hunter-gatherers, apparently before the Agricultural Revolution when fully permanent settlements came into being with plant cultivation and animal herding. Rather than architecture being the product of organised societies, as has long been thought, there is new thinking that, in fact, it may have been the organisation needed to build on such a scale that helped usher in agriculture and settled society.
Perhaps it seems appropriate, based on your name?
You’re both pretty darn strong on science and presenting facts and not opinions. That was my thought when I read the Op.
I’ve been fascinated by the site (which was not a city) ever since I first heard of it a few years ago, but there isn’t really a heck of a lot known about it yet, and only a small percentage of it has been excavated. This is one of those cases where we are probably decades away from having a good overview. Here are two of the better articles on the site, if you haven’t seen them.
Of course we know so little about prehistory… One point I wonder about is about the “Venus of Willendorf”. This is a small carving of limestone. The anatomically correct overall body shape details suggest it is based on real life - which means that at least some women even 30,000 years ago were eating enough to become 21st century America level of obese. Again, very different from our hunter-gatherer subsistence image.
I guess this destroys my theory that in early March of 11787 BC every human chipped their flint points into flint plowshares and planted wheat and stopped living in small tribal groups constantly moving to maintain their hunter-gatherer lifestyle. So someone will have to develop some kind new concept of humans gradually changing from nomadic hunter gatherers into civilized farmers. Or is that idea just too far out to be reasonable?
A new concept has already been developed and is now widely accepted among scientists and professionals. It simply hasn’t filtered through to the general public yet.
See the article I posted above.
(Skip to Part 4 of the article if you’re not interested in how this relates to theories of inequality and ideas of primitive ‘innocence’ presented in some pop-sci bestsellers.)
I’ve already dealt with why this is such an ignorant assumption. If that’s what the “Göbekli Tepe changes everything” argument is based on, it’s based on a provably invalid assumption.
I’m afraid science doesn’t - or better, shouldn’t - work that way.
Yes, there is now a novel theory of the rise of religion vs civilization. But Göbekli Tepe doesn’t *prove *it. You know what would? finding more like it.
We don’t *know *it’s a temple. It could be a memorial complex to a dynasty of “Big Men”, built by slaves.
And don’t tell me HGs can’t have slaves, or social stratification, because that’s trivial to show.
Like I said before, this just displays Schmidt’s ignorance of the much more complex non-agricultural societies that have existed.
Nowhere in there do I see any explanation, or even an attempt at one, for the *millennia *gap between Göbekli Tepe and the Anatolian city-building civilization. So if one can “make a good case”, he should make it, with *evidence *of cultural continuity. Not just state it like it’s already been done.
Only an archaeological ignoramus would think HGs couldn’t build permanent settlements. I’ve already cited 3 such cultures in this thread.
Once again, let me state that I find Göbekli Tepe fascinating, and I do think it has a lot to teach us. But I find the argument that it’s a “total upset of everything we know” is based on utter ignorance of other complex HG cultures, and I have no respect for that.
I just want to clarify that I mean between the founding of the one, and the founding of the other. I’m aware there’s “only” a half-millennium gap between the final Göbekli Tepe infill and the founding of Çatalhöyük.
You can even see traces of this locally - Kasteelberg on the Cape West Coast has clear evidence of seasonal gatherings to feast (of seals, in this case) with continuity of locale from at least semi-sedentary HGs (as evidenced by potsherds) through to early sheep herders.
The theory there is also that the feasts themselves served as loci of attraction for population densification, and the cultural developments were a resultant. So, in a site like Göbekli Tepe, the implication is that the people were all there anyway *primarily *for the feasting (rather than the feasting being a byproduct of having to feed labourers who were *initially *there for religious reasons). Then they go bored…
The Venus figurines (there are many similar ones) don’t really show modern obesity. More likely a combo of pregnancy and steatopygia through a highly stylized lens.
Interesting things about Göbekli Tepe and its environments: Genetic fingerprinting of the worlds first, or one of the first, agricultural crop, Einkorn wheat has shown that it converges on a domestication point about 9500 BC. And a location within 30 km of Göbekli Tepe. A days walk. Apparently the back-fill of the Göbekli Tepe contains a lot of remains of pestle and mortars, implying large-scale consumption of plant matter.
We are getting more and more information about the mysterious Basal Eurasians from DNA these days. It appears the DNA percentage gets higher the closer old remains are to the Ur-Schatt valley (Persian Gulf today). These people seem to have stayed fairly isolated genetically until about 15 - 13 000 years ago when the DNA expands outwards. I would be totally unsurprised if we get DNA from the builders of Göbekli Tepe and it shows a higher percentage of Basal Eurasian than even the Natufians. Basal Eurasian DNA seems strongly associated with the transition to sedentary life in the Levant.
For a long time it was thought that the end of the last glaciation about 12,000-10,000BP was a “special” time. That all sorts of stuff happened around then and soon afterwards. People entered the Americas, agriculture was developed, etc.
Things like Göbekli Tepe, evidence of earlier humans in the Americas, especially early pottery finds like Jomon Pottery (c1650BP), etc. are telling a different story.
One of the things with sciences like archeology is that you tend to look where you expect to find something. The list of places to look should be expanding now as it’s clear that there was a lot more going on well before the last glaciation ended.
And it wasn’t just a one-off–similar things were being made across Europe and Asia over a period of 25,000 years or more.
Of course, depictions of naked chicks aren’t that suprising. What I find more weird is the theme of pooping animal atlatlii. (That is a great blog, BTW–well worth browsing.)