Naah, you’re not thinking Old enough. You need to think Elder than that. 
I can’t believe that nobody has mentioned Atlantis[sup]1[/sup].
[sup]1[/sup]Not the one near Cape Town
Hancock’s very careful to avoid that term. Because that would be woo.
On a more serious note, there are a number of underwater sites with remains going back up to 14,000 years.
There’s Doggerland and adjacent areas on the northern European coast, and the British coast, such as Bouldnor Cliff.
There are plenty more sunken ruins and archeological sites of various ages, including many Roman era and medieval era sites.
Oh, sure. Inundated settlements are only to be expected, given sea level changes and our species’ apparent love of seaside living. It’s a combo of factors that makes the Indian claims in particular suspect.
Yes, in the distant past Antarctica wasn’t covered with ice, and was a much different continent.
That time was very very very far in the past. Before human beings existed.
And can I just chime in. Sometimes people have very strange ideas about hunter-gatherers. I live in a place where the locals didn’t practice agriculture. But they had permanent settlements, high population density, extreme levels of social stratification, warfare, copperworking, hereditary nobility, and all sorts of things that people tend to associate with agriculture. But here in the Pacific Northwest those same population levels and social complexity were sustained by incredibly productive wild food sources.
Today all these very highly productive wild food sources are either cities or farms. Nothing like it exists. But we can expect that most places that today are highly productive farms were in the past highly productive hunting and gathering sites. They might not have supported exactly the same population density as a farm. But we just don’t have the experience of seeing hunter-gatherers living in such sites, since almost all of them were turned into farms thousands of years ago.
Can I also mention that each and every archeological or paleontological site ever mentioned in the popular media is supposed to radically overturn everything we thought we knew about the past, and how sick I am of this hype? “We thought before that this marine fossil didn’t exist in this location until 69 million years ago. Well, now we know it was 71 million! Everything we thought we knew was wrong!” Dude, we learned something new. Every new thing we learn doesn’t overturn everything we thought we knew.
Apologies for missing this. I had a publisher deadline on the manuscript for my next book and withdrew from life and SD to get it done.
Thank you for the mention, Exapno Mapcase. Much appreciated. I have read the whole thread and would have loved to participate, but there is so much to comment on.
My PHD research and subsequent books argue that monumental sites built by hunter-gatherers and early settlement sites are primarily, but not exclusively, sites for the pragmatic purpose of maintaining and conveying all the knowledge stored in memory by cultures without writing.
For those who want to know what I am on about without buying a book, there is a good summary of my ideas in the science magazine, Cosmos:
There are a number of Gobekli Tepe archaeologists in touch with me and view my ideas very favourably.
It is good to be back in the real world and back on SD!
Let me also recommend Lynne Kelly’s wonderful and perhaps revolutionary book.
Lynne even talked me into constructing my own “memory walk.” I chose a tour of trees and bushes going around our house and up and down the driveway. But I found out why memory walks should use monoliths rather than trees. :smack: Since designing the walk, several of the relevant trees have been blown down or deliberately cut.(*)
So, I never got the memory walk going. :o But I did compile a list of 82 plant species (incl. English, Thai and Latin names, and medicinal properties) and pleasing my wife greatly by showing interest in her horticultural efforts. 
(* - One ubiquitous plant is the nimtree, Azadirachta indica. Our orchard/garden is full of little nimtree weeds, but they’ll quickly grow into tall hardwood trees. As I planned my memory walk I became aware of a very big nimtree I’d hardly noticed before, perfectly positioned to give evening shade to our little “parking lot for guests.” But no sooner had I come to appreciate that tree than I awoke to the sound of chainsaws. :eek: Its roots were weak and there was a danger it would crash in a heavy wind. Sure enough, a different nimtree came crashing down in a storm just a few weeks ago; winds fortunately pointing it away from our house. We’re going to have a nimtree table built from these two felled trees!)
Thank you for your recommendation, septimus. It is much appreciated.
In memory workshops I warn people not to attach locations to furniture in their houses. It makes a real mess when they rearrange the room.
I have found that landscape changes don’t matter so much when the palace is firmly in place, because what came before is still memorable. In my History Walk, Joan of Arc conveniently coincided with a wood pile. The owners then plonked a water tank there, removing the wood pile. Lots of irony. I still have memory of the wood pile and Joan of Arc is still there in my memory palace. Joan of Arc died in 1431 while Mehmed the Conquerer was born in 1432. So the landing of the conquering tank now gives me his time in History as well. It’s all good fun!
Enjoy your nimtree table!
And it doesn’t effect your idea at all that the site was built a section at a time, then filled in with debris and a new section built near it, over and over for hundreds of years? Do you concider the site to be one big rock palimpsest? Couldn’t they have achieved the same effect with wooden poles or much smaller rocks?
My theory would work far less successfully if the site didn’t constantly change. Unfortunately, it takes two thirds of an academic book to explain the general theory giving ten indicators that an archaeological site should be considered in terms of its role and a memory space. Just a stone circle or other non-residential monument is not sufficient for me to start arguing it is a mnemonic site. Then each site has to be analysed separately according to the archaeology and context - assuming enough has been excavated. That takes a minimum of a good few thousand words for each site.
I write about why parts of monuments are deliberately filled in the books. But it is too much to explain here. All to do with the necessary role of secrecy for long term accuracy of oral tradition - and we are talking very long term accuracy in the order of thousands of years. See the new book by Patrick Nunn, The Edge of Memory. https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/the-edge-of-memory-9781472943262/
They couldn’t achieve the ‘same effect’ - and those are critical words - with a less impressive monument because part of the design of performance spaces for oral cultures has to be for memorability - the more impressive the better the effect! Oral tradition is performed because song, dance and mythology are far more memorable than pragmatic information in prose form. But it is a complex of performance spaces - there must be both public and restricted and there needs to be all sorts of other objects as part of the archaeological record - my favourite being the portable decorated objects in restricted contexts which are used as memory devices. I talk about this aspect in terms of the Scottish carved stone balls on Cambridge University Press blog associated with my academic book.
http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2015/06/knowledge-and-power-in-prehistoric-societies/
Gobekli Tepe certainly has the indicators but not enough is excavated for me to make a strong case, so it is not one of my primary sites yet. For example, if they find burials which indicate only some individuals were buried with wealthy grave goods and so the society had a material hierarchy, then my theory starts to break down. No burials at all suits me best. The cultures in which knowledge is the source of power, and hence the justification for elaborate memory spaces, are not cultures where there is a hierarchy based on individual wealth.
As for using simpler materials - you do get smaller less impressive sites associated with major sites. I used three case studies in my thesis. In Neolithic Britain you have major stone circles and then lots of smaller ones. In Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, you have the Canyon and it’s Great Houses but also smaller outliers. The same for Poverty Point in Louisiana, there is the major site and then many smaller associated sites. At those smaller sites they achieve the same mnemonic purpose at a more local level with less impressive materials and less knowledge encoded. I have added more sites and more variation in my research since the doctorate which is included in my mainstream book, The Memory Code.
The archaeology to date from Gobekli Tepe is really promising for my ideas, but I don’t think enough is excavated yet for me to be making much noise.
Thanks for the explanations, lynne-42.
Thinking in evolutionary terms, do you think the use of mnemonic sites is a characteristic of the most recent common ancestor of all extant humans? Or, was the usage invented independently by different subgroups?
Um, flint has a Mohs hardness of 7, bronze 3 … one can take a wood and leather foot powered lathe [Romans had them, can’t instantly discover the oldest recorded remains of one right now] and process bronze using flint and an abrasive such as sand to turn the bronze to be used in a more advanced machine. Not sure what the Mohs is for the specific stone at GT, but I bet one can shape it with flint for fine incisings and hammer stones for rough shaping.
I once got bored and took a roughly droplet shaped bit of lapis and some jewelers rouge and a bit of canvas and polished up quite a nice drop for setting into jewelry. Don’t dis the ability of someone bored and with time on their hands …
I think that the usage was invented independently but because of a common factor of all modern humans - the human brain. The basis of my analysis of monuments is the need for a sequence of memory locations. So mnemonic monuments - standing stones, timber arrangements, mounds … must be able to be sequenced. This all comes from the well-known method of loci / art of memory / memory palace ideas. My research showed that all indigenous cultures use this technique. It was not invented by the ancient Greeks, but first documented by them. Australian Aboriginal songlines, Native American pilgrimage trails, Pacifc Island ceremonial roads, Inca cheques … they are all the same thing: a series of locations in which information is encoded for each position. So if anyone finds a Neolithic stone setting which can’t be sequenced, for example, my theory would get a major bashing. You can see why Gobekli Tepe appeals so much!
The reason that humans create sequenced locations and performing knowledge is to do with the neuroscience of the human brain. I have been working with a neuroscientist on showing how the methods which underpin the memory systems of non-literate cultures correlate with the known structures and function for memory especially in the hippocampus. All to do with grid cells and complex stuff which I only understand enough to see why she is so convinced by the correlation. The exciting part for me, in my more mature years, is that Dr Jenny Rodger is an expert on neuroplasticity and that memory doesn’t need to automatically decay with age. All to do with usage.
So monuments which meet my criteria are found all over the world in the transitional stage from mobile to sedentary lifestyle - from using the broad landscape as a memory system, as with Aboriginal songlines, to localising the series of locations, as with stone, timber or mound arrangements. The monuments are abandoned, or massively adapted, when an agricultural lifestyle leads to large settlements and a hierarchy based on material wealth. Then my knowledge elite elders lose their supreme positions and become the knowledge specialists serving the wealthy leader.
One archaeologist pointed out that my system can be extended back to neanderthals with the discovery on arrangements created by them:
I think that’s a tad to speculative for me until there are other sites showing the same features, but I can hope!
Do you think this might change the conventional view of the rise of Civilization? or is Gobekli Tepe a aberration?
What a wonderful question. I don’t think Gobekli Tepe is an aberration. It fits a pattern although it isn’t yet clear exactly where it fits in the broader society.
I don’t see a massive change in conventional views of the rise of civilisation. I think these ideas will modify more than change. I think too much emphasis has been put on nebulous religious rituals and too little on intellectual life. Gobekli Tepe was immediately labelled a ‘temple’ with the implication that it is primarily a religious site. That I think will change. Non-literate cultures tend to integrate knowledge domains so a ceremonial site will serve a multiplicity of purposes.
An interesting blog on this topic from one of the Gobekli Tepe archaeologists:
http://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-telegrams/2016/06/10/could-we-really-call-it-a-temple/
I think this is too big a question for me to answer with enough clarity without getting into semantics and beyond my expertise.
The ice age may have led to the first seafood dinners in South Africa as the interior became a desert. This could easily have led to an awareness of the moon’s patterns, as the coolest shells were reachable only at the lowest tides, and a day-to-day food supply was available at any low tide.
This likely led to a special zigzag symbol still seen on their descendants today. These were our ancestors too, and the symbols were brought with the first new humans into Europe.
Göbekli Tepe is an evolution out of this root religion, likely based on gratitude, and the evidence at www.cultofthebloodmoon.com will blow your mind.
Another way to become aware of the Moon’s patterns: look at it.
(Oh, wait–it is spam. Never mind.)
Well NO, because Human and Human-like creatures have only been around for a very brief time in the History of Life on Earth. You’re saying that ‘someone thought (had a theory) that 99% of all life that has ever been on Earth in, I dunno, A BILLION YEARS has gone extinct, (you know, ignoring all those huge mass extinctions long before there where Hominids), so that same rule has to apply to the Hominids that have only been around a few million years at most’. No, it doesn’t “follow”.
You know what makes modern technology? Accumulated science, research, experimentation and most of all, ECONOMY OF SCALE. Millions of scientists, engineers, dreamers, machine workers, power generators and food providers, all working and learning and making things better over time.
It also requires several small moons worth of resources. Like metals and fossil fuels. We would have noticed that most of the major ore deposits were worked out. Instead we found abundances of metals and jewels pretty much laying on the surface everywhere. Through 1965, the three Iron Ranges in northern Minnesota produced 2.7 million tons of iron. Just my state. That takes technology and scale.
Good luck to any new evolved post-Human tool using sentient race within that time frame. They’re going to find a lot less coal to use, a lot scarcer iron and metals deposits when try to go through an Industrial Revolution and into the age of Rockets. That might make them a little curious.
Now really, we can honestly say that the place is very sophisticated and appears to be relatively advanced for the time period that we can date it to. But we really don’t know anything about those distant past cultures, how they lived, what languages they spoke, what their customs were and so forth, because there are no surviving written or pictographic representations. They just did a better job of digging tunnels and creating an underground town than any other example (of whom there are damned few) from that time period.
It doesn’t mean that they developed firearms, or radios, or even Roman level technology. It simply says that yes, Humans are pretty damned clever and can get a lot done over the typical several-hundred year lifespan of a culture. They weren’t ignorant savages, they just had a much smaller knowledge base and tool capacity. They weren’t dumber or inexperienced in their own technology of stone and wood tools and backbreaking labor.