
Göbekli Tepe – Stone age mountain sanctuary - vinnyglennon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
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arethuza
I know he was writing about the far greater timescales involved in geological
deep time, but this reminds me of what John Playfair wrote of the discoveries
of his friend and pioneering geologist James Hutton:

 _The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far back into the abyss of time_

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mkl
This and many other sites feature in a great book I'm reading, _After the Ice:
A Global Human History 20,000-5,000 BC_ by Steven Mithen.
[http://www.amazon.co.uk/After-Ice-Global-Human-
History/dp/07...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/After-Ice-Global-Human-
History/dp/0753813920)

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arethuza
Worth noting that this excellent book looks like it might be rather dry - it
is also dauntingly large. However, the author takes a novel semi-fictionalized
approach which actually makes it quite easy to read.

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coldcode
Amazing to think a hunter/gatherer type culture from more than 10,000 years
ago could still manage to figure out how to balance huge stones on each other
and plan ahead to carve the reliefs into them. That assumes a lot of though
went into the design and people learned enough to become experts at carving
animals. Even today without all of our knowledge most people could not manage
to accomplish this without power tools.

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contingencies
I believe the site was mentioned in the BBC's _History of Art_ series as one
of the earliest roughly dated examples of pictographic representation. IIRC,
the art was presented as co-occuring with early social/professional
specialization resulting from dietary plenty derived from similarly early
evidence of organized, settled agriculture.

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oska
No, the very significant part of this discovery is that the massive co-
ordinated efforts to raise the stones and build the 'temple' appears, from the
wild game bones that have been found in great quantities at the site and the
later early agricultural settlements found nearby, to have both pre-dated
agriculture and possibly have _contributed_ to the invention of agriculture.

This theory, which is the inversion of the conventional theory that the
invention of agriculture led to complex society as you describe, is covered in
a 2008 Smithsonian article [1] and the Interpretation section [2] of the
submitted wikipedia article.

[1] [http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gobekli-tepe-the-
world...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gobekli-tepe-the-worlds-first-
temple-83613665/?all)

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe#Interpretatio...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe#Interpretation)

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contingencies
I read that also, but IIRC that's not how the BBC presented it. Either way, we
know that both early pictographic art and settled agriculture happened around
the same time and around that area of Turkey. Which one came first is unlikely
to establish a purely causative relationship anyway, so while more information
is always interesting, worrying about the ordering is basically hair-
splitting.

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emp_
I heard about it on Joe Rogan's podcast with Graham Hancock (especially the
oldest one) and the stuff is mindblowing. Having animal bones not from the
region and deliberately bury the entire site about 10 000 years ago (making it
intrusion-free for so long) is a glympse of how civilization goes much farther
than what was believed.

It also blows my mind that a farmer found it, can't wait until technology can
scan the ground and look for human-like construction in a massive scale.

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rian
if you guys think this is cool, check this out:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonaguni_Monument](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonaguni_Monument)

