
Göbekli Tepe - tintinnabula
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe
======
roadbeats
A fun fact about Göbeklitepe; Urfa (the nearby city) is told to be the
birthplace of Abraham, where you can still visit his cave.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bal%C4%B1kl%C4%B1g%C3%B6l](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bal%C4%B1kl%C4%B1g%C3%B6l)

The border of Turkey - Syria - Iraq is one of the best routes if you're
interested in history. I usually start from Urfa and follow Diyarbakir,
Mardin, Hasankeyf, Van and finally Dogubeyazit (where you can cross to Iran if
you'd like).

Each town in the border is full of gems. Take Mor Honanyo Monastery for
example, a 4000 years old sun temple converted to monastery 1500 years ago,
and still operating;
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mor_Hananyo_Monastery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mor_Hananyo_Monastery)

------
therein
What does HN think of Graham Hancock? The antediluvian period is definitely
quite a mystery and almost certainly the traditional history we are taught is
not as clear-cut as it is made to sound.

I think the ancient sky looked a lot different than it does today. And there
were global cataclysms that shaped the mythology of these civilizations
surviving through that event. Moving forward, the later generations adhered to
the myths and propagated them but with minor details forgotten or changed.
Fast forward centuries and people are telling stories told to them by their
parents, without knowing what they are actually about or why, that are heavily
modified over generation to generation and became more symbolic and less
literal.

~~~
AlotOfReading
Disclaimer: I worked professionally as an archaeologist, specifically in
related fields.

He's pretty widely regarded as a crank. To some extent, we've done a terrible
job of educating the public / undergrad population about what the current
state of knowledge is and so it's almost to be expected that people flock to
these sorts of crackpot theories.

I love sharing archaeology with people (it's our heritage!), but the state of
public knowledge is so remedial that it's genuinely frustrating sometimes.

~~~
mootzville
So, why don't archaeologists write more books as interesting and engaging as
Graham Hancock's then that also offer refutations of his claims? I see many
personal attacks such as stating he's a crank...prove it.

~~~
AlotOfReading
There are lots of books, papers, blogs, etc out there that offer refutations
of people like Hancock. _The SAA Archaeological Record_ dedicated an entire
section to one of his books
([http://onlinedigeditions.com/publication/?m=16146&i=634462&p...](http://onlinedigeditions.com/publication/?m=16146&i=634462&p=10)).
Jared Diamond's books have prompted more than one seminar and rebuttal book,
e.g. _Questioning Collapse_.

Unfortunately, people are busy, have real research to do, and don't have time
to deal with every crank out there. Some are even state sponsored, which opens
up a whole world of problems. It's not fair to expect people to do extensive
rebuttals of every crank out there. It's the academic version of Brandolini's
law.

~~~
throwaway_kufu
> It's not fair to expect people to do extensive rebuttals of every crank out
> there.

Yeah but this isn’t just any “crank” out there, in this case it happens to be
someone who is more famous and well known for their ideas than the vast
majority of academics. We are talking about stopping to engage the crazy
homeless person on the street.

This also happens to be what the egyptologists say about Robert Schoch and
John Anthony West With respect to the Sphinx water erosion hypothesis. They
can literally take time to hold press events to personally attack the people
And state there is no evidence for these crazy ideas but refuse to address the
Actual water erosion hypothesis.

~~~
AlotOfReading
The post you're responding to literally links an SAA magazine section wholly
devoted to rebutting just one of Hancock's books.

You also mention that academics refuse to address schoch. Here are a few
academics responding directly to Schoch:

[https://doi.org/10.1002/gea.3340100203](https://doi.org/10.1002/gea.3340100203)

[http://www.hallofmaat.com/sphinx/comments-on-the-
geological-...](http://www.hallofmaat.com/sphinx/comments-on-the-geological-
evidence-for-the-sphinxs-age-2/)

I'd like to point out that the conversation in this thread has covered topics
from Gobekli Tepe to the silurian hypothesis to early agriculture to
climatology to early mesoamerican architecture and now to pharaonic monuments.
That's an incredibly broad range of topics and no single person is an expert
in all of them. Cranks like Hancock BS about an astonishing range of stuff.

~~~
throwaway_kufu
> The post you're responding to literally links an SAA magazine section wholly
> devoted to rebutting just one of Hancock's books.

I didn’t say there weren’t rebuttals. I didn’t even say he wasn’t a crank,
only you can’t exactly apply the “we are to busy forwarding our field to stop
and address every idea from every crank” argument to someone whose ideas (for
better or worse) are gaining notoriety as potentially true and correct.

------
aritmo
There were definitely more cities which were coastal that disappeared as soon
as the sea level rose several tens of meters.

~~~
ed25519FUUU
Which cities? As far as I’m aware, in recorded history the only “city” being
hinted at disappearing under sea was Atlantis, and even that considered to be
fictional. Maybe more I’d you include the deluge myth[1]. None of those was a
gradual increase in sea level.

1\.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth)

~~~
Balgair
Doggerland is good example. Here's a link to get started:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland)

Fishermen have been pulling up housing remnants, bones, fishhooks, etc for a
long time out of there.

Australia too:
[https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8479739/Firs...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8479739/First-
Aboriginal-sites-discovered-underwater-Australia-date-8-500-years.html)

~~~
reedwolf
Doggerland was a "city" in any way we understand the term.

There's a bait-and-switch happening here.

------
nkoren
I'm going to do something deeply shameful, and link to a Daily Mail article on
the subject. It's weirdly... pretty good. It has some of the better
photographs that I've seen of the site, and an angle on the story which is
perhaps somewhat fantastical, but is evocative enough to be worth pondering:

[https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1157784/Do-m...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1157784/Do-
mysterious-stones-mark-site-Garden-Eden.html)

------
frandroid
[https://www.gaia.com/article/turkish-archaeologists-find-
sit...](https://www.gaia.com/article/turkish-archaeologists-find-site-much-
older-than-gobekli-tepe) Turkish Archaeologists Find Site Much Older Than
Göbekli Tepe

------
sedatk
There is a Turkish fantasy TV series on Netflix called "The Gift" that has a
story tied to Gobekli Tepe for anyone's interested.

~~~
fauria
I visited Göbekli Tepe back in 2011 during a road trip through Turkey.

Apart from some locals and a group of archaeologist, there was a filming crew
from National Geographic.

I always wondered what happened with the footage they were recording.

It looked like one of those documentaries that feature an actor that moves
around while a narrator in the background describes the scene, but can't
really recall much more.

------
frandroid
Meanwhile, Turkey flooded the oldest continually-inhabited settlement in the
world, Hasankeyf.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasankeyf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasankeyf)

A true loss to world heritage.

~~~
ganzuul
An aeon ago the people who built Göbekli Tepe buried it intentionally. It is
only intact because of that.

Under water and sediment that city might survive intact too. It is lost to us
but preserved for mankind.

------
KhoomeiK
Since human civilization sprung up practically as soon as the last Ice Age
ended, I wouldn't be surprised if there were other small scale developments
like this throughout the Last Glacial Period as well. There's almost 40
thousand years between ~50kya (the advent of behavioral modernity) and ~12kya
(the end of the Younger Dryas period). Agriculture, on the other hand,
would've likely taken a longer period of climactic stability which is why it
only developed a couple thousand years into the Holocene.

------
noobermin
An aside but generally reading about archaeology makes me somewhat sad about
the focus in modern society, so much of what we must use and interact with to
live is in fact intended not to last more than a few years to keep people's
money incoming, yet the people who made these structures had things that
survived even their own civilization. It would be great if we even had a
modicrum of sustainability in our focus when we make or sell things.

~~~
jjeaff
I'm actually not sure that is the case. What we are seeing in these ancient
civilizations is only the portion that has survived. A great deal, most of it,
has not survived at all. When you look at places like Macchi Picchu, it wasn't
a city that regular people lived in. It was built as more of a palace or
estate for the king.

If our civilization mostly disappeared, then things like large stone
buildings, metal and stone statues would survive just the same and all of our
disposable junk will have mostly disappeared leaving that skeleton of steel
and stone.

I suspect we would even leave quite a bit more than civilizations past
considering all of our roads, bridges, dams, and other enormous concrete and
steel structures that we have created.

~~~
chiefalchemist
All those things breakdown in the presence of Mother Nature. If there is
anything our future selves are going to find it's plastic.

------
graposaymaname
Well, somebody's reading Sapiens I guess :D

------
GnarfGnarf
I don't believe we were visited my aliens or extra-terrestrials.

Check out Brien Foerster's indisputable evidence that many ancient things were
not built by who we commonly think:

[https://youtu.be/gwOEJ7bUSw4](https://youtu.be/gwOEJ7bUSw4)

~~~
lolc
Wow that video is full of arguments from ignorance. I only watched for a
quarter of an hour and my bullshit-o-meter finally saturated when he explained
erosion on an obelisk as the result of plasma balls.

------
alpb
tl;dr on the significance of discovery of this historical site: Up until that
point, we have been thinking humans have built places of worship after they've
settled down and started to grow crops. However, Gobekli Tepe was a pretty
complex temple (most of it is thought not yet seen the daylight yet) built in
hunter-gatherer era.

So in a way, it rewrote our assumption of ordering of some of the historical
milestones in the history of humanity.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe#Chronologica...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe#Chronological_context)
I've personally visited it last summer and it was pretty cool.

------
tigerbelt
I believe Graham has done more for the study of these questions than all the
haters combined!

