Göbekli Tepe traditions built on a long line of building experiments. There are also earlier stone structures and undoubtably myriads of rotten and lost wooden temples.
I think "line of experiments" lends too much forethought and connectedness to these things. It certainly exists within a context of increasing sophistication in human architecture, but it was built more than ten thousand years after the site in the article. Assuming the builders are related at all, there wouldn't even be vague cultural memory extending back that far.
These are certainly different branches on the human development tree, So I agree that there wouldn’t be any vague memory of the specific site. If there was any memory it was in the form of habits just like stone making techniques persisted for tens of thousands of years
Some more background: Russian folklore attributes the name to the event when god Indra (Inder, Hindra in other spellings) was about to cross the Don river.
Indra tried to drink all of Don's water, and exploded.
The locality was then named for his scattered bones.
This reminds me of a pretty niche article I found a couple months ago. It was about the bones of a bunch of cave bears that a father and his young son found in Drachenloch Cave in Switzerland in the early 1900s. They called in naturalist Emil Bachler and he got to work finding more bones in the cave, organized in tantalizingly structured ways.
> In Drachenloch, however, not only were there [crude stone] walls, but behind these walls were found accumulations of bear bones — the long bones of the legs and more or less complete skulls. The pattern was very consistent. Where such walls were present, bones were present. Where they were absent, bones were rare along the cave walls.
These and other deliberate-looking accumulations of bones (including apparent crude “chests” of limestone slabs enclosing more bones) led Bachler to suggest the idea of a prehistoric cave bear worshipping cult. But a counterargument suggests this explanation is unnecessary. It might just be bears being bears, no cult required.
> When cave bears entered a cave to hibernate, they began by scratching nests into the cave fill. In the process, bones and small rocks were pushed aside, often falling into crevices among the fallen blocks. This had two effects. First, it helped to build up accumulations of bones in natural cavities among rocks or among piles of rocks. Second, it protected the bones that did enter such interstices from further trampling and, if they were buried there, from weathering and decay. It is perfectly natural, therefore, that modern excavators should find concentrations of bones in cavities surrounded by rock. Moreover, because further weathering of the cave roof naturally produced subsequent roof fall, it is perfectly normal that such cavities would be covered by slabs of greater or lesser size.
I wonder if something similar happened here. Obviously, the lack of a cave is an issue. But it’s a funny connection to something I read randomly a few months ago.
When building houses you build with what you can find. If you buy an old house in an area without much trees, like an island, expect it to be built with a little bit of everything.
That was one specific interesting point in the article though - the other structures were built out of everything, bones from mammoths, foxes and other small game. This particular structure was entirely built out of mammoth bone and is insanely large.
Given the fact that a single mammoth could feed many for a long time, I would suspect that a building made from 60 mammoths was either a mass death, or a mass ritual killing - it certainly wasnt subsistence killing of the mammoths for food from which the bones would come from...
Maybe an early example of warehousing as resources and huntable animals became scarce: hunt an entire herd as it comes by on a seasonal route and preserve the meat for the year to come. Maybe this was a food processing and storage facility. If so, you would build up from a rather modest start until you scale up to such an extent, by which you probably had accumulated a fair amount of building material already.
I live on an island it's a province of Canada but still and island (150,000 people). There is no hard rock here it's all red/pink sandstone.
Many buildings built here especially in the early 1900s and before used sandstone. Banks and the large churches were built using hard stone like granite imported from Nova Scotia or New Brunswick.
While it did have unique qualities which could indicate ritualistic or cultural significance, I can still see one possibility could be it coming from exactly what I imagine one of my friends doing.
I could imagine their linguist equivalent of "Bro, I'm going to build this one just from Mammoth bones, it'll be freakin' huge. C'mon, it'll be awesome!"
There is discussion in this article about why people would have moved these animals over vast distances. But as the Mammoth is in the same family as elephants and I remember elephants choose to die at a location that is revised by their family over time.
Couldn't it be this has been a similar behavior, people coming to a this site and just found 60 remains and build something with it?
I wonder if it's true that the herds of Bison were a result of a an ecosystem in rapid change - supposedly when the natives in North America died and cities and farms went to waste because of disease from the South, introduced by the Europeans.
That would have allowed the Bison population to explode.
I thought I had the answer at hand but (for once) decided to check my facts BEFORE I wrote. Wikipedia has a really interesting article about this, well worth a (very short) read:
No I’m talking about before there were European settlers in modern day USA. After Cortez, but way before Mayflower.
Supposedly there were many more people on the plains but the human population crashed and the bison took over. This would have coincided with “the Little Ice Age” for further speculation fodder
Nope. The bone beds at the base of "Head-Smashed-In-Buffalo-Jump" are meters thick. 13 I want to say? The plains tribes of the area were running huge herds off there for a very very long time.
>The buffalo jump was used for 5,500 years by the indigenous peoples of the plains to kill buffalo by driving them off the 11 metre (36 foot) high cliff.
Further...
>The cliff itself is about 300 metres (1000 feet) long, and at its highest point drops 10 metres (33 ft) into the valley below. The site was in use at least 6,000 years ago, and the bone deposits are 12 metres (39 feet) deep.
That may be, but because I am not a scientist, I can’t be convinced by that data point. I personally lean into that you are right, but to a layperson, it won’t seem impossible that there were smaller and managed for millennia, then exploded for some centuries
The great plains are large enough to support a ton of ruminant life. I'm not sure there needed to be a collapse in North American human population but it probably didn't hurt. I believe I read somewhere that the longhorn population boomed in Texas during the Civil War. It was afterwards that the cowboy culture really took off thanks to the abundance of free ranging cattle.
The argument was that the plains were man made, that there were forests there before, and then suddenly there were no men left, only grass and buffalo.
That doesn't jive with my understanding. The US government went about systematic elimination of indigenous people. Part of that was the elimination of bison as a food source. The population of bison declined from the millions to around a thousand in under a decade arout the 1860s.
European states in America went about systematic elimination of the survivors, the pre contact population absolutely dwarfed these remnants and in their time, kept flora and fauna in check across the continent.
I don't think so. This finding is just one piece of the big paleolithic complex, which is systematically excavated for a century. Human remains from the complex cover almost twenty thousand years.
On the contrary, I find these predictable puns in journalism to be lazy and annoying. If I have to read about another oil tanker spill that’s “fueling” speculation...
"The sand dunes there were covered with spectators and landlubber newsmen, shortly to become land-blubber newsmen. For the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds."
