If you're interested in learning more about these incredible Turkish archaeological sites, I can't recommend the YouTube channel Miniminuteman [0] enough. Milo is extremely passionate about his field of study and makes highly entertaining and informative videos about archaeology and anthropology, including a recent series where he became the first real archaeologist ever to be allowed to film a documentary on-site at Karahantepe! [1]
He mentions that people back then lived around 35 years. I recall reading it's a mistaken interpretation of the average age, while many people died infants adults actually easily lived to 70+ yo. Is it true and he made the same mistake or am I thinking about a different period in history?
These statistics regularly make it sound like everyone was dying off around 30.
In reality, it is due to infant mortality rates. Once you make it past a certain age (10-15 years) your life expectancy shoots up into the 40-60's easily. However, when you average the population out, those infant deaths tank the average life expectancy.
I'm not surprised they glossed over this, most researchers do, because they don't want to go into infantile deaths, disease spread during child birth, still births, etc.
Not only is it a complex topic, but it's fraught with political and religious ideology. When my history and anthropology professors started talking about it, certain folks of a particular religious bent almost immediately started trying to correct them about it.
The guy in the video said "their lifespans would have only been around 35 years" which sounds not so much glossing over as being plain incorrect.
I am annoyed by these slips every time because they make it seem as if we live so much longer since hunter-gatherer times... Modern medicine reduced early age mortality, sure, but funny enough it did not do much to increase max lifespan (and especially healthy lifespan).
Ah, yeah, that sounds like it was indeed just incorrect.
To add to your comment about modern medicine. Keep in mind that when you isolate out infant mortality, you get an average life span of roughly 60-ish in ancient times.
Present day mortality is closer to 85+ for the G7 countries and 75+ for other fairly well developed countries. That's a 25 year increase! Given those statistics, I would say modern medicine is actually doing quite a bit to improve life expectancy into your golden years!
IMHO healthy life expectancy should be the thing which is discussed and referenced. Back then you’d likely just die if you were too sick to comfortably live.
>Not only is it a complex topic, but it's fraught with political and religious ideology. When my history and anthropology professors started talking about it, certain folks of a particular religious bent almost immediately started trying to correct them about it.
If you don't mind clarifying just a bit. What types of religious folks would get upset about a professor in a course (for a scientific discipline they presumably want to do well in no less) describing the very real history of terrible infant mortality across pretty much all premodern cultures and societies? Why would this even be a problem for them? Daily life in the past was known to be very harsh, even the bible itself (among other religious texts) alludes to that constantly.
I hope I don't regret asking, but I'm genuinely curious about the details here. What religious/political implications are there (in the US, I presume?) for babies and mothers dying a lot in the old times? I've never seen this discussion become polarized before.
As you probably already know, medical science was stifled by the Catholic church for many years. In some ways, some medical practices were more accepted in the Muslim empires of the day. This creates a ultimately pointless but still real "superiority argument" around medieval and ancient times for these faiths.
There can be an ideological bent to try and label Rome (and by relation Catholicism) as being unclean and ungodly because it does not protect its young. Or even more extreme, suggest that their children die regularly because they are godless and that history proved it.
I hope I don't need to explain why this is very much an extremist point of view, but I'll say so regardless so that HN mods or other folks don't label me as being political/religious here.
In my history class, a religious argument of "my children are more godly and history proves it by the deaths" broke out between a group of very devout Orthodox, some Catholic folks, and some Muslim folks. All of them were trying to use the infant mortality rate as proof of some or the other's faith of god in their children. It got very weird, very fast. The professor had to break up the argument.
This happened in Alberta, the "religious zealotry" capital of Canada. Lots of religious conservatism here.
Wow. Never thought of this angle, religion wasn't on my radar concerning this question. Just found it counter intuitive that we live longer but not that much longer... Medicine's great but we have ways to go in our understanding.
> Researchers Gurven and Kaplan have estimated that around 57% of hunter-gatherers reach the age of 15. Of those that reach 15 years of age, 64% continue to live to or past the age of 45. This places the life expectancy between 21 and 37 years.[54] They further estimate that 70% of deaths are due to diseases of some kind, 20% of deaths come from violence or accidents and 10% are due to degenerative diseases.
Karahan Tepe is not hunter gatherers, it's a permanent settlement.
But even that aside, it is definitely not what the guy in video literally said, which is quote "their lifespans would have only been around 35 years", 5:22. By the way, I had to sit through 6 unskippable 10-second ads to tell you the timestamp (2 ads every time I scrub around).
No need. I just don't generally watch YT anymore (aside from rare special cases) and I feel better off. Elsewhere ads don't reach my browser and waste my bandwidth.
I don't know if they -easily- lived up to 70, but it was possible to live to that age for sure :) . death rate of "at birth" and early years was far far higher than now. they certainly lived longer than 30-35 that I hear slung around though. If you lived to 15 or so you could easily live to 50-60. Although those early corpses almost always show infection by parasites and such and not so pretty healing from injuries.
It feels like the significance of this is lost on many people.
My understanding is that complex things like statues were not supposed to be possible 12,000 years ago. I think it’s supposed to be more like 6000 years ago. The fact that it has been carbon dated to 12,000 tears should means that we have to rewrite the theories on the start of human civilization.
These statues needed to be carved out of tools and the educational techniques for carving it off stone and the social structure to support art were not supposed to exist at this time. This is pretty huge in terms of figuring out the birth of human civilization.
And the fact that the same site also has these huge stone megaliths that also weren’t supposed to be possible and were also dated to 12,000 years so just solidified the idea that our current theories are completely wrong.
> My understanding is that complex things like statues were not supposed to be possible 12,000 years ago.
Huh? The Venus of Willendorf[1] is twice as old, and to my eye displays a higher degree of artistry than the statue shown in the article. Several such Venus figurines have been found in central Europe.
Compared to the intricacy of the Venus' limestone carving, the statue from the article looks downright crude. The idea that it's "not supposed to be possible" to make something like that 12,000 years BP is ridiculous, and I can't imagine where you might have got that impression. Yes, the new statue is life-size, while the Venus is a figurine, but that doesn't necessarily make it any more difficult to manufacture (possibly easier, in fact).
Venus of Willendorf is quite small, and not especially life-like, but similar large statues have been found in the area before, from around the same time (12kya ago). It's not even a unique find, and fits reasonably well(ish) in established chronology and progression (insofar that's possible for pre-history). Pretty much everything the previous poster said is wrong.
IMHO it's more interesting and a greater achievement than lifelike. To me it's an expression of fertile abundance that shows more intention, more imagination, more desire to communicate, more understanding of form and humanity than a straight depiction would.
The problem is, how do you distinguish between "lacked the skills or tools to make a true life-like statue" and "intentionally made something more abstract"?
When I played guitar I liked doing noisy high-distortion stuff because I could play bad guitar and still make it sound kind of okay (to my ears anyway).
Not saying that everyone who plays this type of music is a bad guitar player, because many aren't, but some are.
It reminds me of Oliver Sacks' excellent book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat.
It contains descriptions of several real cases of brain damage, including someone who literally made the mistake in the title of the book. He could still see but was increasing struggling to synthesise understanding of objects from the lines and patterns, culminating in that particular confusion (as he was getting up to leave a consultation with Sacks, he tried to grab his wife to put on his head).
This person was an amateur painter, and his paintings were getting increasingly abstract as his condition worsened. The funny thing is, critics would comment that his art was improving in subtly and insight. In reality, he was losing his grasp of object coherence.
As an illustrator who has also done some non-negligible sculpting, this kind of stuff is so much easier than 'lifelike realism' that it's not even close.
i think it looks like what you would make if you werent as skilled, didnt have the right rock, or the tools that were as good as later sculptures. but its still neat.
What I think you might be missing is that Venus could be a pet project of a single person, done in their free time over some period.
The statues, especially in the context of the greater site, could not be made by one person — many people should be working there for quite a long period of time, while physically staying in the place. Since they were working on the temple complex, (a) they could not be themselves participating in hunter-gathering activities (and we think human societies were engaged with that at the time); and (b) someone else should be providing them with the food, clothes, tools, and everything they need — implying there was some sort of a social structure (aka civilization).
This is what I think GP meant when saying "not supposed to be possible 12,000 years ago".
I fully agree with what you're saying, but I just want add something to your comment in case people might misinterpret this sentence:
> What I think you might be missing is that Venus could be a pet project of a single person, done in their free time over some period.
Yes, a single Venus figure is likely made by a single person. But the Venus of Willendorf is not unique. There are 200 over known "Venus figurines" from a period of 300,000 BC to 11,00 BC. So they were a wide-spread phenomenon indicating some form of shared socio-cultural connection among the early humans despite how far we were spread out and how much lower the population density was compared to now.
This is of course tangential to the point you were making.
> The statues, especially in the context of the greater site, could not be made by one person
Why not? Sculptors sometimes make dozens of sculptures per year, by themselves.
> they could not be themselves participating in hunter-gathering activities
Why not? Hunting and gathering doesn't occupy all of a person's time. I see no reason whatsoever to assume that those sculptures weren't created by part-time artists.
> implying there was some sort of a social structure (aka civilization)
Social structure exists even in apes, and is not at all synonymous with what the term "civilization" is usually taken to mean.
As a sibling commenter has explained, there is nothing substantially new in this archeological find, and it fits well into our existing model of how people lived back then. Claims of an incoming paradigm shift triggered by this find lack any substance.
> Why not? Sculptors sometimes make dozens of sculptures per year, by themselves.
Sculptors today are stationary and they depend on money (a mark of a civilization) and tools (same) and supermarkets (same) and demand for their work (economic surplus; same). Leonardo da Vinci, if he was a part of hunter-gatherer society (which is mobile), would neither be able to paint nor invent, for he would be busy with gathering (or growing, or hunting) his own food most of his time; he would also not have access to paper or canvas or colors or brushes.
> I see no reason whatsoever to assume that those sculptures weren't created by part-time artists.
As mentioned, hunter-gatherers are mobile at least part-time, because they go from where some food grows today, to where some other food roams tomorrow, to where yet other food swims the day after.
> Social structure exists even in apes
And bees, and ants; but not the kind that allows a big part of a society (capable adults) to engage in activities that are not directly related to gathering food, growing children, or fighting, but creating temples and art. A group of hunter-gatherers can provide for themselves, their children, and maybe their elders or sick (as long as these are mobile). They can even accommodate a leader or a shaman here and there; but not an apparently big group of able adults that do not hunt and do not gather and do not fight and do not move but rather sit in one place and build a temple and statues.
> there is nothing substantially new in this archeological find
Gobekli Tepe have completely changed our view of the development of the human societies, as we have previously believed the first civilization (Sumerians) to be as recent as 5,000-4,000 BCE (or 6-7 kya). This hints at a civilization twice as old as previously believed.
Hunter gatherer’s had a lot of free time. Based on studies of the last hunter gather groups, in reasonably fertile area they can spend ~15 hours per week on food and ~15-20 hours per week on domestic chores. That seems similar to us except we exclude tasks like commuting, grocery shopping, cooking, working out, cleaning dishes etc from what we consider ‘work’. Thus resulting in a lot more time for hobbies and socializing.
They move around, but would return to the same locations regularly thus potentially spending years in one location over their lifetime. Plenty of time to make dozens of life sized statues.
> In reasonably fertile area they can spend ~15 hours per week on food and ~15-20 hours per week on domestic chores.
on what you base this one? (from what I remember this time would not be even to even produce clothes - unless it is for area of world where no clothing is needed?)
1960’s studies of the Bushmen one of the last remaining hunter gatherer groups had roughly that much time spent working. They really spent quite a lot of time working on hobbies and socializing.
Processing animal skins is also a lot faster than weaving. Clothing is ~170,000 years old, weaving is very recent by comparison.
NAA, but I think what you’re missing is that this Venus statue is something a single person can carve on their own time, anywhere.
Carving a 2-ton statue in-place requires much better and larger tools, and some kind of social organization that values that activity and protects the site.
look, if you take the two things in isolation, then you may have a point. the Venus is certainly a more beautiful artistic piece
but you're trying to argue that an 11cm tall figurine with no facial features is a civilisational achievement on par with a massive 'temple' complex full of metres-high sculptures, reliefs and symbols that would require significant societal organisation and advancement: protection, education, food surplus, likely division of labour. decades of work at least
the Venus of Willendorf could indicate some of those things, but it equally could have just been made by one especially advanced human
> the Venus of Willendorf could indicate some of those things, but it equally could have just been made by one especially advanced human
Hundreds of such figurines have survived to the present day, so tens of thousands must have been produced. They used materials transported over 1000+ kilometers. Clearly, those were made by a large-scale network of artists learning from one another, part of a pan-European culture – not by a random genius doodling around, otherwise they wouldn't be so similar to each other.
It's also pretty obvious from looking at the figurine that this wasn't the artist's first work. They probably had to make hundreds such statuettes before achieving this level of detail, so they were likely at least part-time professionals.
> My understanding is that complex things like statues were not supposed to be possible 12,000 years ago. I think it’s supposed to be more like 6000 years ago.
Recently I keep wondering whether people have thought about this from a statistical perspective.
Like, if I suddenly find a dead rat in my kitchen, what should I think about it? Should I consider that maybe I have had a pest problem for months or possibly years, or should I consider this as "we found evidence for rats existing in my house for at most one day"?
It seems archeology takes the "evidence based" approach and refuses to calculate the expected probability of more stuff being discovered that's older/more impressive using the fact that we are discovering (mostly) random stuff buried in the ground.
What are the chances that the stuff we dug up are not the pinnacle of human civilization back then, and merely an average object? If people 3000 years from now dug up a brick from a rural village, should they infer that we only know how to build brick houses and not skyscrapers? What are the chances of digging up remains of a skyscraper?
Pretty big error bars on any estimations, with the low number of samples. But yeah, I wonder if anyone has tried to give a confidence interval for "tech level over time".
You could look at multiple points and try to generate a distribution of when this kind of activity happened. You might find that the number of points results in a pitifully poor confidence level in an expected probability though. Not enough rats and not enough kitchens.
There is no way to calculate that, since current finds are not random digs. Archeologist search where they have reasons to think something of interest can be found.
its why i love graham hancock and everything he talks about, its so exciting to think about the great achievements of all the human civilizations that have come about in the 200-300k years that humans have been around
We know sculptures and cave-paintings much older than this, some made with great artistic skill, so clearly no archeologist would suggest art was “not possible” at this time. Still a significant find and very fascinating.
Gabarnmang is older, and has been continuously occupied and in use, with only a break in occupation on the order of 50 years, last century, when it was "forgotten about" by the caretakers, in order to protect it ... only to be re-discovered recently (this century).
It is a truly extraordinary site and I personally consider it the holiest of all human sites, ever. More holy than any other - in constant use as a school and commons, for 10's of thousands of years of human existence, containing an extraordinary collection of art, both ancient and contemporary ... probably one of the most important collections of human art, ever.
If Australians had any decency they'd immediately sever ties with the British and make this site the seat of their new sovereign - its that powerful a record of human civilization, imho.
Our knowledge of such ancient peoples is so limited and subject to so many filters, that we should hesitate to think of some achievements as impossible. It’s just not that black & white. The general pattern of civilizational development could still be broadly correct, with this site just being a notable outlier.
I think you might appreciate the book The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow [1]. They dive into the archaeological record and argue precisely that: that the common story of how civilization developed is very wrong, and that complex societies existed before the rise of agriculture, longer than is usually assumed. These findings at Göbekli Tepe appear very much in line with their theory.
It is very interesting, that you says about 6000 years ago.
It is "calculated" (in the middle ages) age of The Great Flood.
I've read some opinion, that modern European historians, even atheist ones, still "primed" by this number and it skews all our understanding of history and perception of archaeological finds. It is not some random number, but legacy of pre-Renaissance Biblical studies, haunting us to these modern times.
> My understanding is that complex things like statues were not supposed to be possible 12,000 years ago. I think it’s supposed to be more like 6000 years ago
I think your understanding was just incorrect. Here's a video [0] from Kurzgesagt that explains in a nutshell when the human civilisation started (spoiler: as far back as around 20,000 years ago, but definitely the case 12,000 years ago, though the boundary is very fuzzy). But also note that even before a proper civilisation started to form people already made art.
I don't even understand what are you on about. The same kind of statue up.to the holding of the genital has been found in the same area in 1993 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urfa_Man
Not even talking of the fact that 25000 years before people were making incredible art at the grotte Chauvet or that around the same time, a 30cm statue was carved in Germany representing an anthropomorphised Lion ans
Yup - if you are thinking about what the story was in about 1978...
Since then there's been a big change from the idea cities were the only locus of culture and technology to a view that nomadic peoples were able to create significant ritual art, technical knowlege, and complex cultures. Of course the view from the 19th and early 20th C's was significantly informed by the need to justify all the genociding of nomadic peoples ("it's for their own good").
The idea I've heard recently is that agriculture grew out of nomadic people encouraging the food plants that they would be looking for in a years time by planting selected seeds and then going off to the next area, over time this led to crops that were more and more adapted as food stuff and this then enabled settled agrarianism. Places like Göbeklitepe are thought to be the ritual centers of nomadic cultures doing this sort of per-agricultural precession. I have read (no expert) that are similar sights in the southern united states where (now genocided) nomadic people used to come together and conduct major rituals which required significant communal investment and co-ordination.
Civilization with no cities... who'd have thought?
All those thoughts were going through my head as I was reading it, and I’m not like a history major or anything. Modern humans biologically have been around for a pretty long time so I’ve often wondered if civilizations existed where we simply haven’t found their artifacts, maybe because they didn’t produce or value them at the time.
A common statement was brought up in my history classes:
"humans of the past were often as resourceful, if not more resourceful than we are, they simply had less opportunities than we do today."
If you put yourself in the place of your ancestors. Who you are, you could probably figure out a way to make a statue. It stands to reason that someone a bit smarter (or more motivated) than you or I could also figure it out without our modern day tools.
Human ingenuity is astounding and I love the idea that past humanity was just us without iPhones.
Do you need special tools to do this though? Or just one rock that's harder than the other one?
That said I used to make "tools" out of sticks and rocks as a child playing outdoors. Why do we think people didn't have tools or the capacity to invent them 12000 years ago?
It has been my pet theory that human civilizations had advanced a lot more before a some kind of extinction event pushed humans back to 1. Maybe not as technologically advanced as the current civilization but advanced in its own way.
It’s an entertaining idea, however unfortunately easily proven wrong. The most striking argument against it (or any “Silurian” theory) is that any form of “civilization” in the strictest sense needs permanent settlements that require permanent agriculture, and hence fertilized soil. We should hence be able to find nitrogen rich layers of soil or sediment where prehistoric civilizations resided, but that’s just not the case.
It doesn't, and the stone itself is typically hundreds of millions or even billions of years old.
However, many ancient artifacts are found buried in the ground, and it is often possible to carbon-date organic material in the soil surrounding the artifact, which produces an estimate for when it was buried. This is typically combined with historians' estimates for when the culture that presumably produced the artifact flourished, though uncertainties of several millennia remain in some cases.
Has the statue itself been dated? 12,000 yo is the estimated founding date of Göbekli Tepe not it's last use. Humans like to move things about go through many phases of inhabitation of a place.
How is dating as a science faring in the replication crisis? It seems fraught with incentives for those involved. Discover something 2000 years old and no-one cares but 12,000 years old and you've got a TV career and a book deal.
The incentives are that the person who discovered the previously oldest <12,000 island that defined their archeological site as the coolest site, tends to fight. That plus 3rd party dating and other solutions. Because sometimes there is not a lot to go off of for dating, I've also seen people complaining that samples aren't always shared. So it's not perfect for sure, but I'm noting there are still incentives in that system
Notice that, although it was a completely alien culture in a very far away time, before agriculture and writing, we still know what a lifelike facial expression looks like.
Many things vary from culture to culture. Facial expressions, at least many of them, are consistent across humanity. If someone stubs their toe or tastes something delicious, you'll know without words.
Look up 'human universals' in anthropology, evolutionary psychology, and in other fields. Donald Brown (see below) gives some opinionated background here, including a literature review (of Brown's own writings, and more):
I don't think any other species has the set of facial muscles humans do. Cats seem inscrutable because they have very few; dogs seem more understandable because they can move their eyebrows.
I think the non-human animal with the most facial expressions is the chimpanzee, but even then it is much less expressive than a human in this regard.
Various mammals have (non-facial) macroexpression somewhat similar to humans, such as excitement, curiosity and fear. Many non-mammals such as birds, fish, and some reptiles can express fear to some extent.
I don't think cat faces are all that much less expressive than dog faces. They have a wide variety of facial expressions, including surprise, irritation/anger, happiness, playfulness, anxiety/fear, disgust, and so on - and that's not including at cat body language, especially tail movements.
Our cat has perfected the guilt-tripping innocent stare. She stands beside her food bowl looking almost blank. This somehow communicates a combination of infinite sadness and disappointment, blended with child-like hopefulness.
have you ever owned and been inseparable from a pet? you absolutely can interpret their moods and you can find papers on it if you like, they do have expressions and body language. It may not be the same as humans necessarily but it is there if you care to research it.
As other commenters said, cats are far from inscrutable. But a lot of their expressiveness comes from their tail and ears, two modalities that humans happen to lack.
Fear and anger on the face of a human and a wolf are very similar. Include body language in general and the similarities expand. If a mammal drops its head, widens its eyes and its ears pull back (yes humans do that too), its time to look for escape, or a weapon.
As someone who spends a lot of time closely with dogs, and recently raised a little of 6 spaniels - dogs "talk" via their facial expressions and can make sounds beyond just barks.
My pet theory is that women bonded with dogs first through an ability to have a mutual understanding with non-verbal communication, and we most likely observed them and could "talk" to them in their own ways - something that has been lost as we turned dogs from inter-species partners to enslaved commodities.
Probably extrapolating from the debunked pseudoscience of "women were gatherers, men were hunters", which fuels 90% of present evopsych nonsense.
For those unaware: prehistorical "hunter-gatherer" societies likely did not have strong divisions of labor and there is no evidence to suggest such a universal division across gender lines. Quite the opposite, actually. Turns out when you hunt large mammals in a group, the statistical physical advantages men have don't really matter all that much and women in turn aren't inherently better at child rearing (which historically was a group activity shared by the entire tribe).
> Turns out when you hunt large mammals in a group, the statistical physical advantages men have don't really matter all that much
Even if women and men are equal in their hunting skill, it would still make evolutionary sense for women not to participate in the hunts. Hunting large mammals is dangerous, and men are more disposable than women. If a tribe loses most of its men, it can still survive since a single man can impregnate multiple women. Whereas if a tribe loses most of its women it is far more likely to die out.
That isn’t debunked, how ridiculous. It’s true not all men were hunters, but that doesn’t mean that there was an equal share of women among the hunters. They travelled as a group and everyone gathered, but men went out to get the kill.
Anyone making sweeping statements that applies to all of hunter gatherer society is almost certainly wrong about at least a few cultures. We’re talking 1-3 million years worth of human society and cultural evolution.
Anthropological studies of (some of the few remaining) contemporary hunter-gatherer societies don't show the presumed division of labor (or several other presumptions either, like pervasive hinger, or the amount of time spent on food collection) written up by 19th century European naturalists.
To be clear: most of the original claims about historical, prehistorical and then-contemporary indigeneous societies that have survived into the Western cultural canon were written by people who were used to extrapolating from their own cultural and social norms to others and judging everything on a scale that favored them and their social hierarchies. This also bled over into other natural sciences, which is for example why Darwin's theory of evolution was so disruptive.
Another example is how a lot of national mythologies were invented largely out of thin air in the 17th through 19th centuries, e.g. the Scottish clan system with its strict lineages and tartans. Most of the mythology around kilts is pure fabrication.
Even in economics this can be found with the common wisdom that money/currency was preceded by bartering, which we now know to be an oversimplification to the point of being wrong with in-group gift economies apparently having been far more common and bartering being part of diplomacy between separate groups rather than something you'd do with your neighbor.
Arguably this tendency even persisted to the point where the myth of an "alpha wolf" arose based on observations of wolves in captivity that was quickly dispelled after actually looking at wolves able to roam in their natural environment.
If you want to present the Victorian Age as the pinnacle of human development, of course you'll see the "uncivilised" natives as beneath you in every way and after hunting their prey animals for game and destroying their natural resources claim that starvation is just part of their natural experience rather than something you inflicted on them by taking away their livelihoods. Luckily most fields of study have moved away from this antiquated approach but sadly there's a growing call among certain people to "return to tradition" and dismiss this as "woke" nonsense.
Some universals are certainly shared with other creatures, and it's not even restricted to mammals. From one article:
Take, for example, social facilitation or the notion that organisms tend to perform better on simple tasks in the presence of observers. Although disagreement about its innate origins exists (Do-Yeong and Junsu 2010), social facilitation has had supportive evidence in humans in a natural setting (Michaels et al. 1982), cockroaches (Zajonc et al. 1969), and macaques (Dindo et al. 2009).
(I don't know about facial expressions, though the fact that I don't know means little - I've just read a bit about it.)
There are other universals among non-human species, not shared with us, such as 100+ discovered for chimpanzees.
Source: Reza Ziai, "Cross-Cultural Universality". In Todd K Shackelford, Viviana A Weekes-Shackelford, eds. Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer (2021)
As I understand it, in that case it is by dating the age of the materials the wood in question was buried in. The minerals are dated using luminescence dating. That tells you when those particles were last exposed to sunlight.
> Most luminescence dating methods rely on the assumption that the mineral grains were sufficiently "bleached" at the time of the event being dated. For example, in quartz a short daylight exposure in the range of 1–100 seconds before burial is sufficient to effectively “reset” the OSL dating clock
> And the timber is much older than the earliest modern human - or Homo sapiens - fossils, which are about 315,000 years old.
this is what astonished me. I somehow depicted our ancestors or relatives to be purely hunter/gatherers without the means (and will) to build complex wooden structures.
It's nearby a relief that is literally some guy stroking his cock with his other hand resting on his stomach. For all we know this was just the work of a very dedicated and very horny artist.
It's always funny to me how some people will go out of their way to avoid acknowledging that historical people may have liked sex or even been queer.
My favorite example is that of two Roman men apparently living together as a household and having items with very graphic depictions of sexual acts between men. They were obviously two very heterosexual men (maybe brothers) and the depictions of men ravaging each other's buttocks were probably a fertility or sports thing.
I may be wrong but I don't believe that the reason that bathroom stalls are frequently adorned with crude sketches of penises is "fertility stuff" either rather than just "lol dicks" and I don't think it's a stretch to extrapolate from this to prehistory.
There's a very real possibility that this is just a 12,000 year old "realistic human statue" of some bloke double-palming his stiffy (which according to the article is incidentally near a relief of another bloke presenting his stiffy one-handed with the other hand on his stomach). Yes, a two meters tall statue takes quite a bit of effort and suggests more than one person being involved in the process but that shouldn't be surprising.
It is said[^1] that the God of the Jews ravaged Pompeii because of polarized views on the matter of sexuality. A bit later, they won the war for the heart of Western culture. So, yes, those bros had those statues and depictions for the sake of fertility and sports, and our modern occidental brains[^2] will keep glitching when told otherwise.
Your first link is to what seems to be a Christian mythology channel rather than a history channel, so I don't know what that brings to the table.
Your second link just emphasizes what I said: weiners don't universally mean "fertility symbol". I don't think the blokes drawing peckers on bathroom stalls do it either as a fertility symbol nor to ward off evil spirits, so this still doesn't address that other motivations can exist.
Also Pompeii is an actual place that was "ravaged" by a volcanic eruption, not "the God of the Jews". Unless you want to pin actual natural disasters in actual places in actual recorded history on a god of the gaps, I don't think sexuality had anything to do with the volcano.
It would be funny if it was the prehistoric equivalent of the city of Dog River putting up a sign saying "Wullerton Sucks!" It could for instance represent a foreigner with the statue saying certain foreigners are wankers.
In that time there is relatively little figurative art of humans. Rarely seen in cave painting, etc. The nearest would be the Venus figurines but they don't typically show facial features or internal anatomical details. It's a major major find bro.
I haven't seen much art from that era either and was pretty surprised to see the statue. However looking into it, I'm even more surprised to learn of the Venus of Brassempouy.
I've heard that much of the ruins from Ancient Greeze were likely brightly colored and painted. I can't help but wonder if the Venus I mentioned had been painted as well. It's possible that they did have detailed faces, and that they simply weren't sculpted.
I suspect it’s more a problem about longevity of the artifacts, rather than lack of talent or knowing one can pick up some mud and form a shape.
They had very similar general intelligence and talents as us, at that time, and tens of thousand of years before. Today, it’s not terribly hard to find artistic kids who can mold extremely good faces, ponies, or whatever else they choose, from a lump of play dough. I assume artistic people existed then too, with comparable talent and frequency, unless there was some catastrophic non-artist pruning that happened very very recently.
If they’re “us”, then that statistical review should show similar distributions to what we have now, especially in children. Can we see the artistic child’s work? It’s probably made of mud, so probably not. We only see accidents of preservation, due to the tools and final materials.
I don't understand why it is so radical though. Even when I was a bored kid I could pick up a stick and whittle out a face not to far from what was in the article with a decently sharp knife and some time. Doesn't seem like a huge jump to do it in stone if the stone is easy enough to shape with a harder stone/mineral...
We're talking anthropology here, not art criticism. It's leagues more realistic than anything we've uncovered. Something like the bronze charioteer which is incredibly vivid and accurate is made nearly 10,000 years later than this one.
> That's not what I consider a "realistic human statue" ?
the HN title is wrong, TFA says "realistic facial expression". Of course, it's neither a realistic facial expression, so all the comments are still valid. Carry on.
Yeah I was expecting something like a greek statue with very realistic human features, but I guess this is still astounding since other statues of the time are even less anthropomorphous.
We have a fairly good idea of how sculpture evolved in the past 5,000 years or so. By 2500 BCE, the Egyptians had already mastered realistic sculpture:
Those statues clearly show some development, but I wouldn't say the Egyptians had mastered realistic sculpture. There is clearly still some kouros-like stylized anatomy here, especially visible in the standing figures. Compare to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polykleitos#/media/File:Doryph...
It’s of course difficult to say how much of the perceived non-realism was simply about cultural aesthetic preferences with regard to style. Especially given that the statues that have survived are those with special cultural or religious significance.
The non-realist aspects were definitely tied to cultural and religious signifiers.
There's actually a fascinating case where Egyptian artists were briefly allowed to abandon the established style and adopted a quite different one during the so-called Amarna period:
Much of the art became almost caricatures with elongated features, but there was simultaneously a realist tendency where portraits of royalty were suddenly allowed to have a likeness. The famous Nefertiti bust is from this era.
It seems clear to me that the artists' skills was not the limitation, but the permitted range of expression was quite narrow until this rebel pharaoh unleashed the short-lived style revolution.
It's kind of mind-blowing that we're three times closer to the Romans than the Romans themselves were to Gobekli Tepe. Gobekli Tepe is as much older than the pyramids, as the pyramids are themselves old.
Experimental OSL dates from a wasp nest overlaying a tassel Gwion Gwion figure has given a Pleistocene date of 17,500 ± 1,800 years BP. The academic community generally accepts 5,000 BP for the end of the artistic style. If the date ranges are correct, this may demonstrate that the Gwion Gwion tradition was produced for many millennia.
Stick figure cave paintings are paleolithic graffiti. If you think artists find it hard to scratch a living these days, you're not going to find much support for following your passion when there is hunting, gathering and defending against predators to do.
But if a sharman (assuming it is a statue for their deity) has the time, then there's no reason it couldn't be perfectly proportioned. It's not like hand-eye coordination has suddenly evolved; it would more be access to better tools than a piece of flint to bang on some softer rock.
> If you think artists find it hard to scratch a living these days, you're not going to find much support for following your passion when there is hunting, gathering and defending against predators to do.
You seem to seriously overestimate the average workload of prehistoric communities (or underestimating the average workload of present day individuals). Also I don't think the concept of making "a living" transfers to gift economies. Nor do you need to spend 16 hours a day every day "being an artist" to develop remarkable artistic skill. Strict division of labor is a fairly recent development that in its present form stems from industrialisation requiring work to be split into discrete processes to enable automation.
Is there some way that we could "scan the Earth" to find other long-buried sites like Göbeklitepe?
Would it be possible to do something from imaging satellites — something akin to ground-penetrating radar / laser range-finding / ultrasound — that might not be good enough for much, but which would be "just good enough" to find any other gigantic cities with walls built of dense stone, hidden under 10-50ft of dirt or sand?
Yes they've been doing lidar scans throughout central america to detect ancient Mayan pyramids and cities that are hidden under foliage. They've identified thousands of structures but other factors have limited their ability to unearth them (# of archaeologists, funding, politics).
Yes, lidar is great and all for what it does, and will definitely find us many new sites; but lidar just detects structures that cause raised areas (i.e. plants growing up and over the structures) rather than detecting structures hidden within a flat plane of fill-in medium like dirt/sand, the way Göbeklitepe was hidden. Lidar wouldn't have found Göbeklitepe.
> Is there some way that we could "scan the Earth" to find other long-buried sites like Göbeklitepe?
The Brits had started a Lidar survey of most of their country a few years ago, I'd say 2015-2016, but I'm not sure if that information is entirely accurate and, if it is accurate, I'm not sure how far they have got with it (what if all the cuts made to spending money on stuff that is not seen as essential).
I'm jealous in a positive way that the Brits have managed to do that. There was some talk about trying to emulate them when it comes to some archaeological sites here in Romania, but apart from a couple of tries/mappings nothing systematic has been implemented.
GP radar should work, as long as the artifacts are of a material sufficiently different from the earth on top of them for the interface to cause a radar echo. I’ve no idea what exactly counts as sufficiently different" though.
I wonder how long ago our ancestors forgot about this settlement and it was lost, and how many times it was rediscovered through the ages. I bet Homer knew of or had heard of some ancient sites that were either never memorialized in a poem, or poems never survived to modern times.
It's honestly staggering to think about how much didn't survive because it was made of wood or clay. And the oral history of our species that is forever lost. Just staggering.
I find it more staggering that anything survived (with a gap before being rediscovered). It's just funny to think about the set of circumstances that might lead to things being left, forgotten, and buried, isn't it?
Yet more astonishing finds from the PPNA! Contemporaneous or even earlier than the Balıklıgöl statues, but the piece and its expression is far beyond it. Each time I think I won't be surprised by another Turkish find and yet . .
Looking at the oldest finds on a world map, I can't help wondering what sort of finds are in those areas less developed - or more wrought by internal violence - were those places to suddenly be easy to roam for archeologists. If Iran were as accessible as Germany, who knows what the equivalent of the Hohlenstein Löwenmensch would be? The events of the early 21st century (can and will) cast a long shadow in the scholarship.
It's almost comforting to know that 12,000 years ago humans were essentially sending random people dick-pics. All the passersby got a dirty little airdrop to the eye holes.
There must be so much more underground in that region waiting to be discovered. For instance less than ten miles south is the town of Kisas, about which wikipedia says: "It is built on top of an old archaeological mound (höyük) which has not been excavated because it lies completely under the town."
And what may have been destroyed and will forever be forgotten.
This region is only a couple miles north of Raqqa, which was an ISIS stronghold only a couple years ago, and they destroyed innumerable historical artifacts.
It always sounded strange to me when I learnt in high school that the "earliest" civilization had rock structures, ziggurats, temples and the like. It gives an impression that human suddenly that converged together at some point, decided to have priests and kings, and construct large structures for no practical worldly reason.
Take the discovery of fire. It is not like some ape suddenly discovered fire and suddenly learnt how to cook. It probably took thousand of years of "consistently being able to create fire" before realizing that it can be used for cooking. The ability to create fire also implies that the prehistoric human was already able to think of risk/benefit. Since fire is obviously dangerous it leads me to think that they already have some sort of culture/philoshopy. Critical thinking cannot exist in a vacuum i.e. they have to had to used it for other purposes as well.
This is obviously unscientific and extremely speculative, but I just think that these things cannot exist in a vacuum is all.
People seem to assume that realistic art is a sign of artistic "progress" and sophistication. But is it really so?
People in prehistoric times must have been the most skilled stone carvers ever. This was the technology of the era. What they might have lacked in tooling they surely had in craftmanship and available time.
Is it a case of not being able to carve something more realistic or not interested in doing do?
Maybe confronted with the later artistic fashion of emulating reality (started in Ancient Greece and ended in the early 20th century) they would retort:
Why waste your time reproducing something that already exists?
Generally young earth creationists don’t believe modern dating methods are accurate. Explanations for why they wouldn’t be accurate vary. But as an example, in my understanding carbon dating is based on a presumption that atmospheric ratios of stable and unstable carbon isotopes have remained constant over time. But how do we know that to be true?
Generally the different kinds of dating methods are also calibrated against one another, so then you get a feedback loop of false conclusions verifying other false conclusions. And then of course you get various points of data that could contradict dating methods. One that was mentioned to me recently is that a plane was found buried under several hundred feet of ice. Presumably if it wasn’t obviously an object from the last century it would have been dated to be much older. So goes the argument.
Anyway, I’m not an expert on dating things or young earth creationism but the
Tl;dr is that they don’t believe the dating method used to claim it’s 12,000 years old is accurate.
svpk's comment aligns with my own understanding. Also, some young-earth creationists may say that God created the earth with age. If you ask them why God did that or where they find such information in the Bible, they'll either say it's part of God's plan or be silent.
Another interesting place where young-earth creationists provide physical theories for biblical events is the Flood. Many ancient cultures have flood myths, some talk of a global deluge in the distant past, and few cultures attempt to derive a physical explanation for the massive flowing of water.
Though less popular today, some young-earth creationists interested in physical explanations (who also almost always have some theories about the Flood) hypothesized the existence of a "vapor canopy", which served as the source of the flood waters. Essentially, the vapor canopy was a water shell which surrounded the earth. The floodwaters came when God caused the vapor canopy to collapse. Now, this hypothesis fails to withstand a small amount of physics inquiry; the earth's gravitational forces would naturally collapse the shell, and the water's shell would make the earth's surface too dark to sustain life. Yet, they're not bad people, just misguided.
Since we're on this topic, there's one physical theory for a global deluge which is my personal favorite from a scientific standpoint. We know the earth has a crust and mantle. The crust is like a hard shell around the mantle, while the mantle acts like a viscous fluid. The mantle is thought to be magnetic [1]. One interesting and obscure field of research is magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), or the study of the dynamics of magnetic fluids. The geodynamo effect [2] proposes that the earth's magnetic field arises from magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) effects in the mantle.
Now, let's say the earth experiences a magnetic pole flip. Presumably, the earth's magnetic field will collapse for some period of time before returning in a reversed configuration. At some point during the flip, the field collapses completely. During that collapse, the MHD forces in the mantle are eliminated. The precise effects are unknown to us, but perhaps the crust then experiences a sudden rotational deceleration. Conservation of momentum says that the earth's oceans will slosh across the surface of the planet. Once the earth's magnetic field returns, the oceans gradually calm again, but much of the earth's surface has now been washed by a tsunami spanning all oceans.
From a purely theoretical standpoint, I like the scientific plausibility of this theory to explain the deluge, particularly because there's no need for the magical invention of a water source. However, there's still issues, like the precise cause of the earth's magnetic pole flip. If the pole flip is caused by, say, the Sun, then we need to know why and if the Sun's own electromagnetic field induces the MHD forces in the mantle. (MHD forces cause magnetic fluids to flow, which, short of additional information, would imply the Sun may cause the earth to rotate via MHD, which, according to a quick web search, is not the scientifically-accepted rationale for the earth's rotation.)
One could argue that was responsible for the severity of the recent rain storms all over the world. Now imagine what could happen if that volcanic eruption had been VEI 7.
Or some 'smaller' asteroid, not even a dinosaur killer, impacting deep ocean and vaporizing it. (Which propably would cause some tsunamis, too.)
What freaks me out is how the hands are depicted on the statue. It’s eerily similar to the Moai statues of Easter Island [1]. I’m not sure what to make of it.
The article says there were traces of pigment that could be dated. There are other techniques related to the layers of sediment or other clues. I think with a site like this they don't need to date every object. If they can gather enough data points they know when the site was in use. It's technically possible that the statue stone is older and was brought to the site and we might never know, but it's just highly unlikely.
I think the "highly unlikely" part is pure speculation.
If the stone in TFA gets buried when _our_ civilization collapses, the stone would now probably date to 2020 AD instead of whatever it should have been.
I read the article and didn’t see the 12,000 years (perhaps obscured by countless irrelevant ad overlays) and wondered how does one date stone, since carbon dating is irrelevant for something that didnt stop breathing and eating?
One way is to date the deposition of the sediment immediately surrounding the artifact. I don’t know exactly how they do this but I recall reading this was the method for some older structures that made the front page a week or two ago.
If you love Goebekli Tepe, you're gonna adore Narwala Gabarnmang, which is theorized to be the worlds first educational institute, and which has extraordinarily interesting ties to Goebekli Tepe, which is believed to be paying tribute to Narwala Gabarnmang with the T-shaped pillars ..
I take great comfort in trying to figure out why these sites were buried. I believe the current understanding is that that were carefully covered with dirt contemporaneously with usage.
There is a theory that they were not intentionally buried after all, but rather that the deposits were the result of geological processes .. apparently they've found arrowheads in the deposit layers that demonstrate that the filling material was deposited over hundreds, or even thousands, of years ..
That makes a lot more sense to me. Do you have a source for more info. I think that would imply a social collapse that could no longer maintain their infrastructure.
Both the Miniminuteman and "The Prehistory Guys" channels on Youtube have featured more details on an analysis of the covering layers of Goebekli Tepe - you might want to check those channels out for more details.
I visited a small archeological site on Corsica yesterday. This got us talking about this stuff which led to my gf asking to watch the gobekli tepe episode of ancient apocalypse last night.
Just after, as I was checking hn, this article was dropped. Same thing went through my mind.
I feel like there's way too many discoveries of ancient civilization dated 10-15k years ago to not think that "some" of his ideas must have some truth to it.
Obviously I understand that he might have exaggerated a lot of it.
The recent excavations unearthed a painted wild boar statue, a human statue, and a vulture statue. All statues are new gateways to understanding pre-historic art and culture.
Not being snarky but the big deal is we're pushing back the line (read: year / era) dividing pre-history from history. These discoveries became history now, yes?
> Prehistory, also called pre-literary history, is the period of human history between the first known use of stone tools by hominins c. 3.3 million years ago and the beginning of recorded history with the invention of writing systems.
This is one common definition of the term history, but it's not a very good one and largely relegated to outdated encyclopedia entries rather than describing how professionals investigate history. It's very poor as a technical definition. For instance, does "history" in an area start when someone writes something, or does the writing have to survive to the present day? Does only one person need to write, or does it need to be socially widespread? Does it have to be full writing or does protowriting count? Do we have to be able to read the writing? Do partial readings count? These ambiguities weren't issues back when it was being used as a criterion for "civilization" ala childe, but that time has long since passed.
Today, it's best to ignore all these difficult and largely unnecessary questions by simply using a descriptive definition where "history is the human past".
By definition recorded history - as recorded in this art work, which are artifacts of history - is being pushed back.
The big deal is we over-estimated what we thought we knew about the past and that over-confidence is being humbled. And because of that the definition of pre-history needs to be updated.
There is no overstating just how absolutely wrong in almost every dimension possible most of the posters on this site are. It’s distilled ignorance mixed with the arrogance of an annoying 8 year old.
It makes me happy that it's possible that future humans might live again on an earth 12,000 years in the future which has cooled again after our civilisation has boiled the planet.
Why would it cool in 12k years? We are loading the atmosphere with carbon sequestered over much longer periods. Some of which even happened in a phase of massive
imbalance in the evolutionary "war" between plants and plant consumers: trees had found a way to never rot (be consumed) which is rather tragic for incumbent biological systems but a crazy boost for carbon sequestering.
The problem is not that we produce heat, the problem is that we change the balance point between energy influx from the sun and energy emission to space. That changed balance point will remain changed much, much longer than 12k years. If we don't have a technological miracle, humans 12k in the future will live in tiny habitable zones near the poles.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@miniminuteman773
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EaKFKYPXVk