Gobeklitepe

pueblo · 05-03-2015 2:27pm #1

Ok, so Gobeklitepe is 11,000 years old and pre-dates Stonehenge by 6,000 years. This is a time that was previously assumed to be the Neolithic Revolution, when people started to transition from hunter/gatherer lifestyles to a more settled agriculture based existence.

What baffles me is that it is most unlikely that the people who built Gobeklitepe woke up one morning and decided let's build a temple.

There must have been a tradition of, and a skill/knowledge base for, creating stone buildings long before Gobeklitepe was built? It couldn't have just appeared over night.

So my first question is, how long would it have taken people from the time they first experimented with carving and erecting large blocks of stone to the time they were able to produce something like Gobeklitepe? Are we talking hundreds of years? Thousands?

My second question is, considering that it must have taken some length of time to develop the skills and abilities needed to work and manage stone like that, where are the examples of their previous attempts? Where is the evidence for the development of the process of learning and refining these skills?

Probably all very amateur questions.... but basically how come there is only one Gobeklitepe??

Wibbs · 05-03-2015 3:29pm

Yea good question. It's not the only time in ancient human history that major advancements happen seemingly overnight. Maybe in the case of the above culture they started off with large wooded structures and then after a while went for stone? The wood has long rotted so all we have left to go on is the stone.

cfuserkildare · 05-03-2015 3:36pm

Firstly " Pot Bellied Hill" did not appear overnight,
It was a sight used for perhaps 2500 years.
Secondly, The remains of a village nearby which was initiially thought to have been for the people who built the monuments turns out that the village pre-dates the monuments by approximately 3000 years, also implies that we settled before we started growing our own crops.

Hope that is helpfull.

Wibbs · 05-03-2015 5:15pm

cfuserkildare wrote: »

Secondly, The remains of a village nearby which was initiially thought to have been for the people who built the monuments turns out that the village pre-dates the monuments by approximately 3000 years, also implies that we settled before we started growing our own crops.

An idea that hardly requires much implication either(though I have noted that there is this idea about that we only settled down when we started to farm). Even in the paleolithic and among hunter gatherers today where food sources are plentiful and stable occupation sites can be used for a very long time. Many if not most today build settlements from where they roam into their food collecting areas. Some of the caves of Gibraltar had been continuously occupied by Neandertals for over twenty thousand years and then we came along and occupied them for a few thousand more. We clearly settled down long before we took up agriculture.

enno99 · 28-07-2015 2:39am

cfuserkildare wrote: »

Firstly " Pot Bellied Hill" did not appear overnight,
It was a sight used for perhaps 2500 years.
Secondly, The remains of a village nearby which was initiially thought to have been for the people who built the monuments turns out that the village pre-dates the monuments by approximately 3000 years, also implies that we settled before we started growing our own crops.

Hope that is helpfull.

what site is considered 3000 yrs older than goblekitepe

Do you have links

cfuserkildare · 28-07-2015 11:09am

The settlement where the builders of the temple has been dated to around 2800 years older than the first temple remains.

ScumLord · 28-07-2015 12:13pm

This was the stone age so advanced stone working skills had been a part of the daily grind of human existence since before we were homosapiens. I'm sure Gobekli Tepe is just the tip of the iceberg and that there were all kind of stone work around at the time.

The thing to remember about Gobekli tepe though, is that it was buried, not only does that save the site from weathering (which would have done some serious eroding by now) but from human intervention. Just look at what less than 2000 years did to the Roman empire, it's been reduced to ruins and we're lucky to have any of it left.

If the religion or culture went through a big shift sites like these can get torn down, either the new society wants to eradicate any evidence of the old ways or reuse the stone (it takes a while to work each block so each stone would be valuable). Even through constant use stone tools could be ground to dust. Monuments get stolen, moved and broken. The fact we have Gobekli tepe at all is a miracle. If it wasn't buried we wouldn't know about these people at all because stuff, not even the surface of a stone, can last that long.

Wibbs wrote: »

Yea good question. It's not the only time in ancient human history that major advancements happen seemingly overnight. Maybe in the case of the above culture they started off with large wooded structures and then after a while went for stone? The wood has long rotted so all we have left to go on is the stone.

Timber is certainly a big part of history we're just missing. While stone makes some impressive buildings it's somewhat limited in that it basically just goes straight up, timber is much more dynamic as a building material, you can do just about anything with it, easily. Stone age man was probably just as adept at wood work as he was at stone work. It's likely they could throw up a wooden town in next to no time and just abandon it when the seasons changed.

tac foley · 28-07-2015 6:41pm

Many above-ground Roman structures were robbed for their material or actually destroyed intentionally, rather than succumbing to nature. Examples of extant Roman structures still in good to unbelievably good condition abound in Mediterranean mainland Europe. The Pantheon is just one, and the wonderfully preserved and still operative aqueducts in France and Spain are yet more examples.

Here in UK, Colchester still has a large proportion of its castle foundations as they were left by Boudicca in its destruction as examples of Roman wall and fortification building.

As for wood in the area of Gobekli Tepe, well, these days you'd have to look very hard to find any at all - perhaps it was the same when the temple-builders erected their stone edifices.

Malta also has some interesting and extremely old structures in the form of temples, both above and below ground.

tac

enno99 · 28-07-2015 7:45pm

cfuserkildare wrote: »

The settlement where the builders of the temple has been dated to around 2800 years older than the first temple remains.

Is Nevalı Çori the site you mean ?

Nevalı Çori was an early Neolithic settlement on the middle Euphrates, in Şanlıurfa Province, Southeastern Anatolia, Turkey. The site is famous for having some of the world's oldest known temples and monumental sculpture. Together with the earlier site of Göbekli Tepe, it has revolutionised scientific understanding of the Eurasian Neolithic. Einkorn wheat was first domesticated there.

I cant find any info on an earlier date for it

These people were brewing beer and plastering the inside of their houses does sound like hunter gatherers

Perhaps you were thinking of this
Goblekitepe

Topographic scans have revealed that other structures next to the hill, awaiting excavation, probably date to 14-15 thousand years ago, the dates of which potentially extend backwards in time to the concluding millennia of the Pleistocene.

So this puts this civilisation before the onset of the younger Dryas period

The Younger Dryas stadial, also referred to as the Big Freeze,[1] was a 1,300 (± 70) year period of cold climatic conditions and drought which occurred between approximately 12,900 and 11,500 years BP (between 10,900 and 9500 BC) in calendar years.[2] The cause of the Younger Dryas stadial is an issue of ongoing debate. Possible scenarios include the collapse of the North American ice sheets, bringing a significant influx of freshwater to disrupt the thermohaline circulation. An alternative scenario is offered in Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, whereby a bolide (meteor) collision could have caused widespread cooling through dust and aerosols entering the stratosphere.[3]

I wouldn't be surprised if they found earlier structures around there sometime in the future

ScumLord · 29-07-2015 5:00pm

tac foley wrote: »

Many above-ground Roman structures were robbed for their material or actually destroyed intentionally, rather than succumbing to nature. Examples of extant Roman structures still in good to unbelievably good condition abound in Mediterranean mainland Europe. The Pantheon is just one, and the wonderfully preserved and still operative aqueducts in France and Spain are yet more examples.

There are some buildings still in use, the catholic church saved many of them by converting them into churches and maintaining them. But like you say, any that didn't have someone watching over them would have been dismantled for other buildings. It's likely if gobekli tepe would have suffered the same problems if it wasn't buried.

Here in UK, Colchester still has a large proportion of its castle foundations as they were left by Boudicca in its destruction as examples of Roman wall and fortification building.

I'm always impressed by the tower of London. It's incredible that it's been there for nearly 1000 years and still looks as sturdy as the day it was built.

Gobekli tepe is a rare find. If we find something similar from the same time period or earlier we'll be doing very well. It throws everything we thought we knew about civilization and religion up in the air and makes the point that hunter gatherers probably had a very developed culture and religion that predated civilization. It raises the notion that religion may have come first leading to civilization, not the other way around.

It wouldn't surprise me if it remains an isolated archeology find and we find nothing else like it, leaving this site some big enigma confusing the feck out of everybody and leading to a never ending argument over what it meant and who built it.

Wibbs · 29-07-2015 7:44pm

ScumLord wrote: »

It raises the notion that religion may have come first leading to civilization, not the other way around.

Well that's hardly a notion SL. The first inklings of modern human culture are at least 35,000 years old and religious/spiritual in nature and in both monumental and portable art and animist in nature like the Turkish site.

ScumLord · 29-07-2015 8:33pm

Wibbs wrote: »

Well that's hardly a notion SL. The first inklings of modern human culture are at least 35,000 years old and religious/spiritual in nature and in both monumental and portable art and animist in nature like the Turkish site.

Sorry, I meant to say religion came before farming, traditionally we were always lead to believe farming lead to everything from organised religion to civilization. But farming may have been the solution to a problem raised by religious sites.

Smiles35 · 03-08-2015 10:53pm

I think you would have needed an excuse for farming back in them days. Think of all the people who would have considered the natural ways the right ways and the domain of the spirits. Never mind the ones who would have considered the skills and areas involved in hunting their source of respect.

The imagry on the stones is interesting too. Could be the first writing.

Gobeklitepe

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