[mrangle]

Where are the tools that carved the high relief sculptures at Gobekli Tepe, around 12,000 years ago?

Where are the high relief carvings that predate Gobekli Tepe, which served as the skill development toward it?

For example.

And we don't need to go nearly that far back to notice lack of ancient metal that had to exist, given what it accomplished.

Metal disintegrates fast. Megalithic evidence, at minimum and across history, implies a woefully incomplete archaeological record.

[civilitty]

> Where are the tools that carved the high relief sculptures at Gobekli Tepe, around 12,000 years ago?

Mostly flint. It's a seven on the Mohs hardness scale which is harder than unhardened steel tools.

Archaic humans have been making flint tools for millions of years.

> Where are the high relief carvings that predate Gobekli Tepe, which served as the skill development toward it?

Where to begin? Abri Castanet 35 kYa [1]. Venus of Laussel 25 kYa [2]. Roc de Sers cave 17 kYa [3]. There are countless other examples - most of them don't event have wikipedia pages.

Oldest known engravings by an Erectus are about 500,000 years old so it's been in the family for hundreds of thousands of years.

[1] https://www.archaeology.org/issues/63-features/top-10/270-to...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Laussel

[3] http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/prehistoric/roc-de-sers.htm

[ses1984]

You’re looking for evidence of a specific thing, which is not the same as looking for evidence of anything.

[pkdpic]

I agree with both sentiments but the closer I get to primary-resource history / prehistory the more I appreciate the horrifying astronomical randomness of what is preserved / what we stumble across / what we use to cobble together our lumpy inconsistent historical narrative.

There is so much cosmic space that exists between any two historical artifacts. There's definitely room for a multitude of completely unpreserved civilizations.

On-the-nose reading that comes to mind, Of Ants and Dinosaurs by Liu Cixin... very anomalous book / quick entertaining read...

[zogrodea]

It's sometimes thought that specific questions yield the most informative results rather than general ones. R. G. Collingwood talks about this again and again in his Autobiography (which is less about the man himself and more about his thinking - quite readable).

For example, when you are debugging code, you usually have an idea of where the error might be. So the process looks like: print at line 43, is everything as expected? yes, so print at line 48 and try inspecting values at the suspected code path in search of errors.

The same detective-like work (which he calls question and answer) is used by historians and archaeologists to reconstruct historical narratives. If you don't have specific questions in your head and a way to falsify them while trying to answer a question, you likely aren't going to learn as much.

[EdwardDiego]

Serious question, do we know that metal tools were used for those carvings?

From what I recall, until iron/steel was invented, it was pretty much abrasion as bronze was not hard enough to chisel nearly every stone.

[AlotOfReading]

They were not. The primary stonework technique was almost certainly pecking [1], where you take a small "hammer" and whack it against the stone, pulverizing a bit at a time. This leaves a characteristic surface you can observe on the pillars today. However, the Gobekli Tepe builders were a bit smarter than just carving everything from scratch. They made use of the exposed limestone layers to quarry materials that were roughly the right shape and thickness.

[1] https://stonetoolsmuseum.com/technique/pecking/

[sigg3]

People who shout about ancient aliens and hidden technology always completely ignore that the people in the past had access to the most advanced machinery available: humans.

Add time to that, so that your project can have a scope of generations, passing down knowledge gained from a lifetime of doing this particular thing, the results become unsurprising even.

Amazing, inspiring and ingenious but also unsurprising.

[fsloth]

Yeah, human craftmanship can reach really, really complex heights.

I guess industrialization has made lot of people oblivious to this fact.

[mrangle]

Abrasion carved both the high relief sculptures and cut the megaliths from which they arise?

Perhaps, I suppose. I don't know enough about the physics and control of the abrasive techniques referenced. Though, I'm always in favor of emphasizing plausible variables that weaken a hypothesis.

What are the chances that abrasion work like that, hypothetically, was so specialized and unknown in 10,000 BC that Gobekli Tepe's high relief sculptures are the sole examples of that period and the earliest examples of such large and truly technical work? Nevermind the artistic skill that is reflected.

Cro Magnon was carving anthropomorphic stone statuettes in the region of modern Germany in 40,000 BC.

Food for thought: the Tell archaeological sites that dot the Fertile Crescent, which includes the Haran area (Gobekli Tepe), contain the most concentrated evidence of human technological firsts that seems to exist. Including evidence of earliest metalsmithing tech, if I remember correctly. See Yarim Tepe for a jumping off point.

So the situation is:

a. Stone carving predated Gobekli Tepe by at least 30,000 years b. The earliest known stone carvings were not in the region of Gobekli Tepe. Implying that stone carving culture and tech was known far outside of Mesopotamia, from an extremely early period. c. Gobekli Tepe's specific accomplishments are the first evidence that we have of such advanced sculpture and megalith construction skill. d. Metalsmithing arose in the immediate regions and cultures that included the area of Gobekli Tepe.

So on one hand we have widespread tech suggested to be responsible for the first evidence of highly technical stonework that is limited to one area in this early period of pre-history, and on the other we have specific advanced tech (metallurgy) that is best for such technical and large scale work arising out of that same area.

It could be a coincidence, but arguably it would be a large one.

[inglor_cz]

Metal is too precious to be just abandoned. Metal is usually recycled, even in our civilization.

Whatever metal objects from ancient civilizations we know, are either grave goods (swords of warriors etc.), or were found in shipwrecks etc., or were found in destroyed settlements, plus a few accidentally lost (fell into a well etc.). But most metal objects get recycled.

[EdwardDiego]

That's a very good point.

[siriaan]

The bedrock around Göbekli Tepe is apparently limestone, so saith Wikipedia, so no, metal is not required to carve it.

[dr_dshiv]

Stonehenge is much harder stone—and carved from “hammerstones.” Crazy the effort it took.