[sethammons]

These Tepe sites give credence to advanced civilization existing before the last ice age. One example is the mostly dismissed theory of water erosion at the base of the Sphinx, suggesting older civilizations leading up to ancient Egypt. To my understanding, it is mostly dismissed because archaeologists found the idea of something older than the Sphinx to be not possible. Tepe sites challenge this. Wild stuff.

[pwillia7]

I got pretty into this alt archaeology stuff and eventually had to move away from it.

I totally agree that the tepes challenge our timeline of when humans made cities and whatnot, but so much of their arguments is the perfect fit of stones or how flat stones are and saying it _must_ be done by modern tools.

I think they have left out how much you can get done from a construction standpoint when you have forced labor or no labor rules like we have had for some time now all over the world and especially in the West.

When I was first in Delhi and went to the Red Fort, I was shocked when they said they built the whole thing 100s of years ago in 9 years. Think about how long it would take us to build something like this now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Fort

So, I really want the ancient atlantis civ in the Sahara to be true, but the guy's I've seen promoting this are too removed from the scientific method to really be taken seriously.

This guy does some good debunking of a lot of the Netflix/Youtube Alt Archaeology people -- https://www.youtube.com/@miniminuteman773

[card_zero]

The Crystal Palace was built and designed in 11 months, 1850-1851. I'm not sure what the key factors making this possible were, but I suspect low wages and complete disregard for worker safety figured.

[nradov]

Sure that's part of it. A lot of the delays in modern construction are due to labor cost optimization and supplier delays. A lot of the time parts of construction sites are idle because some specialized group of skilled workers is at another site or they're waiting for a delivery.

I saw a video where as a stunt a residential construction crew went from a vacant lot to a complete single-family house ready to occupy in less than two days. And that wasn't a prefab house, it was a regular wooden frame suburban house built using all the usual construction methods. They did it by staging all the materials right there and having all of the carpenters, roofers, painters, electricians, plumbers, etc standing around ready to jump in as soon as they were needed. Granted that was a small project, but the point is that with a sense of urgency construction can proceed quickly, and it doesn't require sacrificing worker safety.

[ecshafer]

In about 2004, height of the Florida housing bubble. I stayed with my cousins in a housing development and I watched over the course of a week as this construction company built an entire street of homes. I was wildly impressed because I never see that in the north. They basically had the the foundations poured and then each lot like an assembly line each stage of the crew working. The framers working, then the guys putting up walls, then the roofers, then the plumbers. It was impressive. But I think that only works when you are building 1000 homes.

[throwaway173738]

Yeah that’s pretty much how it goes everywhere. You sacrifice a lot of speed to keep everyone working at 100% of availability because you have to have multiple sites and leave some sites idle. So you may see the same process but slower in other places. For example a framing crew might not be available right as the foundation is finished so there’s lag between the foundation crew and the underfloor. But modern tract house construction is an assembly line where the crews move and the material is fixed in place.

[pyuser583]

Saw something similar with a block of 5 story buildings. Gave a lot of respect for tradesmen.

[itopaloglu83]

Yes, some of it is due to lack of safety etc. must I must say the majority of it is the complete lack of competence in modern times because it’s now being built by normal folks.

I assume it was a limited number of people how knew how to make things and they kept roaming around setting new sites etc. Similar to bridge engineers etc. most of what they make just disappears in the background but they keep building things that makes our modern life possible.

[clickety_clack]

It’s not lack of competence. There is an unbelievable weight of regulation in construction now. It would probably take 2 years of planning consultation just to get the idea approved. Then, each facet of the design would have to be coordinated and iterated between several different specialist teams and contractors, with the tree of contractors increasing as each layer of design takes shape. At the end, you also have the labor laws that people are talking about here.

If we weren’t too worried about things falling down and killing people, or about damaging peoples conception of the vibes in a city, we could have the kinds of developer/architect/engineer/foreman outfits that used to build this kind of thing.

[itopaloglu83]

Yeah, definitely regulations affected the effectiveness, but also good things happened as well, we have a lot more power tools to use and we're not likely to lose our head just because we didn't deliver a job on time.

We have a lot more infrastructure around now, so much that we don't even see the wonders that tame the nature and make it comfortable for us.

[rsynnott]

I mean, it flat-out wouldn't be approved today, and for good reason. Bear in mind that it _burned down_. And, like, see the See Also section on its Wikipedia page; there were a bunch of similar structures, which mostly also burned down.

It just wasn't a good design.

[rsynnott]

Clearly they didn't know how to build things very well. Crystal Palace type structures look impressive, but they are _bad buildings_, both in terms of practicality (what would you use one for?) and safety, and no competent modern engineer would design one, even if it were legal, which it is not. There were a bunch of things like the Crystal Palace built in the 19th century, and the reason you don't see many these days is that they mostly burned down, often within a few years of construction (the Crystal Palace was actually an unusually long-lasting example of the genre, likely because it was mostly lightly used or completely disused).

Like, "why are more people not building impractical fire hazards? It must be because people these days are incompetent" is a pretty weird take.

[clickety_clack]

I also feel that people then were about as smart as we are now, so they could have solved problems in inventive ways they way we do now. Just because they didn’t have an electric stone flattener, it doesn’t mean that stones cannot be made flat in a fairly repeatable way.

[leptons]

And there were no video games, which I think is a huge source of brain-drain these days. I read somewhere once that people played more solitaire on Windows 95 per year than it took in man-hours to send people to the moon (something like that, I don't remember the original statistic). And that's just a shitty game on an old OS.

[JrProgrammer]

To me, blaming an activity which requires active participation for “brain-drain” is such a weird and quite dated thing. Take social media for example, these require no active participation other than moving your thumb up and down, and is in my opinion the real brain rot these days.

People will always find a way to get their dopamine, be it video games, reading, watching stuff, etc.

Don’t pick out a single thing and make it the boogey man.

[leptons]

Sure there are plenty of other frivolous and pointless pursuits that people engage in, like yourself making pointless comments on HN.

[Cthulhu_]

You're attacking video games and the like a bit, but the core of your argument is sound I think - there's 24 hours in a day, a percentage will be spent on taking care of your needs, what percentage that is depends on various factors but most anthropologists agree that that number was much lower in ancient civilizations. People get bored and when they get bored they get creative. Polishing a rock would be one of the things they could end up doing.

[IAmBroom]

> I think they have left out how much you can get done from a construction standpoint when you have forced labor

It's time to kill the "slaves built the pyramids" myth. "Aliens built the pyramids" has exactly the same amount of evidence.

Unless you're referring to wage-slaves, who definitely were the middle-management of the crews. We've found graves of Jewish construction bosses.

[ch4s3]

> challenge our timeline of when humans made cities

Do they? We know non-sedentary people in the Americas sometimes built large mounds and extensive fish works.

[pwillia7]

I think it pushed back when humans started building large structures together a few 1000 years. Oddly, there is no evidence of agriculture at Gobekli Tepe

https://www.reddit.com/r/Archaeology/comments/kxquwx/is_gobl...

[hinkley]

If it turns out to be earlier than we thought then the climate may have been different. These sites could be the swan song of a civilization in decay, or a group that had an amicable diaspora and used these places for social purposes.

I imagine a culture that realized the land couldn’t support them in concentrations, picked a spot to meet every spring equinox to party and maybe make romantic matches and then dissolved back into the surrounding countryside.

Maybe this was their Burning Man.

Essentially someone had to figure out the civilized part of civilization and the density part of civilization. It’s a chicken and egg problem, and who is to say they did at the same time?

As GP mentioned, there were somewhat similar arrangements in North America not so long after this time period.

[ahmeneeroe-v2]

Not defending alt-archaeology, but there is a major difference between precision of construction and volume of construction.

[acuozzo]

> I got pretty into this alt archaeology stuff

Links?

[pwillia7]

This guy has a whole netflix show if you're so inclined

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMHiLvirCb0

[hinkley]

I only watched a little bit of his stuff before I realized people thought he is a kook. But in small doses some of this stuff can sound like sense.

The one that got me was a supposed foundation legend from Sumer that a handful of strangers came and taught them civilization.

The idea of a remnant people floating down a river to escape some sort of societal collapse and then being adopted into a new tribe for their usefulness has a certain something as a hypothesis goes. It’s the “strangers” part that’s a bit suspect since how would you not meet neighbors like that. Unless the river was the end of their journey and not the start.

[AlotOfReading]

    The one that got me was a supposed foundation legend from Sumer that a handful of strangers came and taught them civilization.

These people are called the apkallu. The context isn't what Hancock suggests it is and I recommend checking out the relevant Wikipedia page [0]. Here's a little primer on aspects of Sumerian religion the page doesn't get into though:

Sumerians essentially saw themselves as the first civilization. When they reference a prior civilization, what they're referring to is literally the gods themselves because being civilized is very literally the spark of divinity inside humans that separates us from animals. It's the gods who taught humans to be civilized, sending their representatives the seven apkallu (basically everything related to the heavens comes in sevens) to raise humanity from the among the beasts to serve the gods, as we were designed to do when the gods imbued us with their blood. This is referenced again in the epic of Gilgamesh when enkidu is made like a god by a prostitute who teaches him how to be civilized. Other near Eastern religious traditions carried this on as well. You're probably familiar with Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, when they eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and become like gods themselves, i.e. are raised from among the animals and are cast out from the garden where the animals reside. This all gets a bit mixed up with the Sumerians having a bunch of ancestor cults going on as various human god-kings tie themselves to powerful lineages and so the gods/apkallu are seen as the ancestors of humanity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apkallu

[forgingahead]

> before I realized people thought he is a kook

But what is your own opinion?

[hinkley]

I didn’t listen long enough to get to his really fringe stuff.

[pwillia7]

Here's the other one that I just remembered -- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2Stn8atEra7SMdPWyQoSLA

[baq]

not OP but this guy is a fun read, heavy conspiracy vibes, but never going full wacko: https://theethicalskeptic.com/2023/02/02/karahan-tepe-and-th... (that said there are more wacko and less wacko pieces there, you have been warned)

[itsnowandnever]

just to nitpick: the Tepe sites definitely did not have forced labor. they had no social hierarchy at all. hunter-gatherers were fairly egalitarian.

definitely sedentary neolithic people had forced labor. all the Sumerian legal texts that were some of the first writings ever included legal definitions of slaves, for example. but the pre-neolithic Anatolian people were nomadic animistic people with no social hierarchy.

[sethammons]

> Slavery among American Indians was a complex institution that existed within various Indigenous cultures long before European contact. Unlike the European model focused on labor, Indigenous slavery often stemmed from war captives and was seen as a means of asserting power and honor over others. (https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/law/slavery-american...)

It is absurd to claim "hunter-gatherers were fairly egalitarian" and "had no hierarchy." We know that tribes in north west of the Americas, pre European contact, did not practice agriculture and had slaves. What evidence exists counter to this that supports your view? I assert it is literally impossible to make your assertion. Just because burial perhaps didn't differentiate or demonstrate a hierarchy, that doesn't support that the living didn't.

[itsnowandnever]

indigenous Americans did practice agriculture and were not hunter-gatherers. there were settled cities all across the Americas: Cusco, Tenochtitlan, Tikal, Cahokia. like cereals were the catalyst for the Neolithic revolution in Mesopotamia, the "three sisters" of squash, corn, beans were the catalyst of the Neolithic revolution in the Americas.

sedentary life and agriculture developed in the Americas around the same time it developed everywhere else in the world outside of the Near East (3000 BC). and this roughly correlates to the beginning of the Meghalayan geological age that continues today - which is when the ~10,000 year old original civilizations collapsed and Neolithic cultures became ubiquitous around the world and not just in Mesopotamia and the Yangtze river

[sethammons]

Several Pacific Northwest Coast tribes, including the Haida, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Kwakwaka’wakw, and Coast Salish were non-agricultural, complex hunter-gatherers who lived in permanent villages and maintained clear social hierarchies, including hereditary slavery. Their existence serves as a major counterpoint to the general claim that hunter-gatherer societies were universally egalitarian or lacked hierarchy.

While "sedentary life and agriculture developed in the Americas around the same time it developed everywhere else in the world," it was not the case for the coastal Salish and other tribes who lived on the resource abundant Pacific Northwest.

[dimal]

How are we so certain that they had no social hierarchy at all? I thought that that was the main theory but that very little is certain at this point.

[subjectivationx]

The idea of no social hierarchy is completely absurd.

There is even a small amount of hierarchy at our 15 person Thanksgiving family dinner.

[AlotOfReading]

It doesn't mean no social hierarchy ever, it means low levels of permanent social inequality. You'd be closer to imagine what a society with gini coefficient near zero would look like. That's actually one way people commonly try to measure "hierarchy", even though it doesn't perfectly capture the idea.

[itsnowandnever]

mostly because all the bones of all the dead were mixed in with all the others. implying no concept of "this guy was THE guy in my lifetime". but they presumably still had a meritocracy because while the bones were mixed in with all others of all generations, not everyone would have their bones were mixed in upon death. it was likely only the craftsmen or shamans that achieved that honor. but being honored is different from the "divinely ordained" hierarchy of god-kings that came later.

[p1necone]

I don't see why you couldn't have a highly hierarchical society that also has a "in death we're all the same" philosophy when it comes to burial.

[ragazzina]

So this person is at the top of the social hierarchy, dresses, eats, lives better than everybody else, then their child dies and they shrug and throw the body away in a common grave?

[stinkbeetle]

That's an extraordinary claim since every group of humans in written history, not to mention chimps, whales, and probably all social vertebrates, form social hierarchies.

If that's an accepted idea in the field, hopefully it comes with a lot more evidence than bones being mixed, as future archaeologists might find in many of our cemeteries of today.

[cutlilacs]

This is my main problem with archeology. They take a small amount of evidence for something and use it confidently for their conclusion. There are so many other possibilities why something could be true, but those are ignored for whatever theory appeals to them.

The above comment also illustrates their biases. They map their knowledge to history that came much later to the Tepe sites. Stating that it was "was likely only the craftsmen or shamans" is a prime example of that.

[IAmBroom]

> mostly because all the bones of all the dead were mixed in with all the others.

To know that, we'd have to identify the bones of an important leader in a mass burial site.

We don't know that.

[IAmBroom]

> the pre-neolithic Anatolian people were nomadic animistic people with no social hierarchy.

Citation required.

[pwillia7]

Agree and good point -- do we know how long the Tepes took to build?

[itsnowandnever]

as far as I'm aware, we have no idea other than that they didn't do much at one time. we can only deduce little modifications were done semi-regularly by the ancient pre-historic version of open source contributors. they had to lift 10+ ton limestone blocks and move them into place. but there's ample evidence of them trying to lift those blocks out of the quarry and failing, thus leaving behind broken would-be pillars of limestone for 12,000 years. the best assumption is just that they had tons of wild cereals and gazelle to munch on so these people were able to work on this persistently over many generations. they had no social hierarchy or need for labor at all, so they had all the free time in the world to use stone age tools to build structures that rivaled the greeks 9,000 years later

[pwillia7]

Yeah I love the idea of ancient peoples living in abundance, doing animism, showing up to party at the giant ancient structure every season.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QfsSfhaDVY

[observationist]

Any sort of tribal situation would result in forced labor, and cultures would have formalized notions of slavery, indentured service, arbitrary terms based on religious or traditional ideas. The tradeoff of survival for forced labor is an economic plight that happens frequently throughout history. Chattel slavery is inherently degrading, but it has ranged from ritualistic and formal to downright horrifically malicious - the idea that hunter gatherers were egalitarian and peaceful is basically the whole "noble savage" trope.

The truth is, we don't have much but speculation and narrative about the people of Gobekle Tepe, and even assumptions about them being hunter gatherers at all are based on centuries of bias and assumptions, with a whole lot of cultural chauvinism and religious nuttery baked in for good measure.

We're going to have to start analyzing humans more skeptically and rationally, as opposed to taking most of the modern historical narratives as gospel.

Modern humans have existed genetically for 300k+ years. At one point about a million years ago, the Early Pleistocene bottleneck had the population of human ancestors under 2000 individuals. 700k years later, the first modern humans were born, and the first situations in which we had the opportunity to establish culture.

We know from the great north american megafauna die off, climate records, and archaelogical evidence that something happened around 13k years ago to basically reset whatever human civilization there was. It took around 3000 years before the "neolithic revolution" , cultures demonstrating mastery of stone tools, pottery, more sedentary lifestyles, specialization, and so forth. It took another 4,000 years to reach the point where we had started creating written records again, started creating monuments and technology sufficiently durable to last to modern days, and then so on and so forth, with relatively uninterrupted and steady progress to the present day, each culture and age building upon the previous.

I think it's silly to think that it's only in this last 12-13,000 year period that we reached any of the cultural and technological milestones, and that every culture previous to that must have been hunter gatherer, because hunter gatherer are the default "feral human" prototype culture.

We bred dogs from wolves successfully around 45k years ago. That would have taken a generation or two in a nomadic context, or one really spectacular single lifetime for a sedentary person. Even so, you think that for the 250k years prior to that, not a single culture developed writing, wheels, pumps, discovered metal forming, or other technologies?

The human population was scarce, and because of that scarcity, the majority stayed in the absolute best, premium locations - beachfront. A vast proportion of settlements would now be well off the coast, and we have indeed discovered artifacts and evidence of such in various places where researchers have looked.

I'd be willing to bet good money that over the last 300k years there are many 10,000 year cycles and catastrophes where civilizations have risen and fallen, many achieving high levels of technology, perhaps even discovering electricity, advanced chemistry, medicine, and so on, but due to catastrophes, small populations, they got reset back to baseline. I'd bet that it didn't happen 30 times, as often as possible during the course of events, but I'll also make the claim that our current peak of civilization isn't the only good run that human race has ever made.

We are probably the only ones that made it to mass production, definitely the only ones that succeeded in scaling up resource extraction to the levels we saw back in the 1800s. I think there are probably caches of artifacts, evidence left out offshore that technology will make visible to us, that will show a much richer tapestry of events and cultures and history than the somewhat limited and biased narrative that modern historians have put forth as definitive.

[AlotOfReading]

    and even assumptions about them being hunter gatherers at all are based on centuries of bias and assumptions, with a whole lot of cultural chauvinism and religious nuttery baked in for good measure.

It's based on the fact that we don't observe the morphological changes in plant matter we call "domestication" until the PPNB, after the earliest layers of Gobekli Tepe. Moreover, they have a lot of similarities with other ANE foragers, and there's a distinct lack of both water sources and residential structures suitable for sedentary agriculturalists. Plus, pollen samples from the Harran plain indicate widespread mixed deciduous grasslands during that period, with very low levels of the plants that would later become dominant during the agricultural revolution.

Archaeologists are much better about recognizing the complexity of forager lifeways than they were 50 years ago.

[cobbzilla]

You had me until you said electricity. That implies metal, and we certainly have the tools to find metal that old, but have found nothing crafted by homo anything, afaik. Would it all be too buried? One would imagine that somewhere some evidence would have surfaced. But iirc oldest metalworking is from ~11kya

[sethammons]

you can make a tiny battery with ancient-style materials. It’s essentially a vinegar (or lemon juice) galvanic cell using copper and iron inside a porous clay jar. People often call this the “Baghdad battery"

[adgjlsfhk1]

the problem with these hypotheses is the lack of wiring. a very simple battery is not difficult to make (but pay no attention to the energy density), but making a useful circuit that does anything is pretty hard. the simplest possible useful circuit is a lightbulb which requires ability to create tungston wire, a vacuum, and very thin, precise glass.

[nkrisc]

But what would you even use that for? What large-scale practical application is there for such a device?

[itsnowandnever]

I wouldn't call these guys civilization. the Tepe sites are more like an ancient UN for semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers than a settlement. they visited seasonally for a feast and then left. the only evidence we have is that they were partying. but they had no social organization at all

funnily enough, the lack of neolithic culture, social hierarchy, or permanent sedentary lifestyle (all hallmarks of "civilization") and all archeological evidence suggests they were much healthier and more peaceful than neolithic humans. that's why people link "Garden of Eden" mythology originating in ancient Sumeria to the ancient peoples' observation that people became "civilized" but at what cost since it made humans less healthy, more violent, and presumably less happy due to the novel concept of social inequality

[gnatman]

I find it hard to believe that these peoples had no social organization at all, and even harder to believe that you could state that with such conviction given how little we know about these sites. I’m definitely curious though! Can you share any links or reading recommendations?

[itsnowandnever]

I learned about it in school, I took some anthropology and archeology electives. and what I was told was since there were no defensive structures nor evidence of any security apparatus at all (such as an army) there isn't any evidence of a means to enforce a hierarchy

[AlotOfReading]

That sounds like a Childe-esque checklist. In general, we wouldn't expect a strongly hierarchical social organization in this time period, in upper mesopotamia. That's more characteristic of lower Mesopotamian early societies a few thousand years later when cities like Eridu appeared. What we see in upper Mesopotamia is a pretty strong continuity with PPN sites like GT all the way through the Ubaid period, both in terms of architecture and infant burials and they're thought to reflect socially egalitarian societies. Many people (myself included) consider upper and lower Mesopotamia two largely separate cultural areas throughout the PPN because they're so different and argue that the traditional definitions derived from southern cities (like Childe's) are inappropriate to apply to northern urbanism.

[cutlilacs]

Absence of evidence doesn't mean you can conclude that there was no hierarchy or social organization though. For that you would need evidence that there wasn't.

There seems to be an issue with how archeology is taught at schools, where these conclusions are stated as facts, or theories with a high amount of proof, when in reality, they have very little evidence supporting them.

[card_zero]

Or a more boring theory about the sphinx is that it was constructed at the orthodox time, around 2550 BC, and then later on it rained sometimes. This would be mildly surprising, as opposed to very surprising.

[cryptonector]

Unlikely: there are other buildings from that time in the same area that do not show water erosion.

[ghtbircshotbe]

There is something like a billion years missing from the geological record in places called the great unconformity due to erosion on snowball earth, although it's probably not covering up any lost civilizations. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LXzDfQyUlLg

[tootie]

There were most assuredly many, many older civilizations. Humans have been more or less the same for at least 200k years and have had the same capabilities the entire time. We have preserved artwork much older than this and much finer.

If you mean to say and advanced civilization, then no this isn't really upsetting any orthodoxy.

[fidotron]

The sphinx weathering is odd but it's the Osireion that is a total anomaly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osireion

You would have thought that in a world with curious billionaires someone would pay for a ROV submersible to explore that, I certainly would if I were one.

[triyambakam]

I think it's really exciting. It seems like we always assume technology advances linearly (even with valid counter examples).

[cryptonector]

> These Tepe sites give credence to advanced civilization existing before the last ice age.

Before the last glacial period == 100,000 year ago. This is 12,000 years ago. If we assume (big big assumption here) that there's only really a single unbroken line of civilization, and also assume (big big assumption) roughly exponential growth till now, then no, 100kya would be too long ago.

But those two assumptions are not really safe to make. It's just that we _can't_ know yet.

I suspect that the Sphinx water erosion thing is real and correct, and the Sphinx much older than ancient Egypt.

[jstanley]

~12000 years ago refers to the Younger Dryas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas

[cryptonector]

I'm aware.

[tootie]

The water erosion theory is poorly supported and the orthodoxy is supported by an absolute mountain of corroborating evidence. Remember the great sphinx is part of a massive mortuary complex and we have decades of scholarship documenting all of it. Including the quarry that sourced the building material and written records of the dynasties that produced the work. The notion that it was somehow preexisting from a culture that the Egyptians knew nothing about and who left absolutely no other traces despite having the sophistication to organizing a massive public artwork strains credulity. It's not fully impossible but it's an extraordinary claim and it requires extraordinary proof and what we have is the opinion of a few self-promoters.