[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?

[unmole]

It's not too far removed from sky burials or cremations.

[ragazzina]

"The full jhator procedure (as described below) is elaborate and expensive. Those who cannot afford it simply place their deceased on a high rock where the body decomposes or is eaten by birds and other animals."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial

[cutlilacs]

Why are we assuming that the top of a hierarchy must dress better and eat better than everyone else? They could just be leaders who command everyone, but still an assumption of equality when it comes to good.

Also hierarchy doesn't mean that there is a single individual that's at the top. There could be a series of caste hierarchies, where groups of people were considered "better" than others.

We don't know if everyone from the tribe was in the common grave or a select group of people.

You're building a narrative based on your knowledge of other civilizations histories and understanding of modern day social structures, and assuming those traits must apply to this civilization. The truth is, we don't, and likely won't ever, know how their social hierarchy was built. Anything said is speculation. This isn't the case where you can be 80% confident something is true, more like 2% confident based on the discovered evidence.

[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?