12,000 year old megalith circles turn knowledge of ancient humans upside down

HowardVAgnew

I don't have it either, but I copied and pasted the site name from one of the links in the OP, did a wikipedia search and found this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobekli_Tepe#Dating

Which describes good old radiocarbon-dating as the leading factor used to derive an age estimate.

Dotini

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

Percy Bysshe Shelley » Ozymandias

I'm Dumb

The Nat Geo HD channel on DirecTV shows the earliest showing 3/8.

Evo

Hopefully after it finishes airing, they will put the epsiode online.

PJ524

This is a common misconception, but the notion that medievals thought the Earth was flat is a modern American myth. The anti-clerical Washington Irving, among others, perpetuated this myth as an attack on the "idiocy" of the organized religion.

zoobyshoe

Thanks!

So, they're dating charcoal from household fires.

zoobyshoe

I think you had to have a certain amount of education to understand the world was not flat. I recall reading that Columbus had to hide his destination from his crew; that the common sailor of the day thought you could only sail so far and you'd fall off the edge of the earth.

Evo

Zooby, all I could find was this short video.

http://video.nationalgeographic.com/...-tepe-artwork/

marcus

Hellenistic science (or say Greek around the 300 year period 400-100 BC) was indeed wonderful. It's not the topic here in this thread, so I'm reluctant to say anything more. You can start a separate thread about it if you want. The impressive heliocentric model of Aristarchus is discussed here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristarchus_of_Samos
Sagan's book is a good source but you might get additional detail from Wikipedia, e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
The fairly accurate measurement of the circumf. of the earth was by Eratosthenes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes
who incidentally was in charge of the Great Library at Alexandria for a time.
Wikipedia is not always the most reliable but it's often quite good and at least somewhere to start.

But this is not news to you . You already gave us the Wikipedia link for GOBEKLI TEPE
It's a pretty informative article, not just that section on establishing the dates. Thanks.

zoobyshoe

Assuming the models are more or less accurate, they show how 'un-geometric' these things were. The layout has a Hundertwasser feel to it, naive and childlike:

http://www.masterworksfineart.com/in...hundertwasser/

Inner walls relate to outer walls in a completely freehand way. At the same time there's a celebration of the ability to shape stone, there's no over-riding principle of symmetry behind any of it. (There's no sense they even knew how to draw a circle, which is extremely odd.)

If you look at these Plains Indian designs, you can see that, even without any formalized geometry, they appreciated the design power of symmetry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plains_hide_painting

This lack of math at this site surprises me because my sense of it is that big, long-term laborious projects seem always (in other cases) to have been inspired by some grasp of some geometric or mathematical principle that makes the designers feel they have tapped into some big background principle that deserves monumentalizing. This site seems very emotionally motivated without any apparent intellectual statement built into it as well.

Afterthought: I guess Easter Island would be another example where the monuments have no apparent mathematical underpinnings.

arildno

"This lack of math at this site surprises me because my sense of it is that big, long-term laborious projects seem always (in other cases) to have been inspired by some grasp of some geometric or mathematical principle that makes the designers feel they have tapped into some big background principle that deserves monumentalizing. This site seems very emotionally motivated without any apparent intellectual statement built into it as well.

Afterthought: I guess Easter Island would be another example where the monuments have no apparent mathematical underpinnings."

Quite possibly, as on the Easter islands, those megaliths are votive offerings on a large scale by local magnates, competing amongst themselves to gain most honour (and, "inidentally, more power) among potential followers.

zoobyshoe

Wiki just says they depict the deceased heads of lineages. Where are you getting this more in-depth understanding?

Andre

A bit more about that. This is the best I could find:

This is rather ambiguous. "Evidence of tool use" is not "we found tools", is it? So if carves resemble other artifacts, is that proof of the same tools? and if so, it that proof of the same age? Or could the same type of tools be used for several thousand years?

"Limited carbon dating"? On what? That should be anything organic, but what warrants the idea that the time that such a fossil was deposited there, is equal to the building time?

"Carbon dated to about 9000 B.C."? Sounds like 11,000 before present, but if they talk about pure - uncalibrated - carbon dates then in reality we are looking at some 12900 calendar years before present, using the INTCAL09 calibration table.

All in all, it seems that the dating is not as clearly defined as it looks.

arildno

You may read the following article by Jared Diomand:
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/24/042.html

It is fairly uncontroversial that it was NOT the Europeans that brought upon Easter Islan its decline, it was a self-destructive cycle of status competition; self-destructive with massive deforestation on an isolated island, where the logs where used at great bonfires&banquets and as rollers for the statues.

Evo

After this article, they discovered that different rings had different dates, and they discovered that there had been building going on over this huge area for a couple of millenia (I believe in the last 17 years they said they have only uncovered 3% of the site. And that some of the still buried rings could test even older.

Another strange thing, the newer rings were not as well built and more crudely decorated than the older ones. Then in 8,000 BC, they decided to bury the entire site completely. IIRC, the entire site is something like 900 square meters.

Dotini

Your sense seems reasonable to me.
The very big pillars in the center of the circles seem to depict arms descending from above, with a belt below with characters and symbols. By no means am I conceding anything about Gobekli Tepe before understanding far more about it.

I think this observation of the biggest and best being built first, if true, is instructive.

I have heard from some that the rings may have been buried progressively over the millenia, as if their individual usefulness had somehow expired, one by one.

In the audio link I posted above, hints are made of a much greater antiquity for the site than hitherto announced.

Respectfully submitted,
Steve

arildno

Just a correction:
Dotini, it was zoobyshoe who made that line of reasoning you quoted, not me. I just quoted it.

My argument was primarily concerned by the possible motivations behind these monuments, rather than pin-pointing, as zoobyshoe did, some peculiar and non-trivial features about them.