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A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe
161–170 of 199 posts
Re: A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe
#162These 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.
> 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…
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.
Re: A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
> north Africa Possibly covered by the Sahara, or if we're talking along the coast, underwater. Or covered by current settlements. > other civilization cradles. Because people still live there and built on top.
As I understand it, Tepe is local word for tel. Climate in this region makes them easy to distinguish since not a lot of plant cover making it easier to identify potential sites? Fertile crescent floods. Nile floods. Unique geography and climate in Turcep key to this?
"Tepe" is just a Turkish word for hill or mound.
So "Göbekli Tepe" literally is "Hill with a belly", "Taş Tepeler" is "Stone hills" etc.
Re: A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
It's not too far removed from sky burials or cremations.
"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."
Re: A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe
#165The Tepe sites are really fascinating. Every discovery leads to so many more questions - how did they construct these sites, what were they using some of the structures for, and so on. At Karahan Tepe is the pit full of pillars, with the human-face head on the outer rim .. whenever I see this pit, I get a picture in my mind that the entire site was green and fertile, and this pit was filled with water. It would be th…
It really depends on whether we're going to go through dark ages or a mass extinction event to the point of all our archives being destroyed; if that doesn't happen, we can look up discoveries on wikipedia. If there are any discoveries being made, because the thing with archeology is that things have to have been buried and forgotten about for a long time - grave sites, basements, that kind of thing.
I get it though, it'd be interesting to consider it, but like I said we'd need to forget things first for a long time. But another thing to consider is that the ancient Egyptians had archeologists for ancient Egyptian stuff already, with their history going back from 3000 BC to 30 AD.
Re: A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe
#166Can I just say that it is fantastic that they have included so many detailed pictures of the obelisk. How many times have you visited an article about a discovery only to have no pictures in the article.
I'd actually have appreciated photos of the discovery as it happened. This obelisk is mounted upright. Even a picture of it being mounted, a crane and straps included.
Is this good archaeology? I worry it might be something else.
Re: A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some years back an aunt and uncle owned a cottage in Devon (near Exeter) with 1649 carved into the wall by the front door. Cottages like that had a simple timber frame and cob walls, which is only a slight improvement on wattle and daub! Cob is mud and straw and a few binding agents and traditionally: horse piss to act as an accelerant to aid setting or something. Floors are joist and boards. The roof is thatched, of…
> cast your concrete beam around a long steel bar and put nuts and washers on both ends and tighten them so that the entire beam is in tension. I think you meant "compression".
The steel will be in tension and the concrete in compression.
Re: A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
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.
Re: A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe
#169These 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.
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
Re: A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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.