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A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe

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Re: A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe

#51

Post by alephnerd »

itopaloglu83 wrote: post #46
MomsAVoxell wrote: post #31

The 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…

To me, it looks like a festival ground, so I imagine people coming from all directions and multiple nomad tents etc. around it. What makes me wonder is that why did these hills survive, and why are we not finding similar things in north Africa and other civilization cradles. Maybe these were one off sites with limited use and were later just left alone, while anything in Egypt had continuous settlements so things jus…

> why did these hills survive

Because it's low density arid scrubland that is primarily inhabited by Kurdish and Turkish herders, and was a no-go zone during the PKK Insurgency.

Re: A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe

#52

Post by clickety_clack »

pwillia7 wrote: post #38
sethammons wrote: post #36

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.

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…

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.

Re: A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe

#53

Post by dismalaf »

itopaloglu83 wrote: post #46
MomsAVoxell wrote: post #31

The 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…

To me, it looks like a festival ground, so I imagine people coming from all directions and multiple nomad tents etc. around it. What makes me wonder is that why did these hills survive, and why are we not finding similar things in north Africa and other civilization cradles. Maybe these were one off sites with limited use and were later just left alone, while anything in Egypt had continuous settlements so things jus…

> 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.

Re: A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe

#54

Post by stevage »

> The face of the beprenese is located at the top of the Dikili stone; its sharp lines, deep eye sockets and blunt shape nose, and a similar style with human statues found in Karahantepe. This discovery reveals not only the technical mastery of Neolithic people, but also the way he expresses himself and the ability to think abstractly.

I don't think we were in any doubt about the ability of people 12,000 years ago to think abstractly.

Re: A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe

#55

Post by AlotOfReading »

itopaloglu83 wrote: post #46
MomsAVoxell wrote: post #31

The 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…

To me, it looks like a festival ground, so I imagine people coming from all directions and multiple nomad tents etc. around it. What makes me wonder is that why did these hills survive, and why are we not finding similar things in north Africa and other civilization cradles. Maybe these were one off sites with limited use and were later just left alone, while anything in Egypt had continuous settlements so things jus…

We find similarly old structures across Eurasia, like the epigravettian mammoth bone huts. The late PPNA when KT/GT were seemingly built is when we find the first monumental, stone structures that we know of. It's entirely possible that ancient near east is where these kinds of things were first built. There's reasons I can go into why that's thought to be the case, but we can't rule out that there could be a streetlight effect happening. The ANE is where we expect to find this sort of early structure, and it's also one of the most heavily studied areas alongside North America and Europe. North Africa, particularly Tunisia where there's already a number of known epipaleolithic sites, is substantially less accessible for this kind of research.

To directly answer your question though, the Tas Tepler sites survived because they were buried and the locations they're in are pretty bad places for people to live today. They're way up on hills around the urfa/harran plain where there's outcroppings of the stone used to build them, but also without water. People seemingly just carried water up the hills from cisterns farther down. The locations of those cisterns also suggest that there may be further sites we haven't found, because some of them don't correspond to anything we know of.

Re: A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe

#56

Post by throwmeaway222 »

sethammons wrote: post #34
mjd wrote: post #26

That's impossible, the mirror wasn't invented until millennia later, so there's no way the sculptor would have known what a human face looked like. They must think we're stupid.

I don't get your joke

I think he's making fun of historians that have really dumb reasons for declaring human culture is one way or another because of event X but it doesn't pass a sniff test. In this example, mirrors don't need to exist because people can look at other people (or more simply feel their own face). It was a 40% funny joke.

Re: A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe

#57

Post by Tuna-Fish »

dismalaf wrote: post #53
itopaloglu83 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, it looks like a festival ground, so I imagine people coming from all directions and multiple nomad tents etc. around it. What makes me wonder is that why did these hills survive, and why are we not finding similar things in north Africa and other civilization cradles. Maybe these were one off sites with limited use and were later just left alone, while anything in Egypt had continuous settlements so things jus…

> 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.

The interesting places to find new archaeological sites are places where we know there were lots of people nearby, and where for some reason human habitation ceased and the sites were preserved.

I hold some hope for new methods of underwater archaeology to uncover sites on the southern coast of the Black Sea and in the Persian Gulf. The latter especially because it was vast, rich floodplain during the last glacial maximum, and the oldest known true cities sprouted into existence on it's northern shore pretty much instantly after it flooded. I like to think that the oldest city ever built lies submerged in mud and water somewhere in there, just waiting to be found.

(Not that there would be necessarily much to find anymore, they probably didn't build out of rock.)

Re: A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe

#58

Post by itsnowandnever »

sethammons wrote: post #36

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.

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

Re: A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe

#59

Post by pwillia7 »

acuozzo wrote: post #44
pwillia7 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I got pretty into this alt archaeology stuff Links?

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

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

Re: A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe

#60

Post by baq »

acuozzo wrote: post #44
pwillia7 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I got pretty into this alt archaeology stuff Links?

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)
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