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11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

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Re: 11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

#51

Post by lisper »

MomsAVoxell wrote: post #42
lproven wrote: post #8

The ancient Sumerians invented cuneiform writing about 5000-5500Y ago. This is as long before ancient Sumer as ancient Sumer is before us today. Mind-boggling.

The original caretakers of the Australian continent have been telling the same stories orally for 40,000 years. Let that sink in! It is extraordinary to me that they don't get as much clout as they deserve for maintaining human civilization for so long. They literally evolved cryptologically sound techniques for maintaining their history - through fires, floods, calamity and Mother Nature. We can't even keep our stor…

> The original caretakers of the Australian continent have been telling the same stories orally for 40,000 years.

I know that this is commonly believed, but how could you possibly know?

Re: 11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

#53

Post by AlecSchueler »

MomsAVoxell wrote: post #42
lproven wrote: post #8

The ancient Sumerians invented cuneiform writing about 5000-5500Y ago. This is as long before ancient Sumer as ancient Sumer is before us today. Mind-boggling.

The original caretakers of the Australian continent have been telling the same stories orally for 40,000 years. Let that sink in! It is extraordinary to me that they don't get as much clout as they deserve for maintaining human civilization for so long. They literally evolved cryptologically sound techniques for maintaining their history - through fires, floods, calamity and Mother Nature. We can't even keep our stor…

> the same stories orally for 40,000 years

How is this confirmed without records?

Re: 11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

#54

Post by ck2 »

Potbelly Hill in Turkey dates back to 10,000BCE and it is an amazing story

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe#/media/File:...

the modern people who first looked at it thought it was just a graveyard with stone markers on the graves

then someone dug down much further and those stone markers were several meters high

Re: 11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

#56

Post by roryirvine »

0xffff2 wrote: post #31
retrac wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire. It's due to the historiography of western civilization that for so long always traced its origins back to Greece (and Cleopatra was, of course, Greek.) Compare to Mesopotamia, Sumer mentioned by the parent comment. There may be more surviving cuneiform literature than Greek and Latin. The…

I really hate that I'm even typing these words right now, but wouldn't this be one of the few fields where modern LLMs would potentially provide a real capability that was previously lacking? I'm imagining an LLM might be able to provide rough first pass translations and provide hints about which specific tablets might be most interesting for a human that can't possibly look at them all.

There's inevitably been quite a bit of research in using LLMs to help decipher cuneiform, but it's still at a fairly early stage. Good overview here:

https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/publications/mesopotamia/202...

"Artificial intelligence can therefore provide researchers with a significant support, helping them link together texts that mention the same individual, a geographical site, or a word within a large digitised corpus. But we are still far from machine decipherment of texts."

Re: 11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

#59

Post by nashashmi »

lproven wrote: post #8

The ancient Sumerians invented cuneiform writing about 5000-5500Y ago. This is as long before ancient Sumer as ancient Sumer is before us today. Mind-boggling.

nitpicking: Sumerians were the oldest civilization to have been found using cuneiform or scripted writing. The actual civilization to have truly invented writing is not known.

Re: 11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

#60

Post by bcraven »

lisper wrote: post #51
MomsAVoxell wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original caretakers of the Australian continent have been telling the same stories orally for 40,000 years. Let that sink in! It is extraordinary to me that they don't get as much clout as they deserve for maintaining human civilization for so long. They literally evolved cryptologically sound techniques for maintaining their history - through fires, floods, calamity and Mother Nature. We can't even keep our stor…

> The original caretakers of the Australian continent have been telling the same stories orally for 40,000 years. I know that this is commonly believed, but how could you possibly know?

I recommend everyone watch the documentary First Footprints[0], it is the most wondrous thing I have ever seen.

The simple answer is that some storied reference events that happened that long ago.[1]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n6VJ5jq7zY

[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/aboriginal-tale-anci...

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