Yes, these are faces, but why do they look like pillars to me? Ornamented and sculpted pillars are pretty common across civilizations and I can imagine sloping tent like roof set up that are held up by these pillars. How does one separate a pillar and a obelisk?
A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe
81–90 of 199 posts
Re: A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
> challenge our timeline of when humans made cities Do they? We know non-sedentary people in the Americas sometimes built large mounds and extensive fish works.
I think it pushed back when humans started building large structures together a few 1000 years. Oddly, there is no evidence of agriculture at Gobekli Tepe https://www.reddit.com/r/Archaeology/comments/kxquwx/is_gobl...
If it turns out to be earlier than we thought then the climate may have been different. These sites could be the swan song of a civilization in decay, or a group that had an amicable diaspora and used these places for social purposes.
I imagine a culture that realized the land couldn’t support them in concentrations, picked a spot to meet every spring equinox to party and maybe make romantic matches and then dissolved back into the surrounding countryside.
Maybe this was their Burning Man.
Essentially someone had to figure out the civilized part of civilization and the density part of civilization. It’s a chicken and egg problem, and who is to say they did at the same time?
As GP mentioned, there were somewhat similar arrangements in North America not so long after this time period.
Re: A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 streetl…
To what extent is our understanding of this period limited by survivorship? Granite doesn't weather significantly, so we see lots of metalithic stone structures with ambiguous dating. The near east had significant changes in inland climates so we find ancient cities that were not built over there. Soft rock/mud Brick structures can survive in dry climates - so we see evidence of the oldest civilizations in deserts. C…
Short answer: it's hard to fully say, but most people believe that the holocene is a lower bound on this sort of thing. I'll try to explain, but keep in mind that I'm trying to massively simplify a huge field of open questions.
The fundamental assumption underlying most archaeology is that changes in material culture broadly reflect people reacting to the world around them in intelligent ways. Most archaeologists therefore believe that Pleistocene people didn't build permanent structures out of stone because nomadic or seminomadic lifestyles were more optimal for the chaotic pleistocene environments happening globally. There's a few people who disagree with the universality of this idea, most famously the authors of Dawn of Everything who argue for a more diverse family of lifeways in early humans, but that's just quibbling about the edges of this overall narrative rather than rewriting it.
And we'd expect to have more evidence than we do if the holocene boundary wasn't the effective start date for this kind of structure. Cave environments are much more stable, and it's where much of our evidence comes from. Gobekli Tepe (GT) and other Tas Tepler sites are made with local limestone, an extremely erosion-prone rock. We have sites covered by existing urban cities like Jericho, the earliest layers of which date from around the same time as GT. We also have older structures, like the epigravittean mammoth huts, and a fairly good idea of the forager->farmer transition in the near east across the natufian culture. GT is actually thought to be part of that transition.
But yes, a lot of organic stuff from the pleistocene is gone. Organics were probably the dominant form of material used, so that leaves a huge gap we're still struggling with. Not really sure where I'm going with this, so I guess I'll stop here?
Re: A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
don't forget water and maybe oiled polished obsidian?
Re: A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
I only watched a little bit of his stuff before I realized people thought he is a kook. But in small doses some of this stuff can sound like sense.
The one that got me was a supposed foundation legend from Sumer that a handful of strangers came and taught them civilization.
The idea of a remnant people floating down a river to escape some sort of societal collapse and then being adopted into a new tribe for their usefulness has a certain something as a hypothesis goes. It’s the “strangers” part that’s a bit suspect since how would you not meet neighbors like that. Unless the river was the end of their journey and not the start.
Re: A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe
#86The age is pretty impressive, also I noticed that Firefox could translate the article without issues using privacy-preserving offline translation. Now nobody will know that I have read the article!
Re: A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe
#87Re: A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe
#88Great find! and I don’t want to underestimate the discovery by any means, but... We humans are predisposed to see anthropomorphic shapes in things. I understand why that could be interpreted as a face, but at the same time, it could just be a random shape. It’s just a “T” shape. Sure, it could look like a nose and a pair of eyes, but it could also just be... something.
Other stuff at Karahan Tepe has faces on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karahan_Tepe And you can look at similar things from the Taş Tepeler sites in general: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta%C5%9F_Tepeler The T-obelisk things, with their long skinny arms, do seem to represent figures. I wonder why they have to be that stupid oblong shape at all. Dual purpose as roof supports? Or just tradition, tradition causes wack…
>Looking around the various carvings from related sites, it's also evident that they were greatly interested in penises.
Some things never change.
Re: A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it hard to believe that these peoples had no social organization at all, and even harder to believe that you could state that with such conviction given how little we know about these sites. I’m definitely curious though! Can you share any links or reading recommendations?
I learned about it in school, I took some anthropology and archeology electives. and what I was told was since there were no defensive structures nor evidence of any security apparatus at all (such as an army) there isn't any evidence of a means to enforce a hierarchy
That sounds like a Childe-esque checklist. In general, we wouldn't expect a strongly hierarchical social organization in this time period, in upper mesopotamia. That's more characteristic of lower Mesopotamian early societies a few thousand years later when cities like Eridu appeared. What we see in upper Mesopotamia is a pretty strong continuity with PPN sites like GT all the way through the Ubaid period, both in terms of architecture and infant burials and they're thought to reflect socially egalitarian societies. Many people (myself included) consider upper and lower Mesopotamia two largely separate cultural areas throughout the PPN because they're so different and argue that the traditional definitions derived from southern cities (like Childe's) are inappropriate to apply to northern urbanism.
Re: A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe
#90It looks like a Carbot Animations character.