If you're interested in learning more about these incredible Turkish archaeological sites, I can't recommend the YouTube channel Miniminuteman [0] enough. Milo is extremely passionate about his field of study and makes highly entertaining and informative videos about archaeology and anthropology, including a recent series where he became the first real archaeologist ever to be allowed to film a documentary on-site at Karahantepe! [1]
He mentions that people back then lived around 35 years. I recall reading it's a mistaken interpretation of the average age, while many people died infants adults actually easily lived to 70+ yo. Is it true and he made the same mistake or am I thinking about a different period in history?
These statistics regularly make it sound like everyone was dying off around 30.
In reality, it is due to infant mortality rates. Once you make it past a certain age (10-15 years) your life expectancy shoots up into the 40-60's easily. However, when you average the population out, those infant deaths tank the average life expectancy.
I'm not surprised they glossed over this, most researchers do, because they don't want to go into infantile deaths, disease spread during child birth, still births, etc.
Not only is it a complex topic, but it's fraught with political and religious ideology. When my history and anthropology professors started talking about it, certain folks of a particular religious bent almost immediately started trying to correct them about it.
> Researchers Gurven and Kaplan have estimated that around 57% of hunter-gatherers reach the age of 15. Of those that reach 15 years of age, 64% continue to live to or past the age of 45. This places the life expectancy between 21 and 37 years.[54] They further estimate that 70% of deaths are due to diseases of some kind, 20% of deaths come from violence or accidents and 10% are due to degenerative diseases.
I don't know if they -easily- lived up to 70, but it was possible to live to that age for sure :) . death rate of "at birth" and early years was far far higher than now. they certainly lived longer than 30-35 that I hear slung around though. If you lived to 15 or so you could easily live to 50-60. Although those early corpses almost always show infection by parasites and such and not so pretty healing from injuries.
It feels like the significance of this is lost on many people.
My understanding is that complex things like statues were not supposed to be possible 12,000 years ago. I think it’s supposed to be more like 6000 years ago. The fact that it has been carbon dated to 12,000 tears should means that we have to rewrite the theories on the start of human civilization.
These statues needed to be carved out of tools and the educational techniques for carving it off stone and the social structure to support art were not supposed to exist at this time. This is pretty huge in terms of figuring out the birth of human civilization.
And the fact that the same site also has these huge stone megaliths that also weren’t supposed to be possible and were also dated to 12,000 years so just solidified the idea that our current theories are completely wrong.
> My understanding is that complex things like statues were not supposed to be possible 12,000 years ago.
Huh? The Venus of Willendorf[1] is twice as old, and to my eye displays a higher degree of artistry than the statue shown in the article. Several such Venus figurines have been found in central Europe.
Compared to the intricacy of the Venus' limestone carving, the statue from the article looks downright crude. The idea that it's "not supposed to be possible" to make something like that 12,000 years BP is ridiculous, and I can't imagine where you might have got that impression. Yes, the new statue is life-size, while the Venus is a figurine, but that doesn't necessarily make it any more difficult to manufacture (possibly easier, in fact).
Venus of Willendorf is quite small, and not especially life-like, but similar large statues have been found in the area before, from around the same time (12kya ago). It's not even a unique find, and fits reasonably well(ish) in established chronology and progression (insofar that's possible for pre-history). Pretty much everything the previous poster said is wrong.
What I think you might be missing is that Venus could be a pet project of a single person, done in their free time over some period.
The statues, especially in the context of the greater site, could not be made by one person — many people should be working there for quite a long period of time, while physically staying in the place. Since they were working on the temple complex, (a) they could not be themselves participating in hunter-gathering activities (and we think human societies were engaged with that at the time); and (b) someone else should be providing them with the food, clothes, tools, and everything they need — implying there was some sort of a social structure (aka civilization).
This is what I think GP meant when saying "not supposed to be possible 12,000 years ago".
NAA, but I think what you’re missing is that this Venus statue is something a single person can carve on their own time, anywhere.
Carving a 2-ton statue in-place requires much better and larger tools, and some kind of social organization that values that activity and protects the site.
look, if you take the two things in isolation, then you may have a point. the Venus is certainly a more beautiful artistic piece
but you're trying to argue that an 11cm tall figurine with no facial features is a civilisational achievement on par with a massive 'temple' complex full of metres-high sculptures, reliefs and symbols that would require significant societal organisation and advancement: protection, education, food surplus, likely division of labour. decades of work at least
the Venus of Willendorf could indicate some of those things, but it equally could have just been made by one especially advanced human
> My understanding is that complex things like statues were not supposed to be possible 12,000 years ago. I think it’s supposed to be more like 6000 years ago.
Recently I keep wondering whether people have thought about this from a statistical perspective.
Like, if I suddenly find a dead rat in my kitchen, what should I think about it? Should I consider that maybe I have had a pest problem for months or possibly years, or should I consider this as "we found evidence for rats existing in my house for at most one day"?
It seems archeology takes the "evidence based" approach and refuses to calculate the expected probability of more stuff being discovered that's older/more impressive using the fact that we are discovering (mostly) random stuff buried in the ground.
What are the chances that the stuff we dug up are not the pinnacle of human civilization back then, and merely an average object? If people 3000 years from now dug up a brick from a rural village, should they infer that we only know how to build brick houses and not skyscrapers? What are the chances of digging up remains of a skyscraper?
Pretty big error bars on any estimations, with the low number of samples. But yeah, I wonder if anyone has tried to give a confidence interval for "tech level over time".
You could look at multiple points and try to generate a distribution of when this kind of activity happened. You might find that the number of points results in a pitifully poor confidence level in an expected probability though. Not enough rats and not enough kitchens.
There is no way to calculate that, since current finds are not random digs. Archeologist search where they have reasons to think something of interest can be found.
its why i love graham hancock and everything he talks about, its so exciting to think about the great achievements of all the human civilizations that have come about in the 200-300k years that humans have been around
We know sculptures and cave-paintings much older than this, some made with great artistic skill, so clearly no archeologist would suggest art was “not possible” at this time. Still a significant find and very fascinating.
Our knowledge of such ancient peoples is so limited and subject to so many filters, that we should hesitate to think of some achievements as impossible. It’s just not that black & white. The general pattern of civilizational development could still be broadly correct, with this site just being a notable outlier.
I think you might appreciate the book The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow [1]. They dive into the archaeological record and argue precisely that: that the common story of how civilization developed is very wrong, and that complex societies existed before the rise of agriculture, longer than is usually assumed. These findings at Göbekli Tepe appear very much in line with their theory.
It is very interesting, that you says about 6000 years ago.
It is "calculated" (in the middle ages) age of The Great Flood.
I've read some opinion, that modern European historians, even atheist ones, still "primed" by this number and it skews all our understanding of history and perception of archaeological finds. It is not some random number, but legacy of pre-Renaissance Biblical studies, haunting us to these modern times.
> My understanding is that complex things like statues were not supposed to be possible 12,000 years ago. I think it’s supposed to be more like 6000 years ago
I think your understanding was just incorrect. Here's a video [0] from Kurzgesagt that explains in a nutshell when the human civilisation started (spoiler: as far back as around 20,000 years ago, but definitely the case 12,000 years ago, though the boundary is very fuzzy). But also note that even before a proper civilisation started to form people already made art.
I don't even understand what are you on about. The same kind of statue up.to the holding of the genital has been found in the same area in 1993 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urfa_Man
Not even talking of the fact that 25000 years before people were making incredible art at the grotte Chauvet or that around the same time, a 30cm statue was carved in Germany representing an anthropomorphised Lion ans
Yup - if you are thinking about what the story was in about 1978...
Since then there's been a big change from the idea cities were the only locus of culture and technology to a view that nomadic peoples were able to create significant ritual art, technical knowlege, and complex cultures. Of course the view from the 19th and early 20th C's was significantly informed by the need to justify all the genociding of nomadic peoples ("it's for their own good").
The idea I've heard recently is that agriculture grew out of nomadic people encouraging the food plants that they would be looking for in a years time by planting selected seeds and then going off to the next area, over time this led to crops that were more and more adapted as food stuff and this then enabled settled agrarianism. Places like Göbeklitepe are thought to be the ritual centers of nomadic cultures doing this sort of per-agricultural precession. I have read (no expert) that are similar sights in the southern united states where (now genocided) nomadic people used to come together and conduct major rituals which required significant communal investment and co-ordination.
Civilization with no cities... who'd have thought?
All those thoughts were going through my head as I was reading it, and I’m not like a history major or anything. Modern humans biologically have been around for a pretty long time so I’ve often wondered if civilizations existed where we simply haven’t found their artifacts, maybe because they didn’t produce or value them at the time.
A common statement was brought up in my history classes:
"humans of the past were often as resourceful, if not more resourceful than we are, they simply had less opportunities than we do today."
If you put yourself in the place of your ancestors. Who you are, you could probably figure out a way to make a statue. It stands to reason that someone a bit smarter (or more motivated) than you or I could also figure it out without our modern day tools.
Human ingenuity is astounding and I love the idea that past humanity was just us without iPhones.
Do you need special tools to do this though? Or just one rock that's harder than the other one?
That said I used to make "tools" out of sticks and rocks as a child playing outdoors. Why do we think people didn't have tools or the capacity to invent them 12000 years ago?
It has been my pet theory that human civilizations had advanced a lot more before a some kind of extinction event pushed humans back to 1. Maybe not as technologically advanced as the current civilization but advanced in its own way.
It’s an entertaining idea, however unfortunately easily proven wrong. The most striking argument against it (or any “Silurian” theory) is that any form of “civilization” in the strictest sense needs permanent settlements that require permanent agriculture, and hence fertilized soil. We should hence be able to find nitrogen rich layers of soil or sediment where prehistoric civilizations resided, but that’s just not the case.
It doesn't, and the stone itself is typically hundreds of millions or even billions of years old.
However, many ancient artifacts are found buried in the ground, and it is often possible to carbon-date organic material in the soil surrounding the artifact, which produces an estimate for when it was buried. This is typically combined with historians' estimates for when the culture that presumably produced the artifact flourished, though uncertainties of several millennia remain in some cases.
Has the statue itself been dated? 12,000 yo is the estimated founding date of Göbekli Tepe not it's last use. Humans like to move things about go through many phases of inhabitation of a place.
How is dating as a science faring in the replication crisis? It seems fraught with incentives for those involved. Discover something 2000 years old and no-one cares but 12,000 years old and you've got a TV career and a book deal.
The incentives are that the person who discovered the previously oldest <12,000 island that defined their archeological site as the coolest site, tends to fight. That plus 3rd party dating and other solutions. Because sometimes there is not a lot to go off of for dating, I've also seen people complaining that samples aren't always shared. So it's not perfect for sure, but I'm noting there are still incentives in that system
Notice that, although it was a completely alien culture in a very far away time, before agriculture and writing, we still know what a lifelike facial expression looks like.
Many things vary from culture to culture. Facial expressions, at least many of them, are consistent across humanity. If someone stubs their toe or tastes something delicious, you'll know without words.
Look up 'human universals' in anthropology, evolutionary psychology, and in other fields. Donald Brown (see below) gives some opinionated background here, including a literature review (of Brown's own writings, and more):
I don't think any other species has the set of facial muscles humans do. Cats seem inscrutable because they have very few; dogs seem more understandable because they can move their eyebrows.
I think the non-human animal with the most facial expressions is the chimpanzee, but even then it is much less expressive than a human in this regard.
Various mammals have (non-facial) macroexpression somewhat similar to humans, such as excitement, curiosity and fear. Many non-mammals such as birds, fish, and some reptiles can express fear to some extent.
Some universals are certainly shared with other creatures, and it's not even restricted to mammals. From one article:
Take, for example, social facilitation or the notion that organisms tend to perform better on simple tasks in the presence of observers. Although disagreement about its innate origins exists (Do-Yeong and Junsu 2010), social facilitation has had supportive evidence in humans in a natural setting (Michaels et al. 1982), cockroaches (Zajonc et al. 1969), and macaques (Dindo et al. 2009).
(I don't know about facial expressions, though the fact that I don't know means little - I've just read a bit about it.)
There are other universals among non-human species, not shared with us, such as 100+ discovered for chimpanzees.
Source: Reza Ziai, "Cross-Cultural Universality". In Todd K Shackelford, Viviana A Weekes-Shackelford, eds. Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer (2021)
As I understand it, in that case it is by dating the age of the materials the wood in question was buried in. The minerals are dated using luminescence dating. That tells you when those particles were last exposed to sunlight.
> And the timber is much older than the earliest modern human - or Homo sapiens - fossils, which are about 315,000 years old.
this is what astonished me. I somehow depicted our ancestors or relatives to be purely hunter/gatherers without the means (and will) to build complex wooden structures.
It's always funny to me how some people will go out of their way to avoid acknowledging that historical people may have liked sex or even been queer.
My favorite example is that of two Roman men apparently living together as a household and having items with very graphic depictions of sexual acts between men. They were obviously two very heterosexual men (maybe brothers) and the depictions of men ravaging each other's buttocks were probably a fertility or sports thing.
I may be wrong but I don't believe that the reason that bathroom stalls are frequently adorned with crude sketches of penises is "fertility stuff" either rather than just "lol dicks" and I don't think it's a stretch to extrapolate from this to prehistory.
There's a very real possibility that this is just a 12,000 year old "realistic human statue" of some bloke double-palming his stiffy (which according to the article is incidentally near a relief of another bloke presenting his stiffy one-handed with the other hand on his stomach). Yes, a two meters tall statue takes quite a bit of effort and suggests more than one person being involved in the process but that shouldn't be surprising.
It would be funny if it was the prehistoric equivalent of the city of Dog River putting up a sign saying "Wullerton Sucks!" It could for instance represent a foreigner with the statue saying certain foreigners are wankers.
In that time there is relatively little figurative art of humans. Rarely seen in cave painting, etc. The nearest would be the Venus figurines but they don't typically show facial features or internal anatomical details. It's a major major find bro.
I haven't seen much art from that era either and was pretty surprised to see the statue. However looking into it, I'm even more surprised to learn of the Venus of Brassempouy.
I've heard that much of the ruins from Ancient Greeze were likely brightly colored and painted. I can't help but wonder if the Venus I mentioned had been painted as well. It's possible that they did have detailed faces, and that they simply weren't sculpted.
I suspect it’s more a problem about longevity of the artifacts, rather than lack of talent or knowing one can pick up some mud and form a shape.
They had very similar general intelligence and talents as us, at that time, and tens of thousand of years before. Today, it’s not terribly hard to find artistic kids who can mold extremely good faces, ponies, or whatever else they choose, from a lump of play dough. I assume artistic people existed then too, with comparable talent and frequency, unless there was some catastrophic non-artist pruning that happened very very recently.
I don't understand why it is so radical though. Even when I was a bored kid I could pick up a stick and whittle out a face not to far from what was in the article with a decently sharp knife and some time. Doesn't seem like a huge jump to do it in stone if the stone is easy enough to shape with a harder stone/mineral...
We're talking anthropology here, not art criticism. It's leagues more realistic than anything we've uncovered. Something like the bronze charioteer which is incredibly vivid and accurate is made nearly 10,000 years later than this one.
> That's not what I consider a "realistic human statue" ?
the HN title is wrong, TFA says "realistic facial expression". Of course, it's neither a realistic facial expression, so all the comments are still valid. Carry on.
Yeah I was expecting something like a greek statue with very realistic human features, but I guess this is still astounding since other statues of the time are even less anthropomorphous.
We have a fairly good idea of how sculpture evolved in the past 5,000 years or so. By 2500 BCE, the Egyptians had already mastered realistic sculpture:
Experimental OSL dates from a wasp nest overlaying a tassel Gwion Gwion figure has given a Pleistocene date of 17,500 ± 1,800 years BP. The academic community generally accepts 5,000 BP for the end of the artistic style. If the date ranges are correct, this may demonstrate that the Gwion Gwion tradition was produced for many millennia.
Stick figure cave paintings are paleolithic graffiti. If you think artists find it hard to scratch a living these days, you're not going to find much support for following your passion when there is hunting, gathering and defending against predators to do.
But if a sharman (assuming it is a statue for their deity) has the time, then there's no reason it couldn't be perfectly proportioned. It's not like hand-eye coordination has suddenly evolved; it would more be access to better tools than a piece of flint to bang on some softer rock.
Is there some way that we could "scan the Earth" to find other long-buried sites like Göbeklitepe?
Would it be possible to do something from imaging satellites — something akin to ground-penetrating radar / laser range-finding / ultrasound — that might not be good enough for much, but which would be "just good enough" to find any other gigantic cities with walls built of dense stone, hidden under 10-50ft of dirt or sand?
Yes they've been doing lidar scans throughout central america to detect ancient Mayan pyramids and cities that are hidden under foliage. They've identified thousands of structures but other factors have limited their ability to unearth them (# of archaeologists, funding, politics).
Yes, lidar is great and all for what it does, and will definitely find us many new sites; but lidar just detects structures that cause raised areas (i.e. plants growing up and over the structures) rather than detecting structures hidden within a flat plane of fill-in medium like dirt/sand, the way Göbeklitepe was hidden. Lidar wouldn't have found Göbeklitepe.
> Is there some way that we could "scan the Earth" to find other long-buried sites like Göbeklitepe?
The Brits had started a Lidar survey of most of their country a few years ago, I'd say 2015-2016, but I'm not sure if that information is entirely accurate and, if it is accurate, I'm not sure how far they have got with it (what if all the cuts made to spending money on stuff that is not seen as essential).
GP radar should work, as long as the artifacts are of a material sufficiently different from the earth on top of them for the interface to cause a radar echo. I’ve no idea what exactly counts as sufficiently different" though.
I wonder how long ago our ancestors forgot about this settlement and it was lost, and how many times it was rediscovered through the ages. I bet Homer knew of or had heard of some ancient sites that were either never memorialized in a poem, or poems never survived to modern times.
It's honestly staggering to think about how much didn't survive because it was made of wood or clay. And the oral history of our species that is forever lost. Just staggering.
I find it more staggering that anything survived (with a gap before being rediscovered). It's just funny to think about the set of circumstances that might lead to things being left, forgotten, and buried, isn't it?
Readit News
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@miniminuteman773
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EaKFKYPXVk
In reality, it is due to infant mortality rates. Once you make it past a certain age (10-15 years) your life expectancy shoots up into the 40-60's easily. However, when you average the population out, those infant deaths tank the average life expectancy.
I'm not surprised they glossed over this, most researchers do, because they don't want to go into infantile deaths, disease spread during child birth, still births, etc.
Not only is it a complex topic, but it's fraught with political and religious ideology. When my history and anthropology professors started talking about it, certain folks of a particular religious bent almost immediately started trying to correct them about it.
> Researchers Gurven and Kaplan have estimated that around 57% of hunter-gatherers reach the age of 15. Of those that reach 15 years of age, 64% continue to live to or past the age of 45. This places the life expectancy between 21 and 37 years.[54] They further estimate that 70% of deaths are due to diseases of some kind, 20% of deaths come from violence or accidents and 10% are due to degenerative diseases.
Deleted Comment
My understanding is that complex things like statues were not supposed to be possible 12,000 years ago. I think it’s supposed to be more like 6000 years ago. The fact that it has been carbon dated to 12,000 tears should means that we have to rewrite the theories on the start of human civilization.
These statues needed to be carved out of tools and the educational techniques for carving it off stone and the social structure to support art were not supposed to exist at this time. This is pretty huge in terms of figuring out the birth of human civilization.
And the fact that the same site also has these huge stone megaliths that also weren’t supposed to be possible and were also dated to 12,000 years so just solidified the idea that our current theories are completely wrong.
Huh? The Venus of Willendorf[1] is twice as old, and to my eye displays a higher degree of artistry than the statue shown in the article. Several such Venus figurines have been found in central Europe.
Compared to the intricacy of the Venus' limestone carving, the statue from the article looks downright crude. The idea that it's "not supposed to be possible" to make something like that 12,000 years BP is ridiculous, and I can't imagine where you might have got that impression. Yes, the new statue is life-size, while the Venus is a figurine, but that doesn't necessarily make it any more difficult to manufacture (possibly easier, in fact).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf
The statues, especially in the context of the greater site, could not be made by one person — many people should be working there for quite a long period of time, while physically staying in the place. Since they were working on the temple complex, (a) they could not be themselves participating in hunter-gathering activities (and we think human societies were engaged with that at the time); and (b) someone else should be providing them with the food, clothes, tools, and everything they need — implying there was some sort of a social structure (aka civilization).
This is what I think GP meant when saying "not supposed to be possible 12,000 years ago".
Carving a 2-ton statue in-place requires much better and larger tools, and some kind of social organization that values that activity and protects the site.
but you're trying to argue that an 11cm tall figurine with no facial features is a civilisational achievement on par with a massive 'temple' complex full of metres-high sculptures, reliefs and symbols that would require significant societal organisation and advancement: protection, education, food surplus, likely division of labour. decades of work at least
the Venus of Willendorf could indicate some of those things, but it equally could have just been made by one especially advanced human
Recently I keep wondering whether people have thought about this from a statistical perspective.
Like, if I suddenly find a dead rat in my kitchen, what should I think about it? Should I consider that maybe I have had a pest problem for months or possibly years, or should I consider this as "we found evidence for rats existing in my house for at most one day"?
It seems archeology takes the "evidence based" approach and refuses to calculate the expected probability of more stuff being discovered that's older/more impressive using the fact that we are discovering (mostly) random stuff buried in the ground.
What are the chances that the stuff we dug up are not the pinnacle of human civilization back then, and merely an average object? If people 3000 years from now dug up a brick from a rural village, should they infer that we only know how to build brick houses and not skyscrapers? What are the chances of digging up remains of a skyscraper?
I have so many burning questions lol
its why i love graham hancock and everything he talks about, its so exciting to think about the great achievements of all the human civilizations that have come about in the 200-300k years that humans have been around
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabarnmung
The birthplace of masonry .. the worlds oldest, longest-running university .. its oldest (still functioning) commons ..
Our knowledge of such ancient peoples is so limited and subject to so many filters, that we should hesitate to think of some achievements as impossible. It’s just not that black & white. The general pattern of civilizational development could still be broadly correct, with this site just being a notable outlier.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything
I've read some opinion, that modern European historians, even atheist ones, still "primed" by this number and it skews all our understanding of history and perception of archaeological finds. It is not some random number, but legacy of pre-Renaissance Biblical studies, haunting us to these modern times.
We know of cities 9000 years old.
There is also the Urfa man, dated 9000 BC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urfa_Man
I think your understanding was just incorrect. Here's a video [0] from Kurzgesagt that explains in a nutshell when the human civilisation started (spoiler: as far back as around 20,000 years ago, but definitely the case 12,000 years ago, though the boundary is very fuzzy). But also note that even before a proper civilisation started to form people already made art.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWu29PRCUvQ
Not even talking of the fact that 25000 years before people were making incredible art at the grotte Chauvet or that around the same time, a 30cm statue was carved in Germany representing an anthropomorphised Lion ans
Since then there's been a big change from the idea cities were the only locus of culture and technology to a view that nomadic peoples were able to create significant ritual art, technical knowlege, and complex cultures. Of course the view from the 19th and early 20th C's was significantly informed by the need to justify all the genociding of nomadic peoples ("it's for their own good").
The idea I've heard recently is that agriculture grew out of nomadic people encouraging the food plants that they would be looking for in a years time by planting selected seeds and then going off to the next area, over time this led to crops that were more and more adapted as food stuff and this then enabled settled agrarianism. Places like Göbeklitepe are thought to be the ritual centers of nomadic cultures doing this sort of per-agricultural precession. I have read (no expert) that are similar sights in the southern united states where (now genocided) nomadic people used to come together and conduct major rituals which required significant communal investment and co-ordination.
Civilization with no cities... who'd have thought?
"humans of the past were often as resourceful, if not more resourceful than we are, they simply had less opportunities than we do today."
If you put yourself in the place of your ancestors. Who you are, you could probably figure out a way to make a statue. It stands to reason that someone a bit smarter (or more motivated) than you or I could also figure it out without our modern day tools.
Human ingenuity is astounding and I love the idea that past humanity was just us without iPhones.
Your understanding is not correct.
> The fact that it has been carbon dated to 12,000 tears should means that we have to rewrite the theories on the start of human civilization.
It does not. Göbekli Tepe has in general, but I don't think this specific find does.
That said I used to make "tools" out of sticks and rocks as a child playing outdoors. Why do we think people didn't have tools or the capacity to invent them 12000 years ago?
Wouldn't it be dating the underlying material (i.e. the stone), which presumably predates the actual carving of the statue out of that material?
Edit: I guess if it was buried, they date the organic material around it.
It doesn't, and the stone itself is typically hundreds of millions or even billions of years old.
However, many ancient artifacts are found buried in the ground, and it is often possible to carbon-date organic material in the soil surrounding the artifact, which produces an estimate for when it was buried. This is typically combined with historians' estimates for when the culture that presumably produced the artifact flourished, though uncertainties of several millennia remain in some cases.
They dated the charcoal in layers settled about the statue:
https://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-telegrams/2016/06/22/how-ol...
How is dating as a science faring in the replication crisis? It seems fraught with incentives for those involved. Discover something 2000 years old and no-one cares but 12,000 years old and you've got a TV career and a book deal.
Dead Comment
Notice that, although it was a completely alien culture in a very far away time, before agriculture and writing, we still know what a lifelike facial expression looks like.
Many things vary from culture to culture. Facial expressions, at least many of them, are consistent across humanity. If someone stubs their toe or tastes something delicious, you'll know without words.
Look up 'human universals' in anthropology, evolutionary psychology, and in other fields. Donald Brown (see below) gives some opinionated background here, including a literature review (of Brown's own writings, and more):
https://literary-universals.uconn.edu/2017/06/25/human-unive...
The seminal book is Human Universals by Donald Brown:
https://archive.org/details/humanuniversals0000brow/
(I don't know how fully accepted it is; there seems to be at least some disupte over Brown's theories.)
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I think the non-human animal with the most facial expressions is the chimpanzee, but even then it is much less expressive than a human in this regard.
Various mammals have (non-facial) macroexpression somewhat similar to humans, such as excitement, curiosity and fear. Many non-mammals such as birds, fish, and some reptiles can express fear to some extent.
Take, for example, social facilitation or the notion that organisms tend to perform better on simple tasks in the presence of observers. Although disagreement about its innate origins exists (Do-Yeong and Junsu 2010), social facilitation has had supportive evidence in humans in a natural setting (Michaels et al. 1982), cockroaches (Zajonc et al. 1969), and macaques (Dindo et al. 2009).
(I don't know about facial expressions, though the fact that I don't know means little - I've just read a bit about it.)
There are other universals among non-human species, not shared with us, such as 100+ discovered for chimpanzees.
Source: Reza Ziai, "Cross-Cultural Universality". In Todd K Shackelford, Viviana A Weekes-Shackelford, eds. Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer (2021)
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66846772
Question - how can they prove that someone in more recent times didn't notch more ancient wood?
I love how in other words you could also say “played with lincoln logs” :)
this is what astonished me. I somehow depicted our ancestors or relatives to be purely hunter/gatherers without the means (and will) to build complex wooden structures.
>I was amazed to know that woodworking was such a deep-rooted tradition
I wonder if it was deliberately humorous, which would add another dimension.
I know that the Incas had statues that were basically hardcore pr0n. I’m not sure the reason. Probably fertility stuff.
[8000 years earlier]
"Man": "Yea, so Gary over there cut down my favourite Olive tree so I commissioned this huge statute of a dick to let him know how much I hate him"
Like this thing - maybe it's mocking someone? Who knows.
My favorite example is that of two Roman men apparently living together as a household and having items with very graphic depictions of sexual acts between men. They were obviously two very heterosexual men (maybe brothers) and the depictions of men ravaging each other's buttocks were probably a fertility or sports thing.
I may be wrong but I don't believe that the reason that bathroom stalls are frequently adorned with crude sketches of penises is "fertility stuff" either rather than just "lol dicks" and I don't think it's a stretch to extrapolate from this to prehistory.
There's a very real possibility that this is just a 12,000 year old "realistic human statue" of some bloke double-palming his stiffy (which according to the article is incidentally near a relief of another bloke presenting his stiffy one-handed with the other hand on his stomach). Yes, a two meters tall statue takes quite a bit of effort and suggests more than one person being involved in the process but that shouldn't be surprising.
I've heard that much of the ruins from Ancient Greeze were likely brightly colored and painted. I can't help but wonder if the Venus I mentioned had been painted as well. It's possible that they did have detailed faces, and that they simply weren't sculpted.
I'm the furthest thing from an expert of course.
They had very similar general intelligence and talents as us, at that time, and tens of thousand of years before. Today, it’s not terribly hard to find artistic kids who can mold extremely good faces, ponies, or whatever else they choose, from a lump of play dough. I assume artistic people existed then too, with comparable talent and frequency, unless there was some catastrophic non-artist pruning that happened very very recently.
the HN title is wrong, TFA says "realistic facial expression". Of course, it's neither a realistic facial expression, so all the comments are still valid. Carry on.
https://www.mfa.org/gallery/masterpieces-of-egyptian-sculptu...
But this discovery is a whopping 7,500 years older. It would have been inconceivably ancient to the pyramid builders too.
They're more than just stick figures, they detail ceremonial costumes quite well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwion_Gwion_rock_paintings
* Dating the spectrum of paintings is broad.
But if a sharman (assuming it is a statue for their deity) has the time, then there's no reason it couldn't be perfectly proportioned. It's not like hand-eye coordination has suddenly evolved; it would more be access to better tools than a piece of flint to bang on some softer rock.
https://i0.wp.com/themindcircle.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/...
From the better link someone posted below:
https://themindcircle.com/new-gobeklitepe-and-karahantepe-fi...
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Would it be possible to do something from imaging satellites — something akin to ground-penetrating radar / laser range-finding / ultrasound — that might not be good enough for much, but which would be "just good enough" to find any other gigantic cities with walls built of dense stone, hidden under 10-50ft of dirt or sand?
The Brits had started a Lidar survey of most of their country a few years ago, I'd say 2015-2016, but I'm not sure if that information is entirely accurate and, if it is accurate, I'm not sure how far they have got with it (what if all the cuts made to spending money on stuff that is not seen as essential).
Browsable map: https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=TQ7237355141
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