Oh, for….God’s Teeth, I hate it when journalists write about things.
Look, it’s older than Catalhoyuk by maybe 2,000 years, which is a big deal, but Catalhoyuk was a proto-city in 7100BC. The journalist compares Karahan Tepe to other religious monuments and makes the (false) claim that we thought civilization didn’t exist before these religious monument sites, while ignoring all of the existing evidence for non-religious sites that are almost as old as Karahan Tepe. One of the interesting and puzzling things about Catalhoyuk is that there are no obvious public or ritual or ceremonial structures; it appears to be entirely individual residences but it had waste disposal systems and significant communal facilities like ovens, which implies a high level of social organization and planning.
One thing that always annoyed me during my ancient history studies was the level of absolute certainty in “firsts”, like Sumer (until, oops, Gobekli Tepe and Catalhoyuk); despite the obvious fact that the sum total of our archeological record is a single grain of sand on a very large beach, the “absence of evidence is evidence of absence” fallacy runs rampant. A lot of it is driven by the publish-or-perish nature of academia, PhDs tend to be unreasoningly attached to their theses.
TL;DR: Karahan Tepe is an incredibly cool discovery but no one should be all that surprised by it; the notion that homo sapiens sapiens only got around to doing sedentary architecture and agriculture in the very last 4% of their existence on this planet was always a shaky theory.
Agree, and the Sphinx is 12,000 years old. Was there long before the pyramids.
Very interesting but perhaps it is the author with the phallic obsession and not the ancients. If he used the word penis once, it would have been enough.
I find it amazing that we credit a people whose artistic expression developed no further than stick figure, two dimensional drawings, with creating artifacts in stone that we cannot duplicate today.
But… believe what you wish
the whole bible thing, the whole ufo thing, the whole etc thing?
a hint: NOBODY got it right yet. nobody.
all the clamour is just egos swinging away and bashing everything else within range.
being autistic, and thus leaning towards exactitude, l would express the date range as
11,000- 13,000 to be crystal clear.
unlike the accepted norm of depending on the vagaries and imprecision of ye olde muther tung.
Just never use the “W” word!
Anatolia and the Black Sea region is the cradle of civilization, the early peoples developed and immigrated in many waves over thousands of years spreading north, east, south and west as the northern ice sheets melted.
Many wandered south to build the earliest Sumerian civilizations and later as far as northern India in the early bronze age have all but been replaced today by eastern & southerly invaders over thousands of years.
Those that went west in successive cultural waves through immigration and conquest swallowed the much earlier western hunter gatherers who themselves were the earliest “migrations” from the Black Sea region. All of these waves of “Caucuses” genetic origins culminated over thousands of years to became Europeans.
…”penis chamber”…? So, they had a House of Representatives?
How can you tell the difference between living rock and dead rock?
Oh, for….God’s Teeth, I hate it when journalists write about things.
Look, it’s older than Catalhoyuk by maybe 2,000 years, which is a big deal, but Catalhoyuk was a proto-city in 7100BC. The journalist compares Karahan Tepe to other religious monuments and makes the (false) claim that we thought civilization didn’t exist before these religious monument sites, while ignoring all of the existing evidence for non-religious sites that are almost as old as Karahan Tepe. One of the interesting and puzzling things about Catalhoyuk is that there are no obvious public or ritual or ceremonial structures; it appears to be entirely individual residences but it had waste disposal systems and significant communal facilities like ovens, which implies a high level of social organization and planning.
One thing that always annoyed me during my ancient history studies was the level of absolute certainty in “firsts”, like Sumer (until, oops, Gobekli Tepe and Catalhoyuk); despite the obvious fact that the sum total of our archeological record is a single grain of sand on a very large beach, the “absence of evidence is evidence of absence” fallacy runs rampant. A lot of it is driven by the publish-or-perish nature of academia, PhDs tend to be unreasoningly attached to their theses.
TL;DR: Karahan Tepe is an incredibly cool discovery but no one should be all that surprised by it; the notion that homo sapiens sapiens only got around to doing sedentary architecture and agriculture in the very last 4% of their existence on this planet was always a shaky theory.
Agree, and the Sphinx is 12,000 years old. Was there long before the pyramids.
Very interesting but perhaps it is the author with the phallic obsession and not the ancients. If he used the word penis once, it would have been enough.
I find it amazing that we credit a people whose artistic expression developed no further than stick figure, two dimensional drawings, with creating artifacts in stone that we cannot duplicate today.
But… believe what you wish
Awiens!
And speaking of civilization disappearing, the second most popular article on that site is currently this one: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-is-canada-euthanising-the-poor-
Thanks for the article,enjoyed it.
the whole bible thing, the whole ufo thing, the whole etc thing?
a hint: NOBODY got it right yet. nobody.
all the clamour is just egos swinging away and bashing everything else within range.
being autistic, and thus leaning towards exactitude, l would express the date range as
11,000- 13,000 to be crystal clear.
unlike the accepted norm of depending on the vagaries and imprecision of ye olde muther tung.
Just never use the “W” word!
Anatolia and the Black Sea region is the cradle of civilization, the early peoples developed and immigrated in many waves over thousands of years spreading north, east, south and west as the northern ice sheets melted.
Many wandered south to build the earliest Sumerian civilizations and later as far as northern India in the early bronze age have all but been replaced today by eastern & southerly invaders over thousands of years.
Those that went west in successive cultural waves through immigration and conquest swallowed the much earlier western hunter gatherers who themselves were the earliest “migrations” from the Black Sea region. All of these waves of “Caucuses” genetic origins culminated over thousands of years to became Europeans.
…”penis chamber”…? So, they had a House of Representatives?
How can you tell the difference between living rock and dead rock?
Liked the article.