https://www-trthaber-com.translate.goog/foto-galeri/karahant...
It's from basically the same period and culture as urfa man, but at a site that's been initially dated a few hundred years earlier and is generally understood to have been inhabited first. It's contemporaneous with the famous T-pillars at Gobekli Tepe. The important thing is that this is the first T-pillar discovered with a human face, aside from the one with just a human outline.
I kept scrolling though multiple articles as they seem to have a format type for these types of articles where its numbers a small paragraph and a high quality photo. Simply love it.
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.
"The arm and hand reliefs on the T-shaped standing stones found in Göbeklitepe and its surroundings have long strengthened the idea that these stones symbolize humans. This new find, which was unearthed in Karahantepe, is described as a new turning point in Neolithic period research with the fact that the human face was carved on a T-shaped standing stone for the first time."
"With its sharp lines, deep eye sockets and blunt nose, it carries a style similar to the human statues found before in Karahantepe."
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 wacky things. Looking around the various carvings from related sites, it's also evident that they were greatly interested in penises.
This was sculpted by other modern humans.
I see the boar statue is painted inside its mouth ... with red ochre.
Why throw interdisciplinary shade?
> I haven't seen any indications of paint residues on the pillars, but we know that many of the statues in these enclosures were also painted bright colors that would be missed by a digital reconstruction.
Wouldn’t a digital reconstruction just have whatever textures were selected? If there’s no indication of paint residues, they can look for other clues of course. But, without any other evidence, what’s the alternative, right? Guessing would be bad, don’t want to mislead people.
Wouldn’t a digital reconstruction just have whatever textures were selected?
But just to highlight some knowledge gaps, it's usually not clear what damage was caused during the backfill process, what the exposure conditions for these pillars were during their lifetimes (e.g. roof or not, though these earlier rectangular rooms are generally agreed to have covered with wooden beams), and even the dating is a bit suspect in this area.
Plus, the relevant team may not even have a LIDAR scanner to do that properly as that's fairly specialist equipment. Etc.
Getting to the point where it's possible and reasonable isn't easy.
They must think we're stupid.
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 the ideal device to teach kids to swim - and so on. It's such a fascinating human discovery - the mind serious wanders.
I encourage anyone who is new to this subject to let the imagination run wild. What kinds of people could create these T-shaped pillars, carve them, use them in their building construction .. and then some day, decide to cover it all up with rubble and stone, to be buried for millennia and discovered by some strange, future civilisation.
It makes me wonder what, 12,500 years from now, of our own crazy civilisation might be unearthed, and strange new utility assigned to their purposes ..
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 just eroded over time, with the things like pyramids as exceptions.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Colonial New England barely exists outside of active preservation attempts.
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 or no labor rules like we have had for some time now all over the world and especially in the West.
When I was first in Delhi and went to the Red Fort, I was shocked when they said they built the whole thing 100s of years ago in 9 years. Think about how long it would take us to build something like this now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Fort
So, I really want the ancient atlantis civ in the Sahara to be true, but the guy's I've seen promoting this are too removed from the scientific method to really be taken seriously.
This guy does some good debunking of a lot of the Netflix/Youtube Alt Archaeology people -- https://www.youtube.com/@miniminuteman773
Do they? We know non-sedentary people in the Americas sometimes built large mounds and extensive fish works.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Archaeology/comments/kxquwx/is_gobl...
Links?
I assume it was a limited number of people how knew how to make things and they kept roaming around setting new sites etc. Similar to bridge engineers etc. most of what they make just disappears in the background but they keep building things that makes our modern life possible.
If we weren’t too worried about things falling down and killing people, or about damaging peoples conception of the vibes in a city, we could have the kinds of developer/architect/engineer/foreman outfits that used to build this kind of thing.
definitely sedentary neolithic people had forced labor. all the Sumerian legal texts that were some of the first writings ever included legal definitions of slaves, for example. but the pre-neolithic Anatolian people were nomadic animistic people with no social hierarchy.
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
You would have thought that in a world with curious billionaires someone would pay for a ROV submersible to explore that, I certainly would if I were one.
I don't think we were in any doubt about the ability of people 12,000 years ago to think abstractly.
fatihpense•1w ago