If sites like Karahan Tepe could date to potentially 12,000 years ago, where inhabitants where hunter gatherers (with maybe minimal early agriculture) and pre-pottery. Then why don't we see anything 15k, 30k, 50k, or even 100k years back?

Submitted by LevHB t3_1219uac in askscience

Edit: since that stupid show "Ancient Apocalypse" is getting a bunch of attention at the moment, let me be clear the following has NOTHING to do with that. I do not believe there's some advanced lost civilisation, I do not believe in atlantians, I do not believe these sea people came and gave this technology to these people. I just don't understand how ~12k years ago we go from extremely simple building engineering, to Karaahan Tepe. The advancement to Göbekli Tepe a few k years later though makes total sense, you can see the gradual improvements they made from KT to GT, it's linear progress. But KT appears to suddenly jump into existence, during the younger dryas at that. It just feels to me either I'm missing something deep, or perhaps there could be a chain of similar sites going back 15k, 20k, 30k, etc years (but even then I ask why did it take between ~250k years or ~40k years to figure out the early ones?).

Karahan Tepe, the older sister site of the world famous Göbekli Tepe, appears to be around 12,000 years old.

All of the evidence we have found so far suggests they were hunter gatherers who may have been doing small amounts of agriculture (which is backed up by genetic tracing of our modification of species, which happened over thousands of years). And on top of that did not have pottery.

Of course I've heard that this may imply that it may not have been agriculture that allowed us the time and requirements to build structures like this, but structures like this that allowed us to start agriculture. Or (what I would lean to) is that it was a slow mix of each pushing each other along.

But what I don't understand, is if humans were capable of this back then with essentially pre/minimal-agriculture, then why don't we see any further back?

Why weren't we building these structures 15,000 years ago. Or 30,000? Or 50,000? Or even 100,000?

I understand about the ice age (although some of the PPN sites seemed like they may have developed in the younger dryas, which makes even less sense?). But there were still warmer climates with humans in them.

Why did it take us ~250k years to suddenly figure this out, and then when we do figure it out, we're suddenly pretty damn good at it? Or even if you follow that humans only became behaviourally modem 70k years ago, again why did it take 60k years?

It just doesn't make much sense to me. Humans who could figure out how to make stone weapons, fire, primitive homes, etc, surely absolutely understood that you could chip away and grind away stone.

Is it possible we just haven't found these yet? And that there's just fewer due to lower population? It feels obvious to me that there must be some missing as there's such a jump to the PPN ones.

Or is there a reason humans couldn't/didn't build sites like this. And something suddenly changed?

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[deleted] t1_jdphv3z wrote

[removed]

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FlattopMaker t1_jdpj6bs wrote

Larger groups of people to create and cooperatively share or use the built environment, yes. This requires communication of a certain mutual sophistication. But it does not mean necessarily they were all living together, all the time. We have churches standing today that have taken hundreds of years to build from start to finish. This is even with dense populations, the technology, tools and know-how to construct it in a particular style. Many intervening events delayed the build.

What the changes were that led to larger cooperation, presumably over long spans of time across dozens of generations, are where historical record meets speculation. Some agroforestry researchers believe balanophagy (acorns as the main dietary source of calories and nutrients) declined as demand for trees for other uses became prevalent, which pushed the rise of the less-nutritive and more effortful agriculture. Numerous other options have been suggested. Perhaps structures were initially created from trees for thousands of years before megaliths became the norm.

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FlattopMaker t1_jdpl1o2 wrote

Replying to my earlier post because the we-can't-see-the-decayed-structures-that-were-made-from-trees is speculation extrapolated from history. Greeks started out with temples made of trees. The vertical lines/grooves of the stylized marble columns we are left with were made to mimic tree trunks. The Egyptians started out with leather and chests for crypt or burial funerary goods made from real animal hides and real wood. As materials became more scarce, faux leather was used and wood grain-like grooves made from woven reeds for the chests that we're left with.

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