It's neither Turkish nor Thai for obvious reasons:

- Thailand is in south-east Asia

- Turks weren't around that area, not even close, until ~700 years

Considering that the majority of asia minor was Greek for millenias before, calling this site "clearly Turkish" is like calling Machu Picchu "clearly Spanish"

I'm not sure if Turkey and Thailand were concepts as we have them today 12,000 years ago.

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?

> Colonial New England barely exists outside of active preservation attempts.

As someone who grew up there, this isn't really true. It's more that buildings have been upgraded/replaced over time by choice, resulting in a sparse patchwork of old buildings rather than large old cities. Places like the Wayside Inn[0] predate the country by a century, and have been "preserved" only because they have more-or-less continuously operating as an in since 1686.

The New England climate isn't all that different than the original England. I think the cultural and legal climate around old buildings is more impactful here. I would be curious to know about the comparative longevity of 17th-century wooden buildings in Europe.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wayside_Inn_%28Sudbury%29

KT is obviously (from context here) Karahan Tepe, and GT thus Göbleki Tepe. ANE is a standard abbreviation for Ancient Near East. For PPNA Wikipeda supplies Pre-Pottery Neolithic A, which is a subdivision of the Early Neolithic period.

"Tepe" is just a Turkish word for hill or mound.

So "Göbekli Tepe" literally is "Hill with a belly", "Taş Tepeler" is "Stone hills" etc.

In about 2004, height of the Florida housing bubble. I stayed with my cousins in a housing development and I watched over the course of a week as this construction company built an entire street of homes. I was wildly impressed because I never see that in the north. They basically had the the foundations poured and then each lot like an assembly line each stage of the crew working. The framers working, then the guys putting up walls, then the roofers, then the plumbers. It was impressive. But I think that only works when you are building 1000 homes.

It’s not lack of competence. There is an unbelievable weight of regulation in construction now. It would probably take 2 years of planning consultation just to get the idea approved. Then, each facet of the design would have to be coordinated and iterated between several different specialist teams and contractors, with the tree of contractors increasing as each layer of design takes shape. At the end, you also have the labor laws that people are talking about here.

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.

Clearly they didn't know how to build things very well. Crystal Palace type structures look impressive, but they are _bad buildings_, both in terms of practicality (what would you use one for?) and safety, and no competent modern engineer would design one, even if it were legal, which it is not. There were a bunch of things like the Crystal Palace built in the 19th century, and the reason you don't see many these days is that they mostly burned down, often within a few years of construction (the Crystal Palace was actually an unusually long-lasting example of the genre, likely because it was mostly lightly used or completely disused).

Like, "why are more people not building impractical fire hazards? It must be because people these days are incompetent" is a pretty weird take.

To me, blaming an activity which requires active participation for “brain-drain” is such a weird and quite dated thing. Take social media for example, these require no active participation other than moving your thumb up and down, and is in my opinion the real brain rot these days.

People will always find a way to get their dopamine, be it video games, reading, watching stuff, etc.

Don’t pick out a single thing and make it the boogey man.

You're attacking video games and the like a bit, but the core of your argument is sound I think - there's 24 hours in a day, a percentage will be spent on taking care of your needs, what percentage that is depends on various factors but most anthropologists agree that that number was much lower in ancient civilizations. People get bored and when they get bored they get creative. Polishing a rock would be one of the things they could end up doing.

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.

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.

indigenous Americans did practice agriculture and were not hunter-gatherers. there were settled cities all across the Americas: Cusco, Tenochtitlan, Tikal, Cahokia. like cereals were the catalyst for the Neolithic revolution in Mesopotamia, the "three sisters" of squash, corn, beans were the catalyst of the Neolithic revolution in the Americas.

sedentary life and agriculture developed in the Americas around the same time it developed everywhere else in the world outside of the Near East (3000 BC). and this roughly correlates to the beginning of the Meghalayan geological age that continues today - which is when the ~10,000 year old original civilizations collapsed and Neolithic cultures became ubiquitous around the world and not just in Mesopotamia and the Yangtze river

The idea of no social hierarchy is completely absurd.

There is even a small amount of hierarchy at our 15 person Thanksgiving family dinner.

mostly because all the bones of all the dead were mixed in with all the others. implying no concept of "this guy was THE guy in my lifetime". but they presumably still had a meritocracy because while the bones were mixed in with all others of all generations, not everyone would have their bones were mixed in upon death. it was likely only the craftsmen or shamans that achieved that honor. but being honored is different from the "divinely ordained" hierarchy of god-kings that came later.

as far as I'm aware, we have no idea other than that they didn't do much at one time. we can only deduce little modifications were done semi-regularly by the ancient pre-historic version of open source contributors. they had to lift 10+ ton limestone blocks and move them into place. but there's ample evidence of them trying to lift those blocks out of the quarry and failing, thus leaving behind broken would-be pillars of limestone for 12,000 years. the best assumption is just that they had tons of wild cereals and gazelle to munch on so these people were able to work on this persistently over many generations. they had no social hierarchy or need for labor at all, so they had all the free time in the world to use stone age tools to build structures that rivaled the greeks 9,000 years later

    and even assumptions about them being hunter gatherers at all are based on centuries of bias and assumptions, with a whole lot of cultural chauvinism and religious nuttery baked in for good measure.

Archaeologists are much better about recognizing the complexity of forager lifeways than they were 50 years ago.

You had me until you said electricity. That implies metal, and we certainly have the tools to find metal that old, but have found nothing crafted by homo anything, afaik. Would it all be too buried? One would imagine that somewhere some evidence would have surfaced. But iirc oldest metalworking is from ~11kya

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.

Absence of evidence doesn't mean you can conclude that there was no hierarchy or social organization though. For that you would need evidence that there wasn't.

There seems to be an issue with how archeology is taught at schools, where these conclusions are stated as facts, or theories with a high amount of proof, when in reality, they have very little evidence supporting them.

I reran the numbers and it did come in at 59.5%

> Plus, the relevant team may not even have a LIDAR scanner to do that properly as that's fairly specialist equipment.

There’s a good chance you have a LiDAR Scanner in your pocket right now.

The boar's arms are long and skinny and curved, and kind of loosely attached. This culture's art style had a consistent theme of noodle-arms.