What was missing at Gobekli Tepe that makes the builders not a civilization?But from all evidence so far, it was built not by a "civilization, but by hunter-gatherers. Likely as a location where many groups would come together for various reasons. That my be religious, for trade, or many other things. And this is not unlike many of the American Indian tribes into the recent era. Still widely scattered nomadic groups, simply returning to the same location over and over again.
As such, it would not be a "civilization", simply a location that multiple groups came together in. A step in the right direction, but not there yet.
One of the fascinating things about looking at pre-Columbian America is that we can see such examples much closer. As the Indians remained in a Neolithic state for many thousands of years longer, many anthropologists look to them to try and interpret what has been found more recently. And to me, Göbekli Tepe brings to mind the Mississippian Culture. Once again, largely multiple groups that started to work together, at the same time that agriculture started to spread in the area. Even building edifices and large structures.
But it was not a "civilization", simply a kind of confederation of dozens of different tribal groups. And only lasted a few hundred years before imploding and the various tribes scattering again. Hence, why it is called a "culture", and not a "civilization". Even though they had built large structures, trade routs, and the starts of cities it did not last, never unified, and soon dissolved again.
What was missing at Gobekli Tepe that makes the builders not a civilization?
Maybe they haven't found everything yet.Uhhhh, everything?
Cities, agriculture, evidence of trade? There was none of this, it was simply a gathering place for multiple hunter-gatherer groups.
It is no more a "civilization" than the various rendezvous that happened in the US for hundreds and thousands of years.
What Clare and his colleagues found may rewrite prehistory yet again. The digs revealed evidence of houses and year-round settlement, suggesting that Gobekli Tepe wasn't an isolated temple visited on special occasions but a rather a thriving village with large special buildings at its centre.New discoveries at Gobekli Tepe and closer looks at the results of earlier excavations are upending Schmidt's initial interpretations of the site
The digs revealed evidence of houses and year-round settlement, suggesting that Gobekli Tepe wasn't an isolated temple visited on special occasions but a rather a thriving village with large special buildings at its centre.
I was hoping for a simpler answer as to what was missing. It didn't last long enough to suit you?And once again, such was the case of the Mississippian Culture as well.
But it is still lacking the things that make a collection of groups a "civilization".
Even in pre-Columbian America we had both. Both civilizations like the Aztecs, but it also takes a unification into a singular group. We know the Mississippians were on the way, but imploded before they got there. And from the evidence at Gobekli Tepe they probably hit the same barrier. Getting close, but for some reason never crossing over into a unified body.
One thing about anthropology, there are many examples over and over of groups getting close, but not quite making the next step. Sometimes it is in writing, or math, or even creating a stable government that survives past a single ruler or dynasty. Buildings do not make a "civilization", it may be no more than one or two members of each tribal group that remain with those to support them to maintain the location year round. Maybe priests, or something different.
Once again, we have seen this in various rendezvous in North America. Sometimes returning to the same location year after year after year, sometimes moving each year. Some of them even becoming "permanent settlements", but still never advancing beyond hunter-gatherers and a handful of different groups simply returning for trade and other reasons before departing again.
Without agriculture, that is all it would ever be. Different scattered groups that are always on the move, and never unifying into a single settled community. We could see this first hand in the Mississippians, because when the culture imploded it dissolved right back into the various groups that it had formed from a century or so before. Most of them resuming a nomadic existence, many even becoming little more than tribes of raiders that started to migrate across the continent.
What I would love to have them discover at Gobekli Tepe would be enough various fragments so we could get a DNA profile of these groups. That could tell us a lot more. Like where they ended up after that site was abandoned.
But in this same general region and era we had many other cultures. The Natufian for example, as well as the Kebaran, Mushabian, and Nemrikian cultures. Each of which did later spawn civilizations however. The Natufian may have been the seed that both the Semitic and Egyptian civilizations rose from (there is much DNA evidence to support this), and the Nemrikian spawned the Chaldean and Neo-Babylonian Civilizations. Which by the way is different than the Babylonian Civilization.
Anthropologists are still trying to piece together all the various migrations that humans were making in the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras. And even though "communities" were appearing as early as the Upper Paleolithic (including structures), none appear to have ever really been "permanent". Most likely only inhabited for a handful of years until the local environment was largely stripped, then packing up and moving on again.
I was hoping for a simpler answer as to what was missing. It didn't last long enough to suit you?
Thanks for the answer.It did not evolve enough. It did not unify into a single "civilization".
It can even be argued that the United States until the Civil War was not yet such, just a conglomeration of many different groups. Very different, largely acting on their own until afterwards when it changed and finally accepted a "single identity".
A gathering of multiple different groups with no permanent roots does not make up a "civilization".
Many of the runes look very much like letters from Alpine alphabets, while other has uncanny resemblence to Greek letters. Most likley the runic script was created by Germanic travellers who had seen other alphabets and decided to create a writing system for their own language.
Jackson Crawford has a good video about it.
What is the origin of the underwater ruins, 2300 Feet deep, of a city near the North West coast of Cuba?
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