Wouldn't it be dating the underlying material (i.e. the stone), which presumably predates the actual carving of the statue out of that material?
Edit: I guess if it was buried, they date the organic material around it.
It doesn't, and the stone itself is typically hundreds of millions or even billions of years old.
However, many ancient artifacts are found buried in the ground, and it is often possible to carbon-date organic material in the soil surrounding the artifact, which produces an estimate for when it was buried. This is typically combined with historians' estimates for when the culture that presumably produced the artifact flourished, though uncertainties of several millennia remain in some cases.
They dated the charcoal in layers settled about the statue:
https://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-telegrams/2016/06/22/how-ol...
Huh? The Venus of Willendorf[1] is twice as old, and to my eye displays a higher degree of artistry than the statue shown in the article. Several such Venus figurines have been found in central Europe.
Compared to the intricacy of the Venus' limestone carving, the statue from the article looks downright crude. The idea that it's "not supposed to be possible" to make something like that 12,000 years BP is ridiculous, and I can't imagine where you might have got that impression. Yes, the new statue is life-size, while the Venus is a figurine, but that doesn't necessarily make it any more difficult to manufacture (possibly easier, in fact).
When I played guitar I liked doing noisy high-distortion stuff because I could play bad guitar and still make it sound kind of okay (to my ears anyway).
Not saying that everyone who plays this type of music is a bad guitar player, because many aren't, but some are.
It contains descriptions of several real cases of brain damage, including someone who literally made the mistake in the title of the book. He could still see but was increasing struggling to synthesise understanding of objects from the lines and patterns, culminating in that particular confusion (as he was getting up to leave a consultation with Sacks, he tried to grab his wife to put on his head).
This person was an amateur painter, and his paintings were getting increasingly abstract as his condition worsened. The funny thing is, critics would comment that his art was improving in subtly and insight. In reality, he was losing his grasp of object coherence.
Carving a 2-ton statue in-place requires much better and larger tools, and some kind of social organization that values that activity and protects the site.
The statues, especially in the context of the greater site, could not be made by one person — many people should be working there for quite a long period of time, while physically staying in the place. Since they were working on the temple complex, (a) they could not be themselves participating in hunter-gathering activities (and we think human societies were engaged with that at the time); and (b) someone else should be providing them with the food, clothes, tools, and everything they need — implying there was some sort of a social structure (aka civilization).
This is what I think GP meant when saying "not supposed to be possible 12,000 years ago".
> What I think you might be missing is that Venus could be a pet project of a single person, done in their free time over some period.
Yes, a single Venus figure is likely made by a single person. But the Venus of Willendorf is not unique. There are 200 over known "Venus figurines" from a period of 300,000 BC to 11,00 BC. So they were a wide-spread phenomenon indicating some form of shared socio-cultural connection among the early humans despite how far we were spread out and how much lower the population density was compared to now.
This is of course tangential to the point you were making.
Why not? Sculptors sometimes make dozens of sculptures per year, by themselves.
> they could not be themselves participating in hunter-gathering activities
Why not? Hunting and gathering doesn't occupy all of a person's time. I see no reason whatsoever to assume that those sculptures weren't created by part-time artists.
> implying there was some sort of a social structure (aka civilization)
Social structure exists even in apes, and is not at all synonymous with what the term "civilization" is usually taken to mean.
As a sibling commenter has explained, there is nothing substantially new in this archeological find, and it fits well into our existing model of how people lived back then. Claims of an incoming paradigm shift triggered by this find lack any substance.
Sculptors today are stationary and they depend on money (a mark of a civilization) and tools (same) and supermarkets (same) and demand for their work (economic surplus; same). Leonardo da Vinci, if he was a part of hunter-gatherer society (which is mobile), would not be able to paint or invent, for he would be busy with gathering (or growing, or hunting) his own food most of his time; he also would not have access to paper or canvas or colors or brushes.
> I see no reason whatsoever to assume that those sculptures weren't created by part-time artists.
As mentioned, hunter-gatherers are mobile at least part-time, because they go from where some food grows today, to where some other food roams tomorrow, to where yet other food swims the day after.
> Social structure exists even in apes
And bees, and ants; but not the kind that allows a big part of a society (capable adults) to engage in activities that are not directly related to gathering food, growing children, or fighting, but creating temples and art. A group of hunter-gatherers can provide for themselves, their children, and maybe their elders or sick (as long as these are mobile). They can even accommodate a leader or a shaman here and there; but not an apparently big group of able adults that do not hunt and do not gather and do not fight and do not move but rather sit in one place and build a temple and statues.
> there is nothing substantially new in this archeological find
Gobekli Tepe have completely changed our view of the development of the human societies, as we have previously believed the first civilization (Sumerians) to be as recent as 5,000-4,000 BCE (or 6-7 kya). This hints at a civilization twice as old as previously believed.
They move around, but would return to the same locations regularly thus potentially spending years in one location over their lifetime. Plenty of time to make dozens of life sized statues.
on what you base this one? (from what I remember this time would not be even to even produce clothes - unless it is for area of world where no clothing is needed?)
Currently the guesses are 40,000 to 3 million years ago.
These people in this article are just as intelligent as modern humans.
Processing animal skins is also a lot faster than weaving. Clothing is ~170,000 years old, weaving is very recent by comparison.
the Venus of Willendorf could indicate some of those things, but it equally could have just been made by one especially advanced human
But the claim that “complex things like statues” were “not possible” is clearly BS.
Hundreds of such figurines have survived to the present day, so tens of thousands must have been produced. They used materials transported over 1000+ kilometers. Clearly, those were made by a large-scale network of artists learning from one another, part of a pan-European culture – not by a random genius doodling around, otherwise they wouldn't be so similar to each other.
It's also pretty obvious from looking at the figurine that this wasn't the artist's first work. They probably had to make hundreds such statuettes before achieving this level of detail, so they were likely at least part-time professionals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabarnmung
The birthplace of masonry .. the worlds oldest, longest-running university .. its oldest commons ..
There are more photos than just the single one in the wikipedia link here:
Pardon my ignorance - what separates this from other sites like Lascaux?
Gabarnmang is older, and has been continuously occupied and in use, with only a break in occupation on the order of 50 years, last century, when it was "forgotten about" by the caretakers, in order to protect it ... only to be re-discovered recently (this century).
It is a truly extraordinary site and I personally consider it the holiest of all human sites, ever. More holy than any other - in constant use as a school and commons, for 10's of thousands of years of human existence, containing an extraordinary collection of art, both ancient and contemporary ... probably one of the most important collections of human art, ever.
If Australians had any decency they'd immediately sever ties with the British and make this site the seat of their new sovereign - its that powerful a record of human civilization, imho.
Our knowledge of such ancient peoples is so limited and subject to so many filters, that we should hesitate to think of some achievements as impossible. It’s just not that black & white. The general pattern of civilizational development could still be broadly correct, with this site just being a notable outlier.
Recently I keep wondering whether people have thought about this from a statistical perspective.
Like, if I suddenly find a dead rat in my kitchen, what should I think about it? Should I consider that maybe I have had a pest problem for months or possibly years, or should I consider this as "we found evidence for rats existing in my house for at most one day"?
It seems archeology takes the "evidence based" approach and refuses to calculate the expected probability of more stuff being discovered that's older/more impressive using the fact that we are discovering (mostly) random stuff buried in the ground.
What are the chances that the stuff we dug up are not the pinnacle of human civilization back then, and merely an average object? If people 3000 years from now dug up a brick from a rural village, should they infer that we only know how to build brick houses and not skyscrapers? What are the chances of digging up remains of a skyscraper?
I have so many burning questions lol
its why i love graham hancock and everything he talks about, its so exciting to think about the great achievements of all the human civilizations that have come about in the 200-300k years that humans have been around
Since then there's been a big change from the idea cities were the only locus of culture and technology to a view that nomadic peoples were able to create significant ritual art, technical knowlege, and complex cultures. Of course the view from the 19th and early 20th C's was significantly informed by the need to justify all the genociding of nomadic peoples ("it's for their own good").
The idea I've heard recently is that agriculture grew out of nomadic people encouraging the food plants that they would be looking for in a years time by planting selected seeds and then going off to the next area, over time this led to crops that were more and more adapted as food stuff and this then enabled settled agrarianism. Places like Göbeklitepe are thought to be the ritual centers of nomadic cultures doing this sort of per-agricultural precession. I have read (no expert) that are similar sights in the southern united states where (now genocided) nomadic people used to come together and conduct major rituals which required significant communal investment and co-ordination.
Civilization with no cities... who'd have thought?
How is dating as a science faring in the replication crisis? It seems fraught with incentives for those involved. Discover something 2000 years old and no-one cares but 12,000 years old and you've got a TV career and a book deal.
There is also the Urfa man, dated 9000 BC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urfa_Man
I think your understanding was just incorrect. Here's a video [0] from Kurzgesagt that explains in a nutshell when the human civilisation started (spoiler: as far back as around 20,000 years ago, but definitely the case 12,000 years ago, though the boundary is very fuzzy). But also note that even before a proper civilisation started to form people already made art.
I've read some opinion, that modern European historians, even atheist ones, still "primed" by this number and it skews all our understanding of history and perception of archaeological finds. It is not some random number, but legacy of pre-Renaissance Biblical studies, haunting us to these modern times.
We know of cities 9000 years old.
Your understanding is not correct.
> The fact that it has been carbon dated to 12,000 tears should means that we have to rewrite the theories on the start of human civilization.
It does not. Göbekli Tepe has in general, but I don't think this specific find does.
"humans of the past were often as resourceful, if not more resourceful than we are, they simply had less opportunities than we do today."
If you put yourself in the place of your ancestors. Who you are, you could probably figure out a way to make a statue. It stands to reason that someone a bit smarter (or more motivated) than you or I could also figure it out without our modern day tools.
Human ingenuity is astounding and I love the idea that past humanity was just us without iPhones.
That said I used to make "tools" out of sticks and rocks as a child playing outdoors. Why do we think people didn't have tools or the capacity to invent them 12000 years ago?
Not even talking of the fact that 25000 years before people were making incredible art at the grotte Chauvet or that around the same time, a 30cm statue was carved in Germany representing an anthropomorphised Lion ans
My understanding is that complex things like statues were not supposed to be possible 12,000 years ago. I think it’s supposed to be more like 6000 years ago. The fact that it has been carbon dated to 12,000 tears should means that we have to rewrite the theories on the start of human civilization.
These statues needed to be carved out of tools and the educational techniques for carving it off stone and the social structure to support art were not supposed to exist at this time. This is pretty huge in terms of figuring out the birth of human civilization.
And the fact that the same site also has these huge stone megaliths that also weren’t supposed to be possible and were also dated to 12,000 years so just solidified the idea that our current theories are completely wrong.