"The Birth of Religion" - a National Geographic article.

[moobu2]

I don't agree with the NG article at all but thought some of you might like to read it.

We used to think agriculture gave rise to cities and later to writing, art, and religion. Now the world’s oldest temple suggests the urge to worship sparked civilization.

By Charles C. Mann
Photograph by Vincent J. Musi

Every now and then the dawn of civilization is reenacted on a remote hilltop in southern Turkey. The reenactors are busloads of tourists—usually Turkish, sometimes European. The buses (white, air-conditioned, equipped with televisions) blunder over the winding, indifferently paved road to the ridge and dock like dreadnoughts before a stone portal. Visitors flood out, fumbling with water bottles and MP3 players. Guides call out instructions and explanations. Paying no attention, the visitors straggle up the hill. When they reach the top, their mouths flop open with amazement, making a line of perfect cartoon O's.

Before them are dozens of massive stone pillars arranged into a set of rings, one mashed up against the next. Known as Göbekli Tepe (pronounced Guh-behk-LEE TEH-peh), the site is vaguely reminiscent of Stonehenge, except that Göbekli Tepe was built much earlier and is made not from roughly hewn blocks but from cleanly carved limestone pillars splashed with bas-reliefs of animals—a cavalcade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and ferocious wild boars. The assemblage was built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. It contains the oldest known temple. Indeed, Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known example of monumental architecture—the first structure human beings put together that was bigger and more complicated than a hut. When these pillars were erected, so far as we know, nothing of comparable scale existed in the world.

At the time of Göbekli Tepe's construction much of the human race lived in small nomadic bands that survived by foraging for plants and hunting wild animals. Construction of the site would have required more people coming together in one place than had likely occurred before. Amazingly, the temple's builders were able to cut, shape, and transport 16-ton stones hundreds of feet despite having no wheels or beasts of burden. The pilgrims who came to Göbekli Tepe lived in a world without writing, metal, or pottery; to those approaching the temple from below, its pillars must have loomed overhead like rigid giants, the animals on the stones shivering in the firelight—emissaries from a spiritual world that the human mind may have only begun to envision.

Archaeologists are still excavating Göbekli Tepe and debating its meaning. What they do know is that the site is the most significant in a volley of unexpected findings that have overturned earlier ideas about our species' deep past. Just 20 years ago most researchers believed they knew the time, place, and rough sequence of the Neolithic Revolution—the critical transition that resulted in the birth of agriculture, taking Homo sapiens from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers to farming villages and from there to technologically sophisticated societies with great temples and towers and kings and priests who directed the labor of their subjects and recorded their feats in written form. But in recent years multiple new discoveries, Göbekli Tepe preeminent among them, have begun forcing archaeologists to reconsider.
At first the Neolithic Revolution was viewed as a single event—a sudden flash of genius—that occurred in a single location, Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now southern Iraq, then spread to India, Europe, and beyond. Most archaeologists believed this sudden blossoming of civilization was driven largely by environmental changes: a gradual warming as the Ice Age ended that allowed some people to begin cultivating plants and herding animals in abundance. The new research suggests that the "revolution" was actually carried out by many hands across a huge area and over thousands of years. And it may have been driven not by the environment but by something else entirely.

Click here for the rest

[RC]

1. Chimpanzees have the start of religion.

They are known to take branches and run and beat the ground during thunder storms, till the storm is over.
Or are they just superstitious?

[struggle4progress]

9. Chimpanzees aren't stupid

I read an account once of a bunch bickering and tormenting one another to pass the time in their zoo yard, when a dead tree, intended as playground equipment, toppled over -- at which point the chimps immediately stopped bickering, ran over as a group, grabbed the tree, angled it against the yard wall, and escaped from their enclosure into the zoo and from there into the surrounding city

I'd guess running around and beating the ground with branches, when you hear rumbling growling noises in the jungle, might scare off some potential predators: it only looks silly and superstitious once you know the thunder comes from electric discharges in the clouds

[struggle4progress]

2. Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple? (Smithsonian | 2008)

Predating Stonehenge by 6,000 years, Turkey's stunning Gobekli Tepe upends the conventional view of the rise of civilization
By Andrew Curry
Photographs by Berthold Steinhilber
Smithsonian magazine, November 2008

... Schmidt's team, however, found none of the telltale signs of a settlement: no cooking hearths, houses or trash pits, and none of the clay fertility figurines that litter nearby sites of about the same age. The archaeologists did find evidence of tool use, including stone hammers and blades. And because those artifacts closely resemble others from nearby sites previously carbon-dated to about 9000 B.C., Schmidt and co-workers estimate that Gobekli Tepe's stone structures are the same age. Limited carbon dating undertaken by Schmidt at the site confirms this assessment ...

... Peters has often found cut marks and splintered edges on them—signs that the animals from which they came were butchered and cooked. The bones, stored in dozens of plastic crates stacked in a storeroom at the house, are the best clue to how people who created Gobekli Tepe lived. Peters has identified tens of thousands of gazelle bones, which make up more than 60 percent of the total, plus those of other wild game such as boar, sheep and red deer. He's also found bones of a dozen different bird species, including vultures, cranes, ducks and geese. "The first year, we went through 15,000 pieces of animal bone, all of them wild. It was pretty clear we were dealing with a hunter-gatherer site," Peters says ...

... at a prehistoric village just 20 miles away, geneticists found evidence of the world's oldest domesticated strains of wheat; radiocarbon dating indicates agriculture developed there around 10,500 years ago, or just five centuries after Gobekli Tepe's construction ...

To carve, erect and bury rings of seven-ton stone pillars would have required hundreds of workers, all needing to be fed and housed. Hence the eventual emergence of settled communities in the area around 10,000 years ago. "This shows sociocultural changes come first, agriculture comes later," says Stanford University archaeologist Ian Hodder, who excavated Catalhoyuk, a prehistoric settlement 300 miles from Gobekli Tepe ...

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/gobekli-tepe.html?c=y&page=2

[rrneck]

3. Why do you not agree? nt

[struggle4progress]

4. Thanks for posting this! It's very interesting

I'm not sure I understand the dating yet, and perhaps the local ecology must have been rather different then

It certainly seems to indicate substantial social organization and an abundant enough food supply to support activities well beyond daily struggle for necessities

Interpretation may pose interesting problems. Glibly assigning a "temple" purpose to it may be misleading. I once read a hilarious sci-fi story about a future archaelogist's explanation of the pay toilets in Grand Central Station: people apparently deposited ritual tokens to worship at these special altars

If, in the era before pottery and metal tools, folk were doing such elaborate constructions, there seem to me many possibilities to sort out. For example, the primary purpose might have been simply artistic; or, as with a number of other old sites, the construction might track some astronomical phenomena. Another possibility is that this is the pre-pottery neolithic equivalent of a university library: the ancients were not stupid; they had to keenly observe and reason about their world to survive, but oral tradition has some drawbacks, so perhaps this was a way of producing in stone some mnemonics for remembering useful facts handed down through the centuries. Producing a record in stone to help remember "important stuff we have discovered" might have been the effort

[WolverineDG]

5. They still haven't excavated the entire site

so I'm sure their interpretations are bound to change. But since there is (so far) no evidence of human habitation, what other purpose could this site have had?

dg

[struggle4progress]

7. They won't excavate the entire site, if they follow standard practice. And since the stonework

isn't the sort of thing one could knock off casually in an afternoon, and there are plenty of cooked animal bones with knife nicks, "no evidence of human habitation" must mean something special -- such as "no evidence of prolonged habitation immediate to the stoneworking"

If this is a hunter/gatherer production, the stoneworkers probably belonged to a nomadic group, perhaps living in tents and following game herds, so they may only have worked on their stone carvings there at times of year when the herds were on surrounding the plain relatively near the hill

The ability of the culture to support a superfluous activity like stonecarving suggests an easy abundance of food

I don't know why they were carving these stones. If they wandered back and forth from place to place as the seasons changed over millennia, they might have developed a substantial amount of empirical knowledge: "no rain falls on the North Forty until after the Big Westerly Wind, so we don't go there looking for game and berries while the wind is still blowing from the east" or "When Fat Dude's Star disappears behind Squee Hill, the herds are about to head south." For all I know, they had ten thousand useful slogans along that line that they encapsulated into some pre-Homeric epic poem that took days to recite and when food was plentiful they all got together on the hill to share their wisdom. Maybe somebody finally thought "The Three Day Long Song is fuggin hard to remember, so let's carve some fuggin pictures in stone to help remember it"

[dimbear]

10. Might have been a meetup site, might have been a sports arena,

might have been a monumental tomb. TBD.

Just said sports arena because it reminds me of the colosseum. :)

[okasha]

6. The answer to the quesiton of purpose

may be "all of the above." We know, for instance, that Stonehenge is an enormous calendrical device marking the solstices. We also know from satellite sites that large numbers of people gathered there periodically for ceremonial functions that included feasting. These might have been funerals of important persons, seasonal festivals, king- or queen-makings, installations of priests--we don't know for sure, though there are both cremated remains and at least one inhumation. So far there are no known burials at Gobleki Tepe, but some of the other possible ceremonial purposes seem likely.

[struggle4progress]

8. +

[Leontius]

11. Which parts of the article do you disagree with and why?