> Narwala Gabarnmang as one of the earliest sites of civilization
It is is a rock shelter with a ceiling held up by pillars that appear to have been deliberately shaped and arranged by removing supporting columns to create usable space.
It has one of the longest continuous occupation records anywhere (charcoal dates back over 45,000 years, with art possibly around 28,000 years old), and it produced the world’s oldest known ground-edge stone axe fragment, dated to roughly 35,000–65,000 years ago, predating similar technology elsewhere by tens of thousands of years.
However: no writing, no cities, no centralized state, made by mobile hunter-gatherer groups rather than settled agriculturalists.
It’s also a place of education, a community center, a court for gathered people to hold council, a religious institution and a continuously occupied (except for a stint from 1950 - 2008) seat of power.
For 10’s of thousands of years.
The pillars were engineered to make the shelter more viable over time, and some of the pillars are constructed of stacks of layered rock which contain paintings. Like a stack of books in a library, if you will ..
The paintings record animal husbandry traditions, mythology, and tribal history, also.
> settled agriculturalists.
Australias original caretakers were a level of advanced agriculturalist not seen much elsewhere around the world, and there is emerging evidence that what they learned to do on that continent was transmitted around the world, perhaps as the first widespread distribution of agricultural knowledge - see the link to Gobekli Tepe, also, which - alas - is being minimized, with some speculation that for socio-political reasons it is being suppressed as a line of research…
The T-shaped pillars, it is speculated in some archeological and anthropological circles, refer to the pillars of the school of agriculture and animal husbandry that is, Narwala Gabarnmang and which was then manifest in the Tepe cultures. There are common symbols in both the Tepe site and at Narwala Gabarnmang - which we may not recognize as ‘words’, but which may well represent an encoded language not yet fully understood by those studying them.
The research continues, this is speculation and it is of course controversial to consider that Narwala Gabarnmang is the original school of agriculture, from which knowledge was transmitted to the other Tepe cultures, but please don’t let the authoritative canonicalization of the birthplace of human civilization ceiling hit you in the head .. after all, a lot of things can happen in the span of 80,000 years of human history.
I consider it one of the holiest places in all of human history, personally, but I do have a distinct desire to not propagate the other ‘holy land’ tropes that Europeans have propagated in the rush to eradicate cultures they’ve deemed inferior over the past few hundred years.
I think you're taking this the wrong way. It is certainly amazing and shows advanced culture! However, there's no evidence of civilization. That does not mean brute, or unsophisticated.
How so? The suggestion is that Gobekli Tepe is the original T-shaped pillar school of agricultural knowledge, thousands and thousands of years old, and which was subsequently replicated in another region of the world where agricultural knowledge also rapidly expanded through human industry.
That’s pretty clear. That it has not been academically demonstrated is of course relevant - but then, the research at Gobekli Tepe came to a screeching halt around the same time this idea was first proposed, so perhaps it is important to do more than just scratch the surface of the subject ..
Maybe you'd be happier if one used the more neutral term "complex society" instead of "civilization", since the latter has baggage. I imagine we can agree that some societies are more complex than others but that societal complexity is orthogonal to inherent cultural value.
Also, it is spelled Göbekli Tepe.
>”complex society” .. “civilization” .. “baggage” ..
If Gobekli Tepe is derived from Narwala Gabarnmang, that is civilization at its absolute finest - the transmission of agricultural knowledge from one region of the world, and the replication of one site of knowledge to another site, represents actual civil-ization.
> I imagine we can agree that some societies are more complex than others but that societal complexity is orthogonal to inherent cultural value.
Well, like I said at the top of the thread, I don’t think orthogonality nor complexity should be the basis of an understanding of the nature of civilization, whatsoever. From both of these abstract notions a hierarchy is defined - whereas I see, personally, a distinct expansion of human civilization occurring, if indeed the model institution of Narwala Gabarnmang was replicated in the Tepe cultures. This would be a very distinct basis of civilization, were it found to be accurate.
I acknowledge it is speculation, but it is very tantalizing - and in my opinion, entirely feasible speculation.
>Also, it is spelled Göbekli Tepe.
Öh, ǎlrīght. Ǐ’vẽ sêẽn īt spéllẽd ìn Ēnglìsh ǎnd īn Türkísh. Sørry, Í mêänt Tûrkïyē’îsh.
It’s true, I should’ve allowed for and been more respectful of that particular transmission of T-shaped knowledge…
> Gobekli Tepe is derived from Narwala Gabarnmang,
Ok, now we're just making up stuff.
It’s called speculating, and the actual academic research on this speculation is actually still ongoing, so defunding this proposition as ‘just making stuff up’ is just a negation technique that is intended to prevent further thought about what is factually a very fascinating possibility.
You do know that pretty much all science and technology begins with a tiny pinch of speculation, right? We wouldn’t even have civilization without someone making stuff up.
And both Göbekli Tepe and Narwala Gabarnmang sites are distinct examples of humans, making stuff up.
Really, how boring can you be.
> It’s called speculating
Indeed.
> Really, how boring can you be.
Some people speculate that humans were seeded by aliens. That's even more interesting than your story.
Yeah, there’s speculative evidence of this in both the Tepe and Gabarnmang cultures, also, true that .. of course one would have to discard the pedantic curmudgeon in order to pursue the idea though ..