Origins of Settled Life | Ian Hodder | Talks at Google
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- Опубліковано 5 тра 2015
- The ritual origins of settled life in the Middle East: Göbekli and Çatalhöyük.
Recent archaeological discoveries have upturned our theories about the origins of agriculture and the dawn of settled life. While climate change and economic adaptation have long been seen as prime causes, recent work at Göbekli and Çatalhöyük in Turkey has shown that social gatherings at ritual centers played a key role. The remarkable finds at Göbekli include 6 meter stone monoliths carved with images of animals and birds and forming ritual enclosures. Recent research at Çatalhöyük shows a fully fledged town in which wild bulls, leopards and the severed heads of ancestors were important social foci.
Ian Hodder was trained at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London and at Cambridge University where he obtained his PhD in 1975. After a brief period teaching at Leeds, he returned to Cambridge where he taught until 1999. During that time he became Professor of Archaeology and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. In 1999 he moved to teach at Stanford University as Dunlevie Family Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Director of the Stanford Archaeology Center. His main large-scale excavation projects have been at Haddenham in the east of England and at Çatalhöyük in Turkey where he has worked since 1993. He has been awarded the Oscar Montelius medal by the Swedish Society of Antiquaries, the Huxley Memorial Medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute, has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and has Honorary Doctorates from Bristol and Leiden Universities. His main books include Spatial analysis in archaeology (1976 CUP), Symbols in action (1982 CUP), Reading the past (1986 CUP), The domestication of Europe (1990 Blackwell), The archaeological process (1999 Blackwell), The leopard’s tale: revealing the mysteries of Çatalhöyük (2006 Thames and Hudson), Entangled. An archaeology of the relationships between humans and things (2012 Wiley Blackwell).
This Authors at Google talk was hosted by Boris Debic.
please, google, keep the visual focus on the photos & maps! so irritating to watch the speaker walk around & pointing at stuff, we know not what, & when there are closeups of the pictures & maps, two seconds is not enough time to absorb anything of value to the viewer...grrrr
That comment is accurate. Setup a capability for the speaker to point on the chart such that the audience and interactive sessions are both able to see what is being highlighted on screen. (Check out Harvard's CFA Colloquium's)
Did you get your money back? Ask the CIA.
Well, he says it was a very long and gradual process. Maybe he's trying to symbolically represent that for us by being as boring as mud. Dead mud? OLD dead mud?!?
You must learn to look DEEP, my child, for one is entering upon a journey of... some kinda bullshit or another, most likely. But wot-B UNDER the bullshit? Send money, all wil-B revealed..... (bitsa-money=bitsa-reveal; lotsa-money=lotsa-reveal)
It's Googles brainwashing techniques so you'll retain all this false information. Lol
That's what the stop and arrows buttons are for - and I used them many times on this video
Don't understand on what basis you can conclude the Göbekli peoples were hunter gatherers. First, no actual living sites for those who built these temple structures have been excavated. The German archeologist said that was perplexing however only about 5% of the entire site has been looked at so far. But even more disturbing is the that this individual completely fails to mention that Göbekli was deliberately buried, not covered by age. It appears he is the classic typical archeologist that throws out anything that doesn't agree with accepted theories, rather than revisiting their accepted theories and changing them. I think it is ridiculous that anyone thinks that hunter gathers one day just got together put down their spears and hunting bows, and said, "lets build this giant megalithic structure, lets make the carving really tedious in relief rather than just chiseling, and then when we get all done, lets bury the whole thing!" Rubbish!
The funny part is the presenter seems confused throughout the presentation as well. The teacher becoming the student.
@@greg5023 Which are we?
Look at Göbekli with an architect's eye: the vertical stones are not religious markers, they're roof supports for circular buildings, T-shaped to provide more support for roof beams. Tthe stacked rubble "deliberately filling" the spaces between 'em is not filler, it's drystone walls.
The main buildings look to me like a mix of granaries and tax collection offices. And the circles found by ground radar? Huts, for permanent residents.
If you hunt and gather the area long enough to support enough people to construct all this, you've denuded the wildlife for 100 miles around, then starved, or enslaved everyone for miles around to bring in the supplies you need, to similar effect (by then you might as well just do civilization). Nope, wasn't hunter-gatherers. These people had not only developed agriculture far enough to support a settled town, but had sufficient leisure time to develop a full-time artisan class.
We'd probably get fewer crazy interpretations if archeologists looked first for practical everyday-life applications, and only used "must be for ritual use" as the explanation of last resort, rather than their all-purpose go-to. Every time I hear 'em say such things, I feel an urge to beat 'em about the head and shoulders with a copy of _Digging the Weans_ .
@Nunya Bis That was my exact same thoughts! I've kept up with this site since it's "re-discovery". So much that he left out, as well as plain old misinformation. I'm so glad there are people like ourselves (and many others) who investigate on our own, instead of blindly accept whatever we're told by these so-called quack-ademics (ty John Anthony West for that term)
@@Reziac omg, yes! Someone else who gets it! Nicely said. Thank You :)
When he points to the visual, it would be nice to pan UP so we can see what he is talking about. It takes more than a split second to see so better not to return the camera to the back of the speakers head.
Fascinating. It’s always interesting to hear an intelligent explanation of others’ theories. Thanks for posting.
The articulation of the time depth and entanglement issues, near the end, as a root of settlement is a good contribution to thinking about civilizations' emergence.
A rather funny thought experiment crossed my mind as I was nearing the end of this presentation: say we could travel in time and ask those Neolithic people why they had such an elaborate or 'entangled' social structure. Their answer is simple: " So a 21st-century university professor could justify their tenure by showcasing their ability to work with high levels of complexity, especially in the form of information-glutted scatter graphs."
Joking aside, I just did not find his theory convincing. I thought it was highly speculative to build a whole theory of social organisation based solely on kinship relations derived from teeth. So the answer to the burning question of why did people first decide to band together is that they came together to be part of a network.
Which is not saying much, probably because it sounds a lot like circular reasoning if you pay attention to the words. Networks are basically people coming together. So a translation from academese is: people come together so that they can come together. Wow... very illuminating.
Also for social security. I mean, sure, that's what packs of animals do too, you don't need etnographic studies. The thing is, why did these people settle down and build houses at this particular time in history and not earlier. And couldn't you also apply 'entanglement' to packs of hunter animals too? To me, it sounds less like a clarifying concept and more like a projection of one's confused state of mind. I mean, no wonder, if you just put all of your scientific hopes in the basket of 'quantitative data'.
What I found more illuminating was the very nice observation that the scenes with people surrounding animals were incorrectly tagged as hunting scenes, and that, in fact, they were 'teasing and baiting' the animals. I wonder why. I mean you can always say it was part of some religious ritual, sure. But it can also be something else at the same time. The playful attitude towards the animal is reminiscent of the act of taming. It could be that their religious ritual was also an act of 'remembering' their success with domestication. With so much symbolic emphasis on cow horns, it could very well be the event that changed their hunting lifestyle so dramatically and created the incentive for those people to settle in one place and build durable houses.
Sorry, but going against the Marxist - was it? - idea that you need domestication first and then you get settlements just doesn't make sense. Wild animals are, well, wild. They will not hang around your village just because you need a food source. You need to follow them around and move on to a new place once they become scarce. Sure, you don't like Marxism and communism failed miserably. But come on, if you say building houses had nothing to do with the economy, that is with a steady source of food, you are going against common sense. Also, if you say that the village was an early form of social security, well, that is actually an economic explanation (Marxist, hehe). But I just don't think you could go and get food from the Flintstones next door just because Fred is your fifth cousin once removed. They also need to have some meat lying around in the first place.
I don't really expect to get a reply but it's already enough that it got me thinking about these fascinating discoveries. Also, I think that a lot of the work done on these sites is extremely valuable and I am grateful for this post being made publicly available on youtube.
Good comment and well-written. Ian Hodder is a Marxist and his ideas flow through his collectivist imagination. Hodder's interpretation of the monumental structures discovered at Gobelkli Tepe is a product of his own confused, post-Modern ideology. If you have never studied archeology / anthropology, you might not realize when an object or place is not easily identified it becomes classified as the product of ritual and the guessing game begins. Ian Hodder is archeology's biggest guesser of times long past. Nowhere else on the planet did hunters, gatherers and scavengers decide to alter their ancient traditions and subsistence strategies and decide, hey! let's settle down here for awhile and build a massive ritual center. Only a fraction of the Gobekli Tepe site has been excavated. In time, as the site reveals its secrets, a settled community of horticulturalists is bound to emerge. Nomadic peoples did not build monumental architecture, instead, they painted on cave walls and carved fetishes.
The interesting thing is that a bunch of hunter gatherers did not just decide to build these on the spur of the moment, they must have been developing stone carving and monument creation for quite a while to gain the skills needed to create these structures. Somewhere there must be the remains of their progress around the learning curve leading to all this.
Damn right they must have had civilisations for thousands of years before this to get to this level of construction and organisation.
A higher wisdom and remains of higher civilization’s remnants
Yes, it is just estimated 2% excavated- but the problem will be that the older ones will appear more sophisticated than the newer ones ... like with the pyramids, Machu Picchu, and many other sites.
@Piotr Kisiel Yes, logical. Where can I find these outcomes of radar research of the site?
more likely they were taught by a more advanced civilization that moved into the area from another region.
I enjoyed speaker’s calm and measured delivery, and use of terms that non-archaeologists can understand. Do wish we could have seen more of the slides as they were being discussed.
Really pleased this fascinating talk popped up - absolutely astounds me how these clever people can ferret out these ancient secrets and then weave them together to give me a glimpse into such distant people.
Göbekli is turning archeology on its head. You would never know that from watching this guy...
Intellectuals don't like to be wrong, too much ego involved
@Wednesday's Child so what point are making?
@Wednesday's Child Very well
i'm a student who is turkish. i was born in constantinopole, but my father was born in konya(iconium)
i have travelled to çatalhöyük several times so far. four times visited to konya archeologic museum!
çatalhöyük is masterpiece which is unique! first settlement in worldwide!
Thank you very much for this lecture. Excellent and extremely helpful.
This entire lecture is spoiled by the camera's insistence on following Hodder about instead of staying on the images that he is discussing.
Exactly
Yes!
Pues para que los que vemos la charla entendamos. Hodder no es animador, es uno de los grandes científicos vivos en el mundo. No es un programa de National Geography. Imaginate una platica de Enstein vista ahora, que no se fijara en su charla, lamentaramos la forma de enfocrla. Las imagenes de la conferencia estan en mil sitios web. Aqui hay uno, www.catalhoyuk.com/
Agreed
I mean, why not. The speaker should be a good storyteller and their theory should be the focus of attention, not the images. If you want images, just look at a gallery of pictures.
Very good lecture. Thank you. I wish perhaps you could have elaborated on putting GTepe and CH in the larger picture of ancient sites - as witnessed by a quetion coming after the lecture. In particular, is there any relation to the "nearby" areas like Bactria, Vinca /Tripilla, and, above all, Stone Grave culture north of the Black Sea?
how about training the pinheads on the camera's to focus on the [[ scenes /pictures/subjects/maps/etc., rather than the speaker's/narrator's etc., we know what ''they'' look like HELLOW! >>>>>>>
We don't know these were the origins...perhaps something older will be discovered in the future.
Absolutely it will. What is my biggest fear is that people will hide / destroy these findings in their own fears.
It absolutely already has been!
ua-cam.com/video/tDMvrIqPg0w/v-deo.html
@@rodehovededelux3066 'Comments are turned off
'- creationist or psychic woo?
For now, this remains the "0"point of himanity in time until something else is found, probably again in Anatolia, Turkey, or Mesopotamia. Those who are aware of the humans journey to civilisations, Anatolia is the cradle for the civilisations.
ua-cam.com/video/VZxqiRPJa_g/v-deo.html
Easy to see why he chose this type of interest - he is absolutely transfixed with facination.
those hunter gatherers at GT did a pretty good job for a first go at monumental stone masonry, with no drafting, logistical or geometrical knowledge. I'd be well pleased with those carvings after a weeks course down the local polytechnic and all the modern tools, almost like they were civilized and food was brought to the site rather than growing it right next to the most sacred site this society had. Maybe they did it at the weekends after hunting all week?
Really enjoyed the artistry and the depictions of Catalhoyuk. Thank you.
Very interesting. I would also have enjoyed learning about what tools they employed.
Supposedly deer antlers, flint knives , axes and other hand tools.
Very interesting thank you. Limits of civilizations are further back in time than we learned at school. We may expect more surprises in the future as human development may not have been only linear growth of culture, skills and knowledge.
The dude is clearly an EBE, that lives in a completely different world from ours. He managed to turn a fascinating subject into something unbearably dull and boring. It takes an insanely inhumane, and highly developed intellligence to do such a thing. It almost looked like he himself would fall asleep at any moment while delighting us with this endless, monotonous mumbling.
Dunno what an EBE is, but IYI comes to mind (Intellectual Yet Idiot).
@@Reziac Agreed Rez. The man bumbles mumbles ums and arrs his way through a childish presentation. If he is a representative of the quality of professors in this field, then they are bullshit merchants too
He is an archaeologist, not a scientist ! Stay calm .
How about instead we tar, feather, and light him?
Compared to 95% of strictly educational based lectures this was entertaining and well put together. You are used to watching showmen whom cater to the low attention span - entertainment genre. In academia you will find their audience is strictly interested in learning and not in being entertained.
Thank you for sharing this!
And all the comments coming from totally normal people are describing the instability of everything he’s theorizing
because academics tend to oversymbolize, overintelectualize and overinterpret everything they know very little about. All we need is pure data and exact numbers.
Wish someone would publish photos of a couple of completed PhD dissertations in archaeology. The amount of work, of collection and classification and theoretical deliberation is perfectly stunning. The way our ancient archeology cowboys deride them says more about our civilization than the ones they love to speculate about. It ought to be possible to enjoy alternative conceptions and even test them for serious plausibility without trashing the integrity, fairness and value of 'mainline' scholars.
Very interesting lecture!
Very educative. Thanks
Great, very informative!
thank you for your work youve done so far on representing archeological funds,cultures and how we lived...ive always found the structure of the houses and even some totems very similiar around the area of old houses,with 'dams' where the roof of one house gives way to the entrance of another in my hometown hadim...interwoven,that is to say...i also bought your book the leopards tale 2006 because im not just interested in archeology but also think people now and then have lived in similiar ways until recent years...unfortunately modernization,getting away from our own cultures and nature is killing traditional ways of our ancient lives and how our ancestors lived...but i can say,im lucky i experienced that part of ancient culture before modern houses with roofs came up...i even found simlilarities in mexican ancient roofs and houses similar to ours...definitely think those roofs and cultures and the common practical usage of them have many things in common.regarding ancestry,even language...
Remember.....this is AN explanation....not necessarily THE explanation.
7munkee this is not an explanation this is make-believe!
They need to make that more apparent. Because you'll have all of mainstream academia regurgitating the same dry BS as fact and then going on a man-hunt for those who speak the truth later. It's crazy how humans turn things into an unmovable belief of faith.
If I come up with a hypothesis and there are many other explanations out there, I would argue my point of view against the other ones. But his hypothesis is so full of contradictions and failing logic that I never would dare to make such a crap public.
Absolutely fascinating, thanks. No doubt more will emerge from these sites and maybe others. Some exciting new views on how and why farming emerged.
@Piotr Kisiel Yes thanks, I'm doing that. Almost a relief that Gobekli Tepe isn't totally unique but maybe indicative of what was happening back then in the general area? Thanks anyway.
Very informative, thanks
being a visual presentation, it'd have been better if the screen he is referring to would be shown more and for longer
If you could see then you would really know how full of crap this guy is
@@elpatron7916 haha, yeah he rambles on a bit and skips over quite important facts. I couldn't watch the whole thing...
Nice presentation but Dr. Hodder's comment that Hunter Gatherers were responsible for Gobekli is not plausible. The degree of engineering required to carve, transport, and position these monuments is astounding. For example the reliefs carved onto the stones are raised not embedded or carved into. They were placed onto the stone as they were quarried and the rock removed. Moving 15 ton rocks that slender requires modern day engineering techniques.... Why was this not discussed or even acknowledged? This would demand a dedicated group of skilled artisans and
stone cutting engineers. The people responsible for this site invested hundreds of years into its development and yet intentionally buried it completely for some unknown reason. His explanation of the the reliefs was somewhat confusing and dismissed as some form of ritual/spiritial center. But of course this is true but you don't need a PHD in archeology to come to that conclusion. I was hoping for deeper analysis.
Other interpretations talk of the likelihood of some scattered remnants of an earlier, more developed civilization, being able to carry out such an amazing feat at this period. My own intuition is that there may have been such along the coast of say, India, in the early stages of the of the holocene, before the settlements were lost under gradually rising sea levels.
@Jeremy Kirkpatrick I've read as much as I can about Gobekli Tepe and it seems completely illogical to me that anyone would think hunter gatherer tribes built this site.
I was in Turkey in the late 1950's near Karamursel for 2 years, then to Sembach in Germany. You have misspelled gobeklitpe but I like your lecture.
Thank you, I appreciate the treat of obviously quite expensive education. Google rocks!
It was very interesting. I enjoyed it Thanks
Show the slides when he's indicating sites. I don't want to look at him talking and miss the maps!!
Is there evidence of nomadic precursors to the period when building started and how far back does it go?
I think we're looking at it, right there.
"ducky type things" a very technical archaeological term.
They're clearly auks. How he couldn't recognize them as auks, and called them "ducky type things," I have no idea. And that's not my only problem with this man's very outlandish interpretations of what he's seeing.
and I suppose you have better credentials, why are you commenting at all? isn't the troubled viewing of the photos & maps done so awfully enough?????? must we hear your comments about words?
I wouldn't say others are better credentialed, but as artists have often pointed out, sometimes credentials in archaeology tend to interfere with an objective understanding of visual-art, which is open to subjective interpretations, and may be clouded by personal bias. For instance he called images of snakes fearsome, but the snake depicted was not attacking anyone. Why should we automatically assume the artist who sculpted the snake saw it as frightening? Persons who are more familiar with those animals know they don't bother you if you don't threaten and agitate them first, and snakes were often respected, and even revered, by ancient people. That's because they envisioned the snake shedding it's skin to be a symbol of regeneration and rebirth. It's a life-affirming animal in the ancient artistic/symbolic tradition. Even today, the medical symbol of good health STILL REMAINS snakes wrapped around a winged staff! So they saw snakes as something to respect and admire, not fear. It's only been since the re-framing of the serpent as the source of all evil, and the inducement of the first woman, Eve, into sin and rebellion by the Judeo-Christian tradition, that we've come to see snakes as vile, detestable, animals who need to be killed on sight. But, the people who carved these images weren't Judeo-Christians. Hodder himself admits they pre-date all that cultural baggage by thousands of years. So, while, I have no doubts he knows what he's talking about in terms of archaeology and dating, I believe he's quite incorrect about his interpretations of the art. Sometimes you have to put yourself in the shoes of the artist to fully understand their artworks, and get yourself out of your own pre-conceptions for a while. I examined the "ducky" bird images again, and while I originally felt they most closely resembled auks or even dodos, I was troubled by the problem that neither auks nor dodos are native to that region! I searched and searched for what birds in this region these resemble, and kept coming up empty. That is, until I STOPPED myself from only looking at adult birds. Once I expanded and started looking at juveniles, AHA! I realized that they also look just like vulture chicks! So, knowing that, now this art all started to make more sense to me. We have here a mother bird adoring her miraculous egg, and, we also see chicks, thriving, in various stages of growth & development. So, one reason why we comment, is only because we hope to illuminate what is most probably an artistic misinterpretation. Where Mr. Hodder sees a preoccupation with death in these vultures, I think the people who sculpted them were actually celebrating life! They did not hate or fear the vultures as frightful. Everything I see here indicates to me these people were far less judgmental, condemning, and severe about the birds than Mr. Hodder has asserted.
Yes he should have said 'thingies'.
people legitimately complaining about this is the funniest shit like just listen to any archaeologist speak im begging u lmfao we all do this. thingies my man
This is Clark Kent doing his best to convince us he's not Superman.
Succeeding well, actually.
Haha! Great Comment.
The utmost respect for a brother Ian who brings us all this data. A true scientist cleans the lenses of the telescopes and microscopes. It is up to us to leave them clear for the next person to look through or spray paint a graffiti artist tag.
I am a novice, interested in the human journey. To understand pre-industrial man, man before machine, we look to dirt, water and sunshine....and animals. We love the tales of children raised by animals - the jungle book, where the wild things are, the story of romulus. once upon a time, man's belief system was constructed outside. today, our arguments, perspectives, debates are formulated under artificial light in climate controlled enlosures. Our outdoor based words are losing relevance. When they lose their meaning we start throwing them at each other.
if you track culture back to pre-industrial, and then futher, to pre-sheep pen (Eden), then you will find hunter-gatherer. This is the majority of our existence. yes, sophists, you were not deposited here at the international airport. You followed the herds from watering hole to watering hole. Your culture was shaped by which herd your tribal leader chose to follow.
which animal track your tribe followed, shaped your culture, even to this day.
It even sheds light to tendencies, it even shapes dna.
east of the Mediterranean sea is an animal migration channel connecting africa to the rest of the world. in that channel, animal followed the sun, and we followed the animals. The animals, ate, trampled and digested and composted plants. man followed behind, gleaning seeds, picked through poop, and if favor smiled, brought one of these animals down. man noticed he could survive on bread as the wheat evolved. Other men continued the chase. When the ice retreated, the auroch ventured further north. some northern tribes hunted this new creature instead of buffalo or roe deer. He followed them south and attacked, intermarried and assimilated with the bread people. He brought with him his funneling trap technologies he used on deer. because of the beautiful olive women in the wheat fields, gleaning behind the heards, he changed his schedule. He built giant stone traps near the wheat fields. He used deception to funnel the beasts. This is the origin of the cowboy and the megalith. This culture gave birth to rodeo clowns and matadors. it is why we have running with the bulls on our bucket list. But Every Sunday at church we listen to Abraham and melchizadek of catalhoyuk. We are converting to the sheep culture from the east where the Saul found David, not at the crag of the wild goats, but the sheep pens. The passover lamb is the blood of righteousness😁😊😉
Thank you for your efforts Ian Hodder and regards from Istanbul.Thank you Google for introducing us to him.
Hodder's map is a little bit wrong I thing. GobekliTepe is not in that area actually: goo.gl/maps/jYCSFTJx642GfT286
PS: Please show us presenter's media all the time and use presenter himself in a little box at a corner of the video. That way we can understand him more I guess.
The carvings are actually neolithic storyboards. A story-teller/shaman would use the pictograms to create stories for the people, like movie night. Violence, sex, adventure. It's entertainment/ritual. Lots of monsters, lots of options for great story-telling.
Maybe just zodiac: Scorpion (scorpio), the boar (Andromeda), the bird (Cygnus), and the menstruation could've been the milky way. I don't know, just a idea.
Hunter gatherers coming together to make these monuments sounds so unlikely as to be impossible! How can you even conceive of such idea?
Asta Lyberth I agree! There seems to be so much make-believe guess work and assumptions in this talk. Some of it just seems utterly ridiculous!
Yours is an 'Argument by Personal Incredulity' which is always a weak argument. What you should be doing is testing your own assumptions about H and Gers. Based on what we know about human nature, sociality is essential to our evolution. We are capable of creating and maintaining very complex, even inter-tribal social nextworks. And they were no less clever than us.
Omne Bonum I think you’re quite right and I guess I think you are SO right that it makes the suggestion that we were still hunter gathers for over a 100, 000 years so unlikely. I think we are a social race that builds. I have children and they started building with blocks as soon as they could hold them, then whole villages in minecraft. I think there were complex and settled communities much earlier in human history than is portrayed here.
@@HellCatt0770 You know, I think much of what we have learned in school about our history and the history of this world are stories invented by someone !
@@HellCatt0770 Exactly. We know a lot, however we simply don't know precisely what our ancestors were up to during the entire Pleistocene. But we do know one thing for sure: they were US! We need to stop thinking of ancient humans as stupid, scared brutes. They had language, dance, music, art, oratory, story-telling, mysticism. And there is so much time during which so many semi-nomadic tribes would have been criss-crossing the same area, fusing and fissioning. fighting and forgiving (not to mention fornicating!) My guess is, if you can imagine human beings doing it, they did it in the Pleistocene. Only with rocks.
It was probably seasonal residences and/or monastery. The hunter/gatherers left their old/sick at their ancestral sites w their priests/priestesses & visiting them/their remains periodically.
Really interesting lecture.
Has it ever occurred to you that those horns might be there for a more practical reason like hanging things on..??
A bull's skull isn't something you could just buy in the Neolithic. Even if their society was very egalitarian and everyone shared the food, someone would have to get the horns. Whether they earned them by chance, merit or force, they were some kind of trophies and must have been used for display.
You mean the *ritual* of hanging your clothes and hats!
Yes, even Megalithomania has fallen to the 'talker' rather than prepared photos and maps.
why did he have the temperature graph running backwards??
Archaeologists put their own preconceived modern ideas on everything they dig up. And if they haven’t got a clue it will be ceremonial or sacred. Every Celtic bronze shield found has always been ‘Ceremonial’ weapon or ‘Parade armour’. Now they have discovered a bronze shield with battle damage. Now they’re saying we will have to re-evaluate what there real use was. It’s a shield, which is a weapon, therefore it will be used in battle, it’s not rocket science. They get so preoccupied with projecting their own middle class values on everything they dig up, they can’t see the wood for the trees.
I thought the "earliest" structures have been found by ground penetrating radar and thus have yet to be excavated.
Correct. The earliest structures will never be excavated. It's impossible to know whether a found structure is the "earliest."
Thanks for the nice lecture. However, animal herding or domestication also requires a lots of collective effort like agriculture. As like agriculture, you also have to invest your efforts and shelter for them and wait a long for the result. So I would say, animal domestication, agriculture, ritual practice and living permanently, all of these four process were happening simultaneously. And their outcome was these amazing early neolithic villages in Central Anatolia, like 'Aşıklı Höyük' and 'Çatal Höyük'. :)
Abu Bakar Siddiq -do you think the science of crop rotation was developed as relatively contemporaneously as well? I would appreciate your thoughts.
I would say, in a bit later period. Not contemporaneously. You may have examples of 'crop rotation' in mature neolithic settlements and not exactly in early neolithic sites.
Sidduq, learn to look at maps and see the timedifferences. You just merge time here...that's not history but just assuming that things happen "in broadly the same period" some 20 generations long. People so often fantasisze that they can say something in this field without reading the actual sources.
FANTASTIC! THANKS FOR UPLOADING!
I think it gave family members time to specialize in one area of skill. Or division of labor. Also strength in numbers for hunting etc.
Very nice evidence-based summary of recent excavations, from a guy with a great deal of knowledge about this site and about the period and region in question. Contradicts earlier thinking, but the evidence is what it is.
im making a school projekt, was this comment sarcastic?
@@willetheman7260 why sarcastic? The presenter is clearly very knowledgable.
Cant watch if a title claims "origin"......when it comes to our history, we just have "oldest known so far".
The title does not claim that Gobekli and Çatalhöyük were the origins. It would, if there was a colon instead of a semicolon.
Is there any connection with Old Europe, with Balkan's region? What is with DNA evidence- local people or came from outside?
7:04 gotta love the editor of this video
I'm still uncertain why he is projecting the notion of "violence" into the carvings.
@Barb Mulvaney Baiting and slaughtering animals is violent. Especially the baiting part.
At least heads don´t come off on their own. Some animals had their teeth revealed, which usually isn´t a good sign.
totally agree. these are clearly symbols of the constellations.
How can you talk about the richness of nature and then impose an arbitrary gender construct into the mix??
@@hallerd I see a festival. Am I wrong? 28:55
at 14:59 - I absolutely disagree with this gentleman's very bizarre & utterly misguided interpretations of this artwork. The artwork clearly does not represent "violence, sex and death" nor is it "overtly male." Only the lion, boar, and maybe that dog-like animal are clearly male, and all the other animals like that cattle, the bears, and those auks are either female or of an undetermined gender, so it's quite an EQUAL representation of genders. One of the auk birds is clearly a mother caring for her egg, not "playing with a ball or spherical object!" (You have to be kidding me with that one!) And there is no headless corpse there, that looks like something ALIVE riding playfully on a smiling bird's back, and you can't tell what it was, because it's damaged. Nor is the mother auk playing with a severed head! That's obviously her egg! It's quite clear this artwork represents harmony with nature, nurturing, caring, and is all about a celebration of life (the woman he calls "being penetrated" is simply giving birth.) This is also about a reverence for animals, not death. HE has decided these animals like the scorpion are "wild and dangerous" not these people who lived in harmony with nature and understood these animals so well and respected them. And none of these animals are dead nor are they even being attacked. They are simply LIVING! In one of the carvings, a smiling woman & man appear to be dancing happily with a turtle! How is that "violence and death?" Wow. And visible teeth don't always represent "violence" either, they also represent smiling. And smiling is certainly what these animals really appear to be doing! Bulls don't represent "violence" either. In the Minoan civilization, for example, they represent strength, and the Minoans saw the domestication of bulls as something peaceful and wonderful. Snakes also don't signify violence in neolithic prehistory either. Goddess figures frequently handle snakes to represent the calming and delicate nature of feminine nurturing and sensitivity. Egyptians also revered snakes. It's not until Judeo-Christianity that the serpent is seen as something intrinsically evil. For a scientist, he seems awfully prone to think in lock-step with archaic Christian fears and hang-ups, and inclined to very grim perspectives that aren't actually here.
It occurred to me last night that perhaps I was too irritated and dismissive yesterday when I objected to the idea that the bird was playing with a human skull rather than venerating and nurturing her egg. But let's set aside for the moment the fact of the size differential; that there were no carnivorous birds as large as the bird that's depicted, who'd literally dwarf a human, (except for phorusrhacids, the so called "Terror Birds" which paleontologists believe never lived in Turkey, nor even at same time and in the same places as to be in direct contact with human beings!) When I take a second look at the bird on the relief, I notice the rings around her neck suggestive of the vulture, certainly a very large bird and one that would be well-known to the people there, (though not as large as that!) and one that does indeed eat flesh. Okay, still, I think if that IS a skull, the bird is clearly not attacking it in a violent nor aggressive way! It's obvious the bird looks serene and very gentle, not fierce. So, if that IS a skull rather than an egg, or some combination of BOTH skull & egg simultaneously, then the people who carved it were saying something about life and re-birth. In other words, they may have recognized that a skull is approximately the same shape and same color as an egg. Therefore, all those who die are also reborn. Again, the focus here isn't on death, but on LIFE! This would also explain why these people buried their dead in the fetal position, and sometimes holding a skull lovingly as one would hold a baby. They would've recognized that babies often curl up in the fetal position when they sleep, and that eggs are what baby birds emerge from; and so the dead may be reincarnated (reborn) through the skull-egg. This idea could even be the ancient original source of the ancient Greek myth of the Goddess Athena being born from out of the skull of Zeus. Another thing: finding skulls with small fractures could very be the result of athletic sports injuries (ask any football player about that) or even hunting injuries. (I.e. accidents, and not intentional head bashing.)
Vultures are often used in sky burials, something that doesn't seem to have occurred to Hodder, but then he also assumes all the cattle heads with horns are bulls, despite the fact that both genders of aurochs had substantial sets of horns. He "inherited" Catalahoyuk from James Mellaart, who had immediately pronounced the site as a goddess worshipping culture, so Hodder has worked very hard to try to dismiss such notions, seemingly carrying that bias against Golbeki Tepe, which Schmidt had declared was proof of goddess worship, too. Some male archeologists (it seems) get carried away when they see animals and humans depicted with genitalia, assuming that the #ToxicMasculinity that rose with the patriarchy in the Bronze Age was common before then, too. There is absolutely no proof that the patriarchy existed prior to the early Bronze Age. You're also correct that the serpent (and large cats) are often associated with the goddess, since snakes shed their skins in a way that looks very familiar to anyone who has given birth. Love your theory that the orb the vulture is guarding is its egg, but, if the image is depicting a sky burial, it could be a skull. Bones, after being stripped by vultures, are then bundled up for ritual purposes. Keep up the great critical thinking!
Oh come on. One thing is to criticise unfalsifiable/uncertain interpretations presented as certainties, perhaps due to the personal convictions of the presenter/archeologist. It is another thing entirely to draw on spurious concepts like "toxic masculinity" that were invented literally last year in order to produce one's counter-analysis. That's just doing more of what you're criticising this person for in the first place. There's no proof of "patriarchy" or "matriarchy" on any of these megaliths, nor really in their interpretation as symbolising male figures, death (?), or female figures, harmony (? again, spurious connections), etc. Anachronistically appealing to either of these two notions just immediately signals the fact that you're an ideologue attempting to use ancient structures to prop up your dubious politics.
On another video, the presenters put forth theories linking many of the images to symbols, often similar to forms found elsewhere whether we know their significance or not, and celestial phenomena (constellations such as Scorpio, the sphere on the wing as the moon or sun, etc.) I find that our modern paradigms - patriarchy etc. - may or may not be helpful but certainly merit some mistrust.
Your interpretation makes much more sense to me than his.
Q: Why are British academics are so unable to teach?
A: Because they don't actually understand themselves. Something (actually the only thing) I learned at Glasgow university was that you should never buy books written by lecturers at British universities, always buy American text books if you want to have things explained by someone who understands his/her subject.
Kids being separated from parents sounds like what happens in slavery. Why would they put up with that? Tradeoff for a secure apartment with what had to be the most modern amenities of the time? Head wounds being common sounds sketchy.
We still like to decorate with heads. I have a painted deer skull on my bedroom wall just because it looks cool.
Keep digging. Can’t get enough of these strange sites.
Thank you
I come away from this as confused as when I began. Does Gobekli Tepe show us how and when agriculture originated? Did agriculture begin after the building project commenced? Bear in mind that modern genetic strains of wheat (all 28 of them) originate from this exact location!
Nothing that they have presented so far makes common sense, it's too typical of the classic explanation where everything is tied to rituals and religion. I guess the round buildings in Gobekli are more related to something logical, that the city needed by that time, like buildings for administration, management or storage of resources, teaching, study or some kind of hospital or market. They found a bunch of animal bones in Gobekli, so it could mean that they had domesticated animals, and for that you need farming, also they need water management, a place to collect the garbage, people building stuff and maintaining that stuff. Probably they knew all that stuff many years before the construction of the city.
yes he argues, with Jacques Cauvin, that the "symbolic revolution" happened first and then agriculture - so the religious megaliths were BEFORE agriculture. It's a transition - as Zizek calls a "vanishing mediator."
The idea, as I've understood it, is that Göbekli Tepe gave the previously disparate bands of hunter-gatherers something to congregate around and hold them together, facilitating the formation of larger groups consisting of unrelated people, which in its turn lead to the development of agriculture and permanent settlements.
From what I've heard, the earliest structures as Göbekli Tepe are not associated with any permanent occupation of that site: no houses, no storage, no water, nothing associated with longterm food preparation. The large concentrations of animal bones are all from wildlife. The settled living sites with signs of agriculture found in thr vicinity of the mound but not right near it all postdate the beginnings of Göbekli Tepe. This is what led researchers to postulate that the coming together of disparate groups for the transcendant purpose of building this ritual site was the basis of cooperative social structures that favored the appearance of agriculture, which needs much larger groups than hunter-gatherer societies (which typically are only viable with 30-70 people max.).
@@cathjj840 nice summary.
15:07 "...perhaps a fox there, and these ducky type things."
A true scientist will never say "surely", "it's obvious", "never", "always", because time and ruthless nature of truth has taught him that he knows nothing for sure, that at any moment a new piece of data, a new discovery can make him look as fool if he says things with surety. Only charlatans say things with surety because people tend to flock towards an "authority figure". So scientist use words like "perhaps" or "[insert an association] type thing" to signal that there is no 100% surety there, and when he says about some symbol as a bear depiction, he adds immediately that it's because they found a number of objects with the same sort of body position, with a head of a bear or something like that.
@@lehcyfer Well, the Ducky Type Thing is a Dodo or rather depicts a Dodo. If you know what a spider is and you see a sculpture of a spider you say it is a spider and you don't say that according to Karl Marx its a deprived or angry spider.
Those who jump to conclusions find very fast that science is unforgivable, and learn to only say things that are hundred percent true. A scientist would never say that some crude depiction in stone from several thousand years ago is something. He won't even say it is a depiction of something. If he thinks it is a depiction of spider he will say "It appears (to me) that it resembles a spider".
@@lehcyfer and after many repetitions of this type it becomes fact and no other explanation is considered
@@grahamdean9978 Because scientists are precise in language, interpretation remains separate from the facts that underly it.
The popular press often conflates the two, and so in the public mind, what you say happens.
(from minute 7:20 to 12:10 on Göbeklitepe, from 20:00 to 25:02 on Çatalhöyük, and a comparison of the two sites from 43:50 to 46:03).
there are many updates on this that shed light on the site and the bird stone is the most important because it explaines the whole reason behind it
Where did the people who made Gobekli live?
Great question. They did not bury their homes - unfortunately! So there are no remains of every day life from this time period.
They cannot give up on the "hunter/gather" orthodoxy, can they?
The guy is avoiding the key issue...authodox history hitherto assumed that hunter gatherer were incapable of the organised labour/social organisation that this incredible site (complex) would require.
@@neilmichaelwalsh3940 That is the revelation of this site. People are capable of many things in the right circumstances. We are talking about humans. Hunter-gatherer is a label, not a fixed category. Humans by definition are very capable of co-operation on many levels.
Obviously they need to dig up the rest of the mounds to see what the dates actually say, some of these may go back further and i would make them the highest priority in future excavations.
Absolutely! But the sad thing is that the man in charge of the excavations only got funds for the area already done. Then he will have to rebury it, if no one else steps up and pay for it. The area still underground is believed to be of enormous size, who knows what can be found? This is a typical case where the funders don't care or are afraid that to many "out of place" discoveries will be done. Maybe NASA step in since they have done excavation in several old places we lack knowledge of. I hope you can understand my english.
The archaeologist who ran the dig since the mid 90's estimated that, based on how high the mound is, the site could've been in use for another 2,000 - 3,000 years earlier than the parts which have already been excavated.
Es una maravillosa charla
There is a site that is 5000 years older than gobeki and this guy don't even mention it Gunung Padang if you are interested in ancient civilization you must learn about Gunung Padang too he speculates a lot but very informative thank you for sharing
The site was dated 6,500 years BP (before present) by carbon radiometric dating at 3-4 meters below the surface (12,500 years at 8 to 10 metres below the surface), and the artifacts at the surface date to about 4,800 years BP.
that's false information sir !
At some future time, there will be discoveries of civilizations on earth from a million or more years ago.
just shut up
completely unconfirmed dates. the RC dating they got was contextual and not artefactual, therefore being circumstantial at best! Hodder might be a post-procesualist but he's still one of the best researchers in the world, so don't go calling him 'this guy'.
Hunter gatherers built all this? Had to stop listening after I heard that.
First of all, the dating on this site is by no means certain. It was intentionally buried and the dating was done on the soil that it was buried in, which gives it a MINIMUM age of 9000-10,000 BC. There's no telling how old it actually is before this minimum age because of how well it has been preserved.
Given the size of the site and that only 5% of it has been excavated, it must have taken a long time for whatever people built all of it, and you don't just go and build all of that only to bury it again shortly after, so it must have been there for a substantially longer length of time than the minimum.
For years the mainstream said people need agriculture to build megalithic structure. Now they say hunter gathers built GT. Well hunter gathers don't stay in one place to build to that stuff. Makes more sense to me to revise back the date when agriculture started not change the ability of hunter gathers.
As modern analog we see isolated tribes in the Amazon cultivate wild plants such as the yuca root and while they also do some hunting/gathering, their survival and ability to survive and remain is a stationary location is reliant upon the WILD crops they cultivate. Some tribes also use hollowed out gourdes for storing food and water not pottery. These biodegrade so of course none will be found thousands of years later.
Yes I clicked on this surprised that Göbekli Tepe was being discussed on Google Talks, then the bloke who introduced the speaker started rattling off his academic credentials and I continued watching thinking it would be interesting to see how the orthodoxy were going to attempt to explain Göbekli away - I also stopped watching at the point where he starts regurgitating the absurdity that this was all put together by hunter gatherers.
The sad simple truth is that they don't tend hand out the big academic gongs to those who question established 'fact'. That said I would have expected even some guarded comments from a man with such secure tenure (such as those offered by the late Klaus Schmidt) and even thought he was going there when he started talking about how Göbekli forces us to question previous assumptions . . . sadly not. Most of the greatest innovations in science have come from those who've recognised that the current explanations don't quite hit the bullseye and gone seeking better ones. Thats why we now remember Galileo but none of his contemporaries.
Yea Hunter/gathereres who were hunting and gathering to survive decided...Hey lets cut out some massive granite blocks with our stone chisels and create some high art and then bury it...This guy is a brainwashed clown.
I think Graham Hancock has the closest to the correct idea, Civilizations have existed for a VERY long time, and they are wiped out by cataclysms, wiping their memory. They all heavily focus on astronomy. Which I think makes sense, because when humans settle down at night (hunter gatherer or not) they probably studied the stars before bed, and if you have 100 people, for example, spending just an hour a night pointing out stars etc, they probably gain the knowledge fast.
@@crossfarm4146 Hancock is pseudo-science.
Organized hunters. Military protected gatherers.
The concept of larger groups hunting plains animals like bovines makes sense as a precursor of domestication.
Gatherers protected by watchmen makes sense as a precursor of farming.
Saving seeds and penning in cattle is likely the next step.
I believe falconry and wolf relations developed about the same time as horse breaking.
Strength in numbers on the plains with wild wheat and barley is most likely. High fat diets led to all of this. Nuts are big there as well.
There is absolutely no possible way that hunter gatherers just woke up one day divinely inspired to create what is "supposedly" the worlds first true north aligned building, more interestingly, explicit depictions in these highly sophisticated stone carvings on the massive megaliths show intense knowledge of astrology, not only that but agriculture just randomly pops up in the same exact location? It's so obvious that this is not the case and that this was a transfer of technology. That being said we must now consider the need to re-date a LARGE portion of the megaliths in the world, there are too many "coincidences" and even more absolute mysteries in this picture of history now that we need to start properly synthesizing this data and connecting the dots. The Piri Reis map ALONE should make anyone question the conventional theory of the evolution of civilization
I had to watch this for my Anthropolgy class and it is so painful to listen to this guy talk.
It's great to get a different, mainstream explanation of Gobleki Tepi, including Catalhoyuk. I have been hearing about these sites from alternative sources previously, but thankfully Gobleki Tepi has recently made it to the world stage. The alternative theory has been leading down a wormhole, to Atlantis, that has apparently been defiled by the nazis 😐😑😐
The nazis were interested in Atlantis as they were of everything occult. For ex Werner von Brown who USA took in their space program because of his technical knowledge. He mentioned that their knowledge came from above - pointed his finger towards the sky. (It's on YT). We can't avoid everything the nazis were involved in, then we have to skip lots of needed things. As to Atlantis, it was known of long before the nazis existed, as were the swastika. The latter is still used in ex Buddhism, called the Suncross, a sign of life and prosperity. Hitler turned it around rotating to the left and changed colors to black/red. It's sad that they have infiltrated many of the atlantic theoris, we have to be careful and "read between the lines" watching them. Does anyone know of some quality channel about the subject? I hope you can understand my english.
@@skandivan1 This is all common knowledge, but have you heard of Godwin's law?
The circular stone t shape pillar temples appears to be designed to celebrate marriage. Two prominent large t shape pillars are central and surrounded by a family of t shape pillars. Ritual circles
Couldn't help thinking at times: Singing in the rain... I'm singing in the rain...
History just keeps getting older and ..
From the comments I take it that some ancient aliens type has been talking about the same site?
From your comment it is pretty obvious that you don't know about the handbag problem.
Yeah the bird man images were a gift from god for the ancient aliens/lizard overlords set
Great video, thank you very much , note to self(nts) watched all of it 51:20
Lecturer: How do you hold 8000 people together without any central authority?
Petr Kropotkin: Well child, let me explain...
It was really exiting to learn about a completely different society.
Look at how much time they had, ours is spent filing tax returns.
Just like in Egypt where the hunter gatherers just suddenly new how to build a pyramid that we can't build today, these folks just suddenly had the skills to build Gobekli Tepe.
Archaeology is defined as a dogma perpetuated by liars.
You are absolutely correct sir...."they" are hiding the truth from us.
It's a joke. How sad to be a dogmatic historian or archeologist right now. They arn't scientists so why we've been listening to them this long I have no clue.
@@mortal88 why would you want to trust Scientism!
You say liars, are they? Or are they just really really stupid people that ignore the obvious. There was a civilization going back in history that was far more advanced than we are today!
It has nothing to do with space aliens either.
Got to ensure history never compares to the Bible.
@@smellyfrogbits3424 I think they are too dumb to know the truth.
Was the megalithic yard employed in the building of this sites?
Obviously a careful scientist with the ability to communicate ongoing work...could we have an update of the latest finds with a video director who knows how to fill the screen with the illustrating image for the duration of the informative comments for that image??!!
I have another theory that may explain the origins of society. Perhaps the thing that FIRST singled out hominids from other species (perhaps as far back as Australopithecus) - before even fire or tools - was our collective fear of the unknown: i.e. 'religious' superstition and the desire for us not to be free, but instead transfer responsibility for our future to 'spirit guides' or gods.
That would explain many things, including grouping (or self-herding). That in turn would lead more naturally to a division of labour: various task groups. And that in turn would lead to having more time to pursue other 'passtimes'. It would also explain how a heirarchy based on joint 'faith' would grow readily, and how it is fundamentally hard to dismiss, for most, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and seems to be ingrained into our primitive minds even until today.
The Australopithecus didn't have religion. Apes tend to be very social and organize into very tribal groups just like us humans.
"the desire for us not to be free"
The concept of freedom doesn't exist when you're a big hungry animal with no claws or fangs. You either band together and hunt (or gather) your dinner, or you starve to death.
You seem to have come to a conclusion (that religion is a primitive flaw built into our brains) and then worked your way to prove it. In reality, religion is a natural expression of our genes, just like music or art. Belief in the supernatural isn't a requisite for religion to sprout, it happens all the time. Right now in the US you have SJWs and Communists in one corner, and Neonazis, right wingnuts and Trump worshippers in the other one.
And you know Australopithecus didn't have religion how? We have observed CHIMPANZEES that are showing signs of having religion.
Australopithecus carried around an artifact that looked like a face. www.nytimes.com/2018/02/01/arts/design/nasher-sculpture-center-dallas-first-sculpture-review.html What does that indicate if not a proto-religious impulse? A response to the vagaries of the spiritual forces that surrounded them. Then comes Gobekli Tepe millions of years later. Why should we be surprised at the view the first came religion then came social structure? Especially since we've long spoken of Homo Religiousus.
Did a kindergärtner script this ? "Oh look it's Santa and a candy cane !! " Ducky type things?
XD
and a headless man riding it with his genitals exposed.
It's called "know your audience". He did give this talk at Google, after all.
Probably built after the big flood, then used as a prayer place or place of sacrifice maybe ? However, its also the first place farming/ agriculture began which meant population growth obviously
Wonderfully presented to lay people interested in archeology. I would like to know what dating methods was used to determine the age of the site. Also the gathering of thousands of people must have depopulated Anatolia or Anatolia was so populous that tribes decided to come together to maximize on the scarcity of animals for hunting. What came after gobeliky, how that culture developed in the future? Thank you for any tips.
They used c14 dating, which was just invented at the time of the digs.
Has it escaped this erm..quackademic that hunters and gatherers would be far too busy hunting and gathering to be bothered dragging and sculpting lumps of granite into pieces of high art for their sheer amusement.
He even insulted their art by saying they put monsters and penises on everything.
I know mate, look at him, he knows himself he's talking shit, but he can't help himself..cos the govt are paying him, or in this case Google...same thing really
Modern hunter-gatherers actually tend to have a lot of free time. Agriculturalists are the ones enslaved by their jobs. That said, there is reason to wonder if that is true of the h-gs in question. The modern h-gs tend to be living in areas where the living is fairly easy. There isn't, to my knowledge, good evidence for how good the living was for these ancient Anatolians.
@Adrian Caswell In the end, somebody built the thing. So, either there were H-Gs that had a lot of free time or early agriculturalists that somehow hid their agricultural activity. We could also find evidence of this activity later, but that would upend a lot of thinking about the development of agriculture. Me, I'm sticking with the HGs for now.
between gobekli and çata there are 3000years .
Between the writting of The Epic of Gilgamesh and the First Crusade there are 3,000 years, and both people believed in a universal flood and the creation of man from soil.
The tall center uprights at Gobekli remind me of the trilithons at Stonehenge
Can you imagine how our local pub will be classified in the future. A place where they gathered to perform religious ceremonies.
and sexual deviancy
so these hunter gatherers started out of nothing and formed a "spirutial" place with 16 tonns pillars - ssshhhhhhhh
Who says "out of nothing"? Just because this is the oldest larger construction so far ? There might be future findings. Here is one older settlement area .ua-cam.com/video/V7D5JdgRv3o/v-deo.html
@@paulingvar We should see a long tradition though of quarries, pillars, and art. Of which we have not found anything yet. Nobody has these skills out of nothing.
@@mver191 This specific site was saved because it was buried. Don´t expext it is easy to find exacty how this evolved. But sometimes humans ca be very creative. So far this shows (some) remarkably creative people at this site.
Never in my life have I heard speculation dribbled in such a boring manner or for that matter dribbled as if it were the absolute truth. This man shouldn’t be teaching anyone anything
He hasn't really got a clue about the things he is talking about ! As you say it is all speculation !
You don’t need to domesticate species to drastically alter the food produced on a given piece of land. The indigenous tribes of the Pacific Northwest cultivated a wide variety of plants and drastically changed huge swaths of land in order to facilitate hunting and travel. There may have been some selection of the plants, but mainly they were gardening in amongst the other vegetation, not clearing a rectangular plot and tilling (although they did do that for their main starch crop, camas).
The Great Plains are being reforested because they were kept clear by massive herds of bison, which grew massive because the plains Indians purposefully prevented succession.
Actually, the bison were en route to extinction because of the Indians. Remember they didn't have horses until whites arrived, and only a suicidal maniac hunts bison on foot (they are fast, aggressive, and dangerous). So they set grassfires that drove whole herds over cliffs. There are massive boneyards at the foot of these "buffalo jumps" -- nearly all of which went to waste, cuz a band of a couple hundred Indians can't use up a big pile of bison carcasses. And in fact there weren't very many plains Indians, because water was so scarce. (They were mostly the stragglers who escaped the Iroquois genocides.)
Fact is bison (or cattle, which doesn't matter) are nicely symbiotic with grass -- which evolved to be grazed. And grass can do well where trees struggle or die.
And the post-ice-age Great Plains were never forested beyond the low areas and streambanks; there just isn't enough surface water or rainfall to support more than scrub trees. Indeed, if you want to keep your shelter belt alive, you need to plow the native grass out from between your trees -- there's not enough water to support both.
The video presents us an alternative view about the progression of history through the discovery of Göbeklitepe. What is the significance of Göbeklitepe in that sense?
Interesting, hunter gatherers with advanced masonry techniques. They could stop hunting and gathering, seemingly a trivial part of life, in order to build massive structures. I'm sorry but that's bollocks. These people had organisers, artisans and infrastructure of provision in order to pull this off. I couldn't watch it all, it goes against any sense of logical interpretation.
Archaeologists don't claim to know how exactly these people lived or how they organized to make the structures, However, Gobekli Tepe doesn't have any evidence of being inhabited, and it was built well before the first evidence of agriculture, both things which point to hunter-gatherers. If you have an alternate theory that requires less assumptions I'm all ears.
@@pomponi0 well said.