The Archeological Find That Broke History

It’s crazy when you think about the fact that the pyramids were older to the Romans, than the Romans are to us. And now finding an ancient city that is literally twice the age of the pyramids….I’m thinking there is a LOT about early human civilizations that we DON’T know.

I think the most amazing thing about the Göbekli Tepe is that it was used up until the present as a religious site. If you ever watch the interviews made with the locals you'll see that people regarded that site as a holy place, went there to pray, and make wishes. So everyone knew it was a special spot for thousands of years, but nobody knew exactly why. That's fascinating.

Gobekli Tepe is the kind of thing that if I'd heard about it as a kid I might have grown up to be an archaeologist. It's fascinating.

it's mind boggling that there were so many civilizations in human history that perished. and how many more we haven't discovered (yet)..

I was an anthropology student for a hot second, and what struck me often was the tendency of Anthropologists to underestimate the abilities of the ancient world. Like saying that a site from 9000 BCE could not possibly have been inhabited by people who understood the movement of the stars. Ummmm...yes it could.

'people in the past were a lot more intelligent than we give them credit for.. '. Absolutely! Have been saying this for years. From an Irish perspective there are huge numbers of megolithic sites which are extremely complex and date back a couple of thousand years before the Pyramids and Stonehenge and yet are barely recognised. From an amateur point of view I'd say that we've barely scratched the surface of human history. Fascinating though.

The first person who found it was a farmer who got his plow stuck in one of the stones. The guy reported it but they didn’t take him serious. Then Klaus Schmidt came to the scene and identified the site for what it is known today.

“Except not cool cuz that kinda breaks history” I’ve never understood this mindset. Especially from someone with a scientific mind. How can anyone think this is anything BUT cool? It doesn’t break history, it’s making us understand history more accurately.

Seeing stuff like this reminds me of why “Ozymandias” will always be one of my favorite poems. Really captures the concept of what’s lost to time

What I find most compelling about the whole area (of discovered sites), which doesn't seem to have been addressed by commenters or archaeologists, is that all discovered sites so far seem to have been constructed on the periphery of the ancient water boundaries which are visible on satellite imagery as the darker green of vegetation which had been fed for millennia. It's also a way to determine the extent of where it was possible to grow settlements anywhere in the world. I've also used interactive flood maps to scour water boundaries along the Nile to indicate where ancient ports may have been situated, and in some cases, potential robbed out structures. It's great fun, addictive and compelling, but can lead to days passing swiftly from being singularly focused!

I got to visit this site in 2015. I was so overwhelmed I sat for hours contemplating the depths of our ignorance of our history.

I appriciate that the current understanding of when animals were domesticated etc led to the "it must be all hand built": but if you have a massive structure that shoves building back to before supposed start of domestication/farming: maybe that 'Start' was earlier as well?

There's also the big flats of footprints in New Mexico that pushed N American history back thousands of years. (And the child's footprints that put both feet together and then hopped into a puddle (in a sloth track) and splashed water all over, before running to catch up to their parents, just like children all over the world, just like I did as a child. That single detail really brought the past alive for me.)

Fun fact: the species of wild grain closest to what became the first agricultural grain is located only 20 miles from Göbekli Tepe... suggesting that the very first agriculture occurred in that neighborhood.

The big dipper is a bear being pursued by three hunters, not a bear with a long tail. Modern city dwellers don't thing of a hunt when they think of a bear. Göbekli Tepe might be the result of a seasonal lifestyle. We live on factory farms and eat fresh salad in the dead of winter, but life used to be heavily dependent on the season. One idea is that these people were dispersed most of the year and gathered in dense cities for one season each year. Also despite bizarre remarks about stating to realize they weren't animals, there is no reason to think people thought they were animals even 50,000 years ago.

I highly recommend reading The Dawn of Everything by David Wengrow and David Graeber. They get into lots of sites like this, including ones that are even older or were in unexpected areas. The ultimate point of the book is the one you make: that people throughout history were infinitely smarter and more creative than we give them credit for, and the model of civilizational development like you described in the beginning of the video is sometimes undermined by the evidence, yet many researchers perform academic acrobatics to fit the evidence into existing models of civilizational development.

Greatings from Turkey. I didn’t have a chance to visit the gobekli tepe but very recently i’ve visited çatalhöyük. Which is an almost 9000 years old settlement. It was a very interesting feeling. Than i went the Boncuklu höyük. It was a smaller and less known place than the çatalhöyük but as the history goes it was older. The experience was incredible.

“Feeling timeless is timeless”. That’s such a great quote. Human hubris is universal, it seems. We like to think we couldn’t just disappear, but we live on a floating ball in space, with an ever raging mother nature. We are but a blip in the sands of time.

I don’t know if you follow miniminuteman but he’s an archaeology graduate with his own channel. He just got permission to go to Göbekli Tepe and take 12 people with him. It’s going to be really interesting to see what he’s able to film there and what information he’s going to be able to take away from it. I am so completely jealous that I’m not able to go.

When you consider the real deep time history of our species, going back at least 50k-150k years, even 15k years is relatively recent. It is absolutely mind-blowing to think how many civilizations have come and gone throughout this time, and how much memory has been lost to deep time. And how we will likewise be lost to our future selves.