Gobekli Tepe & the Younger Dryas: why did we start farming?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 13 ม.ค. 2023
- Why did humans, after thousands of years of nomadic existence, hunting and gathering, decide to settle down and begin farming? This is perhaps one of, if not the, greatest question that archaeologists have been attempting to answer for the past century and a half. Going along with the development of agriculture and the Neolithic Revolution, there is another mystery.
In south eastern turkey lies a massive archaeological site, the famous, and mysterious, Göbekli Tepe. As it turns out, the site of Göbekli Tepe, constructed after the Younger Dryas Cold Snap ended about 11,700 years ago, may very well help in answering this question. Which then raises another one: what was the Younger Drys period, and what caused it? Was it the draining of Lake Agassiz in North America? Tue eruption of Laacher See volcano in Germany? Or, perhaps more exotically, was it caused by an asteroid or comet? This last theory, commonly known as the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, argues for a drastic alteration in the earth’s climate during the end of the last ice age. It has many detractors and many supporters, ranging from accredited scientists, to more…interesting and questionable opinions such as the notion that it wiped out an ice age civilization, currently espoused by Graham Hancock and others like him, especially in the recently Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse .
I am an old woman who couldn't afford to go to college. Channels like yours are invaluable to me. I can't begin to tell you how grateful I am.
Wow, thank you!
I’m an old woman who did go to college. Channels like this are fascinating to me, too. It’s never too late to learn new things.
You are not an old woman! You are a perpetually curious woman.
@@lolat7355 hear hear...keeps this old woman going
@@dragonfox2.058 I'm just middle aged but disabled and can't work anymore, I have to sit most time at home, I would die of boredom as I have been always very curious about the world and would love to travel. Now I travel with the internet at least.
As a farmer, I am thinking these guys are missing a big part of the transition. You do NOT need to sow seeds, especially grains like barley or buckwheat. The act of harvesting grains with hand tools will almost always result in self-sowing of the next generation. Grains ripen from the bottom of the stalk to the top, so what this means if you wait until the top of the stalks are dry and ready to harvest, about 25% of the stalk (the bottom part) has already fallen off onto the ground and will reseed the next generation. With grains like Barley and buckwheat which grow very fast, you end up with fields of monocultures as the grains out compete almost all weeds. If you stay in a spot, and you harvest Buckwheat, you will have an entire other harvest available in about 12 weeks or less without sowing seeds.
That's an interesting thought. Thanks for pointing it out!
Wow I didn't know this and my grandfather is a former farmer guess you always learn something new guess this explains why farming superseded hunting and gathering you could produce far far more of a surplus simply by letting the wheat replant itself.
Excellent point of view.
Very interesting! But weren't ancient cultures different from what we use now? The crops that we have today are result in thousands of years of selection. Can it be that previous variations of the crops, having smaller and lighter grains, did not behave this way? Anyway, I know nothing about farming.
Their are many wild edible plants and mushrooms that "like" disturbance... that is, they propagate better if harvested properly.
...
Hunter/gatherers stay in one place and alter the food sources there on purpose... if that's farming, I farm my local woods
I think people need to be more mindful of the difference between horticulture and farming, and that horticulture can have extended back quite a bit farther than farming. We have fairly good evidence of horticulture at least two times farther back than Gobekli Tepe. So long before we were farming, hunter gatherers were doing more than just gleaning naturally placed resources. Hunter gatherers are not incapable of planning, and they don't move randomly. They would manage plant resources near their living sites. And humans continued doing this long after Gobekli Tepe into historical times. What I am getting at is that we may be over focusing on individual sites and time periods, when we should be focusing on the forces that cause the mobile to settled transition.
I agree. We have people on the planet now farming in ways thousands of years old, while just down the road is a big agrobiz with a military battalion of modern equipment. Changes are slow and uneven.
Similarly, people keep searching for some sort of individual spot where humanity evolved, whereas things make much more sense when you realize it was a long slow process taking part across much of the African continent. I think people are searching for these individual sites, monuments, and artifacts because it is a very simple piece of concrete evidence (relatively speaking of course), but humans have always been complex and building slowly upon prior knowledge.
Yes, an example of that would be the possible influence of humans on flowers and fruiting plants, simply by caring for ones they found desirable, long before agriculture.
The issue with generalizing certain time periods, especially in the prehistorical age, is that specific sites can be vastly different and have varying technological advancements. The forces that caused ancient humans to settle were those specific technologies. Also, you need to be more specific about the horticulture vs farming argument. Horticulture is a type of farming.
@@georgeforeman89 It's a matter of context and the specific meaning of the word in the anthropological rather than the common sense. When you see anthropologists and historians referring to farming they are specifically referring to a population that is sedentary and the majority of their nutrition comes from domesticated livestock and intensive agriculture. When you see them refer to horticulture they are referring to a population that practices intentional management and harvest of plant resources. The first definition is skewed and they really should adjust their definitions based on a more rational standard but those are the definitions they are working from.
Not even two minutes in, and you include a disclaimer when this information will probably be outdated. I have never seen anyone regardless of the topic, being this transparent about the level of accuracy their video is conveying. Hell, to this day I'm finding so many software tutorials that point to options that aren't even available anymore, and the uploader just refuses to take down the video, and you would have even less incentive to include such a disclaimer, because even when the information gets outdated, for the topic, this video will still remain a valuable "time capsule" of what people used to think.
There is one word for this: integrity. And you have my utmost respect for that.
This was a nicely laid out mass of information. I particularly liked that you acknowledge right off the bat how much we don't know yet.
I always say, people of the past were not a bunch of superstitious idiots - they were survivors in a world where death lurked around every corner. They built stone structures and mastered metallurgy that we still can't understand. I hope these discoveries shed more light on just how amazing these people were... :)
Bit tangential, but I like to think that many myths and legends were also a primitive means to passing down information, especially before writing.
For example, did ancient peoples make up stories for the constellations because they were "dumb and superstitious" or because it was an easy way to remember how to track the seasons using the stars? I guarantee it was the latter. It would've been extremely valuable for the eventual development of agriculture as well.
These people who could "read the heavens" would then slowly migrate around the world passing this knowledge, possibly explaining why many myths and legends have similarities. It'd be extremely valuable information that nearly all cultures could use.
I'm not saying the myths are true, just that I doubt they come out of thin air. Many people have this weird idea of "they're just dumb made up myths with no insight into history."
Yeah imagine trying to figure out you can burn rocks until metal seeps out and then to collect the metal and remelt it into the shape you want. Or how people figured out how to move 20 ton stones or domesticate animals. I can honestly understand why some people think ancient aliens helped them lol.
"First came the Temples, than came the city" that would explain why the Mesopotamian early cities were dedicated to particular gods
It reminds me of the Thucidydean description of the genesis of the city of Athens
Temples are usually erected next to natural springs, im gathering in a cooling event when all the rains are being locked up in ice a spring being the only source of decent water to save your peoples lives would be a good place to pay homage to a god...
its erroneous to say that religion was anything but fundamental to the development of civilization. why have we seemed to forgotten the very reason we built so much?
It also explains how we overcame Dunbar’s number. Basic hunter gather bands always divided into 2 groups once they exceed dunbar’s number of around 150. The groups would become hostile to each other and move away from each other. It’s built in population control to avoid over taxing resources.
Organized religion gave people a common super group to belong to so they could continue to cooperate and trust each when they did not know each as well as a hunter gather band would. Organized religion was the glue that made civilization possible.
Though by Sumerian accounts being ruled by the priests wasn’t very pleasant. They seemed quite happy when the first kings overthrew the temple form of government.
@@MrWolfstar8 it's stands to reason, since one of the main thing religion does is preserve shared memory (either through myth or outright oral and textual histories) and ties between the holy-men (shamans, priests, bards etc) of groups that are otherwise grow distant of each other.
You must be the hardest working history youtuber. Your output is insane
I appreciate that!
On a wide range of topics too :0
Indeed.
This channel is awesome and I have to shout out Dan Carlin's hardcore history for being another well done history channel
Years ago I visited a community in Costa Rica. Small, closely spaced houses faced the road on both sides. Behind every house was a long narrow fenced yard, and at the very back of each yard was a latrine/outhouse. When I used the latrine I was appreciating the row of fruit-laden papaya trees which stood all along the back fences of every yard. Later I mentioned to my host how nice I thought those papaya trees were. He laughed and said "We didn't plant them. That's where we put the mierda." And I thought Hmm seeds do get swallowed, and that might be how people learned to garden, waaay back,
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I mean go looking through the leaves around any oak tree and you will find sprouted acorns. I can't imagine people just looked at these for untold thousands of years and never figured it out.
@@80krauser
And acorns have long been a major food source. Especially in lean times.
Burning may have played a role as annual, grassy species like wild barley etc will grow back quicker and take over in disturbed areas compared to perrenial species. Just by continually returning to places and clearing land to attract and hunt game, ppl may have created meadows that became pastures and eventually farms. In Australia we see evidence of interdependency between ppl who burned off land and kangaroos which relied on the pastures created which with other types of animals could lead to domestication
@@mpetersen6 Yeah that’s what I mean. And way back in the day they were a staple along with chestnuts and hazelnuts, pecans and hickory nuts depending on your continent.
@@80krauser
Some tribes in California harvested lots of acorns and took special care to take care of trees that produced naturally sweet acorns (1). There have been efforts to domesticate oaks for sweet acorn production but they fail every time because of the number of factors involved
1) Sweet because they do not require processing to leach tannins.
Outstanding. I began university courses in Paleoanthropology many years ago, (changed majors soon after)...and this 1/2-hour video is more informational about the Rise of Human Society than any drawn-out course I took.
It's hard to explain how much I love this channel, explaining complex historical processes without losing academic rigour or dumbing things down
100% agree.
and while keeping the rigor and accuracy, it is still understandable to laymen like me.
this was super interesting lecture to me, imagining how dozens of generations lived a semi sedentary lifestyle, what kind of religions and superstitions they could have had, what were their everyday struggles fighting other tribes, since-then-extinct animals, and natural catastrophies, that they barley had to chance to fully understand.
Gobekli Tepe is one of my favorite topic in (pre)history, because it shows how one find can change the established view one a certain topic.
I like to refer to this period of time as the Long Exhaustive Introduction Period that morphs into The Interesting Topic at Hand Period. I think this was what a lot of viewers were probably expecting. An otherwise well-intended dive into the Gobekli Tepe region is a fascinating discovery, that once reached, provides wonderful new information to absorb.
Beer, definitely started farming to make beer 🍺😅
Thank you for mentioning its one of multiple cradles of civilization.it drives me insane to no end when people ignore the others:)
Great report. The whole of the Middle East was much wetter with greater rainfall 12500 years ago. There were forests and plenty of wood. When rainfall diminished and trees were cut down, the area dried out and became semi-desert. The populations had to abandon unviable settlements and they congregated in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins to be near water. Game animals disappeared and so hunting became difficult, so only farming with a reliable water source was sustainable.
Some points as an archeologist (from a different period and area): It is a common occurance that we cant dig up every part of a site. Göbekli Tepe is in quite a fortunate position, because there are no modern buildings that might interfere, both having destroyed parts in the past and not being able to remove parts of the modern structure (a common occurance at the site I work with currently and where almost all of the digs happened during construction works as so called emergency digs). The other thing is the annoyance with juggling with different papers. This is the result of people not wanting to be redundant and copying, but this often leads to leaving the original reports in a language not that widely spoken and later work only references aspects of these initial reports. A good example is the Parthenon, a highly researched object, but the most important work has been of reconstruction works in the 70s and the report and plans are entirely in greek. Other works reference this one, but if you want an overview of every stone in the building this is the only place you cant get that.
Overall very well put together video. Only one grievance: it would be nice if you could link your sources as footnotes directly in the video, so people can look at the information themselves
Thank you for this concise explanation of wetland gardening and the progression to agriculture, which makes much more sense to me than the neolithic revolution as it was taught to us entry-level archaeology students back in the 90s. Gobekli Tepe and its neighbors are among the most fascinating sites on the planet, and I really appreciate this breakdown. Well done!
You're very welcome! Thanks for watching. If you want a nice dive into early agriculture, "Against The Grain" was one of my major sources. It's an excellent read
Interesting parallels between Golbekli tepe and The Mississippi pyramid/mounding building culture
Specifically non sedentary hunter gatherers building monuments
both in a wetland condition of their time
@@tewekdenahom485 Yeah, what is the name of that big non-farming settlement? Poverty point?
@@MarcosElMalo2 yeah that's correct :)
I thought Cahokia was a farming community?
But Golbeki tepe is built on golbeki tepe is built on ....... Going back generations that is why the mounds developed rather than being built mounds. Do these mounds not have more in common with the flat topped pyramids of S America which extended into the same time period, 1000 to 1400 AD , as the Mississippian mounds?
Then there is the very odd neolithic Silbury Hill near the Avebury stone circle. Why? Springs to mind when one sees it. I believe there is another in France somewhere.
This was very enlightening. Usually this topic is presented with myths, legends, and aliens, but few facts. Thank you for this fascinating look at history.
You're very welcome
I know that when an Historian’s Craft video emerges, that I will be illuminated and elevated. I have listened to multiple lectures or podcasts on the subject, but none which situated the site within its context as adeptly, and none which explored the different layers. Keep up the great work, Mike!
Thank you ChatGPT
@@notreally2406 lol, I admit I had a bit to drink before writing that.
@@qboxer still too cogent to be ChatGPT.
You’re whole channel is a gift to the historic community, very hard working researcher and historian
Wow, thank you
Great video, loved the end. I can just imagine generations of people coming to gobekli tepe to participate in the ritual and practice of cereal cultivation, coupled with feasting and creating social bonds, spreading the knowledge of cereal food to people all over. I wonder how far people traveled to go there, how they heard about it.
Absolutely
Beer, beer cult, a lot of research is pointing that way for cultivation of grains.
Group meetings would undoubtedly also be places to learn new things and meet potential mates.
As a geologist, I’m so pleased that you gave this overview of recent geologic time with respect to the human time scale. Please note that there is no R sound in the first syllable of Quaternary, it’s pronounced Kwah-TER-ne-ree. I know it looks like Quarter, but it doesn’t have that first R. Love your channel🙂
You are right. English is a bad language for transmission of knowledge. It's awesome for marketing.
@@MarcoBonechi All languages change over time.
Everything acquires new meaning through it's useage. Anything that does not change is left to history and forgotten because it no longer serves a purpose.
This is how English is one of the best languages, because it is malleable. Most are still stuck in archaic prescriptivist forms pushed upon the people by scholars who are divorced from society as a whole. English has no one to prescribe how it "should" be used, aside from common guidelines for how things are formed.
I suspect it will continue to evolve as the planet as a whole contributes and changes it in different ways.
@@MarcoBonechi Figures "English" is a difficult, not bad, language because the Britts took words from every other language and semi-anglicized them to make them meet their linguistic needs... remember, historically Brittan was invaded by the Norse, French, Romans, and who knows who else... and currently there are hundreds of "English" Dialects Globally
My Grandfather was a farmer. He'd farm someplace for awhile, get feed up, Buckaroo for awhile. But I never saw him hunt much, which was unusual, because most farmers think they can survive on hunting if they had to. But other than that, he would fit into a neolithic society pretty good I think.
Gobekli Tepe did not necessarily have a single purpose. It could have been a regular meeting place for trade between hunter-gatherer groups--a stone age trade show. You could trade things you have for things you need. You could maybe even trade things for food if your group had a bad year. Then, as long as people were showing up anyway, they could have simultaneously engaged in many other kinds of activities: spiritual/religious practices, sharing innovations and news about nearby ecologies, mingling to find marriage partners from other groups, news about births and deaths, storytelling and music, resolving disputes between groups or individuals that emerged since the last gathering, games and competitions, and teaching the next generations about the other groups in the region and how to get along with them. Maybe Gobekli Tepe was none of these things. But we should not prematurely fixate on the idea that Gobekli Tepe is a temple complex analogous to modern buildings dedicated to spiritual/religious practices.
Like having huge festival and getting drunk on alcohol - not much different from today!
Agree....some thoughts are ...it was a place of learning/teaching...
OK, now this video is one excellent piece of work!
Very thorough, yet not tedious for even one second.
It illustrates a very clear picture of the relevant time period - both on the large scale (at the beginning of the video), and in a more focused perspective.
Thank you!
As always a fascinating, well researched and thought-provoking video. Whenever I engage in speculation of our preliterate ancestors, I remember a book, The Motel of the Mysteries, which is a humorous and sarcastic send up of our tendency to project our own notions back onto our ancestors. This is no less a problem than the false narratives of people like Donnelly and his later acolytes von Daniken and Hancock. Thanks for providing a factual and well thought out presentation.
I walked through GT before the nicely done covering. Subsequently, more Tepes have been located all over the region. From there to Cappadocia to the west, aka, the real town of Bedrock
Thank you for putting this together! This is the most comprehensive & detailed video I've seen/paper I've ever come across on Younger Dryas or Gobleki!! Thank you thank you!!
Thank you so much! Since first reading about Klaus Schmitt's work, and seeing the then available images, it struck me that in none of those, nor in his comments was any sign of violence'/warfare.
I found that unique. The manner in which you present your videos is refreshing. Down to earth, not pretentious or forced "I'm an expert". That is so rare!
This was very interesting. Glad I found your channel.
Your video lectures bring me back to my days in college. Didn't know I missed lectures so much until I ran into your channel
Glad you like them!
How wonderful to have actual grow-up history and information--no dramatic "Hollywood" music, no aliens, no "magic" technologies mentioned. Thank you.
I tend to think herding, especially on a large scale, and animal domestication went hand in hand with agriculture in turning hunter gatherers into settled agriculturalists. This is especially true when you consider that before the domestication of textile crops and animal wool a lot of things, most importantly clothes, was made from animal skins.
I don’t think you have settled agricultural societies without both agriculture and animal husbandry.
Cow and plow culture.
This was superb. And thank you for no annoying background music
Fascinating! Thanks for a well-presented video. My parents were both avid armchair archaeologists and we had lots of books and magazines about archaeology in the Middle East. They would have been just astonished by the discoveries you presented.
One particular site with a short overlap with Göbekli is named Asikli Höyük and I would like to add it to this specific conversation. Asikli's earliest period of settlement aside (round clay buildings, hardly dug into at this point), we can see a kind of small town emerging from about 8.500 BC lasting for about 1.100 years. It was a dense and organized settlement with new buildings strictly adhering to their predecessor's outer supporting walls leaving a gap between the outer walls to the house next to it. The administration of whatever kind made sure this was perpetuated over the entirety of the later ca. 1-millennium- period. Asikli had small paved/plastered roads leading to the small quaters and likely two buildings substantially larger and different in use to the other houses.
The proximity to a natural volcanic source of Obsidian, a very useful glass to make blades and tools from, albeit brittle and often to be replaced, was the likely reason trade in Asikli was abundant. And trade meaning materials like Turquoise and sea shells present, originating hundreds if not thousands of miles away from the site.
What connects it to this video is that for the first half of the later settlement, so roughly 500 years or so, domesticated plants and animals seem to not have played a significant role in people's diet. Whilst only in the later periods we see the domesticated forms overtake in quantity. To me personally this seemed puzzling at first. Unless of course human behavior is considered as part of the equation. I also understand it to be unlikely humans developed farming when all of a sudden food was scarce. There are better understood, previously reported and easier to implement measures humans can resort to. Namely restrict marriage age while looking for better roaming grounds. I don't quite like to throw ideas of demand and supply into the mix when talking about the earliest complex human structures. However it's as you said, temples predated farming. And I would like to add that towns and (small scale) global trade predated it as well. Some farming being around for a long time, yes, but not as a food growing source of nutrition for virtually all people. It was but one of the behaviors humans had added to their wheelhouse at the the time, contemporary with complex belief systems, trade and societal administration spanning greater areas and multiple groups of people.
Imagine how lush and bountiful that area must have been to support that kind of activity in the region. Imagine the manpower required to conceive, organize, and execute all of this.
Can we get some intelligence into this field? What evidence of farming would remain after 12,000 years and a global flood?
@@TheBelrick Fossils and seeds of domesticated crops.
We see evidence of the domestication of the crops we now use (and have since the Neolithic) during this period, but none from before that.
If there was some pre-catastrophe agricultural civilization, it was based on completely different domestic plants and animals that have left no trace. (Other than the dog, which was domesticated by hunter-gatherers well before this.)
@@jeffmacdonald9863 So evidence of numerous a herd of wild animals driven into wooden stocks would last 12000 years? No
Would evidence of wild plants dug up and planted in close proximity last 12000 years? No
Put it this way. As a brain trainer. When they find 150000 year old humans. That meant to them that humans hadn't existed for 200,000 years prior
Then they find 350,000 year old human fossils
Its not oops. they are literally using the lack of evidence FOR evidence
How many fossil remains of clovus people do we have? (just as a brain exercise in how rare it is for anything to be preserved for over 10,000)
Clovus were the first peoples don't you know!
Oh look, evidence of humans 36,000 years old found in Americas
Oops or fundamentally flawed way of looking at archaeology?
@@TheBelrick Did I say anything about either of those two examples?
Look at genetic evidence of domestic animals and crops. We can tell from that when our current ones were domesticated. In many cases, we have direct evidence of early changes due to domestication.
The earliest examples of proto-agriculture certainly started before we have any direct evidence and if all you're saying is that it goes back a bit farther than we're currently sure of, then there's no disagreement.
But if you're positing some pre-catastrophe agricultural civilization, then at the very least they didn't use any of our current crops and there's no evidence for earlier domestication. Or for a global flood, for that matter.
@@jeffmacdonald9863 You didn't comprehend my post at all. Were you so desperate to prove yourself and anthropology correct.
-Why is someone else's ideas so important TO YOU?
-Why did you ASSume that agriculture must have DOMESTICATED species? I explicitly stated wild species in my example. We do the same today with Bison, wild horses, elephants etc!
-Why did you again ASSume cultivated crops instead of wild crops unchanged but moved to the same location?
-You ignored my examples that clearly there is evidence that MOST evidence does not survive long periods of time let alone introducing global cataclysms that we know take place including one 12,000~years ago!
ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE IS NOT EVIDENCE OF NON OCCURANCE!!!!!
A body with knife wounds but no knife is still evidence of knives existing!
We know that people lived specialist lives in close proximity to each other for long periods of time in turkey 11000 years ago. They were fed and fed without HOPING that stray animals wandered by.
Just do not look at how WE did it and assume that is how it must be done and the only way it could be done
Deep breath, put honesty first, winning second. Then let us continue discussing.
Great video. I haven't read anything about Gobleki Tepe so it's nice to have the rundown. I wasn't aware before that Klaus Schmidt had such far out ideas.
Thank you to your patrons, I love this stuff. I can’t help but I’m grateful.
Great Video
8:30 only issue I have with the way you are covering this is bringing up the German volcano. Although some volcanic activity can certainly have significant climate effects and is worth investigating as either a cause or contributor, The German volcano by itself is simply far far too small to cause a global disruption that lasts more than a year or 2.
20:10 The info on this has changed in the last couple of years it now appears there was indeed permanent settlement of Gobekli Tepe(though not at the earliest layers of the site), the sheer amount of grinding stones and other domestic materials found especially in the square and rectangular stone buildings is pointing very strongly that way.
Absolutely. Really the Younger Dryas strikes me as a bunch of things hitting off at around the same time, hence why the volcano, lake, and impact are mentioned. And dang, I thought I had made the revision to the video about permanent settlement. Ah well. This is what happens when I edit on a few hours of sleep lmao
@@TheFallofRome
you did mention permanent settlement, but it came about 20 seconds after this point when you talked about the "camps nearby" and came off more as a "disagreement between archeologists" than an examination of the new evidence, and specifics weren't really mentioned. The coverage there wasn't that bad but just felt off given the time devoted to the older ideas and the strength of the more recent evidence.
I actually tend to disagree about this view on the younger dryas and think it likely that the relatively rapid changes to have 1 precipitating cause, but I'm not entirely sure what that is. I'm pretty convinced the impact did happen, and increasingly convinced it had something to do with megafauna extinction especially in the Americas, but far less convinced that an impact can explain the 1,000 years of cold, what would need to be proven for me to go all in is that the younger dryas was actually unique in important ways compared to other events of cooling and warming in other glaciations over the last 2-6 million years.
@@flyingeagle3898 Hi I'm a geologist and I can attest that in the field the evidence that supports the impactor hypothesis isn't enough, the field is getting squeezed by numerous new papers suggesting stars don't only supernova but can also micronova. In fact this last year we've observed 2 stars going micronova, and seemingly, leaving behind the star in similar conditions. Could it had been a solar micronova? That could open a very interesting discussion and could answer many conundrums in the isotope and mineral realms.
@@buteos8632 I don't really see how a Nova of any kind would or could cause micro diamonds, increased iridium levels and the Carolina Bays, this strikes me as a far less plausible explanation than an impactor.
@@buteos8632Its important to keep also in mind that those events are not either/or, it could be Micronova and impacts together, things could be linked for some reason we dont know yet.
Well narrated and well researched. Cannot thank you enough.
By far the most interesting thing I've watched, in a long time.
Very interesting and informative video. There's a good point about the lack of accessible media, whether popular books or TV documentaries, by archaeologists leading to others (like Hancock who isn't mentioned in the video) creating fringe ideas about these sites.
It's sad that so much of this information is locked behind obscure & expensive academic articles and books. This video at least gives a great introduction to this topic to a wider audience.
We definitely don't want fringe ideas being presented. That would be terrible. How would progress be made in truly understanding these mysteries unless we constrain discussions to the mainstream idea! I for one think Hancock should be locked in a jail cell for his heresy! We must always trust what authorities tell us! ALWAYS! I can't stress that enough. We must cast aside any heretical free thinkers, as they are a danger to progress!
Before Gobekli Tepe was studied in detail, everyone "knew" that civilization started with the Sumerians. Now we all "know" that stone age hunter gatherers built Gobekli Tepe prior to any agriculture or civilization, and we "know" that there were no civilizations before the end of the last ice age.
Anyone that suggests otherwise is espousing fringe theories, because we "know" that agriculture and civilization developed independently at least six times in the last ~10,000 years, but not once in the prior 250,000 years.
@@SimonHergottSeems like Hancock should be happy but he’s not. Guess he found out that you can’t make a flashy movie and sham the experts like you can the public. But he’s created a lot of interest. He should be happy.
@@frankmazzur5674 the fringe theories isnt challenging narrative, if you pay attention you'll see historiography has been in constant flux. Its wanting praise and wealth for badly arguing old, and sometimes plagiarised, ideas in an unconvincing way without presenting evidence
@@Rynewulf My point was that not too long ago the idea that hunter gatherers could build anything resembling Gobekli Tepe would have been considered a fringe theory and dismissed out of hand, much like the ridiculous notion that Vikings could have made it to North America.
Now, of course we know that hunter gatherers built Gobekli Tepe thousands of years before the "birth of civilization" and that Vikings made it to North America 500 years before Columbus, but the idea that anyone else could have been earlier is a fringe theory, and anyone even suggesting the possibility is deserving of ridicule.
Humankind ,in my opinion , is maritime almost the whole way back alongside all the hunters but we know so little that it is barely mentioned in our collective history and was probably a massive part of life , we have always lived around the coasts and waterways our maritime history needs connecting to our hunter gatherer history in a way that shows how much more we relied on the sea than the land .
Just opinions, I don't care...
Thanks a very nice video. I first found out about Gubekli tape in David Graeber and David Wengrow and their description of the place was fascinating. You mentioned most texts on the site are highly technical but this book has been written for the common person like me who wants to know more about history and start of the civilization. Highly recommend 👌
That graph at 3:00 brought me a rush of memories. Going to the museums in DC at like 4 with huge plaques like this covered with the millions and millions of years. Thanks for the vid
Excellent synopsis of complex issues…thx
"We did not domesticate grains. Grains domesticated us."
This reminds me of James C. Scott's 'Against the grain'
@@Samhildenach Just read the wikipedia synopsis of the book. There are distinct similarities.
I think our human history is very complicated and occurred in many environments, where there were many different leader personalities and selection procedures. Therefore, at some location, some times, between the Artic and Antarctic examples of nearly every theory existed.
Plus few literate societies being wealthy enough to educate all, if the leaders who knew why they dug certain ditches and calendar details died or were slaughtered (by enemies or disgruntled others) canals were no longer dug --- not necessarily because it was slave labor (though that may have been frequently the case) but because nobody understood the hows & whys any more than I can turn a river into an electric power generator.
I hope every town in the country has a library with a LOT of how-to books and lots of people able to teach reading to their young, because if true literacy once again becomes a province of only the elite, civilization is on a ticking time bomb and we will "go to go" with no knowledge how to restart the game.
Fascinating video! So well done and really helpful when trying to understand this stuff. Hope you do one on the current state of thinking regarding aDNA/Yamnaya problem with all the pros and cons
Such a great, comprehensive video. I really appreciate the way you set things up first before the main point you wanted to discuss.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Fantastic video! Gobleki Tepe really is fascinating.
Well done! And fascinating conclusion. Makes so much sense!
I came here for "why did we start farming" and stayed for Gobekli Tepe, too. I like this take on the origins of farming, because it agrees with my preconceived ideas about how these things work. The part about Gobekli Tepe was completely new to me. I expect I'll be spending a lot of time with this channel.
Thanks! I'm happy you enjoyed the video. If you want to do some reading, I'd recommend "Against the Grain" and "The Dawn of Everything"
New to me too that Gobekli Tepe is on the highest point of the German mountain range.
@@TheFallofRome Thanks for the recommendations. Amazon says I bought "Against the Grain" a few years ago, but I don't remember reading it and don't see it on my bookshelves. An archaeological expedition to unearth it is in order. I've just now added "The Dawn of Everything" to my Kindle queue. Things can get lost there, too, but it's easier to find them again.
@@johngorentz6409 you’re welcome! Happy reading!
Gobekli Tepe was buried for the last time at precisely the same time as a climate catastrophe. (A real one.). The temperature plunged. Not as bad as the Younger Dryas, but it was sudden and severe. You can see it in the Greenland isotope data. Those temperatures would not be experienced again until the Little Ice Age. I suspect their crops failed and they returned to migratory hunting.
I suspect the landscape was lush and give them every need up until the dramatic climatic and geological changes that took place globally.
It has to be considered now more than ever with James Webb pressuring things we though we knew that influences the very foundations of all fields of study.
I love your work, thank you sincerely for all you do on this channel!
Glad you enjoy it!
Perhaps sites such as these only seem unusual because they were made of a durable material--stone. There may be many other late Pleistocene temples constructed of wood or situated on the coast that would have eroded or been swallowed up by changing sea levels.
This is my new fave channel for history.
Very well done.
Loving your videos on pre-history. Very under-covered topic by history youtube
Great topic choice again
Thanks!
Brilliant presentation, you have won my subscription. This was truly the dawn of the beginning of us.
Great stuff. Thank you. I will think on these matters.
CO2 levels and how well wild wheat and barley grow. C3 plants (like wheat and barley, trees, bushes, rice) just don't grow well enough when CO2 levels are low like in ice age conditions. The first pop of CO2 at 14,000 years ago led to the Natufians and the second jump after the younger dryas kicked off the agricultural revolution. Before that, it wasn't profitable enough to gather wheat and barley, let alone grow it in fields. It is the same story for almost all of our agricultural products. What did grow well enough in ice age CO2 levels is C4 grasses. And what did we mostly eat in those times - Grass-eating herbivore animals because that is all there was.
And the oceans and seas.
Great video, love the topic.
Glad you enjoyed it!
I should have been sleeping when I started by watching this, but I found it so wonderfully fascinating and well explained, I was riveted!
*I LOVE GOBEKLI TEPE* cos unlike most poeple I LOVE being wrong - being wrong menas I get to learn a new thing and as a slighlty autisic person a new fact is like the best thing ever...
And G/T totally upends our previous understanding of history and civilisation - semi nomadic hunter gatherers made a temple BEFORE they made a city, so coming togehter to worship may its self be the foundation on which citeis were built, and they were carving amazing things 8,000 years before some guys in Briton put some stones on top of som stones and we think its cool.
9:30 It took me way too long to figure out why the Younger Dryas was to the left of the Older Dryas on the timeline.
What were people cooking in before pottery???
No vessel needed to steam food in a basket.
Excellent overviee. Many thanks.
Why they could not leave domesticated graines for longer period of time?Can you clarify that a bit?Great video,very informative 😊
Great video, not only for the information it offers but also for the well-founded interpretive proposal.
As someone who reads Oswald Spengler these days, I found this presentation as a confirmation of some of his views on history.
Loved this! Thank you! Watched the whole thing. Very cool.
Outstanding job. With all the misinformation about Göbekli Tepe this is vital information summarized just right for people to get a proper introduction.
Wonderful history tying the Pleistocene cultures like the Natufian Culture through Göbekli Tepe all the way to ancient Sumer in a logical science based breakdown.
Excited to see what's next for a topic !
Yes, I also really enjoyed the clarifications and many ways it has to be put in context, esp. the "slowly emerging" vs. "a revolution".
I find the impactor hypothesis surrounding the younger dryas to be fascinating. I've heard a few different ideas and such. It's a shame that some of the biggest names out there sharing these ideas are also kinda crazy as well. But then certain aspects of the theory have been validated by other finds since the idea was put forward. I'm more in the camp of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Someone can have a good idea and their other ideas can be less good. We don't always have to reject everything because ideas can have merit outside of authorship. It just makes it harder for academics to take certain ideas as seriously as they might do if those putting them forward were less... Bizarre.
It's got nothing whatsoever to do with a theory being associated with a certain person or not, and everything to do with whether evidence supports a conjecture or not. Interpreting the evidence in a measured way is also part of archaeology. Evidence shows that the younger dryas period happened. That is a fact. What it doesn't support is massive, globally catastrophic disasters, wiping out all traces of civilisations . . . . that is speculative fantasy.
I'd add that it's always, without exception, archaeologists and geologists etc that find evidence and publish it. People with "outlandish" ideas have never, ever actually gone out and scientifically investigated sites or conducted experiments. They just "reinterpret" proper scientists work for their own ends.
@@MrWolfstar8 Except nothing is being "supressed" (that is a con to add to the "us against the system" myth), the conjecture isn't supported by the evidence. Sea levels did not rise suddenly. They rose at about 40mm a year for a period of (if I remember off the top of my head) about 300 years at the height of the B influx. No massive floods (localised ones for sure but nothing "global"). This is well established by numerous proper scientific papers.
@@MrWolfstar8 th-cam.com/video/341Lv8JLLV4/w-d-xo.html
@@MrWolfstar8 we have scans of the ocean floor. Where are these underwater cities. We find settlements but nothing on the scale of cities.
There is no suppression in modern Archeology. This isn't the 1800's anymore with science filled with religious dogma.
My Great Uncle carries a Y-haplogroup connected to the Natufian culture. It’s wild to think that one of my far distant ancestors likely walked at a site similar to Gobekli Tepe.
My dad chromosome says Natufian j2a. My dad could grow anything and his favorite animal was cattle. That J2a went to Mesopotamia, Crete and then southern Italy. Archeologists found the tools there for agrculture.
Excellent, excellent video! Well done!
Australian Aboriginal peoples did this kind of mixed gardening and hunting where it was available. Unfortunately, a lot of the history was lost with the genocide of the native peoples of this land. Though the domestication of Australia's animals were not suitable some plants were for the type of use described in this video.
Absolutely great video. Thank you!
Very well done and informative
There are likely dozens of Gobekli Tepes under the Persian Gulf. It was mostly dry during the Younger Dryas. The oceans were over 350 feet lower at the end of the Glacial Maximum. Maybe we should look under the Mediterranean and Black Sea too.
The best paper on that is "Sea Level Changes in the Mesopotamian Plain and Limits of the Arabian Gulf: A Critical Review" available from multiple sources.
Lovely video but as an Ontarian the way you say Ontario gets me 😂. Love your videos, here’s too a good 2023 mate.
Ha! Being from New York State, we have a ton of regional accents that no one else can really get. How should I be pronouncing Ontario then?
@@TheFallofRome on-tear-ee-o
@@qboxer That rendering is confusing since "tear" has multiple pronunciations (consider the tears you cry). On-TAIR-ee-oh is clearer.
@@SomasAcademy fair enough
@@TheFallofRome the most common pronunciation of Ontario in Ontario is On-teh-ree-o
Amazing work! A very meticulous investigation, and yet a simple explanation based on evidence. Thank you!
Well-thought-out and informative.
*Go impact go!* I thought ancient architects, notably just an amateur YT enthusiast, covered some papers suggesting the were covered by subsidence and not intentional backfill? Perhaps I’m misremembering.
That’s possible. This is like the farthest thing from my speciality so I might’ve just missed that paper(s)
Believe ancient architects has it wrong for the moment. As far as I know the slopes about are low. Would have been easy to roll a stone down. the slop if it got in the way.
@@michaelleblanc7283 could be. I have no dog in the fight here, this is casual fun for me.
It’s unlikely to be as in good shape as it is without humans filling it in. The site is really well preserved.
My guess is the people of the area had decided to migrate and didn’t want other peoples to desecrate their temple so they took the time to bury it.
Thank you for the interesting video on this important archaeological site. I've heard of a hypothesized Holocene impact in North America. I would be interested in a future video on that topic! Thanks again for this one!
God be with you out there everybody! ✝️ :)
A well fine video, as Stefan Milo would say 😉. I really like the pacing (visually and topic wise). Thanks for making this!
I needed that video. Thanks
Mmmmm, beer. 🍺😋
Oh yes!
One word:
BOOZE!!!
And if safely ergotised, even more reason to plant!
Excellent analysis. You have a very listenable voice, well done. Thank you
I dunno. The alien hypothesis seems much more plausible to me.
/s
Reptilians!
@@TheFallofRome Maybe reptile aliens?
"why did we start farming?" bc ancient people had no cell phones and couldn't order Uber Eats. Pretty obvious.
An excellent presentation - thank you!
It's an often mentionned fact that archaeologists, when faced with a site whose purpose is unknown, will say "well it may be a religious/ritual place". It's almost a meme.
Well, what if the backfilling of the Göbekli Tepe site served a ritual purpose of some sort. Maybe a change in the mindset of the people of those times led them to just bury the Göbekli Tepe site, sort of like the Taliban blowing up the Buddha statues, or ISIS blowing up the ruins of Palmyra. Has anything like that been considered?
Nonsense: there was no history before ‘The Kardashians’ and no life before Oprah. As a devout neocreationist, I firmly believe that the universe began on Monday September 8, 1986 when Oprah first appeared on the air. Valiant effort, though. - Brilliant channel - just subscribed. Greetings from Delphi, Greece.
What a great video. Thank you.
Wow so clear and concise.
175k years ago in Poland Nearthdals were (farming) the arced around the cave they lived in was total bare of trees. reasons wood for fire and see enemy's/food coming. also privative farming of moss (edibale) might have been found in France by nearthdals
also privative farming of (edibale) moss might have been found to be done by nearthdals in France.
i think the cave was 40-50 arces of cleared land. now nearthdals are seen much more like american plains Indians. with small ish family groups in a much larger tribe in the hundreds(800) if not thousands. they did row/fish/and eat plants
lager tribe hundreds members**