Yesterday I watched a documentary on Gobekli Tepe, the archaeological site in what is now Turkey. I had been aware of the site and more or less aware of what information had been released to the public for some time. It is believed that it is the oldest instance of building with “dressed” stone known in human history, dating to just after the last ice age. The site shows both highly-developed technical sophistication in stonework, architecture (the elaborate structures certainly required careful planning) and art (the stones are decorated with bas-relief sculpted decorations, mostly animal (zoomorphic) forms but also what are probably stylized representations of humans.
The main point of the documentary is that contrary to the expectations we had based on all our earlier best-guesses about human history, these stone structures seem to have been built by a pre-agricultural society, “hunter-gatherers”. Apparently all of the bones they have found from eaten animals are of wild, not domesticated animals, and there is (as far as is known) no evidence of farming.
If true, this is huge.
This isn’t just “stones and bones”, folks, this is about understanding ourselves, who we are, and how we got where we are today from nothing. Every insight we gain into the progress of early man or proto-humans from being as helpless as any other animal (more so, apparently) to our current level of interconnected technologies adds to our “blueprint” of how it is done, should it ever need to be done again- whether it is just an individual caught without the support of technology, or entire peoples recovering from disaster, or human colonies having to deal with reduced availability of technology in starting the process over somewhere else, knowing how we boot-strapped ourselves as a species from no-tech to high-tech is knowing how to do it again if we have to- hopefully without taking tens of thousands of years, or longer, this time.
There are caveats- there are reasons to think that this area was the cradle of the first advanced civilizations, but it might not be. If it is, it’s possible that it was not unique and that the progression of civilization was different in different places.
The reason that this is so surprising is that we had assumed that agriculture occurred first, enabling a stationary lifestyle, removing the necessity for constantly moving to where the game/food was, and that in turn enabled permanent building, writing (nomads can’t carry a ton of clay tablets around), storage of surplus food for lean times- the basic trappings of what we call civilization.
Now it seems that we may have settled in one spot before inventing agriculture. This was enabled by an extremely fertile location that could support a large group of gatherers, replenishing itself within walking distance of the settlement before all the local sources were exhausted, which would have meant starvation. That probably means that something conceptually similar to crop rotation actually predates agriculture, people learned the cycles of wild food replenishment, probably as nomads, and was able to use that knowledge to determine when certain sources of food could be harvested without either wasting effort on immature plants or over-exploiting the sources to exhaustion.
The immediate practical incentive for giving up a nomadic lifestyle, other than all the ancillary benefits (and problems, like making slavery and large centralized governments feasible) that later came with it, seems to have been food storage for the lean times. Even though the scientists haven’t found any sign of domesticated crops or animals, they have found what seem to be grain storage bins.
Bottom line, it now seems that we as a species may have been “preppers”, “hoarding” extra gathered food against times of adversity, even before we learned to grow that food for ourselves. Put another way, civilization as we know it came from having the foresight to prepare for an uncertain future.
Stated even more simply, civilization was created by preppers/survivalists, not kings, shamans or farmers.
– Robert the Wombat