Ancient cities

[Young Master Smeet]

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/08/evidence-that-humans-had-farms-30000-years-earlier-than-previously-thought/

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The tropics demonstrate that where we draw the lines of agriculture and urbanism can be very difficult to determine. Humans were clearly modifying environments and moving even small animals around as early as 20,000 years ago in Melanesia, they were performing the extensive drainage of landscapes at Kuk Swamp to farm yams [and] bananas… From a Middle East/European perspective, there has always been a revolutionary difference ("Neolithic revolution") between hunter gatherers and farmers, [but] the tropics belie this somewhat.

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École française d'Extrême-Orient archaeologist Damian Evans, a co-author on the Nature paper, said that it wasn't until a recent conference brought international researchers together that they realized they'd discovered a global pattern. Very similar evidence for ancient farming could be seen in equatorial Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Much later, people began building "garden cities" in these same regions, where they lived in low-density neighborhoods surrounded by cultivated land.

[Anonymous]

The excavations at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey are also extraordinary.  They have found stone temples (if that is what they were) that are several thousand years older than Stonehenge.  They believe they were constructed up to 11,000 years ago. The German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt began excavating it in the mid 90’ies.  So far, only about 5% of the site has been excavated.  They reckon there are about another 16 stone temples still buried. It seems that human accomplishments keep being pushed back further into pre-history.

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“With the sun higher in the sky, Schmidt ties a white scarf around his balding head, turban-style, and deftly picks his way down the hill among the relics. In rapid-fire German he explains that he has mapped the entire summit using ground-penetrating radar and geomagnetic surveys, charting where at least 16 other megalith rings remain buried across 22 acres. The one-acre excavation covers less than 5 percent of the site. He says archaeologists could dig here for another 50 years and barely scratch the surface.”

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“To Schmidt and others, these new findings suggest a novel theory of civilization. Scholars have long believed that only after people learned to farm and live in settled communities did they have the time, organization and resources to construct temples and support complicated social structures. But Schmidt argues it was the other way around: the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths literally laid the groundwork for the development of complex societies.The immensity of the undertaking at Gobekli Tepe reinforces that view. Schmidt says the monuments could not have been built by ragged bands of hunter-gatherers. To carve, erect and bury rings of seven-ton stone pillars would have required hundreds of workers, all needing to be fed and housed. Hence the eventual emergence of settled communities in the area around 10,000 years ago. "This shows sociocultural changes come first, agriculture comes later," says Stanford University archaeologist Ian Hodder, who excavated Catalhoyuk, a prehistoric settlement 300 miles from Gobekli Tepe. "You can make a good case this area is the real origin of complex Neolithic societies."

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gobekli-tepe-the-worlds-first-temple-83613665/

[Anonymous]

University of Edinburgh research at Gobekli Tepe, article dated 21 April 2017:

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Ancient stone confirms date of comet strikeEvidence from a historic site appears to confirm the date of a comet strike that killed thousands.The event also wiped out many large animal species, and triggered a mini ice age.Analysis of symbols carved onto stone pillars at Gȍbekli Tepe in southern Turkey – one of the world’s most important archaeological sites – suggests that a swarm of comet fragments hit Earth around 11,000BC.They ushered in a cold climate that lasted more than 1,000 years.Stellar signalsEngineers studied animal carvings made on a pillar – known as the vulture stone – at the site.By interpreting the animals as astronomical symbols, and using software to match their positions to patterns of stars, researchers dated the event to 10,950BC.The dating from the carvings agrees well with timing derived from an ice core from Greenland, which pinpoints the event – probably resulting from the break-up of a giant comet in the inner solar system – to 10,890BC.Significant signsThe carvings appear to have remained important to the people of Gobekli Tepe for millennia, suggesting that the event and cold climate that followed likely had a very serious impact.Researchers from the University of Edinburgh suggest the images were intended as a record of the cataclysmic event, and that a further carving showing a headless man may indicate human disaster and extensive loss of life.Space observatoryFurthermore, symbolism on the pillars indicates that the long-term changes in Earth’s rotational axis was recorded at this time using an early form of writing, and that Gȍbekli Tepe was an observatory for meteors and comets.The find also supports a theory that Earth is likely to experience periods when comet strikes are more likely, owing to Earth’s orbit intersecting orbiting rings of comet fragments in space.The research is published in Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry."It appears Göbekli Tepe was, among other things, an observatory for monitoring the night sky. One of its pillars seems to have served as a memorial to this devastating event – probably the worst day in history since the end of the ice age.”Dr Martin SweatmanSchool of Engineering

http://www.ed.ac.uk/news/2017/ancient-stone-confirms-date-of-comet-strike

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