Gobekli Tepe And The People Who Built It: A Conversation With Archaeologist Jens Notroff

[Music] hello everyone hope you're all doing okay hope you're well there are a few archaeological sites that have really captured the public's imagination like gobekli tepe and today I have the pleasure of talking to yen's not trough an archaeologist who has worked on the site continues to work on the site I've got a ton of questions for him I'm probably gonna be picking his brain for far too long he's gonna get sick of me but I I really think you're gonna enjoy what he has to say so thank you yen's for joining me on my channel today yeah thank you for inviting me actually yeah no problem I've been meaning to make a video on gobekli tepe for so long because as I as I told you just before we started it doesn't matter what video I talk about what subject I talk about in my videos you know 11th century China someone's gonna hop in the comments and say yeah but what about completely tap a wave why aren't you talking about that why are you keeping that for that I bet yeah I'm really happy to have a real expert here I hope you don't mind me calling you that yeah used to work on the side but that's okay you know far more than me that's for sure so for my viewers who have been living under a rock I don't know how you could have possibly missed this if you have been following archaeology but what is gobekli tepe briefly who briefly okay I'm good I'm trying to to cut it short um actually it's very early monumental site at the site of the earliest or one of the earliest yet known monumental constructions it's a so-called pre pottery nunatak site so it's dating to two the early Neolithic right after the last ice age named pre pottery already implies it belongs to a time when people were still hunter-gatherers highly mobile and not even having invented and pottery by them well it's a it's a rather large site it consists of a lot of money monuments maybe we can discuss about this later basically erected by hunter-gatherers and for the purpose that's our current working interpretation so to say for the purpose to create a meeting place a gathering place there different groups different mobile hunter groups of the region come together to exchange goods to exchange information marriage partners and apparently this site was marked by these monuments and yeah a lot of social activity was going on there like and yeah communal building projects the monument itself may be feasting rituals so um yeah that would be really in a nutshell be the basic information about committee Tepper oh maybe I just after that pre patroon Neolithic might be a bit special over term we're talking about the tenth and ninth millennium BC here yeah and it has these a huge t-shaped pillars which which are really it's probably the most famous visitor of it yeah this is the main characteristic architectural feature this yeah really characteristic t-shaped pillars like the letter T the capital letter T yeah now I I have to ask this because I know someone is already typing it in the comments you said it was built after the last ice age so is it built after the Younger Dryas um well we're we're talking we're talking about the the period there the climate is changing there of course related to this change nature and culture changing and archaeology is it's difficult to pinpoint a specific date in archaeology we're talking about timeframes here so these are processes which are not happening all of a sudden but these are developments over over a certain amount of time so we're right in the middle of this Younger Dryas change happening so to say so this is right after the Ice Age the climate is changing and this brings a lot of a lot of yeah change within the environment and this of course affects the the very how people back then lived yeah I think that's important to note like you said that these changes happen over a long period of time you sort of pick it up and it looks like a snapshot these are very long processes but we'll definitely cover more of that I just have to ask as an archaeologist you know did you feel very lucky working on such a famous and popular site I would I think I would say no of course it's yeah it's fascinating well not about the fame of the site itself but the the implications the the site and our excavations there have actually make it so so exciting because this is maybe one of the at the moment very rare places that we can put a finger on to a very crucial point in the history of ourselves so this this is the the period and the wider region where our modern life starts actually yeah star atrophy if you want to put it like this this is where people started to become sedentary create permanent settlements starting with agriculture husbandry and so pretty much everything which defines our our lives today yeah so in short yeah it is pretty exciting to work there as such a key moment in history there aren't many I remember when I did my archaeology degree we tried to find the first metalworking site in Britain which you know wouldn't know fantastic to find yeah and we didn't find anything we spent weeks digging in the hills found absolutely nothing and came yeah but that's yeah we cannot deny this that's also an important part of our ecology sometimes you're just looking and this not what you expecting to find yeah that's sure I've had plenty of those before so yeah so you touched briefly on that as Quebec litre pay as this sort of meeting place where people in the in the wider community would gather was anyone living at Quebec the tepee was at a purely this meeting place or was it a settlement in any way or we're not sure about that the last time I'm not really sure about that and because it's not completely excavated so if I would say there is no trace of a settlement and I don't know the complete extension of the side and I could not know if there would be different kinds of architecture in other spots but what we do know is how settlement domestic architecture of that period and region looks like and apparently we did not really find structures matching these these building types and DeBakey Tepper we have to imagine as a it's on a mountaintop in mountain ridge and usually settlements are preferred to to be created in a much more favorable positions in the valleys where the animals come by where water sources flow and so on these are things we do not really exactly have up where on the mountaintop at chemically taper so it would be quite some way down to the valleys and we're not quite sure about water sources on top of the mountain there is a rather shallow very little river in the neighborhood right bSpace but it's not quite sure if this was existed in in the neolithic as well and if it was sufficient to provide enough water to escape settlement up where so um I would be careful I wouldn't really exclude that people were staying for a longer time we're but as of yet it's hard to prove in the archaeological record I mean we have to keep in mind at least they're highly mobile groups and this hunter groups where removal wait probably be living in tents or something like that during this day on on the side and of course archaeologically tents wouldn't leave much of a trace so it's it's more under not sure side yeah yeah but as you said not the most ideal place for a large village no really did the villages we know I look different what's interesting about the villages we know and which are excavated to a certain degree but almost each of these settlements has a building which is set apart from the rest of the typical domestic architecture it's larger it has benches and often specific stone furnishings of sculptures and so on and this is interesting because these so-called special-purpose beliefs of communal buildings resemble what we do have on directly tap as well with the difference that in the villages where's one or two of these buildings and at correctly cheaper ways much much larger numbers of these communal buildings so this may also give a hint about the relationship between villages and the this gathering site or social hub at committee table well that's interesting I definitely want to pick your brains about the villages so gobekli tepe is this famous side with t-shaped pillars but as you said other we have other villages around the area now am i right in thinking that some of these also had those t-shaped pillars yes it's true and the most famous or best-known example probably is the side of Newberry jewellery which was excavated in the 80s nearby and this was actually the site where these t-shaped pillars were discovered for the first time and there they do have the case of such a settlement with a special-purpose building and this building this community building produced these t-shaped pillars Liberatore is a bit younger when the oldest faces be recognized correctly temper and where maybe it's a short excursion in neolithic architecture there's a general idea that the building shape went from more circular or oval buildings to rectangular ones and a character temper we can can see this as well that the much larger monumental and apparently older enclosures buildings the large circular ones with t-shaped pillars of four meters to five point five meters night and then there's a younger layer or younger buildings which are rectangular and producing much fewer and much smaller T pillars than these older larger enclosures and now the pillars are about two meters high and at nevela jewelry we have this later face as well with the rectangular buildings and smaller T t-shaped pillars so the scale of the monument sort of Deek well at least in the size of those pillars had decreased over time yeah the buildings and the palace got smaller a bit screw interesting any of the villages that we've discovered so far contemporary with the earliest levels of Quebec the tepee and the and the large monuments or yeah it's a bit difficult since we're still discussing psychology and really only have hints at the exact chronological setup of the enclosures I mean we have already carbon-dated from some of the Walt Lester's in in these buildings but of course these states only tell us when this wall was placed at the last time we do not really know when the enclosures were built of course an archeology you have certain certain tools and techniques at hand to get an idea about about the age so in this case it's basically tool type the stone hoods are very specific and we can can compare these to other known sites and this is how we arrived at this pre pottery Neolithic Age plus of course the complete or almost complete absence of pottery and those it's difficult to to really say this this and that village is of exactly the same face but of course there are famous sites like for example Shyu which definitely can be set into the same time frame as a tip nhi uni is well we've got one of these special-purpose buildings for example and all these pillars in these special-purpose buildings are those pillars separate from them I'm just trying to along show me which isn't a tigress region and there are no realty pillars but this might be maybe if he got a map of special architecture we see a certain certain regional yeah Regional Development so where are these t-shaped pillars in the Euphrat rest region around typically temper and never literally and so on and then the further we go for example to the tigress like sites with Charlie and there the tea sheckler's are more at least in the preserved State v we now know room from excavation a more yeah upright stones Auto stats without necessarily the tea port on the top but these sites are linked by iconography and tools and so on so much we you really understand I belong to a wider cultural community about to answer your question it enable eatery the tea pillars are inside the the buildings mmm interesting so it is so they are in a way very similar to a building say Quebec yeah even those sites without the explicit tea shapes are comparable by interior design by the typical benches and so yeah it's it's it's safe to say that there is a connection between these sides and the in the wider region of a period yes I there's one thing I really like you to help me make clear in my because I feel like with gobekli tepe we have this it's very difficult to talk about it in the archaeological terms that we have or at least in my mind I find it very difficult because these people building these villages and gobekli tepe on the one hand we're using the phrase pre pottery Neolithic and sort of the the very early start of settled agriculture and on the one hand we don't have the evidence that they were farmers as such I I've been trying to read up before this interview and the sort of grains that we find are the wild varieties rather than domesticated and we I don't believe they have any domesticated animals there is that correct as of yet the the record hints at the wild species here but it's difficult actually and if I may already join in or do you want to extend its just wondering because I feel the people when we say hunter-gatherer we sort of imagine people that live like maybe Kalahari Bushmen and on the on the other hand that they're building these huge monuments how much what sort of lifestyle do you think these people were living were they raising crops from wild varieties how how settled were they do we have an idea of that well they definitely we're staying at a place over a longer period of time but at the same time of a seasonal and so far but where they're following the animals we know where the Gazelle Hertz are coming through the area and spring and so this would be the time where you chose a lands probably be organized but may also where regularly threatening to these villages we know of the thing about agriculture and husbandry as a as as an event of food production is that this is something we really cannot easily see in the archaeological record it's easy for me to say of course with the help of our specialists from from zoology there certain bones belong to wild species but in fact domestication is a long process which takes quite some time generations for animals at least to become visible in the physical record so until a bone or the appearance of an animal changes there's a lot of time going going by and that's why as far as if I sum up the discussions we have with our colleagues from archeology is that in the beginning of course animals wild animals are managed and the whole domestication process starts over time and takes a long time and the same is true for for plants as well of course so I'm the lifestyle of these hunter-gatherers and the huge amount of animals animal bones we found that the side which basically are hinting at gazelle and Oryx I'm certainly underline that hunting was a huge factor and subsistence so I definitely would stick to the term hunter-gatherers but they may have had aspects of their life that were more in common with later Neolithic farmers I mean at one point they must have experimented with plants coming back if you put them in a certain place and I can imagine that this is happening occasionally as well so there's no reason to assume wouldn't experiment with other food resources but the final step to towards food production was not yet done I think that's the interesting part of the side we're right in the middle of this process yeah it's definitely I think I mean I did a lot of research on the origins of the Neolithic for one video of mine and the sort of length of time it probably took first what we can see in the archaeological record that is uh his agriculture to develop was was really thousands of years and Quebec Lee Tepe seems to be sort of smack bang in the middle of that time frame yeah that's the point it just doesn't pop up and is there that we're talking about the long process here and be currently looking at one step in this long process but an important step in which that makes this site so exciting yeah yeah because if you I'm just imagining you know if you are hunter gatherer and you lead a more mobile lifestyle you can't just wake up one day and be like okay from this day onwards I am a farmer exactly it's not hard work what's her on the subject of the villages still we have compactly today this huge site where people would gather and we have villages around that in the region of sort of southern turkey we we haven't defined that for people sorry if we're talking here in sort of South East Turkey yeah how does this area in this culture compared to other areas in the Fertile Crescent I know for example further south in the Levant there are many sort of pre pottery Neolithic sites and very early sites that show sort of experiments with agriculture is Quebec Lee Tepe very different to them or does it fit into this whole regional pattern of the Neolithic well it's it fits in and so far that you can of course see this this drive of innovation and experimentation there as well it's a bit different due to its position in the northern periphery of the so-called Fertile Crescent and which in the past looking from the salvan Levant inside was always considered periphery due to state of research I would say but now it turns out that this northern rim of the Fertile Crescent gains at least as much important as these southern sites and there are also a couple of elements linking these regions I would say I mean we have this really fascinating pre pottery Neolithic funerary ritual if you well would like to hold like that which seems to express a real fascination and concern with bodily disarticulation with explanation so look the deflesh off of bones we know from sites like Jericho telethon for example these famous Lestat replastered Scouts where and I've seen that yeah yeah the flip scouts were given back a new Facebook with Gibson and all kind of shells as a enlace and apparently in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent we have hints at a similar fascination with this kind of mortuary ritual we in the iconography of gravity temper for example we see a lot of depictions of headless human beings or separated human heads often in combination with scavenging animals and particular vultures vultures in general play an important role in the iconography of the site and related sites and it's like like chattel Luke for example which is a bit later indirectly Tippa but still belonging to that neolithic realm of the area and there are also examples of replastered skulls so this is something I think which links be arias Louis and the broader PPN culture if we want to put it like this yeah that's fascinating I didn't realize how widespread that the plastering of skulls was especially that I really think guys I saw a few examples but in my head I had assumed that they were just from a couple of sites I didn't realize how much that was and I know on one of the pieces of architecture it gobekli tepe there is a large carving of a bird is that interpreted as a vulture do we believe that to be a vulture if you're referring to the pillar decorative pillows and pull out 43 I think there's definitely there's a large bird depicted a lot of other birds and the headless human being in the lower part yeah that is actually with the help of our colleagues from archeology it is interpreted as a voucher due to the characteristic peak and there is a very present color on this bird and ditch this is a feature very common with the vulture search to me it looks like an albatross yeah well looking at the animals actually around at the side and the particular in the bone material vulture makes more sense an albatross actually I know I really regret saying that now because I know someone's gonna jump in and be like you're right it's an albatross Atlantis or something oh really I haven't heard people say that before well where people buried it Quebec Lee tap a it's a it's an interesting question and since we learn of our our ideas about the site is that it is related to this mortuary ritual I was was referring to just just a couple of minutes ago we didn't find any barriers yet but and it's a big but in other sites I mentioned China for example the burials were placed inside the walls of this special-purpose buildings and as of yet we didn't didn't look into the walls we didn't deconstruct walls at the side for simple stability reeds regions reasons and documentation reasons and the know of a couple of human bones coming from the back filling material in these buildings and which is a bit problematic and because they are small in numbers really small compared to the animal bones and you really still do not know where the material actually is coming from which is accumulated in in these buildings we used to at least partly backfill them so I'm it could be all the stuff collected else on either side it could be a bit younger stuff pulled in there after some time of view so this is quite difficult but the human bones we did find in this filling material are quite interesting they are part of Scouts a couple of other human bones but the skull the skull pieces and show some interesting cut marks and scratch marks and our anthropologist colleagues they interpreting these these marks as yeah kind of ritual modification of the discounts interesting but no no burials as of your heads which yeah could be a reason for this as well I mean I'm carefully speculating here but with the concern about explanation defleshing and this omnipresence of vultures and other necrophagous animals in the iconography there are other very famous examples from chattel Duke for example of the pictures of vultures and headless bodies next to these vultures the idea came up that may be part of the funerary ritual was what we would call sky burials the view - yeah even historic or even modern burial practices in in Asia and Tibet for example where dead bodies are exposed to animals and rather remote areas and in particular it's vultures when feeding on the flesh and then the D flesh bones are collected and buried and interestingly the the bodies have to be prepared because the Watchers just cannot pick the the flesh so on the the bodies are prepared with with the help of tools like knives and so on to help well just to pick the flesh and I could imagine that this preparation would also leave some kind of cut marks and so on on the bones and if we imagine gravity taper as a possible site of such a sky bury ritual when it would make sense that we do not have the burials of a essence if it was only the site for defleshing and the bodies the buried elsewhere it would somehow fit into the picture in particular since we know we're in the Neolithic burials often bare we're undertaking under the flaws of the living rooms in the settlements hmm so if there were burials they might be under the the floors of these buildings which we haven't been able to deconstruct in the floors and walls well not in this case and maybe in case of the younger higher buildings but the flaws of these larger circular buildings monumental buildings consist of the natural bedrock so they are erected on the kaftan smooth bedrock so I don't expect any variance underneath there that would be quite quite some effort to cut into the into the bedrock sorry I could imagine that that the bodies were then brought elsewhere to be buried there and another point I just remember maybe working as an argument here as well I mentioned the animal bones and also watch your bones and among the the are we found of the bird bones the underside there's a really high degree coming from nikrif agus birds like while it's just at a particular corvatz Ravens and so on and this in my opinion may be also yet another hint at some something very something going on there which was rather attractive for these kinds of birds that's really changed how I how I pictured gobekli tepe in a way I know we're very carefully speculating here and just sort of discussing what might be this isn't definitive yes passing around ideas and bits how we arrived at expectations in the end yeah in my head I imagine gobekli tepe you know I've always sort of you did very positively like the dawn of civilization and like man making this incredible sculpture but it could have been covered in dead bodies being picked around by his vultures one doesn't have to exclude the other I think and it's also something be encountered quite often when we discussed not only gareki pepper in particular but ritual in prehistory in general this distinction between ritual spaces and domestic spaces and and this is clear distinction between these these spheres which are of course a result of our secular Western upbringing but actually I don't think that that is a necessary distinction between these for for other people as well so it could be long together so yeah I wouldn't say it's mutually exclusive that's a that's an important point to bring up we definitely have a clear divide between ritual and secular activities in a way that these people may not have had at all you did mention that Gobekli Tepe was back filled was filled in so we have this big site that has you know been a huge effort to construct over many many generations can you give us an idea of how long it was used for before it was filled in that's it's really difficult to give exact time frames here but it's certainly talking about generations yeah the the backfilling yeah the big filling event it's like it sounds easier than it actually is and this site stratigraphy is actually quite complicated so what we can say now but this is still something we're working on actually is that at least in the lower levels of the sites there are some clear hints at intentional backfilling where the positions left and so on and the material speaks in favor of intentional backfilling events but they also have to to say that in in the upper parts a lot of the material just looks like it may have also eroded in like if for example a building high up on the mound was crumbling and walls were falling down this material was rushing down into the enclosures as well so we have to consider both actually intentional backfilling events but still leaving part of the building visible and in particular sticking the heads of the cheapest out of the out of the filling and then the complete closure of the site the complete back filling events might well be also associated with natural events erosion events and so on mmm that's another and nothing I've read about it so far the perhaps unintentional backfilling so it's it's it's the work of progress or picture is still changing of course with ongoing ongoing work we have to keep in mind excavations that just started in 1995 Sylvia compared ibly a rather young excavation and still far from reaching reaching the end of all all work there I'm sure this will take years and years and years to excavate the full site completely sure it's not it's not really the intention to excavate sites completely non archeology just for preservation reasons because of course excavation means destruction of the context which are so interesting and actually even the more more important part of the excavation and the may of high material itself because it's the context telling us about when and what happened there and how all these finds the objects were associated so that's why usually we aim to excavate as much as necessary to answer particular research questions but at the same time still leave a lot of the material a lot of the context preserved in in the ground for colleagues with probably surely better developed techniques and approaches in the coming years yeah that's a important thing to save because I know there are many people out there who feel like let's just dig it up let's just get the answer right now let's just dig up the whole site and and see what we find but like you say once we remove it from the context we remove all that context we exactly like lost the ability to learn from it that's also why take some paintings painstakingly long tool to document everything yeah does Quebec elite at bay in any way affect our view of the the origins of Neolithic and the origins of farming because I know there's sort of the am i right in thinking there's a divide between people that think that archaeology developed very slowly almost without sort of deliberate human action and then they're not sort of mutually exclusive but then other archaeologists that believe these large gatherings and preparing for feasts kind encouraged agricultural development does gobekli tepe affect our view of that and at all i know it's often depicted in the popular popular depictions as a kind of a game changer but in fact research in the in the area and in the neolithic process the process of militarization is going on and particular Natalia for for a lot of years even before excavations that chemically tempers started and actually excavations at contempo are a result of this proceeding research so um it definitely helped us to get a finer picture to get a clearer picture of the events surrounding this so called the authorization process but it's not turning our ideas about the Neolithic period upside down you mentioned these these fees things and that may be the necessity to have enough surplus to to attract the crowd for for this feasting and communal work processes may have somehow fueled the the interest to experiment with other food resources and to start to start food production and I think that definitely should be a factor we should keep in mind here one of the earliest sites where I'm corn this is one of the Neolithic founder crops was cultivated and domesticated is the shield volcano of Karachi which is in a wider vicinity of Gobekli Tepe and the genetic pinpointing it could be could be establish that this is one of the sites there there this domestication started and I think this is related to the events we see at pepper yeah were they using these grains there's a very important question whether using these grains to produce beer let's actually that's actually a question which is as old as archaeologists thinking about domestication of off grain I think it started in the 1950s the so-called bread would symposium where the question indeed was discussed if our interest in the domestication of cereals was initially for making bread or for producing beer and from a rather pragmatic point of view it's actually easier to produce beer then to produce something like bread you have to prepare the grain you have to do much more work steps to finally end up with a loaf of bread when to just yeah pull put some some grains into water add the necessary yeast which could as well come from the bacteria we have on our our skin as well and then under certain conditions and certain temperatures which is bit complicated more complicated when I when I put it you know it could ferment and develop a very light bearish kind of beverage and vf8 gravity temper we do have large stone vessels with a capacity of up to hundred sixteen leaders if I'm not mistaken and well in these vessels we found something which might be interpreted as the results of fermentation processes yeah but it's if we were imagining a nice pint of beer we should probably get that image out of I headed like you said it would be very light and not what we're thinking yeah colleagues colleagues did some experimental archaeology and recreating the kind of beer which was which could have been brewed there and to put it politely it's nothing I would like to drink ever even a yeah I don't think so yeah probably had a lot of bits in it I feel like not a smooth yeah yeah and drink not that much alcohol but in the end it was it has had its advantages towards water which which in particular we would stored for a couple of days or weeks it was much much better than just having the the water there I had never thought when I was reading about that debate that beer was the easier to produce them bread it's yeah I mean if you if you just think about all the work steps from from cereal grain to final bread it's quite some in between work steps which have to be done producing floor and so on now I have to ask you this question because I'm aware the clock is ticking and and we can't skip it there are many people out there yes who would say that you are a bit of a shill you're hiding the truth and that Gobekli Tepe is evidence of an advanced civilization one that maybe even spanned the globe before the Younger Dryas and and there you're just not imaginative enough to see that and it's not possible for gatherings of hunters to produce such large architecture I mean I don't even know what the question is really what do you make of these accusations why don't we believe that why don't we believe that Gobekli Tepe is this basically the survivors of Atlantis to put it bluntly yeah I mean it's not the only example of still rather mobile groups creating monuments you know no other examples as well if I imagine poetry point for example and it's an impressing example for sure but advanced technology is one of these words I really don't know what to to make of what is advanced technology or an advanced society in this context we know how these pillars how these buildings are created we we know the quarries we know the tools so it's it's rather for us it's it's really not that difficult to see the people carving these pillars moving these pearls and directing these pillars to the places where we find them now and the tools are topologically comparable to other sites and they clearly say pre pottery Neolithic together us too to be honest I would have difficulties to imagine how this advanced civilization globe-spanning civilization would have looked like if you're talking about the large-scale civilization then we again have the problem that these people must have must have eaten something and again we don't have any genetic record of domestication processes prior than Neolithic so-called Neolithic Revolution Neolithic package so it just doesn't fit so if it was an advanced civilization we surely would have find more of them when these rather singular sites and apparently apparently not even globally related sites in the world so but where would be my take on this actually and these accusations plus personally I don't have any advantage of denying the existence of such an exciting super civilization quite the opposite if I knew of of a globe spanning ancient Atlantis like civilization don't you think I would score or Netflix steal and book deal and everything to to just come come up with it come out with these things that's always the the part that I find most funny is that the accusation that archaeologists are hiding the truth because they're so concerned about preserving their ideas and preserving their positions but if anyone is going to benefit financially from the discovery of Atlantis yeah it's all the archaeologists who will just immediately start churning out books and documentaries and in particular archaeology if I might add is one of the few disciplines I'm aware of the constantly changing paradigms so it's if you just look at Neolithic research last twenty or fifty years we have changed our ideas and theories so often it's be quite hard to say we're sticking to old ideas here yeah and yeah it's definitely true I mean I've seen some videos on YouTube let's say you know they'll start off with the phrase archaeologists think civilization began in Mesopotamia 2,000 BC and you know I don't know anyone who who would I don't know an archaeologist who would say such a thing and to be honest yeah in particular we even abandoned terms like civilization because these are hollow terms and everybody can project imaginations into into this term as well once civilization is is a concept which is not really reflected in an archaeological record or the archeology archaeological theory actually yeah like you said it's a whole item I always imagine that I don't know if this is a good example but I always imagined it sort of after the fall of the Roman Empire in Britain you know we had abandoned cities and all sorts and societies sort of took a step back for a bit and yet we still had writing for example and a on the other side of the world in Mesoamerica maybe they didn't have writing but they were living in huge urban centers that we wouldn't match for hundreds and hundreds of years so it's which one was the civilization you know what does it even mean yeah that's really always in the eye of the one who make comes up with the definition on this it's not really helpful could you speak super briefly about the quarry's you mentioned we have the GREs and the stone tool yeah am i right one of the t-shaped pillars that was never fully dug out into the ground more than one actually but there's one very prominent because it's rather large about seven meters I think and the quarries are situated on the rock plateau so right around the side so it's it's maybe this is also wonderful reason the monuments were erected where they are because the material the resources were already there and we we know the quarries we we met them and it's really visible their work pieces were retrieved and we can see the we called L'Atelier situations where our tools lying around there are remains of these work processes so rabble and so on lying around and as you said there's even one very prominent t-shaped pillar still lying around at some point and the process of cutting it from the limestone benches it's apparently was breaking and then abandoned for that reason because it couldn't you couldn't be used anymore as a workpiece yeah but it's all in the really closest vicinity to the side so very short short ways actually it didn't have to carry them far and they could have perfectly easily cut the stone out of the rock using their tools that they had available to them yeah the limestone is rather soft and could be easily scratched with the material lying around like The Flintstones for example and the limestone psi and geologically it's quite interesting a Pearson ban sure so I basically only had to work all these benches and cut on the natural limestone layers out that would make would have made it much easier when to carve the whole pillar even in its thickness out of the bedrock as far as I'm concerned that's case closed sorry Atlantis maybe next time yeah maybe next I know there's one video made by a very prominent channel on YouTube that just churns out in my opinion pure bollocks and it says that the proof of Gobekli Tepe is that is part of an evidence of curb spending civilization is that they had a bag an alleged bag carved on one of the pillars and also in I know this handbag scenario but actually if you if you go down into each of these depictions they're not at all related I mean we know the Mesopotamian examples which are packets and we even know them from written sources the things on directly tape actually the handle of this pack is is so awkwardly put on that it wouldn't work as it back and you have little animals depicted next to each of these these depictions so it really looks more like depiction of the maybe the buildings itself so that's why the half circular shapes appear but I wouldn't think a Stone Age hunter has a lot of need for a handbag actually that's interesting that they might be depictions of the building because when I was looking at it idea just an idea but as you said the sort of handle is sort of off to one side it would be in the middle of the back so I wondered that yeah but I mean I see the bag is one of the most basic constructions ever every human ever has been able to work it out how to make a bag it's not if you want to carry something the easiest way is to put a string or something on it and hook it up it would be the easiest way to construct a mode of transportation maybe the idea wife by I think it might be the pictures of the enclosures in this case of the buildings is little and the little animals next to it because where there seems to be one very prominent animal associated with each of these blue links which is appearing rather often in the pictures of the pillars and maybe if this is linked to to certain group identities it would make sense to depict a building next to the emblematic animal but again this is just an idea and more more tossing around thoughts than actual sexual proofs yeah what animal is that it depends on the under building based one building you're showing a lot of birds another building showing dominated by the pictures of boar and so it really depends and it changes with each building interesting almost like they had a head of theme maybe yeah before we go I have a few most sort of quickfire questions from my patreon ok supporters if that's okay yeah sure yes thank you very much to patreon guys for supporting me and making this stuff possible I appreciate it coda holic wants to know what is the the biggest surprise that you have found there or the the thing that surprised you the most about gobekli tepe that would be probably the implications of these buildings for social hierarchy among hunter-gatherers and a Neolithic so the idea that so many people working together and somebody had to coordinate all of this and this implies social hierarchy at least I wouldn't have expected among these groups mmm at least tempo temporary social hierarchy yeah someone would have to at least temporarily have to direct people and have this kind of how they were gonna make a building you just can't bring 500 people together and expect that they're coming up something like this without coordination yeah that's true that's a very good point Merrick would like to know there's the attention of the people that believe that gobekli tepe is basically the survivors of Atlantis does that ever interfere with the work and the research on site no not really it that may be it it changed how we address this public public interest and the narrator's that we spend a bit more time or at least recognized the importance of public outreach more to make visible that there are more interpretations than these rather rather exotic interpretations in the which are dominating in the public idea about this site yeah exotic and shallow I would like to add then yeah we have full picture of the site at all storm of Steel shout-out to that guy has another YouTube channel himself check it out he wants to know what is the strangest question you've ever been asked about gobekli tepe strangest question oh I wasn't asked this directly in person but it comes up very very often I do you discuss it here as well that the site may have been proof of an advanced super civilization in particular of an alien super civilization but the latest high up on the list of strangest things I would say yeah I mean never me even mine I mean Atlantis is one thing but never even mind the aliens guys that's really that's really far out there I always feel like those ideas you know they're so critical of the evidence the archaeologists presents and then when you ask for the evidence aliens it's the most superficial non-existent I mean it's it's kind of a lazy lazy interpretation because yeah delegates all the work to an imaginary group and so yeah could have been everything Krishna my patron wonders how is research funded at Quebec Lee tap a because there is this accusation the group's fund research to get a specific result that they want I know this is kind of an expensive question but that's a good question actually I mean the the research project is a cooperation project of the German archaeological Institute and the Archaeological Museum in offer and Turkey so it's an international and interdisciplinary cooperation and the money is coming parley from from the Institute of course but basically we are founded by the German Research Foundation we had 12 year project and the right basic the the German Research Foundation of course is yeah funded by German takes money so we are basically funded by by Texas and when the money is handed out there's no expectation of you must find there certain results or anything like that no there's a strict rule not only in Germany but I would say internationally that science is free if so as this idea of scientific freedom and this is explicitly also said about the funding processes so no way definitely don't have a list of things to check off we have to find okay last question Keegan wanders they've seen I'm not sure which image they're talking about personally but they're saying that they have seen an image of a woman at the site that is perhaps not carved in the same style is this perhaps like an example of graffiti I'm not sure which carving they're referring to yeah yeah I know what we're referring to there is indeed the whole iconography of the side as far as it's really by the clear mode of depiction is dominated by male depiction so we had a lot of palaces around animals and people are indicated as male examples and there's indeed one female depiction and this is a this is a later graffito on the stone slab in one of these rectangular buildings I was mentioning and it yeah it's a carved crudely carved figure of a woman we are addressing it as a crow Pharaoh indeed yeah because it's soldier saying oh so unique in the whole iconography interesting I'm now imagining one you know women back in the day thing like screw all these fallacies everywhere I'm gonna carve myself under one of these pillars and it's not on its it's not on one of the pillars it's a stone slab just a block of stone lines in one of the buildings maybe not even part of the original building oh okay but by but it it still was in the context of this being done in the neolithic not not like in the minute probably i mean it's it's hard to date stone carvings but from context it belongs to the neolithic i would say to the to the neolithic period yeah is there anything you really want the public to know about quebec date ever anything you feel like doesn't get any attention not not in particular just question what do you read on the internet and if you got access to the original resources and sources dare to look them up and read for yourself make your own mind and don't believe everything which is written on the internet don't even believe everything I say just check your sources and have fun learning more about the past which is really exciting even without advance super civilizations and ancient Aryans promise absolutely absolutely and they can go to the tap a telegrams correct to see what you your you and your colleagues are reading and writing about the site yes exactly a lot of the stuff I was mentioning like the Celtic community and all the other sites with similar iconography and similar characteristics like the animal bones all of this stuff you can read on the on the block in much much more detail the colleagues are doing a great work and collecting and presenting the decree and making it making it accessible even beyond the scientific publications so you definitely check it out excellent there you go no conspiracy out there guys making it as easy as possible yeah yeah okay well thank you so much yen's I'll put thank you paid telegrams and your Twitter down in the description check it out stay informed guys read the sources follow the sources and yeah thank you so much ants this has really been a great I've absolutely loved it it's been my pleasure thanks a lot

Channel: Stefan Milo

Views: 352,143

Rating: 4.781847 out of 5

Keywords: History, Archaeology, anthropology, folk tales, stefan milo, american history, ancient history, world history

Id: WgwiUkEL4yE

Length: 58min 42sec (3522 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 09 2020