Archaeologists find 12,000-year-old pictograph at Gobeklitepe
hurriyetdailynews.com
hurriyetdailynews.com
It is the oldest building in the world. The only older constructions that we know of is a small wall made from piled rock to protect a cave from the weather. Not only is it the oldest but it also is large : 1000 feet across and at least 50 feet deep with several layers covering at least two millennia. The site was only discovered 20 years ago and only about 20% have been excavated so far!
Cultivation first started in the Gobekli area. We know from DNA analysis that the wheat we use today is based on a wild variety of wheat that grew miles away from Gobekli.
It is located in the middle of the fertile crescent: the birthplace of civilization. It is located between the Tigris and Euphrates near their source which is the location of Eden in the bible. It also is located right next to Şanlıurfa which is said to be the birthplace of Abraham.
The size of the monuments also are impressive given that the people who built them were still hunter-harvesters living in small tribes without the knowledge of the wheel or pottery. It required a large workforce working over a large amount of time.
I am happy that the recent discovery seems to confirm my personal theory that Gobekli is a Dakhma [0], a place where bodies were left in the open for vulture to cleanse.
Probably a reference to Theopetra cave?
Our focal point of the site was the incredible stone monoliths. A massive endeavor requiring advanced technology, organization, and craftsmanship to quarry, transport, and carve the reliefs, all happening 5x as far back in history as the time between present day us and the Greeks. That's a lot of really advanced stuff, and obviously advanced social relations and intelligent people, happening a really, really long time ago. If you're the kind of person who likes to identify with your fellow man, regardless of nationality or race or whatever, it makes you a larger person knowing things about our very distant ancestors.
A spoiler in a nutshell: conventional wisdom has it that a time of plenty allowed us to settle down and figure out the technology for feeding lots of settlers, and that in turn created a surplus that made it possible to sustain non-productive groups like religious leaders.
It might, however, have been the other way around: it may be that a shared fiction ---possibly a set of beliefs, what today we'd call a religion--- forced people to stay in a place ---maybe Göbeklitepe--- for long enough that new techniques for ensuring sustenance had to be developed. Anyway, do read that book. It's the best on the subject since Guns, Germs and Steel.
The buildings themselves are the biggest proof. No roof, inconvenient and small entrance, holes to let the soul escape. The carvings found at Göbekli were also found on other sites which were associated with religion and death. One example would be the carving of vultures and headless bodies. Vultures which are associated with death and the ritual of excarnation: the floor of the buildings were made waterproof and sloped to allow the draining of bodily liquids. We know that people in that area would bury bodies without their head or even reopen the grave to remove the head. They also have been known to put plaster on skulls and keep the heads around.
The strict functional differentiation of society into subfields such as politics, education, science, law etc that characterises modernity, emerged only over the last couple of centuries. In the past they were really much more intermeshed. What we mean by religion today has relatively little relevant to ancient societies.
Not the stratification of professional roles we see today (which is pretty staggering) still breaks down not too far from these categories. The US BLS EEO-1 Job Classification Guide's top level breaks down to the following major classifications, each with the indicated number of subclassifications:
1 Exec/Senior Offs & Mgrs.
33 First/Mid Offs & Mgrs.
266 Professionals
57 Technicians
21 Sales Workers
64 Administrative Support Workers
132 Craft Workers
120 Operatives
34 Labors and Helpers
91 Service Workers
From Integrated Public use Microdata Series, classifications by year:
https://usa.ipums.org/usa/intro.shtml https://usa.ipums.org/usa-action/variables/OCC#codes_section
1880: 227
1920: 587
1930: 283
1940: 236
1950: 269
1960: 302
1970: 444
1980: 505
1990: 513
2000: 545
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3832wx/occupat...
The evolution of society from the stone ages to modernity is characterised by increasing:
1. Functional differentiation. That means we specialise more in smaller and smaller fields. Even 100 years ago westerners would typically have grown some of their food themselves, and might have played a role in building their own homes.
2. Voluntarism. That means that we choose our field of work ourselves. In the past our social station made that decision for us. If our father was a farmer, we'd probably be a farmer too, if daddy was a slave we'd be slaves etc. Nowadays we progress through a sequence of choices (which university to go to, which field to study, what company to work for etc) and a sequence of exams and tests that seeks to quantify our ability for a chosen job.
Weren't castes or other social segments strongly associated with certain roles actually fairly strongly established?
The classifications I posted above show that how specialized you see work depends much on how the classifications are defined. My sense is that periods of rapid change in employment structure lead to increases in classifications. E.g., the 1920 set. Which actually covered 1900 - 1920. See Vaclav Smil's recent articles on the innovation of the 1880s.