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Rant: The new dig in Turkey is making me rethink everything about early cities
Last week, the team at Karahantepe in Turkey showed off a 12,000 year old building with carved stone pillars. Three years ago, most experts said big, complex sites like that were much younger. Now some think we need to move the start date for city life way back. Others say it's just one special site and doesn't change the bigger picture. What's your take on this?
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kelly.nora6mo ago
Isn't it wild how fast the story can change? I saw those pictures and my jaw dropped. It feels like every few years now, something gets dug up that makes the old textbooks look silly. I had the same feeling when they kept pushing back the dates for stuff like Göbekli Tepe. It makes you wonder what else is still buried out there that could flip the whole timeline on its head again. I'm leaning toward this being a bigger deal than just one weird site.
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adam7516mo ago
That's a good point about how fast things change. When you look at the dates for Gobekli Tepe and now this, it seems like a pattern. Do you think we've been wrong about how fast people could organize and build, or is there another reason these sites keep popping up in that one region?
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felix_henderson546mo ago
You said it makes the old textbooks look silly, but I have to push back on that a bit. The textbooks are just our best guess with the info we had. This new find is amazing, but it's part of the normal process. We get new data, we update the story. It doesn't mean the old experts were dumb, they just didn't have these stones in front of them yet. It's a sign the science is working, not that it was broken before.
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