For when your map is lacking resources

What food sources the population outgrew to devastate is not recorded.

The land becoming arid because of poor farming practices or over-grazing is not an unreasonable theory, since it is common throughout recorded history.

None of that belies the fact that any source or type of food would need long-term storage enough to get through off-seasons.

The fact that there are many examples of hills or tepe of this type would serve to show how large and advanced the population in the area really was.

How they stored food is not something we are likely to find out with certainty. But common sense solutions would involve having raised, off the ground silos. Much of the primitive world stored their food is such constructions. Unfortunately they were made of wood with a thatch roof and have long since vanished. Rat’s are the biggest enemy with stored food, followed by molds. So by raising them off the ground prevented rats from getting in, and airy so it dried out more preventing molds from developing. It’s not just bad farming practice, ie overgrazing that causes famines, most of them are caused by climate change. Yep, that whole region was densely populated, in Turkey and around the black sea area there are tens of thousands of prehistoric megaliths. Hunter gatherer cultures can’t support dense populations.

Evidence points to GT having been completely buried on purpose, which would mean we don’t know how far down general ground level was while occupied.

Ritual or burial chambers would have yielded some scrap of evidence as such by now.

That much effort put forth by, what for all intents and purposes would still be first-gen agrarian society, for something that didn’t directly have to do with survival?

Storage for perishable food resources of a society advanced enough to master basic agriculture, would show exactly what we see, empty cupboards.

It being buried on purpose is about the only thing they know about it with any certainty. Nothing was found to indicate what the site was used for, so they took everything with them. I would say that the lowest ground level is where the bottom of the megaliths are. That’s not to say there are not subterranean levels as well, they have been discovered else where in the wider region from Macedonia to Turkey, but not discovered in GT to date. They have ground penetrating radar, cavities would have shown up. They have only uncovered about 3% of the site so far.

It was clearly an affluent society that created such extensive works.
Someone took everything and buried it.
It might not necessarily have been those who built it.
The City of the Dead outside of Cairo, Egypt might look similar in 25,000 years if it gets looted by a greedy and belligerent horde who sack its riches, remove, pile and burn its corpses.
That all trace of a conquered people should then be completely buried would have been an angry malice intent on demonstrating its power.

Incipient agriculture was starting in the area of southern Anatolia and to the south in t he Levant and Jericho: it’s just that there is no evidence of cultivated plants in the area of Gobekli Tepe itself.
One possible answer, which has been proposed for both Gobekli Tepe and Poverty Point in the USA (another massive monument complex in an apparent hunter-gatherer economy) is Religion. That both sites provided a ‘Sacred Space’ for seasonal religious ceremonies used by people from the surrounding areas who in return provided food and ‘luxury’ goods (religious offerings?) (Poverty Point in Louisiana had copper objects that came from the upper Great Lakes, apparently all the way down the Mississippi).
Since we don’t know diddly about the religion(s) in question, this is a contention that is impossible to prove or disprove, but it does conveniently provide a reason for massive communal labor in a spot that doesn’t show any signs of being able to support the laboring population - seasonal hunter-gatherers showing up for part of the year to erect another mound or monumental stone, stage some religious ceremony, and then scatter back to following the herds.

The parallels are with Stonehenge, which also apparently saw seasonal concentrations of visitors 3000 years ago and earlier, and the ‘first city’ at Uruk, which was built around two religious sites (Eanna and Kullaba) that started as seasonal and then, as agriculture took hold in the area, became permanent centers for people to concentrate.

As I said, a possible mechanic that explains the ‘facts’ as we know them so far, but really impossible to prove or disprove without any direct religious evidence from the period.

It would be extraordinary if other people took such care in leaving no evidence and burying it. Evidence is always left when a place is attacked and looted. It seems as if the builders decided it was no longer of use, carefully packed everything up leaving no trace of themselves, and then carefully buried the site before leaving. It’s a mystery for sure.

A gathering place doesn’t necessarily have to do with religion, it could be just a designated place to meet periodically to trade goods, exchange ideas, meet the partner of your dreams, etc. We still hold such events today, gatherings of like minded people, festivals. Trouble with that idea is that GT is not isolated, there are many such sites in the immediate region. The main stream concept of a steady progression from hunter gatherers to agrarian cultures, is nothing but wishful thinking. Humanity has built itself up, been destroyed many times over throughout the millennia’s. At least four such cycles of humanity reaching an advanced civilisation, only for them to be destroyed, is evident all over the world.

About 99% of their beliefs were animistic, a study of the animated. They believed that everything had it’s own spirit, and by that I mean ‘sprit of place’, not magic beings. So for example someone they would claim had an eagle spirit, frequently depicted with wings, they are describing a wise person. An eagle can fly high to see the bigger picture from all angles. A person with a wolf spirit is a leader and teacher, etc. A good example…There is a story in Loch Ness, Scotland about a creature that can grab people off the shore or shallows and drag them into deeper water to drown them, called a water horse. A horse is a vehicle than can transport someone from place a to b. The story is describing an undertow, not an actual creature.

Hunter-Gatherer to Argriculture is in many ways not a 'steady progression at all, but a Regression: working far more hours for the same result, losing personal freedom and choice and becoming tied to land and crops in a way that also tried you to the direction of other people. Numerous hunter-gatherers studied in the 20th century in South America, Southeast Asia and Africa all said the same thing: they knew all about agriculture and planting crops to eat, but, thank you very much, they couldn’t see the point as long as their were plants to gather and animals to chase as required. Of course, the greater population density made possible by intensive agriculture meant that the hunter-gatherers were slowly pushed off into marginal areas, but that doesnt seem to have been part of their personal equation when evaluating the life-style they preferred.

Possibly. The carvings at GT can be interpreted that way, but they could also be something entirely different. To take your own example, in Greek religious mythology, the eagle was not particularly wise at all - the Owl was the wise bird, not intrinsically, but because the owl was the companion/totem bird of Athena, the Goddess of Strategems and ‘cleverness’. Religions are full of subtle distinctions and peculiarities like this that are, unfortunately, not obvious from a bunch of rock carvings 11,000 years’ distant. You may be exactly and precisely correct in your interpretation, but there’s no way to prove it.

Absolutely, a good example is the African bushmen tribes. They are very few in numbers and could end up being crowded out of existence. It’s good that there is still room for such people to live how they like and for the most part are left in peace to get on with it.

This thread is getting way off topic.

Perhaps we should ask the African Bushmen. They were shown some abstract cave paintings that had been baffling archeologists, the Bushmen were easily able to decipher and tell the story being depicted. Our problem is that our higher education system fails to think outside of it’s own box. It has it’s hypothesis and woe betide anyone who disagrees.
The owl as a symbol of wisdom is telling you the wisdom is of a particular nature, in the case of an owl the wisdom is silent and springs on you unexpectedly, an eureka moment. Birds in general are a symbol of wisdom, the fine tuning comes in the particular species used.

Does that matter?

Yes. If you want to continue the discussion then we have this section of the forum for that.

Fair play, will remember that for next time. :slightly_smiling_face:

My apologies to all for the digression. A good discussion of ideas is hard to cut off . . .

Capitalising on something is not Capitalism. The terms are not really related as the capital in Capitalism refers to ownership and financing of enterprises, not processes of daily life. Capitalism is not some intrinsic or inevitable law of nature as some would have you believe, it’s an invented economic and social system just like other invented economic and social systems. We choose which system we want to use.

Off topic I know but I just had to.

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