http://www.newsweek.com/id/233844

It's cause for pause to contemplate works of this magnitude predating agriculture. I wonder what The Old Man would say. Or just one of our resident Old Men!

The new discoveries are finally beginning to reshape the slow-moving consensus of archeology. Göbekli Tepe is "unbelievably big and amazing, at a ridiculously early date," according to Ian Hodder, director of Stanford's archeology program. Enthusing over the "huge great stones and fantastic, highly refined art" at Göbekli, Hodder—who has spent decades on rival Neolithic sites—says: "Many people think that it changes everything…It overturns the whole apple cart. All our theories were wrong."

The very first 3 comments say it well:


I find the tone of this article troublesome. Science is not about proving your point. Science is about using a precise methodology to uncover truths about our world. It is quite simply not possible for this so called scientist to make these astonishing statements. There is no way he could prove such statements, no matter what he finds in the ground at Gobekli. Whats more-----factions and divisions of religion define religion. I see no evidence from any other source that would lead me to believe that there were enough people------who lived in the crossroads of Europe and Asia----who believed in any religion with the degree of uninamity needed to make this incredible statement [that some single religion pulled people from near and far to this place------and was the impetus for them to work together to build a massive structure celebrating that religion. And that this event was what started civilization] This is quite simply preposterous. This theory would need mountains of evidence from a multitude of sources before it could bear the weight of scientific scrutiny. We cannot trust anything that cannot be proven scientifically----------accepting a persons individual religious faith. I therefore do not trust that this so called scientist has the credibillity to even be working at this site----much less interpreting what the sites discoveries tell us about the past.


Speaking as an archaeologist, frankly, "...may be the very first thing human beings ever built" is hype. Shelters allowed peopling the world long before Göbekli Tepe. What "Göbekli Tepe" evidences is our ignorance, not to mention how ignorance makes interpretation premature.


Could have been a Mall?
Could have been a gentleman's club?
Are you sure that bowl was for Holy water?
Why do we scream religion as soon as something is dug up?
There is more than ample proof the Pyramids are as old as that. anyways...
Dig it up and show the world by keep shortsighted conclusions to yourself.
Where is scientific neutrality and common sense...I find it hard to believe exuberance is blinding.

They found a big thing. That's it, so far...

Gotta watch that "exuberance".

the first thing that came to my mind was that it was bullshit to claim it the first work of construction. It is *obvious* that the earliest works would have been either (or both) too shoddy in form or too weak in material to have withstood the ages. So the presumptuousness is quite striking, I agree.

Still, this is a fascinating finding. And being in the cradle of civilization, I see no need to get too concerned about a few handfuls of centuries either way. The interpretation will almost certainly change and grow over time; it was gratifying that the guy intends to leave everything intact for future researchers with more sophisticated tools. That'll surely offset some of the preconceptions that Schmidt and the article's author put forward.

Besides, weren't churches, gentlemans clubs, malls and morgues all one things back in the day?

[div class="excerpt"]
"There's more time between Gobekli Tepe and the Sumerian clay tablets [etched in 3300 B.C.] than from Sumer to today," says Gary Rollefson, an archaeologist at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, who is familiar with Schmidt's work. "Trying to pick out symbolism from prehistoric context is an exercise in futility."

Still, archaeologists have their theories—evidence, perhaps, of the irresistible human urge to explain the unexplainable. The surprising lack of evidence that people lived right there, researchers say, argues against its use as a settlement or even a place where, for instance, clan leaders gathered. Hodder is fascinated that Gobekli Tepe's pillar carvings are dominated not by edible prey like deer and cattle but by menacing creatures such as lions, spiders, snakes and scorpions. "It's a scary, fantastic world of nasty-looking beasts," he muses. While later cultures were more concerned with farming and fertility, he suggests, perhaps these hunters were trying to master their fears by building this complex, which is a good distance from where they lived.

Danielle Stordeur, an archaeologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in France, emphasizes the significance of the vulture carvings. Some cultures have long believed the high-flying carrion birds transported the flesh of the dead up to the heavens. Stordeur has found similar symbols at sites from the same era as Gobekli Tepe just 50 miles away in Syria. "You can really see it's the same culture," she says. "All the most important symbols are the same."

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/gobekli-tepe.html?c=y&page=3[/quote]

Awful lot of speculation goin' on, mostly from Herr Schmidt. The place certainly needs explanation but this dude is shooting from the hip.

I'm sure that SLAD has got this stuff all figured out....

... what we are looking at here is a reflection in a mirror ...of another reflection in a mirror. This is the same problem as the one that tries to use Robinson Crusoe to derive the primitive categories of Political Economy. The problem lies with Robinson himself.

Whatever his condition, Robinson is a thoroughly modern capitalist and he immediately projects - and cannot keep from projecting - all of his understanding, his concepts, his fetishes, and his fully-formed illusions onto whatever circumstances he finds. He does not see the past... he recreates the present in the past. Even the basic categories which Robinson uses to classify his world are themselves rendered meaningless in the course of their retrospective application.

To connect this point to a related one that has been coming up, both here and on SI for the last several weeks, consider a category like "hierarchy". Is there such a thing as "hierarchy"?

Well, there are certainly the appearances of "tiers" in most social circumstances and it is not much of a stretch to draw an analogy between the hierarchies that exist in human societies to those in nature and then back again to the behavior of small groups of people or even perhaps to the "individual" and his very own "nature". As a literary device, it is common, and it lends a universality to what we see. Pisarev's Bees is a shining example.

When we move from analogy to connection, however, the category does not last long. The truth is that the most obvious expression of "hierarchy" in human society - social classes - are not at all analogous to "hierarchies" in the natural world. For one thing, hierarchies in nature are always rooted in the division of labor, even if that division only exists along sexual lines. In human society, on the other hand, the primary basis of hierarchy does not come from one's position in the division of labor but in one's exemption from it. In nature, there is no alpha status that even remotely removes one from the division of labor as a whole. Are we sure we are talking about the same thing?

Now move from the social world to the personal one and describe the animal traits which lead one to a mastery of "personal skills" which in turn allows someone to triumph in the social tiers...

Say what?

There is no such connection. Human hierarchies are not even remotely based on ANY personal traits: aggressive, benign or otherwise. They are largely historical.

By the time we are done, we have made the word, "hierarchy", so mushy that it means nothing at all... OR... we have discovered that it is yet another shadow - a fetish - behind which the real motive forces of society reside.

“To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but reading and writing comes by Nature.”

[div class="excerpt"]
When we move from analogy to connection, however, the category does not last long. The truth is that the most obvious expression of "hierarchy" in human society - social classes - are not at all analogous to "hierarchies" in the natural world. For one thing, hierarchies in nature are always rooted in the division of labor, even if that division only exists along sexual lines. In human society, on the other hand, the primary basis of hierarchy does not come from one's position in the division of labor but in one's exemption from it. In nature, there is no alpha status that even remotely removes one from the division of labor as a whole. Are we sure we are talking about the same thing?[/quote]

You are a clever fella, that is a clear distinction. I'm guessing that the two are connected, however tenuously, in that one developed from the other. Not unusual in the evolutionary process for one physical or behavioral trait to evolve into something somewhat or rather quite different. That hierarchy in human society is a relatively recent development does not recommend it as evolution is directionless.

That hierarchy in human society is a relatively recent development does not recommend it as evolution is directionless.

Evolution is certainly NOT directionless. I concede that it isn't "purposeful" from a certain standpoint, but directionless?

I figured Dhal would be all over this one, I was giving him dibs.

Do you consider survival, reproduction of the genome, a 'direction'? Guess I'm not following you but it seems to me that to imply direction to evolution borders on the metaphysical.

The "evolution" being discussed in this article and subsequent thread is the evolution of culture and technology. There is absolutely a "direction" here. You can't develop a fire-pit technology until you have fire. You develop a wheel after you have used logs to roll things across the ground that are too heavy to lift. The lever and fulcrum come before the pulleys and wenches. With culture (technology) there is an unavoidable direction of evolution/development.

And even with physical evolution there is an environmental "direction to it, no? If your species evolves in a certain climate, terrain, and environment, you will do so "in the direction" of more compatibility. Evolution is the resulting process of living beings in an environment - the two constantly shape each other and so there is a 'kind of' direction of development in all evolution...

There is no proof of hardly anything being posited. The assumptions being made by this guy are ridiculous. for one thing the dating of carved stone is notoriously difficult. Also, there is no way to ascertain the local movement of people or peoples in preliterate times to any degree of certitude, so you cannot know who these people were as opposed to who others were. Roman artists purposely imitated Greek artists, Greek and Etruscan art is equally blended; Greek artists worked in Egypt and Persian artists worked in Greece - we know these things because some boring assholes wrote about it. We do not know anything at all about the people who made the things this article is discussing. It sounds like to me that this German guy is grinding something...prolly wants more dough...

cuz I wasn't even considering that.

Attributing 'direction' to organic evolution is pretty mushy. The 'direction' is subject to a mass of variables and the direction can only be maintained if those variables remain constant. But those variables do not remain constant, climate for example. Also, selection is exercised on the individual, with the likely exception of group selection in highly social species like ours. An individual in a suboptimal environment will be subject to different selective pressures, if it and other individuals manage to reproduce successfully under these conditions then we have a change of direction for that population. If a population is isolated from the main gene pool it does not have the full complement of traits, some will be expressed more commonly, some less so than in the general population. This cam lead to allopatric speciation, is that not a change of 'direction'?

Attributing direction to organic evolution seems a bit too deterministic, contingency is always in play.

it will roll down hill - that is the direction it will take; nothing but its shape, the terrain, and gravity making it happen. Not mushy, not mystical, just material reality.

All of those variables you listed are just the environment. Environment changes, that change is, in itself, part of the environment. The living organism changes its environment (and is part of it) while the environment changes the organism. Now Darwin theorized that the motor of evolution was "Natural Selection" (that is the theory part - evolution, itself, can and has been proven). I tend to think that Natural Selection is not the "Survival of the Fittest", but more the "Survival of All Those Not Unfit" (but that's just me).

Now, if you are using the term "direction" as in "being directed" then, yeah, I am not on that train, at all; but if "direction" means movement from a point "A" toward (an always moving) point "B", then I would say I would agree with that...

How can that be called 'direction'?

The only direction is reproductive success.

which is true that "direction" and "motion" are not that different, BUT importantly, things are always evolving from less to more complex INCLUDING biological evolution.

Forget all of the details for a sec and look at the big picture: you start with single cell organisms in the highly acidic oceans and now you have incredibly complex varieties of all shades and stripes, adapted in everywhich way to any environment you can imagine including lava vents at the bottom of the ocean that scream inhospitable more than a Dick Cheney scowl.

Whats more, you can even argue that part of the evolutionary success of humans is ability to iteratively adapt to varying environmental conditions.

Anyway, its Hegel's Ladder only turned right-side up. Its an elaboration on Kant's (arguably) most important realization/discovery that the solar system formed from collapsing interstellar gas

This whole idea of statistical randomness is bassackwards: remember that thought (logic) mirrors reality and NOT vice versa. That means that its ridiculous to say that biological evolution or entropy/information or gases or anything else follows Statistical Laws. Instead we can say that they exhibit behavior that we've been able to codify to a certain level of predictive and explanatory precision/accuracy using various statistical techniques

Bet your ass physical things evolve in a directed way. Each successive movement builds on what has come before and what is already in existence.

not the end of it. Evolution is not random, it is directional; in that it is the process by which an organism develops an increasing compatibility with and to its environment. The direction is from less adapted to more adapted to the environment. The "moving point 'B'" is that the environment changes and compatibility can probably never be "total", a species can always become more adapted to its environment and new adaptations will be required when the environment changes (which it almost always will) - none of this is incompatible with "direction". All the individual can do within the evolutionary process is to pass on its genes to as successful a set of offspring as possible; the species, itself, evolves toward more compatibility with its environment.

because reproduction=self-perpetuation through time, and because you are talking about something as dynamic as biological organisms with their own expansive nature, adaptations and advances in complexity are basically synonomous terms. Otherwise, reproduction would simply be monotonic.

Also, don't get TOO caught up in the "adapted to environment" argument. Its sort of the wrong side of Protagoras' "Man is the measure.." maxim. The environment is not entirely the measure of evolutionary success when you consider that "adaptability" is actually an important and powerful evolutionary direction in itself.

and remind them that "Nature" is not "mechanistic", but the our "mechanism" are "naturalistic".

Granted that the "direction" of evolution may just be a logical construct, after the fact ("we don't know where we are going, but we know where we been"), that doesn't make the "direction" evolution any less tangible...

and not thinking about the Mazda Miata enough.

Big picture, we started with some floating gas in vaccum-like outer space and now have a world teeming with biological lifeforms with humans standing as the pinnacle of this evolutionary process.

Metaphysics would actually demand that we deny any such direction and instead insist on the predominance of the Aleatory. Of course contingency and chance are the grease that lubricate the material wheels of evolution/reproduction but they're not the star of the show by any means

If they are, then we're in some REAL relativist territory that eventually devolves back into "What is truth?" musings.

If a system can only be considered in its full development, it introduces the question of what perspective is possible other than "after the fact" (which is a misnomer if "the fact" is ongoing)

From the full development we then pare back layer upon layer until we strike to the more core elements and then we reassemble the whole with a much greater and more complete understanding of how this collection of processes and events and interactions and relations functions as a totality

Thats dialectical materialism in action (and thus there is no other kind).

A quote I always remember from Gramsci is that positive science (ie positivism) tells us that the tree grows from the acorn. This is an entirely different "after the fact" as it expresses only superficial truth without any care for or cognition of the manifold development process at work.

Remember also that mechanical motion/direction is entirely and immutably linear (a chain of successive cause/effect pairs) and nothing in nature follows such a formulaic progression outside of very scripted/controlled events such as laboratory experiments.

In fact, as Engels and many, many others point out cause and effect are very much a matter of perspective. If two moving objects collide they will both hold that the other object is the "cause" of the collision. Engels says something to the effect that "what is here a cause is there an effect, what was then an effect is now a cause"

I agree with all you say here except the use of the word 'direction'.

A few years back Kid or Pinko put up an essay by one of the 19th century Russian 'theorist'(I think) contending that socialism was the 'goal' of evolution. It was well-meaning nonsense. That's the sort of thing I am objecting to.

Only it is quite a leap to equate "goal" and "direction"

In fact, part of Hegel's failing is that he outlined a conception of ongoing and non-terminating unfolding/development and then tried to inscribe it in philosophy as Absolute Truth, which is of course exactly the thing that a perpetual unfolding denies and refutes in the first place. (And Absolute Truth and "Goal" are really the same thing if you think about it)

Also read my post about Gramsci's critique of positive science below as that is also simply another way of expressing the same idea.

I'm sure that the theoretical elaboration of the details will change (although as you say the written record provides a solid framework) but it doesn't at all weigh on the fact that the material record -- the past in TANGIBLE form -- is still there.

The next time some hipster asshole tells you that the past is only in your mind direct the fucker to a museum or archaeology dig.

evolutionary movement. ;) (And Protagoras has to worry about getting on my wrong side - but that's another thread).


Evolution is "driven" by something; there are natural processes that generate evolutionary movement. If you are saying that things move from simple to complex simply because that is way things are and we don't know why, well I would say that is what is the fun part!. The theory of evolution is in what is its motive force. All things react to all other things in space and over time. All things (mater and energy) are acted upon in space and over time by all other things. These actions and reactions constitute the fabric of the evolutionary process. Now through observation it can be determined that there is a directional element to evolutionary processes; from simple to more complex, from less well adapted to more highly adapted. What Darwin wanted to know was what made this so. The reason "Natural Selection" is still just a theory is because the process is universal and involves all the laws of physics, nature and some we probably don't know yet and maybe never will. So, (sorry for all this rambling shit), we don't know what moves evolution, but we do know it is there and it does move in a direction (or two :aetsch: )

but I assumed Pinks would jump in here too. The idea of "direction" is too important to any kind of a Marxian conception of the world to simply let it pass without comment.

I'm actually thinking of quoting somethng from Engels to put the point home. I prefer Engels to Marx on this point because he writes in a more everyday style.

EDIT: I would also like to add that this is one of the *very* few places on the web we could have this conversation without having to deal with wonks and insane people (or do I repeat myself ;)?)

Anyway, I agree that BP is focusing more on the specific mechanisms than I am, but I am not making a "way that things are" argument.

The difference is that we have actually over millenia of human histoy, through the sciences, managed to take the entire unorganized chaotic enigmatic world around us and categorize and compartmentalize and from there work BACKwards to analyze and understand things in Nature.

From this very critical observational power lent to us by the sciences (sometimes literally looking backwards like in archaeology or astronomy incidentally) we can see the hows and whys of things coming into being and moving out of being.

While it is cyclical and all things come to their end, we also see a compounding or an exposition whereby the simple beginnings explode in a lattice-like form into systems that are completely unimaginable at the outset. Whats more, we can trace how these systems undergo change over time, how they morph into more advanced and more complex versions of themselves and how they operate internally with an emphasis on all of the details involved.

So its only a "how things are" argument, if you think that Marx's Capital is also simply a tome on "how things are" without serving to facilitate and foster not just understanding but also carrying implications for the system under observation/analysis.

If yer gonna start with that philosopher shit I'm outta here.

"I'm just a simple soldier...."

I promise I tried to think of a way to make the point without introducing "philosophy", I was hoping this instance would be borderline enough to pass your inspection :)

I'll try harder in the future!

I've gotten kinda usta youse guys talkin' that indecipherable stuff, it's sometimes fascinating to watch but I can't make no sense out of it, like Modern Art.

Carry on.

...our friend Pinko has a way of drawing out the most serious discussions.

Complements to those on this thread. Apply the same cold, rigorously rational and materialist perspective to politics and it will have an impact.