alt Hacker NewsI guess it’s unrelated to this particular find but is Turkey now the place where civilization first started or Gobekli Tepe and the other similar sites are not considered civilizations at this point?
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Probably depends on definitions but there are cave paintings in France 20,000 years older and contemporary with sites in Australia. There are also much simpler Fertile Crescent sites that are older but not much more then holes in the ground.
I think you need evidence of a system of government, agriculture, culture, laws to dispense justice predictably and a writing system to track and record aspects of the above. Hence we can have Egyptian, Indus, etc., but not prehistoric civilizations. The human organizations just didn’t have enough progress to be considered civilized. Thats not to say they were not advanced vis a vis their other contemporaries but rather didn’t meet certain milestones that mark a civilization.
There isn’t really a settled definition of “civilization” but usually one of the requirements is developing some kind of writing system without outside influence. As far as we know the people at Gobekli Tepe did not have one.
Granted you can also argue the same about Incans and to some extent Mesoamericans, so it’s kind of debatable.