“a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built”

A pillar at the Gobekli Tepe temple near Sanliurfa, Turkey, the oldest known temple in the world

History in the Remaking
A temple complex in Turkey that predates even the pyramids is rewriting the story of human evolution.
By Patrick Symmes | NEWSWEEK  |  Published Feb 19, 2010, From the magazine issue dated Mar 1, 2010

They call it potbelly hill, after the soft, round contour of this final lookout in southeastern Turkey. To the north are forested mountains. East of the hill lies the biblical plain of Harran, and to the south is the Syrian border, visible 20 miles away, pointing toward the ancient lands of Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, the region that gave rise to human civilization. And under our feet, according to archeologist Klaus Schmidt, are the stones that mark the spot—the exact spot—where humans began that ascent.

Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn’t just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.

Göbekli Tepe—the name in Turkish for “potbelly hill”—lays art and religion squarely at the start of that journey. After a dozen years of patient work, Schmidt has uncovered what he thinks is definitive proof that a huge ceremonial site flourished here, a “Rome of the Ice Age,” as he puts it, where hunter-gatherers met to build a complex religious community. Across the hill, he has found carved and polished circles of stone, with terrazzo flooring and double benches. All the circles feature massive T-shaped pillars that evoke the monoliths of Easter Island.

Though not as large as Stonehenge—the biggest circle is 30 yards across, the tallest pillars 17 feet high—the ruins are astonishing in number. Last year Schmidt found his third and fourth examples of the temples. Ground-penetrating radar indicates that another 15 to 20 such monumental ruins lie under the surface. Schmidt’s German-Turkish team has also uncovered some 50 of the huge pillars, including two found in his most recent dig season that are not just the biggest yet, but, according to carbon dating, are the oldest monumental artworks in the world.

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.”

Schmidt’s thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city.

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

The Venus of Hohle Fells is the oldest known example of figurative female art (Image: H.Jensen/University of Tubingen/Nature)

Further views of the Venus (Image: H.Jensen/University of Tubingen/Nature)

Further views of the Venus (Image: H.Jensen/University of Tubingen/Nature)

Ivory ‘Venus’ is first depiction of a woman
www.newscientist.com  |  May 2009 by Andy Coghlan

With its outsize bulbous breasts and hugely exaggerated genitalia, a statuette of a woman has pushed back the history of female figurative art by 5000 years, to at least 35,000 years ago.

Anthropologists are staggered by the find, which also shows that even this long ago, our brains and their ability to think in abstract ways were probably as sophisticated as they are now.

Discovered in the Hohle Fels Caves of south-western Germany, the “Venus” figurine carved from mammoth ivory is remarkably well-preserved, with only the left arm and shoulder missing. “It’s perhaps the earliest example of figurative art worldwide,” says Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen in Germany.

Conard speculates from the exaggerated sexual features that the 6-centimetre-high figurine might have been a fertility symbol. A small loop where the head should be suggests that it may have been hung on a string and worn as a pendant. He points out that the previous oldest female “Venus” figurines are from about 27,000 years ago.

Jill Cook, who curates and studies ancient figurines at the British Museum in London, says that the implications go way beyond art by showing that our ancestors of 32,000 to 35,000 years ago had brains just like ours.

“It shows that people at this time in Europe had reached a stage in development of the brain which enabled objects to be symbolised and abstracted,” she says. “You’re dealing with a mind like ours, but simply a different time and environment.”

Journal reference: Nature (DOI: 10.1038/nature07995)

One of the San people of South Africa.

World’s most ancient race traced in DNA study
www.independent.co.uk  |  By Steve Connor, Science Editor  |  Friday, 1 May 2009

The San people of southern Africa, who have lived as hunter-gatherers for thousands of years, are likely to be the oldest population of humans on Earth, according to the biggest and most detailed analysis of African DNA. The San, also known as bushmen, are directly descended from the original population of early human ancestors who gave rise to all other groups of Africans and, eventually, to the people who left the continent to populate other parts of the world.

A study of 121 distinct populations of modern-day Africans has found that they are all descended from 14 ancestral populations and that the differences and similarities of their genes closely follows the differences and similarities of their spoken languages.

The scientists analysed the genetic variation within the DNA of more than 3,000 Africans and found that the San were among the most genetically diverse group, indicating that they are probably the oldest continuous population of humans on the continent – and on Earth.

The study, published in the journal Science, took 10 years of research involving trips to some of the most remote and dangerous parts of Africa to collect blood samples. The project found modern Africans had the most diverse DNA of all racial groups in the world, confirming the idea that Africa is the birthplace of humanity, said Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania.

The scientists also found genetic “markers” in the DNA of the present-day inhabitants of East Africa living near to the Red Sea, which indicated that they belonged to the same ancestral group who migrated out of Africa to populate Asia and the rest of the world. West Africans speaking the Niger-Kordofanian language were found to share many genetic traits with African-Americans, indicating they were the ancestors of most of the slaves sent to the New World.

One of the main findings to emerge was the genetic similarity between groups who shared similar languages despite living many thousands of miles from one another. The Sandawe and Hadza of Tanzania shared common ancestors with the Khoisan speakers of southern Africa: all three groups speak “click” languages.

AP Photo. A Neanderthal skull is shown in the foreground of a modern human skeleton. A survey of modern humans suggests that ancient Neanderthals may have left their genetic mark in humans of European descent.

Three Subgroups of Neanderthals Identified
By Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Staff Writer  |  14 April 2009 08:17 pm ET  |  www.livescience.com

We tend to think of Neanderthals as one species of cavemen-like creatures, but now scientists say there were actually at least three different subgroups of Neanderthals.

Using computer simulations to analyze DNA sequence fragments from 12 Neanderthal fossils, researchers found that the species can be separated into three, or maybe four, distinct genetic groups.

The evidence points to a subgroup of Neanderthals in Western Europe, another in Southern Europe near the Mediterranean, a third in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and possibly a fourth in Western Asia. These groups have been postulated before, but this is the first study analyzing DNA data to look for genetic variations differentiating the subgroups.
Neanderthals are a hominid species that lived between about 130,000 and 30,000 years ago. They coexisted with humans for a while, and may even have interbred with us.

“Because the Neanderthals lived in a very vast territory, and their evolution took place over a very long time, we wonder if there were sub-populations, or if it was a unique population,” said researcher Silvana Condemi, a paleoanthropologist at the Universite de la Mediterranee-CNRS-EFS in France. “Other studies show differences between Neanderthals and modern humans. For the first time we are working just within Neanderthals and taking into account the diversity within that group.”

Condemi and Virginie Fabre and Anna Degioanni, also of the Universite de la Mediterranee, describe their findings in the April 13 issue of the journal PLoS ONE.

The researchers tested various hypotheses, including that all Neanderthals belonged to a single homogeneous population, or that Neanderthals could be divided into two, three, or more subgroups. They found that the three- and four-group model best fit the data by accounting for the genetic discrepancies seen in the samples.

The authors admit that their categorization is based on limited data, since they only have fragments of mitochondrial DNA sequences from a small sample of individuals.

Princeton University paleoanthropologist Alan Mann agreed, and said it’s too early to draw bounds around sub-populations because we don’t have any data from individuals outside of the bounds, such as from Neanderthals in Africa or Southeast Asia.

“My view is this is very interesting research but it’s very premature in our study to be able to draw any but the most generalized and preliminary conclusions,” he said in a phone interview. “I like the data they present. But at the moment we have to be extremely careful about exactly what we make of this.”

In the future, the researchers would like to compare their genetic data to what is known about physical distinctions among Neanderthals from different regions, as well as cultural differences, such as unique tool use among various populations.

“What is nice is that there are some variations in the genetics, and we see also from the bones and teeth that there is some variation,” Condemi told LiveScience. “We give a confirmation that the Neanderthals are not one homogeneous group.”

It is not known for sure what eventually caused Neanderthals to die out, while we Homo sapiens have survived to this day. Likely reasons for their demise are competition with humans and climate change.

Photo: Archaeologist Mansur Sajjadi holds the 4800-year-old artificial eye, which was discovered at the Burnt City in 2006, in an undated photo.

Bulletin published on 4800-year-old artificial eye of Burnt City
www.tehrantimes.com  |  Sunday, January 4, 2009  |  Tehran Times Culture Desk

TEHRAN — All studies on the 4800-year-old artificial eye from the Burnt City were published in an English-Persian bulletin early last week.

“The bulletin contains all comprehensive studies and analysis of the experiments carried out on the artificial eyeball,” an expert on the Burnt City, Mansur Sajjadi, told the Persian service of CHN on Friday.

The Governor’s Office of the Sistan-Baluchestan Province has financed the bulletin’s publication, which has been prepared by the Burnt City Cultural Heritage Center.

The eyeball was discovered by an archaeological team led by Sajjadi in late 2006 at the 5200-year-old Burnt City located 57 kilometers from the city of Zabol in Iran’s Sistan-Baluchestan Province.

It belonged to a large woman who died when she was 25 to 30 year old.

Studies show traces of an abscess in the upper arch of the eye, and tracks made by the eyelid are visible on the lower part of the artificial eye.

It has been made of natural tar mixed with animal fat.

The thinnest capillaries on the eyeball have been made with golden wires with a thickness of less than one millimeter for aesthetic reasons.

The pupil of the eye has been placed in the center of the eyeball and some parallel lines forming an almond pattern are visible around the pupil.

The eyeball has two holes in its two sides, which were used for fixing the eye in the eye socket.

A joint Italian-Iranian archaeological team led by Sajjadi has begun the 12th season of studies at the city since last week.

They plan to classify the information gathered during the previous seasons of excavation at the Burnt City.

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