The ancient Sumerians invented cuneiform writing about 5000-5500Y ago.
This is as long before ancient Sumer as ancient Sumer is before us today.
Mind-boggling.
MomsAVoxell
The original caretakers of the Australian continent have been telling the same stories orally for 40,000 years.
Let that sink in!
It is extraordinary to me that they don't get as much clout as they deserve for maintaining human civilization for so long. They literally evolved cryptologically sound techniques for maintaining their history - through fires, floods, calamity and Mother Nature.
We can't even keep our stories straight in the modern era for longer than 8 months.
lisper
> The original caretakers of the Australian continent have been telling the same stories orally for 40,000 years.
I know that this is commonly believed, but how could you possibly know?
bcraven
I recommend everyone watch the documentary First Footprints[0], it is the most wondrous thing I have ever seen.
The simple answer is that some storied reference events that happened that long ago.[1]
Thanks. I don't have time to watch the video, but the article still leaves me skeptical. Matching myths to past events seems to me fraught with all the same potential pitfalls as matching them to future events and thence labeling them as prophecies, especially when the event in question is as common as a volcano erupting. But I will admit it's not entirely implausible either.
nkoren
I also don't have time to watch the video, but am somewhat familiar with the topic. One of the primary themes of the dreamtime stories is about the origins of various landforms: how this hill got here, how this valley got there, etc. They're often quite detailed, because explaining the unique quirks of the landscape is part of the appeal. So, not just a generic "why the valley is here" stories, but specific "why the valley has seven sharp zig-zag kinks in it" kind of stories.
There are a number of such stories which tell about landforms which have been under the ocean for 11,000 years, since the great meltwater pulses raised the ocean at the end of the ice age. Long after the stories were documented by anthropologists -- who thought it was unusual that so much mythology would be concerned with the topography of the seafloor -- sonar was invented, which confirmed that the landforms existed more or less exactly as the stories said.
So personally I think that's pretty hard proof of at least 11,000 years of accurate oral tradition.
_bernd
I have no proof on hand but I have seen for instance a documentary on the French German station ARTE tv where they featured a kind of crazy dude who have gone through more or less every oral story of a tribe, the western world actually have written down.
Then he started to compare and traced bits and pieces and this is really crazy who many parallels you will find.
He then together with anthropologist estimated how old these stories might could be, based on travels and migrations like those of the caretakers...
MomsAVoxell
You’re making a very glib conclusion. Please, if you have an interest, make an effort to learn more about this subject. It’s not just matching myths .. its recording a history of geologically recorded events, along song lines actually walked where those geological events occurred.
“Prophecies” is a very euro-centric way to dismiss the subject. Indeed, there is encoding for you to be discovered, which has been rigorously demonstrated.
Dig deeper.
FloorEgg
The whole point of hacker news is to converse curiously. It's stated clearly in the guidelines. Here is a person encouraging curiosity and getting down voted.
Why is the dismissive non-curious comment not getting down voted?
Am I in denial about whether the curios community still exists here?
To recognize the topic on hand... When a native community shares an oral tradition that accurately describes something that's been under water for 12+ thousand years despite not having the technology to map the sea floor that's pretty strong evidence in the accuracy of their ability to persist accuracy through oral tradition.
Parent is entirely valid in encouraging curiosity in this subject to anyone who is dismissive of it.
TLDR: the story is about a constellation that is seven sisters, but one is hiding; and that constellation does indeed have seven stars, but one hasn't been visible for 100k years.
thaumasiotes
> The simple answer is that some storied reference events that happened that long ago.
This is another thing that you can't know.
If there is a match between an inferred geological event and a mythological event, you'd still have to ask "what is the rate of this happening by coincidence?"
MomsAVoxell
Your mistake is leaning on the mythology, having, it seems, not actually listened to the songs and stories yourself, directly.
There is no coincidence - the song lines record real geological events, such as the lowering of the oceans, the formations of islands, the drying up of lakes - on an ancient timeline - all of which are verified in the geological record.
Please, do not lean so hard on the petard of treating this subject as one of methods and coincidence.
These are real cultural artifacts, which encode real events.
thaumasiotes
> These are real cultural artifacts, which encode real events.
The total amount of evidence for the second half of your claim is zero, and you should realize that.
It's something people want to believe, but it's not something there is any reason to believe.
[deleted]
Comment removed.
marcusverus
Occam's razor suggests that a coincidence is just a teensy bit more likely than a story surviving unchanged for a thousand generations.
lukan
And then you'd still have to ask yourself, whether anything is real or a simulation, or a dream of god, etc.
Otherwise history is indeed much guesswork, as we don't have a timemachine and rely on lot's of indirect evidence for everything.
MomsAVoxell
This is like looking at a seismograph or an electrocardiogram and concluding that it doesn’t represent anything worth knowing “because nothing is real”, “they were just dreaming because they were primitive”, or “we don’t have a <mythological and impossible device> to prove these stories”.
We do have methods of proving these stories - we can dig trenches and see the history as it was described, in the land itself.
Please, do not dismiss this on the basis of some authoritarian postulates about not having developed your own cultures time machines. Song lines literally are a verifiable time record.
lukan
I was mainly mocking the absolutistic comment above, I find it very possible that the aborigines culture remembers very old events and that there can be proof in the conventional sense for it. But it would be indirect proof.
MomsAVoxell
It is direct proof in the geological record, what part of that are you just failing to understand?
lukan
Do you have the qualification to evaluate, whether some parts in the soil is a direct proof of some oral telling?
Do you know their language? Can you rule out missunderstanding, misstranslation or plain fraud?
I cannot, so I fail to understand the absolute direct proof here.
Do you have a researcher btw. who says there is absolute proof for this?
I doubt it, I rather think their language is along the lines of: "those findings indicate that ..".
"The original caretakers of the Australian continent have been telling the same stories orally for 40,000 years."
And especially for this claim of yours, citing from the one given link:
"Eruption 37,000 years ago may have sparked a legend about four giants"
Notice the "may"?
[deleted]
Comment removed.
lukan
I did research and just gave you a quote that says maybe. I have zero reason to assume your position there is definitely proof for the claim 40000 years memory to be correct.
"Do your own research for my claim" doesn't work around here.
MomsAVoxell
If you weren’t so arrogant you could have gone on a journey of your own discovery. That is important on matters of great cultural significance such as this - do your own investigation and gain your own understanding, honestly - don’t just accept what you’ve been conditioned to think about it. The requirement to be honest goes both ways.
Because the original caretakers stories have been so degraded by imperialist idealogues over the centuries, the onus is on us in the modern era, to make the effort of discovery ourselves.
What you must understand, from your perspective as the ‘protector of truth in this community’, is that colonial disruption severely damaged the transmission and integrity of Aboriginal oral traditions, so modern people (scientists, researchers, and society) must actively recover and validate what remains rather than relying solely on what was passed down intact. Your desire to achieve the perception of “scientific rigor” in this discussion is manifesting the very imperialist attitude which degraded these peoples’ wonderful, amazing culture, in the first place.
So, get off your horse and learn some things. Make an effort to educate yourself and don’t just play the imperialist-knows-best card.
This should get you started at least:
Nunn, P.D. & Reid, N.J. (2016). “Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating from More than 7000 Years Ago.” Australian Geographer, 47(1), 11–47.
DOI: 10.1080/00049182.2015.1077539
Nunn, P.D. (2016). “Australian Aboriginal traditions about coastal change reconciled with postglacial sea-level history: a first synthesis.” Environment and History, 22(3), 393–420.
DOI: 10.3197/096734016X14661540219311
Related earlier/conference work includes Reid, Nunn & Sharpe (2014) on Indigenous Australian stories and sea-level change (proceedings of the Foundation for Endangered Languages conference).
“The Legend of Budj Bim - The Story: The Gunditjmara [Dreaming] narrative tells of a creator being named Budj Bim ("high head") whose teeth and blood became the molten lava and scoria flowing to the sea during a violent eruption.The Science: Radiometric dating confirms the [Budj Bim] volcano last erupted approximately 37,000 years ago, meaning the oral tradition passed down through generations via songlines matches actual geological events from the Pleistocene epoch.”
Benjamin, J. et al. (2023). “Stone artefacts on the seabed at a submerged freshwater spring confirm a drowned cultural landscape in Murujuga, Western Australia.” Quaternary Science Reviews.
Scientific American coverage (2024) of related work by Mick O’Leary and others describes elders recognising digital models of now-submerged watering holes as part of a songline known for generations, consistent with a landscape from >7,000 years ago when sea levels were much lower.
Broader context appears in papers on Murujuga/Dampier Archipelago submerged archaeology (e.g., Benjamin et al. 2020 on the first confirmed Australian underwater Indigenous sites) and predictive modelling for the Rottnest Shelf (e.g., a 2025 Journal of Maritime Archaeology paper evaluating archaeological potential, which references Noongar stories of walking to Rottnest Island.”
Note: there is much, much more for you to discover - I’m only relaying the experience for which I have great affinity, having grown up visiting Rottnest Island myself, many times.
Stop being a dickhead about it, and go on the journey, mate.
lukan
"If you weren’t so arrogant you could have gone on a journey of your own discovery."
Thanks, but I did travel the world (and libaries) quite a bit and also was in the outback at places where few other souls go.
Still, I do see a difference with having a sound hypothesis - and having solid proof.
And I do not see actual researchers making claims as you do. They present their theory and data.
Arrogance is rather associated with being very sure of oneself without having the data to back it up.
MomsAVoxell
I too have been all over the outback, and I find your skepticism unwarranted. If you’d had any time with the culture, you’d understand how important it is for us to value their stories, rather than push imperialism at them.
That you are unsatisfied is of no relevance to the fact that the studies are solid. The evidence is in the stories and the geological record. I hope there is much, much more research done on this subject in the near future, for some to criticize and others to truly value an incredibly important culture, on the brink of extinction, precisely because of the types of Euro-centric, imperialist views you proffer being applied to their existence.
lukan
"rather than push imperialism at them."
Dude, all I am saying is that I have not read any claims by any researchers that there is absolute proof of any sort.
You have such a claim, then just show it.
And imperialism has nothing to do with whether the oral history of the aborigines goes back 40 000 or 10 000 or just 1000 years. British imperialism succeded, because they had superior weapons.
MomsAVoxell
The geological record isn't proof enough for you?
lukan
Are you a LLM?
smallnix
I remember they found remnants of a 10k yr old ritual ground that matches the ritual in the oral tradition.
There is also a legend of incestuous royals connected to the Boyne valley tombs in Ireland, written down in the 12th century. DNA examination of a person buried in the tombs found that his parents were indeed very closely related. This suggests almost 5000 years of oral tradition, even surviving a fairly big cultural replacement event.
If that can happen, it's not so surprising a story can last 20-30000 years either - especially not if there's not much else making a similar impression to tell stories about.
MomsAVoxell
Indeed, there are scientific studies which correlate specific tales to geologic events which occurred in the tens of thousands of years ago - there are multiple studies now.
The one I know of by way of personal experience (heard the songs, been there many times) is the tale of the creation of Wadjemup (Rottnest Island) ...
I don’t have references handy at the moment - I leave it up to you as an exercise to go on a course of interesting discovery - because there are some very fascinating papers for you to read, if you maintain the interest in the subject. The treatise on the potential crypto mechanisms (kinship system in a multi-lingual environment) is extremely fascinating, if I get a chance to find the references in a few days or so I’ll try to follow up … but anyway, do go do your own search, it is worth the journey.
The song lines literally are a record of what has happened to the land over these periods of times - supported by the geology itself.
The formation of islands, the kinds of animals that used to be found there, the movement of lakes, the lowering and raising of the oceans - these are all confirmed, recorded events.
AngryData
It isn't confirmed but their stories do match some geological and enviromental events going back that far.
thaumasiotes
That's the beauty of the claim - it doesn't need to be confirmed!
MomsAVoxell
And the ugliness of the counter-claim, which can affirm authority without having done any actual study of the subject.
The claims are confirmed.
ViktorRay
What are some good books or websites where one can read these stories? I am interested in learning more about them.
Writing seems like it should be far more ancient than we ought to assume. You make some tally marks to count something, show someone else how to read your tallys, now you have a proto writing system. All you need is to iterate more symbols describing more things to scale it out, and this sort of thing seems like it would snowball over time and generations.
Seems like there ought to be countless ancient proto writing systems not just in our species either. I guess most species aren't in situations where storing information like this offers much of a selective advantage. Maybe you can count an animal scent marking out its territory as a sort of proto writing system; it is only somewhat different than the plat map in your city hall.
We can presume with near certainty that there are vast quantities of lost artifacts from lost civilizations of early humans that were crafted from organic matter that have just deteriorated to dust. We say "Stone Age" only because stone artifacts are the only to survive. You can assume there were orders of magnitude more and more sophisticated artifacts and art works made from wood or mud or skins that are just gone forever. It's also entirely possible some of those artifacts contained something akin to written language but whatever it was is long gone.
redhed
I think writing was forced more by demand than the ability to do. Before the first city states which needed laws, taxes, debts, etc to be recorded, people just did not need to write detailed information. Like most technology it could have been invented earlier, but the need just wasn't there. Simple oral story telling and a few written symbols was good enough.
stevenwoo
The book The Language Puzzle delves into this a bit - even our closest genetic primate cousins appear to lack the physical adaptations in both brain and voice box/mouth to develop verbal language and written language is a step farther, other species show some signs like cetaceans and elephants. There’s a bit of speculation in there that advanced hand tools and language may have been coincident (from archaeological evidence with close time stamps) and that still took a very long time.
exhumet
they have found tally markers on bones and other objects like that, so yeah you would be correct, i guess it really comes down to what "writing" is i guess?
inanutshellus
My first thought was that I'd argue that tally marks are "counting" not "writing"
...but...
if "writing" is the act of conveying ideas through markings then... I guess it is kinda writing.
pazimzadeh
Probably happened on wood, which wasn’t preserved
Insanity
one of those mind-boggling timeline comparisons I sometimes think about is Cleopatra and the Pyramids. The Giza pyramids were built around ~2600 years _before_ Cleopatra. And she's about 2000 years removed from us today.
So to think that Egyptians and Romans in Cleopatra's era went to visit the Pyramids as a kind of tourist thing from a civilization 2 millennia removed from them is quite astounding.
I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire.
retrac
> I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire.
It's due to the historiography of western civilization that for so long always traced its origins back to Greece (and Cleopatra was, of course, Greek.)
Compare to Mesopotamia, Sumer mentioned by the parent comment. There may be more surviving cuneiform literature than Greek and Latin. The sheer volume is kind of hard to overstate. The Library of Ashurbanipal is a prime find but hardly the only one of its kind: 30,000 tablets including mostly-complete copies of epic poems, histories, dictionaries, and thousands of administrative and personal letters. And there's millions more tablets from thousands of other digs.
And the crates and crates and crates of ordinary shipping receipts, if ever systematically studied, offer the potential to understand their society in ways we never will with classical antiquity.
But most haven't been read. There aren't enough people who know Sumerian and Akkadian (and all the other languages written in cuneiform over its 3000 year history) and how to read cuneiform for the task to translate them all to be completed in our lifetimes.
Stories of Mesopotamia do not always resonate. In fact they are often very alien and inscrutable. It's very hard to grasp the Mesopotamian mind. I'm unsure if this is lack of familiarity or because they really were so different, because in the western tradition they are the canonical Eastern Other, and shrouded with thousands of years of myth and misunderstanding.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the strangeness, I found reading translations of Gilgamesh and Atra-Hasis to be revelatory and hope that my descriptions don't put anyone off. They're worth it. To this day "Babylon" has all sorts of associations, many of them unsavory. Which is rather unfair to them.
The Babylonians had 360 degrees in their circles, 24 hours in their days, and when they looked up at the stars they saw patterns like the Twins (what the Greeks would borrow as Gemini), the Bull of Heaven (Taurus), and the Crawfish (Cancer), the Hebrew month of Tammuz is named after the Sumerian fertility god Dumuzid, and the Mesopotamians leave many other echoes in the later cultures, now that we know to look.
thaumasiotes
> the Hebrew month of Tammuz is named after the Sumerian fertility god Dumuzid
There are more direct connections. The Greek god Adonis, Aphrodite's consort, is the near Eastern god Tammuz, with the same mythology and worship rites. (And his name reflects that; it's the Semitic title "lord", cognate with Hebrew adonai.)
0xffff2
I really hate that I'm even typing these words right now, but wouldn't this be one of the few fields where modern LLMs would potentially provide a real capability that was previously lacking? I'm imagining an LLM might be able to provide rough first pass translations and provide hints about which specific tablets might be most interesting for a human that can't possibly look at them all.
roryirvine
There's inevitably been quite a bit of research in using LLMs to help decipher cuneiform, but it's still at a fairly early stage. Good overview here:
"Artificial intelligence can therefore provide researchers with a significant support, helping them link together texts that mention the same individual, a geographical site, or a word within a large digitised corpus. But we are still far from machine decipherment of texts."
ch4s3
I doubt there's much Akkadian and the 14 other languages written in cuneiform over more than 2,000 years. Several of these are language isolates. Its probably not intractable but would require a lot of human labeling and correcting by academics who can read these languages. It would be a fun legacy project for an eccentric billionaire. If I were Bezos, it would be on my todo list.
exhumet
and imo ive also thought the same thing, but then it does still come down to the amount of people and time it would take to go over those rough translations and pull the wanted info out of it. manpower is lacking in a lot of those fields
ericmay
Why would you hate that you're typing those words? Technology is useful and neutral, and if we have good uses for it like it seems so here, let's do it! :)
inanutshellus
because it's a fad-ish response right now.
A decade ago every "omg just use [answer]!" was to suggest blockchain solve your problem.
Every possible problem seemed to have a solution that involved blockchain.
... now that "[answer]" is always "AI".
So I get his sense of cringe... while also acknowledging I had the same thought. We've never been better at pattern matching, pattern identification, OCR, translating across languages... seems like a great use of an LLM.
ccozan
> There aren't enough people who know Sumerian and Akkadian
one LLM is enough!
MomsAVoxell
I'm really (honestly) waiting for the day when an LLM gets into the Akkadian and Sumerian texts and starts revealing extremely mind-blowing details to the world.
I truly believe we might one day, soon hopefully, see an LLM making observations about our history which blow open the horizon of humanities future.
Imagine, if you will, some of the secrets buried in these texts, revealing to us all just how it all began, and where things are headed.
In the grand context of galactic-scale civilizations, we might be in for some surprises ..
t-writescode
I’m not entirely sure why you’re downvoted. Though I don’t expect “ancient aliens” or anything of the sort, translating from A to B is literally what LLMs were invented for.
They’d be very, very good at reading, discerning, summarizing, etc, vast quantities of text like this.
lukan
They'd also be very good at halluzinating the most fascinating stories together. Unlike a for a coding agent with reproducible tests, it is hard for a history bot to verify it's finding.
MomsAVoxell
I mean, even if or if not the ancient aliens things is in there, I’m pretty sure there are very wild things in there that will be equally enthralling.
I hope for example, that I live long enough to get an understanding of Rongorongo .. imagine the tales - or otherwise mundane details - we may some day extract from these immensely interesting human mysteries ..
Disclaimer: I’m also a fan of Protong and would love to see LLM also look for a prototype tongue along a similar framework of artistic interpretation … without Szukalski’s baggage, of course …
GolfPopper
There was still a wooly mammoth population on Wrangel Island in the Artic when the pyramids were built. They didn't go extinct until several hundred years later.
>I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire.
Shakespeare wrote a play about her and Elizabeth Taylor played her in a movie. The effect of modern media is 99% of the reason why Cleopatra feels more "contemporary" than, say, Hatshepsut (for whom plenty of artifacts exist) or even Nefertiti.
quuxplusone
Cleopatra was a contemporary of Julius Caesar, and played a major role in his biography. (Which is why Plutarch wrote about her, which is why Shakespeare wrote about her, which is why 20th Century Fox made the film about her.) Julius Caesar is... a big name... in the West. Call that "the effect of media" if you like, but it's a thing.
Hatshepsut and Nefertiti lived respectively 1400 and 1300 years before Cleopatra, and about 700 years before even the founding of Rome. I'm no expert, but seems to me that those two names completely disappeared from the historical record between say 1000 BC and AD 1800, and were rescued from obscurity only by 19th-century archaeologists.
Insanity
+1, I think the real reason that Cleopatra is still living in our common culture is mostly because of her association with Julius and Marcus Antonius, as well as of course proximity to Augustus.
I don't think Sharespeare would have mentioned her had she not figured prominently in the lives of main figures during the fall of the Republic.
vintermann
Nefertiti was subject to a "damnatio memorae"-campaign as I recall, along with the rest of her monotheist (Aten-worshipping) family.
tmtvl
That's why Cleopatra is a (relatively) household name while Sophonisba is an obscure historical trivia question.
PowerElectronix
There were archeologists in ancient Egypt studying ancient(er?) Egypt.
ccozan
Not sure what is mind boggling. The homo sapiens exists in the _current_ form ( physiologically and brain size, etc ) since at least 250k years. about 50k year ago abstract art was already in vogue.
nashashmi
nitpicking: Sumerians were the oldest civilization to have been found using cuneiform or scripted writing. The actual civilization to have truly invented writing is not known.
lproven
Conceded. :-)
janandonly
In a recent Irving Finkel interview he talks about Gulbekle Tepe and the proto-writing that was way older then even Sumerian.
the modern people who first looked at it thought it was just a graveyard with stone markers on the graves
then someone dug down much further and those stone markers were several meters high
bgnn
I've been to Gobeklitepe. Amazing place. What has been dug so far is a small fraction of what's under the surface yet.
These round structures are intriguing. It's thought to be temporary. People came from all directions, built these, stayed for a while, ate a lot of hunted animals, and they buried these structures to never use again. Why? We don't know.
I should visit Karahantepe too. Looks as interesting.
YeGoblynQueenne
>> Less than 12 miles away from Karahan Tepe, a high relief of a man gripping his phallus flanked by two roaring/biting leopards carved into the stone is the earliest narrative scene ever discovered.
So, er, what is the um narrative conveyed by this scene?
samudrijan
It’s a cautionary tale: man who jerks his meat in the woods risks getting eaten by leopards.
bena
Depends on the nature of the grip.
He could be trying to protect his junk from the leopards, or taunting the leopards by jerking at them. So many options. The past was just as juvenile and perverse as modernity.
anentropic
Given that they went to considerable effort to carve it in stone as part of a temple complex, it was likely neither juvenile nor perverse
Contortion
I think you underestimate the amount of effort people are willing to put in to being juvenile or perverse.
anentropic
I guess my point was that "juvenile" and "perverse" are modern judgements
westmeal
Some people like making others laugh, maybe they thought we'd appreciate it
ccozan
Humor and jokes exist since the great apes!
tclancy
Have I got some ancient Greek theatre to show you?
Exoristos
Wait until you see some of the carvings in Gothic cathedrals.
webdoodle
This is most likely the explanation. Apex predators will often try to kill the seed of an enemy by tearing off their junk. It's much less dangerous than trying to kill the enemy, and it serves the same purpose of ending their genetic line.
doodlebugging
If you find yourself weak and near death out in the wilderness but in a situation where you know there is hope for rescue and you must try to avoid being eaten by the wild animals there is one thing to remember about how wild animals exploit vulnerabilities.
The first scavengers or predators on the scene will evaluate your condition and attack the softer parts of your body. That includes your anus and genital area, your stomach/gut area, your eyes and neck. It is in your best interest to cover those areas as best as possible. Those animals will try to create injuries that are serious enough that you will not survive so they go for the soft parts.
Buzzards are known to start at the anus/genital area and move into the gut area. when they are cleaning a carcass. Same with larger prey animals. Use your resources and energy to protect the soft parts and you will improve your chances of survival. Duck and cover by assuming a fetal position can work if you can maneuver your backside into a sheltered position where it is less accessible. Cover your ass in other words. When fighting back you should remain facing the threat with your rear covered.
emiliobumachar
What?? The predator is after a meal, not up for doing harm for harm's sake.
hluska
There are pictures available.
I’m certainly not an expert but he’s holding his stomach in one hand, giving himself a good tug with the other and looks somewhere between scared and confused. The leopard on the left is all smiles.
There’s another dude standing a few figures away with his back turned to old tug-a-lug. He’s holding something and looks kind of ashamed though I could be reading that into the image since it’s not really well carved… Tug-a-lug is the best carved of all and must be the centrepiece of the story.
If this is another great flood narrative, I sure prefer the Hebrew great flood story.
doodlebugging
After looking at the 3D relief of the guy with his pecker in his hand I feel like this was carved in the period immediately preceding the abandonment of the site in pre-history. I base that on the definition of the outlines of the leopards. It appears that initial work had started on giving each of them a 3D view as they are cut in along the margins of the belly and back. Maybe the entire panel would've been a 3D relief had the people been around to complete it.
Something came along and compelled these people to abandon the site or they were killed off by a different group. Very interesting anyway why a group would put so much effort into constructing these sites without the sites being places where they lived. I think I read somewhere that there is no evidence to suggest that anyone ever lived there. They were places where people gathered. I could be wrong though.
avadodin
I don't think it is necessarily a sign of any tragic upheaval but to me that decline in carving quality indicates that the man wasn't meant to be part of a scene initially.
Perhaps an image of a God or a King.
The leopard-obsessed bunch showed up later and started drawing leopard graffiti around putting in far less effort.
That in itself could represent an invasion but it could also represent young people these days or even aligned additions to the King’s biography for reference.
doodlebugging
I have thought about this and I have to disagree since the figure of the man is centered between the two leopards and is scaled similarly to them. I feel like the work here was incomplete. Perhaps all the wives followed them to the site, were appalled when they stormed inside, and drug their husbands home by the ears while banishing them from the site forever. Or, maybe a stronger rival group they were looking to join in order to strengthen their community sent members to a gathering of their clans. During the rival group's visit, there was a big show-and-tell session where stories were told and libations passed around for all to enjoy before the closing presentation unveiled all the cat and weenie stuff. Upon being optically blessed with the wondrousness of the new group, those new guys returned to their villages and described what they had seen. After reporting back to other members of their group it was unanimously agreed that those guys were perverts and no one wanted to associate with them.
A few years later, before the cat/pecker group could complete their service yourself station, the stronger group herded them out of the area forcing them on the road to new lands, new experiences and opportunities for personal growth - of the whole body instead of just parts.
And now you know why I am not much of an archaeologist. I get a little tired of every polished rock being something someone worshiped though it looks like for these people that probably fits.
ozgung
Man gripping his phallus was a popular character in Karahan Tepe in the old times.
Leopard seems to have had some sort of religious meaning to them. They have also found other sculptures where humans were carrying live leopards on their back in the same region.
> Since systematic excavations began in 2019, a number of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figural sculptures have been found at Karahan Tepe, often in unusual combinations. Several examples of a human carrying a leopard on his back. The leopards in these sculptures are not slung on the man’s back as if he had killed them in the hunt or tamed them enough to carry them, but rather are depicted snarling, with teeth bared, very much alive and very much unfriendly.
Interesting that "you've got a monkey on your back" is a commonly-used expression in English. I could imagine these people saying the exact same thing, with "leopard" substituted in.
"Bro, I gotta get this leopard off my back..."
jollyllama
No, you have it reversed, the leopards have the monkey on their back.
I'm not sure I would call that riding. With all the poses I suspect this was some odd-ball cult practice. I'm sure the archaeologist who had to polish that knob on that anthropomorphic figure in that one panel #3 has some good stories. Probably significant that its the smoothest part of that figure.
The old joke about what they call a chicken fucker in Oklahoma comes to mind here except I think those pre-Turks were cavorting with leopards.
avadodin
I was going to say that these ancient furries were about as much proto-Italians if not more than proto-Turks but then I noticed you said pre so maybe you meant simply that they predate the Turkic invasions.
doodlebugging
I was trying to say that with the anthropological and archaeological data that we have available right now the best we can do is say that they pre-date the groups that are peopling the region today whose histories we understand. It is possible that some of those groups resident today share ancestry with those who built the sites but it is also possible that the original builder groups moved on due to environmental, societal, or other pressures we are not currently able to document.
Maybe the ones who built this site went to the Spanish/French border and are the ancestors of the Basques, who have a unique language. I'm not the guy to answer that question.
If I wanted to identify this group's descendants among modern people I would look for people who have a deep connection to cats like the ones depicted in their monuments.
And now you know why I am not much of an archaeologist. I get a little tired of every polished rock being something someone worshiped though it looks like for these people that probably fits.
avadodin
Turks, and yes the Basques, among other Europeans, have a large amount of ancestry that is close to these people but specifically it peaks in Sardinians.
Technically, everyone could be descended from their closely related neighbors who got sick of the cat people, rather than from the cat people themselves, though.
erikig
I'm inclined to think that this was art not documentary.
stainablesteel
"riding" and "leopard" are doing a lot of work here
he might be standing and holding it, but that's a nice find
huseyinkeles
I spent so much time looking at it, how do they see a leopard there?
analog8374
They have this standard icon for leopard. That's an example of it. It's like our Mickey Mouse isn't exactly anatomically correct either.
a3w
I read that as "man riding turkey", but why would he wear a leopard, Brain? Narf.
jeltz
He would wear a leotard because he is a wrestler.
alecbell
Link is broken?
Zigurd
"Hold my..." checks notes, yeah it's a couple thousand years earlier and near enough "...beer and watch this!"
tclancy
Exact same thought, “Oldest evidence of bad ideas found in Turkey”.
quickthrowman
Haha, I had a similar thought.
EXT DAYTIME - SUNNY
An athletic man wearing a thin leather tunic crouches behind a leopard, facing the camera.
“Hi, I’m Mörêk, welcome to Jackass!”
Mörêk leaps forward and grabs onto the leopard, the leopard takes off running while Mörêk lets out a whoop and the opening bars of Corona start playing.
oriettaxx
mmmmhm, riding?
anigbrowl
Disappointing that it only has a single low-resolution picture which mostly obscures the leopard.
This is as long before ancient Sumer as ancient Sumer is before us today.
Mind-boggling.
Let that sink in!
It is extraordinary to me that they don't get as much clout as they deserve for maintaining human civilization for so long. They literally evolved cryptologically sound techniques for maintaining their history - through fires, floods, calamity and Mother Nature.
We can't even keep our stories straight in the modern era for longer than 8 months.
I know that this is commonly believed, but how could you possibly know?
The simple answer is that some storied reference events that happened that long ago.[1]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n6VJ5jq7zY
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/aboriginal-tale-anci...
There are a number of such stories which tell about landforms which have been under the ocean for 11,000 years, since the great meltwater pulses raised the ocean at the end of the ice age. Long after the stories were documented by anthropologists -- who thought it was unusual that so much mythology would be concerned with the topography of the seafloor -- sonar was invented, which confirmed that the landforms existed more or less exactly as the stories said.
So personally I think that's pretty hard proof of at least 11,000 years of accurate oral tradition.
“Prophecies” is a very euro-centric way to dismiss the subject. Indeed, there is encoding for you to be discovered, which has been rigorously demonstrated.
Dig deeper.
Why is the dismissive non-curious comment not getting down voted?
Am I in denial about whether the curios community still exists here?
To recognize the topic on hand... When a native community shares an oral tradition that accurately describes something that's been under water for 12+ thousand years despite not having the technology to map the sea floor that's pretty strong evidence in the accuracy of their ability to persist accuracy through oral tradition.
Parent is entirely valid in encouraging curiosity in this subject to anyone who is dismissive of it.
TLDR: the story is about a constellation that is seven sisters, but one is hiding; and that constellation does indeed have seven stars, but one hasn't been visible for 100k years.
This is another thing that you can't know.
If there is a match between an inferred geological event and a mythological event, you'd still have to ask "what is the rate of this happening by coincidence?"
There is no coincidence - the song lines record real geological events, such as the lowering of the oceans, the formations of islands, the drying up of lakes - on an ancient timeline - all of which are verified in the geological record.
Please, do not lean so hard on the petard of treating this subject as one of methods and coincidence.
These are real cultural artifacts, which encode real events.
The total amount of evidence for the second half of your claim is zero, and you should realize that.
It's something people want to believe, but it's not something there is any reason to believe.
Otherwise history is indeed much guesswork, as we don't have a timemachine and rely on lot's of indirect evidence for everything.
We do have methods of proving these stories - we can dig trenches and see the history as it was described, in the land itself.
Please, do not dismiss this on the basis of some authoritarian postulates about not having developed your own cultures time machines. Song lines literally are a verifiable time record.
Do you know their language? Can you rule out missunderstanding, misstranslation or plain fraud?
I cannot, so I fail to understand the absolute direct proof here. Do you have a researcher btw. who says there is absolute proof for this?
I doubt it, I rather think their language is along the lines of: "those findings indicate that ..".
"The original caretakers of the Australian continent have been telling the same stories orally for 40,000 years."
And especially for this claim of yours, citing from the one given link:
"Eruption 37,000 years ago may have sparked a legend about four giants"
Notice the "may"?
"Do your own research for my claim" doesn't work around here.
Because the original caretakers stories have been so degraded by imperialist idealogues over the centuries, the onus is on us in the modern era, to make the effort of discovery ourselves.
What you must understand, from your perspective as the ‘protector of truth in this community’, is that colonial disruption severely damaged the transmission and integrity of Aboriginal oral traditions, so modern people (scientists, researchers, and society) must actively recover and validate what remains rather than relying solely on what was passed down intact. Your desire to achieve the perception of “scientific rigor” in this discussion is manifesting the very imperialist attitude which degraded these peoples’ wonderful, amazing culture, in the first place.
So, get off your horse and learn some things. Make an effort to educate yourself and don’t just play the imperialist-knows-best card.
This should get you started at least:
Nunn, P.D. & Reid, N.J. (2016). “Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating from More than 7000 Years Ago.” Australian Geographer, 47(1), 11–47. DOI: 10.1080/00049182.2015.1077539
Nunn, P.D. (2016). “Australian Aboriginal traditions about coastal change reconciled with postglacial sea-level history: a first synthesis.” Environment and History, 22(3), 393–420. DOI: 10.3197/096734016X14661540219311
Related earlier/conference work includes Reid, Nunn & Sharpe (2014) on Indigenous Australian stories and sea-level change (proceedings of the Foundation for Endangered Languages conference).
“The Legend of Budj Bim - The Story: The Gunditjmara [Dreaming] narrative tells of a creator being named Budj Bim ("high head") whose teeth and blood became the molten lava and scoria flowing to the sea during a violent eruption.The Science: Radiometric dating confirms the [Budj Bim] volcano last erupted approximately 37,000 years ago, meaning the oral tradition passed down through generations via songlines matches actual geological events from the Pleistocene epoch.”
Benjamin, J. et al. (2023). “Stone artefacts on the seabed at a submerged freshwater spring confirm a drowned cultural landscape in Murujuga, Western Australia.” Quaternary Science Reviews.
Scientific American coverage (2024) of related work by Mick O’Leary and others describes elders recognising digital models of now-submerged watering holes as part of a songline known for generations, consistent with a landscape from >7,000 years ago when sea levels were much lower.
Broader context appears in papers on Murujuga/Dampier Archipelago submerged archaeology (e.g., Benjamin et al. 2020 on the first confirmed Australian underwater Indigenous sites) and predictive modelling for the Rottnest Shelf (e.g., a 2025 Journal of Maritime Archaeology paper evaluating archaeological potential, which references Noongar stories of walking to Rottnest Island.”
Note: there is much, much more for you to discover - I’m only relaying the experience for which I have great affinity, having grown up visiting Rottnest Island myself, many times.
Stop being a dickhead about it, and go on the journey, mate.
Thanks, but I did travel the world (and libaries) quite a bit and also was in the outback at places where few other souls go.
Still, I do see a difference with having a sound hypothesis - and having solid proof. And I do not see actual researchers making claims as you do. They present their theory and data.
Arrogance is rather associated with being very sure of oneself without having the data to back it up.
That you are unsatisfied is of no relevance to the fact that the studies are solid. The evidence is in the stories and the geological record. I hope there is much, much more research done on this subject in the near future, for some to criticize and others to truly value an incredibly important culture, on the brink of extinction, precisely because of the types of Euro-centric, imperialist views you proffer being applied to their existence.
Dude, all I am saying is that I have not read any claims by any researchers that there is absolute proof of any sort. You have such a claim, then just show it.
And imperialism has nothing to do with whether the oral history of the aborigines goes back 40 000 or 10 000 or just 1000 years. British imperialism succeded, because they had superior weapons.
Found it https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01912-w
If that can happen, it's not so surprising a story can last 20-30000 years either - especially not if there's not much else making a similar impression to tell stories about.
The one I know of by way of personal experience (heard the songs, been there many times) is the tale of the creation of Wadjemup (Rottnest Island) ...
I don’t have references handy at the moment - I leave it up to you as an exercise to go on a course of interesting discovery - because there are some very fascinating papers for you to read, if you maintain the interest in the subject. The treatise on the potential crypto mechanisms (kinship system in a multi-lingual environment) is extremely fascinating, if I get a chance to find the references in a few days or so I’ll try to follow up … but anyway, do go do your own search, it is worth the journey.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agcH95AfU58
How is this confirmed without records?
The formation of islands, the kinds of animals that used to be found there, the movement of lakes, the lowering and raising of the oceans - these are all confirmed, recorded events.
The claims are confirmed.
https://www.aboriginalculture.com.au/aboriginal-religion/
There are plenty of other places to start the journey but those will get you on the path.
The San have been around for over 100,000 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_peoples
https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/mungo-lady
Seems like there ought to be countless ancient proto writing systems not just in our species either. I guess most species aren't in situations where storing information like this offers much of a selective advantage. Maybe you can count an animal scent marking out its territory as a sort of proto writing system; it is only somewhat different than the plat map in your city hall.
EDIT: Apparently neanderthals are thought to have used tally marks... (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-did-neanderth...)
...but...
if "writing" is the act of conveying ideas through markings then... I guess it is kinda writing.
So to think that Egyptians and Romans in Cleopatra's era went to visit the Pyramids as a kind of tourist thing from a civilization 2 millennia removed from them is quite astounding.
I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire.
It's due to the historiography of western civilization that for so long always traced its origins back to Greece (and Cleopatra was, of course, Greek.)
Compare to Mesopotamia, Sumer mentioned by the parent comment. There may be more surviving cuneiform literature than Greek and Latin. The sheer volume is kind of hard to overstate. The Library of Ashurbanipal is a prime find but hardly the only one of its kind: 30,000 tablets including mostly-complete copies of epic poems, histories, dictionaries, and thousands of administrative and personal letters. And there's millions more tablets from thousands of other digs.
And the crates and crates and crates of ordinary shipping receipts, if ever systematically studied, offer the potential to understand their society in ways we never will with classical antiquity.
But most haven't been read. There aren't enough people who know Sumerian and Akkadian (and all the other languages written in cuneiform over its 3000 year history) and how to read cuneiform for the task to translate them all to be completed in our lifetimes.
Stories of Mesopotamia do not always resonate. In fact they are often very alien and inscrutable. It's very hard to grasp the Mesopotamian mind. I'm unsure if this is lack of familiarity or because they really were so different, because in the western tradition they are the canonical Eastern Other, and shrouded with thousands of years of myth and misunderstanding.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the strangeness, I found reading translations of Gilgamesh and Atra-Hasis to be revelatory and hope that my descriptions don't put anyone off. They're worth it. To this day "Babylon" has all sorts of associations, many of them unsavory. Which is rather unfair to them.
The Babylonians had 360 degrees in their circles, 24 hours in their days, and when they looked up at the stars they saw patterns like the Twins (what the Greeks would borrow as Gemini), the Bull of Heaven (Taurus), and the Crawfish (Cancer), the Hebrew month of Tammuz is named after the Sumerian fertility god Dumuzid, and the Mesopotamians leave many other echoes in the later cultures, now that we know to look.
There are more direct connections. The Greek god Adonis, Aphrodite's consort, is the near Eastern god Tammuz, with the same mythology and worship rites. (And his name reflects that; it's the Semitic title "lord", cognate with Hebrew adonai.)
https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/publications/mesopotamia/202...
"Artificial intelligence can therefore provide researchers with a significant support, helping them link together texts that mention the same individual, a geographical site, or a word within a large digitised corpus. But we are still far from machine decipherment of texts."
A decade ago every "omg just use [answer]!" was to suggest blockchain solve your problem.
Every possible problem seemed to have a solution that involved blockchain.
... now that "[answer]" is always "AI".
So I get his sense of cringe... while also acknowledging I had the same thought. We've never been better at pattern matching, pattern identification, OCR, translating across languages... seems like a great use of an LLM.
one LLM is enough!
I truly believe we might one day, soon hopefully, see an LLM making observations about our history which blow open the horizon of humanities future.
Imagine, if you will, some of the secrets buried in these texts, revealing to us all just how it all began, and where things are headed.
In the grand context of galactic-scale civilizations, we might be in for some surprises ..
They’d be very, very good at reading, discerning, summarizing, etc, vast quantities of text like this.
I hope for example, that I live long enough to get an understanding of Rongorongo .. imagine the tales - or otherwise mundane details - we may some day extract from these immensely interesting human mysteries ..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo
Disclaimer: I’m also a fan of Protong and would love to see LLM also look for a prototype tongue along a similar framework of artistic interpretation … without Szukalski’s baggage, of course …
https://www.theglobalwow.com/mammoths-alive-during-pyramids/
Shakespeare wrote a play about her and Elizabeth Taylor played her in a movie. The effect of modern media is 99% of the reason why Cleopatra feels more "contemporary" than, say, Hatshepsut (for whom plenty of artifacts exist) or even Nefertiti.
Hatshepsut and Nefertiti lived respectively 1400 and 1300 years before Cleopatra, and about 700 years before even the founding of Rome. I'm no expert, but seems to me that those two names completely disappeared from the historical record between say 1000 BC and AD 1800, and were rescued from obscurity only by 19th-century archaeologists.
I don't think Sharespeare would have mentioned her had she not figured prominently in the lives of main figures during the fall of the Republic.
Link: https://lexfridman.com/irving-finkel/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycladic_art
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe#/media/File:...
the modern people who first looked at it thought it was just a graveyard with stone markers on the graves
then someone dug down much further and those stone markers were several meters high
These round structures are intriguing. It's thought to be temporary. People came from all directions, built these, stayed for a while, ate a lot of hunted animals, and they buried these structures to never use again. Why? We don't know.
I should visit Karahantepe too. Looks as interesting.
So, er, what is the um narrative conveyed by this scene?
He could be trying to protect his junk from the leopards, or taunting the leopards by jerking at them. So many options. The past was just as juvenile and perverse as modernity.
The first scavengers or predators on the scene will evaluate your condition and attack the softer parts of your body. That includes your anus and genital area, your stomach/gut area, your eyes and neck. It is in your best interest to cover those areas as best as possible. Those animals will try to create injuries that are serious enough that you will not survive so they go for the soft parts.
Buzzards are known to start at the anus/genital area and move into the gut area. when they are cleaning a carcass. Same with larger prey animals. Use your resources and energy to protect the soft parts and you will improve your chances of survival. Duck and cover by assuming a fetal position can work if you can maneuver your backside into a sheltered position where it is less accessible. Cover your ass in other words. When fighting back you should remain facing the threat with your rear covered.
I’m certainly not an expert but he’s holding his stomach in one hand, giving himself a good tug with the other and looks somewhere between scared and confused. The leopard on the left is all smiles.
There’s another dude standing a few figures away with his back turned to old tug-a-lug. He’s holding something and looks kind of ashamed though I could be reading that into the image since it’s not really well carved… Tug-a-lug is the best carved of all and must be the centrepiece of the story.
If this is another great flood narrative, I sure prefer the Hebrew great flood story.
Something came along and compelled these people to abandon the site or they were killed off by a different group. Very interesting anyway why a group would put so much effort into constructing these sites without the sites being places where they lived. I think I read somewhere that there is no evidence to suggest that anyone ever lived there. They were places where people gathered. I could be wrong though.
Perhaps an image of a God or a King.
The leopard-obsessed bunch showed up later and started drawing leopard graffiti around putting in far less effort.
That in itself could represent an invasion but it could also represent young people these days or even aligned additions to the King’s biography for reference.
A few years later, before the cat/pecker group could complete their service yourself station, the stronger group herded them out of the area forcing them on the road to new lands, new experiences and opportunities for personal growth - of the whole body instead of just parts.
And now you know why I am not much of an archaeologist. I get a little tired of every polished rock being something someone worshiped though it looks like for these people that probably fits.
See his 2.6 meter statue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karahan_Tepe#/media/File:Karah...
https://arkeonews.net/a-unique-11000-year-old-statue-of-a-hu...
Interesting that "you've got a monkey on your back" is a commonly-used expression in English. I could imagine these people saying the exact same thing, with "leopard" substituted in.
"Bro, I gotta get this leopard off my back..."
The old joke about what they call a chicken fucker in Oklahoma comes to mind here except I think those pre-Turks were cavorting with leopards.
Maybe the ones who built this site went to the Spanish/French border and are the ancestors of the Basques, who have a unique language. I'm not the guy to answer that question.
If I wanted to identify this group's descendants among modern people I would look for people who have a deep connection to cats like the ones depicted in their monuments.
And now you know why I am not much of an archaeologist. I get a little tired of every polished rock being something someone worshiped though it looks like for these people that probably fits.
Technically, everyone could be descended from their closely related neighbors who got sick of the cat people, rather than from the cat people themselves, though.
he might be standing and holding it, but that's a nice find
EXT DAYTIME - SUNNY
An athletic man wearing a thin leather tunic crouches behind a leopard, facing the camera.
“Hi, I’m Mörêk, welcome to Jackass!”
Mörêk leaps forward and grabs onto the leopard, the leopard takes off running while Mörêk lets out a whoop and the opening bars of Corona start playing.