Could hunting of megafauna have had the same effect as agriculture?

Generally speaking, the rise of noteworthy civilizations follows after the arrival of agriculture in the area. The abundance of food enables a higher population concentration, and allows people within the group to assume specialized roles.

But then archaeology finds a site like Gobekli Tepe. A fairly big stone constructed complex that indicates a lot of humans had gotten together to build and/or commune. But with no evidence in it anywhere of the needed agriculture.

en.wikipedia.org...


The site is over 10k years old, long enough for some megafauna to perhaps still be alive. And so I'm wondering: is it possible the hunting was just that good? Could a small group of hunters have been keeping a larger society fed off of a comparatively few very big kills per season? Would that meet the requirement for making it possible to have specialized roles?


upload.wikimedia.org... NAmerica_Madagascar.svg.png

"The Ancestral Puebloans were an ancient Native American culture that spanned the present-day Four Corners region of the United States, comprising southeastern Utah, northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado."
It would seem the Anasazi had the same problem sustaining their population. Then again the America's seemed to have lost a few civilizations in that period of time. I think water was the key.





a reply to: bloodymarvelous

a reply to: bloodymarvelous

"Civilization" is not the same thing as "culture."

Gobekli Tepe was created by a culture, which also created some other sites that are somewhat similar.

Civilizations mean people living in cities (there are none in the world at that time period) and raising crops and utilizing domesticated animals and recording histories and notable people through writing. Use of symbols is not a civilization (the oldest symbolic (rock art) paintings are 27,000 years old. The oldest carved image (the Lowenmensch) is around 40,000 years old.

Neither of these is a product of a civilization.

a reply to: bloodymarvelous

I would have basically repeated everything that Byrd just said while adding that the oldest layers of GT are pretty clearly PPNA (pre-pottery Neolithic A). This means they were aceramic, or predating the use of pottery. A culture must be sedentary enough to establish things like agriculture and pottery before passing the threshold of becoming civilizations. Another important clue to your query is that in all structures at GT, we find animal pictographs carved into the T Pillars. None of those engravings resemble any megafauna but do resemble known local wildlife (fox, ibex, vultures etc...). I think it’s highlt unlikely that a 1000 years. The youngest layers of architecture that can be tied to the same culture are only PPNB (Pre pottery Neolithic B) which, while close to the advent of agriculture in the region, is still farther out from any sort of Megafauna than the oldest dated structures at 11.6 Ka.j

a reply to: bloodymarvelous

How do we know there was no agriculture? What exactly do archeologists look for to determine whether they farmed or raised livestock? Is there some type of stone tool, or do we look for structures, or what exactly?

It makes sense that it would take prehistoric humans to remain in an area for the entire season for a number of generations to understand how wild food plants propagate, mature and fruit before developing agriculture. So naturally an area where they could remain so long in without agriculture would have plentiful game and forage foods to sustain them while they figured it out. By this same logic however, they would have to stop following the mega-fauna herds on their migrations and stay put in one area for the whole season.

From that perspective hunting mega-fauna is likely more unfavorable for developing an agricultural civilization IMHO.

another graham hancock thread. good.

to my understanding agriculture was found all around the surrounding area over 3 years, so im not sure where this is coming from.

the way its portrayed (and i believe it too) is that a more advanced (relative) civilisation destroyed by the floods of the younger dryas period (meltwater 1 an 1b) passed on the knoweldge.

those that survived the 300-400 foot sea level rise by the large glaciers being impacted by either comets, asteroids or coronal mass injections. this is corroborated by measured sea level rises just before gobekli tepe, measured rainfall and many other forms of dating.

its believed that that the advanced civilisations/cultures would live near the coasts (lile all advanced cultures would), all evidence would be destroyed. there would be a "progression reset" and the only few survivors would give advanced knowledge on cosmology, ship building, agriculture, language etc etc in exchange for safety in a more primitive tribe.

thiese same measurement place the development of egypt thousands of years than previously thought( precipitation on walls near sphinx).

could go on more but im almost certain agriculture has been found in the surrounding areas

Well it's for me to disagree with the archeologists again. No city at that time, BS, BS.
There is a city off the coast of India in the gulf of Cambay (which is under water) to which they gave a date of 9,000 years ago. Buuuttt, for it to be above sea level you have to take it back before the melting of the ice age which happened 11,000 years ago. That's the ice melting at 11,000 so the city must have flourished before then.
These archeologists have selective memory, they like to miss out important information that doesn't tally with their timeline.

originally posted by: crayzeed
Well it's for me to disagree with the archeologists again. No city at that time, BS, BS.
There is a city off the coast of India in the gulf of Cambay (which is under water) to which they gave a date of 9,000 years ago. Buuuttt, for it to be above sea level you have to take it back before the melting of the ice age which happened 11,000 years ago. That's the ice melting at 11,000 so the city must have flourished before then.
These archeologists have selective memory, they like to miss out important information that doesn't tally with their timeline.

There is no city in the Gulf of Cambay (Khambat.)
They did dredge up a piece of wood from the seafloor that dated to the age you mention.
But a piece of wood on the seafloor isn't a city.

Even if there were such a city there, being underwater doesn't equate to being flooded by ice age melt.
Just ask the (former) residents of Port Royal in Jamaica.

Harte

a reply to: Harte
I don't know how you come to that conclusion as there are ample videos of divers going down to the ruins, which they think is the legendary city of Dwarka. And for it NOT to be flooded would mean very much lower water level which can only be attributed to the water being locked up in the Ice Age ice caps.

originally posted by: crayzeed
a reply to: Harte
I don't know how you come to that conclusion as there are ample videos of divers going down to the ruins, which they think is the legendary city of Dwarka. And for it NOT to be flooded would mean very much lower water level which can only be attributed to the water being locked up in the Ice Age ice caps.

If a city can only be submerged if it were built prior to the end of the LGM, how then do you account for a city like Heracleion that was still thriving above water 1200 years ago?

twistedsifter.com...

You seem to discount anything proposed by the mad titans of academia solely because of the association with academia which is little more than blind ignorance when taking random 3rd party accounts as the word of god while entirely ignoring testable and repeatable data. The submerged structures off he coast of Dwarka are the result of erosion, not from being above water prior to the end of the LGM.

originally posted by: bloodymarvelous
Could a small group of hunters have been keeping a larger society fed off of a comparatively few very big kills per season?

We can look at relatively contemporary societies that kill large game to feed their tribes. The plains Indians lived off the bison, a leftover megafauna. Maybe they were able to track and kill enough of them to free up a labor force so they could build all their dirt pyramids and effigy mounds. But following the bison tended to make the plains Indians more nomadic, which would seem to diminish the likelihood that they'd stop and build large monuments.

So I don't know. I've been trying to understand how hunter gatherers could get organized enough in enough numbers to build and maintain large monumental sites. However, I sometimes suspect that these preagricultural "religious centers" perhaps had a little more to do with the second oldest profession (prostitution), rather than the first oldest (farming). That sort of thing would bring the hunters in, you betcha.

originally posted by: crayzeed
a reply to: Harte
I don't know how you come to that conclusion as there are ample videos of divers going down to the ruins, which they think is the legendary city of Dwarka. And for it NOT to be flooded would mean very much lower water level which can only be attributed to the water being locked up in the Ice Age ice caps.

The remains of Dwarka aren't in the Gulf of Khambat. Dwarka is further up the coast, in the next bay north.

But that explains your previous post, at least.

The submerged section of Dwarka sank during the European Medieval Period. This isn't really arguable, because some of the submerged construction mirrors European construction methods of that period.

How old the oldest parts of the city actually are has yet to be determined. It may never be determined.

Harte

originally posted by: Byrd
a reply to: bloodymarvelous

"Civilization" is not the same thing as "culture."

Gobekli Tepe was created by a culture, which also created some other sites that are somewhat similar.

Civilizations mean people living in cities (there are none in the world at that time period) and raising crops and utilizing domesticated animals and recording histories and notable people through writing. Use of symbols is not a civilization (the oldest symbolic (rock art) paintings are 27,000 years old. The oldest carved image (the Lowenmensch) is around 40,000 years old.

Neither of these is a product of a civilization.

If the word "civilization" refers only to permanent cities, then I guess it was the wrong word.

Only agriculture could give that, because agriculture is the only path to food that doesn't require moving around to follow it.

But does large scale construction require permanent settlements on the scale of a city? Could specialists emerge in a culture that depends on hunting, if the hunting is really plentiful? Could they stay at a build site working (perhaps a few months of the year while the season lasts), while hunters bring them carcasses from time to time?


I'm thinking maybe this happens near the end of the time of megafauna, and this is no coincidence: humans develop a new, extremely good, hunting technology/strategy and start killing the megafauna at a faster-than-replacement rate. For a short time in history, they have it really good. Then the megafauna die out and they are left to hunt smaller game.

A new megafauna hunting tech could explain the rise of a technologically advanced culture that doesn't have much in the way of cities or long term settlement.

And overhunting of them could explain its collapse.


I also thought you might find this interesting, perhaps deserving of its own thread:

blogs.discovermagazine.com...

Apparently some giant sloths were capable of digging through soft stone. Which opens up the question of whether domesticated megafauna could have been useful in megalithic construction, or not?