October 8, 2024 • 46 mins
Gobekli Tepe is a profoundly ancient spiritual site that shouldn’t exist, according to conventional wisdom. The massive site of columns and pictograms was built thousands of years before humans were thought to have been able to create anything like it.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and Chuck's
here and it's just us and that's fine, and this
is stuff you should know. One of my favorite types
of addition is the Distant Past Let's figure it out
edition and it's so surprising edition.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Oh man, you've always loved this stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Huh, I certainly have it. Jazz is me at least
as much as Earth's science.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Yeah, I think you know the age old question like
if you could, you know, have a real wayback machine
and go back and go to like any concert. Your
answer would be like m something where tuk took like
took bones and banged it on rocks just so I
could see what was going on.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Ah yeah from a distance, as long as you didn't
know I was there, because I assume I would get
beaten to death by that same guy.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
You know you're like that. And craft Works first tour.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
I saw craft Work in the Disney like concert hall
in La No.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
I'm very jealous of that show.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
I'll tell you about that every time. Man. That was
a great show.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Looks amazing.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Yeah, they had like a three D light display and
everything one day. Yeah, one day. They're still touring as
far as I know.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
So yeah, they don't get around here that much, you know, No,
but when they do, go see them, No for sure.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Also, while we're on recommendations, I watched a movie that
I've just been passing over for years now that is
actually worth the watch. It's a mind bending horror movie
called Triangle. I think it's Australian because I'm pretty sure
just about everybody in it's Australian, but they're pretending to
be American. But it's it's you know how often like
(01:54):
mind bending movies that like mess with like just reality
and stuff like just fall apart at some point. This
one stayed tight from beginning to end.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
It. Wow.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yeah, it was a good movie. I would definitely recommend it.
I mean I don't think it won any Oscars or
anything like that, but it was definitely worth watching.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
You know what, you can take the Oscar Award and
stick it right up the collective butt of the world.
This is just called Triangle.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Just Triangle.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Yes, all right, okay, never heard of it.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
You all hang out here, you go watch it and
then come back and we'll talk about it.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Two thousand and nine British film is what it says?
Is that possible?
Speaker 2 (02:32):
I thought it was like twenty eighteen. Does it look
like there's a person wearing like a bag over their
head in the on the poster?
Speaker 1 (02:39):
No, that's another one trying.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
I want to say twenty eighteen.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Fear Comes in Waves. Probably, Yes, it looks very b movie.
But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
That's what I thought too.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
That can be good.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
I totally thought it looked be too. And then I
was like, this is really good. This movie hasn't gotten
enough credit from me.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Okay, all right, I'll check it out.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Okay, So all of the archaeology and anthropology fans are like,
shut up and start talking about go Beckley tepee. I
don't know why that was hard. It's really actually a
very easy word to say, or a pair of words.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
Yeah, I saw tepee. Actually, I don't know how specific
that gets though.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
That's spoken by people who raise their pinkies when they
drink their tea.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Yeah, but a tepee is is like a mound or
a hill. Correct.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Yeah, go Beckley means belly, so people take it to
basically mean pop belly hill.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Yeah, and this this is a place in Turkey, and
it is an a place where a lot of archaeological
digging is still going on, and it was one of
these places that is. And I know you love this
kind of thing more than anything, but like when an
archaeological find kind of up ends traditional thought of how
(03:57):
we thought things were, and this is one of the
eight examples of that.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Yeah, especially when it's true and not like pseudoscience, like
somebody's like it was ancient aliens.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Right, Well, where's the proof?
Speaker 2 (04:07):
They're like, it's ancient aliens? Man, don't don't harsh my mellow.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
Well you want to hear something funny? What part of
what I watched on YouTube about this was from the
show Ancient Aliens.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of like pseudo archaeology that
surrounds this that you have to kind of be careful of. Yeah,
for sure, this is like true, like this truly has
upended our current or yeah, I guess still basically our
current understanding. And that is thus we've told this story
many many times on this podcast, and it turns out
(04:40):
that it's probably at least oversimplified, if not just outright
and correct, But the whole basis of what we're talking
about has to do with the Neolithic Revolution, which says
that somewhere around ten eleven thousand years ago, people in
the Fertile Crescent Mesopotamia started to settle down, raise crops,
and as they were able to support more people, more
(05:02):
and more people came and moved to that area. They
domesticated animals, cities sprung up, and then from the city's
hierarchies grew and then we had kingdoms and wars and
all sorts of stuff, and also arts, culture, architecture. All
that stuff developed from the people first settling down in
domesticating cross becoming sedentary, like transitioning from hunter gathers to
(05:26):
farmers essentially, and that that was the start of all
the other stuff that followed. Go Beckley Teppe turns that
on its head essentially.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
That's right. And this was one of those discoveries that,
like I said, really sort of upends everything that we
thought to be true. The real discovery and you know,
we'll kind of get to what had happened before this,
But the big, big find was in nineteen ninety four,
and that's when you know, archaeologists started really literally digging
(05:57):
into it. It had been known to local there, you know,
for a while obviously, because it's sort of like the
Sherpa that are like climb this mountain all the time.
There were people living nearby and Turkey in the nineteen
sixties even that were finding pretty cool stuff here. But
it wasn't until nineteen ninety four that they made the big,
(06:18):
big discovery and really, like I said, started digging in
and forming opinions over and you know, we'll get to
these because they still haven't settled on exactly what gebecley
Tepe was.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
No, they haven't, which explains why we haven't said what
it is yet. But that nineteen sixties survey found a
bunch of slabs of limestone, but they mistook what they were.
They mistook their significance. They thought they were gravestones from
a medieval cemetery, and it would turn out that they
were about eleven thousand years older than that, because what
(06:54):
go beckley Tepe was when they started digging it up
in the nineties under the leadership of a guy named
Klaus Schmidt, who was the guy who saw this and
was like, this is not a natural formation, this is
clearly human made. Let's see what's underneath this hill. He
found that this was essentially a Neolithic settlement that dates
back at its earliest spot as far as we know,
(07:15):
to about eleven thousand, six hundred years before today.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
Yeah, and you know, the significance of all of this,
if we haven't been clear enough, is that basically they're
dating this long before like hundreds maybe even a thousand
years before what we thought was when people started settling
down and becoming farmers, which led to all the you know,
(07:41):
modern advances eventually that we know today that, like you mentioned,
so this was a long long time before that when
we were like no, no, no, At the time, people were
just moving around hunting and gathering and kind of just
I don't know about struggling to survive, but subsistence living,
you know, from season to season, that kind of thing.
(08:02):
And ninety four, like you said, was when Schmidt came
in there and he got pretty excited, like so excited
that he bought a house nearby and set up camp
and said, all right, this is going to be the
base for me and my small team. Anytime students are
coming over here, they can stay here, and this is
now the official home base of this extraordinarily interesting archaeological site.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Yeah, and he would go on to lead the dig
at Gobeca Teppe until his death I think at age
sixty in twenty fourteen. If I'm not mistake anybody or else,
you know, well, this was like he was like, well,
here's my career. This is what I'm doing for the
rest of my life. Like they're totally they They've been
digging at Gebecley Tepping now for what thirty years. They've
(08:51):
easily got another fifty years of excavation left unless some
huge new technological advance and archaeology comes along, but using
current practice says they have decades left of exploration to
do of this site. But what Schmidt found from the
outset just didn't make sense because, like you said, they
think that they were building this before people even started
(09:13):
to settle down and start farming, which means it was
thousands of years before people should have been able to
create things like this, like massive structures. That it takes
a lot of people in a coordinated manner to come
up with a coherent plan and then build this stuff
and then also imbue it with symbolism as we'll see,
(09:36):
it just did not make sense. But the date the
radiocarbon dating was right and so Klaus Schmidt was smart
enough to be like, we might have this whole Neolithic
revolution story wrong.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
Yeah, for sure, so just sort of brass tacks. It
is in southern Turkey. It's located at the highest point
of the Germis germ Us unfortunately named Mountain range, which
is right on the edge of the Fertile Crescent there
not coincidentally, and the mound itself is about fifty feet tall,
(10:07):
covers about twenty two acres and it was kind of
one of these things where basically he had gone there
he knew that people nearby had dug up some things
that looked like tools and stuff like that. He was like, well,
this is pretty interesting. And when he stood back and looked,
he was like, that hill up there doesn't look like
the rest of these sort of flatish plateaus. It's more
(10:28):
rounded and it looks like clearly formed by humans. And
that's when everyone, you know, all the locals in their language,
said no, duh, we've known this for a while. So
he said, all right, you know, I'm going to set
up shop here, and they got to work, starting with
that uppermost level, which was what did we figure it
(10:48):
was like ten thousand ish years ago.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Yes, so the most recent use of it was ten
thousand years ago. And Olivia helps us with this, and
she pointed something out that I thought is definitely worth mentioning.
The go Beckley Tepe site was older to the people
who built the pyramids at Giza and Stonehenge. Then the
(11:12):
people who built the pyramids and Stonehenge are to us.
It's that ancient, that like, it was, yeah, thousands and
thousands of years old. That ancient when the people started
building the pyramids. It's just yeah, like you said, it's
a brain breaker, like how old this thing was, and
then what they were able to do and what they're
(11:33):
able to do. So, by the way, no one knows
what culture this is, because again it's not supposed to
be a culture from our understanding of people at the time.
I've seen interpretations of communities at around this time what's
called the pre pottery Neolithic, which is a specific era
(11:53):
in the Fertile Crescent where there wasn't pottery. Pottery existed
elsewhere in the world, like Japan was making a maze
using conk shell pottery around this time. China has twenty
thousand year old pottery, but just in the fertile Christ
and they hadn't started making pottery yet, so they're called
the pre pottery Neolithic group essentially. But suffice to say,
(12:17):
this group got together and decided to build this at
least as far back as eleven six hundred years ago,
and then they stopped using it about ten thousand years ago.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Yeah, so they started top down, like you said, the
most recent use would be the stuff on top, obviously,
and they started to notice, wow, there are actually buildings
here with straight walls, so that means that somebody shaped those.
It wasn't just by pure chance or luck that those
walls ended up being straight. They found these limestone pillars.
(12:49):
There were about two meters high on this upper level.
Some of them had decorations on them. These upper ones
had etchings of lions. And then they started going down.
Obviously things are getting a little bit older, and then
they said, wow, these pillars are getting a lot bigger
than the ones on top. Some of these things are
fifteen to eighteen feet high, weigh about ten tons, and
(13:13):
they look like they're arranged in very specific ways. There
were at least twenty circles or ovals that had these
that basically made up these enclosures, and there were you know,
some of them actually were shaped in such a way
that they wondered, like, it's no accident that they're shaped
in the form of a triangle. If you connect them,
(13:33):
like it might be like a stone hinge kind of
thing happening.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
Yeah, that's definitely one theory is that at least part
of this was a cosmic observatory. And yeah, like you said,
the settlement overall the site forms it like some of
the columns form an equilateral triangle, and then the center
of the site bisects that triangle perfectly. So it's just
it's not accidental. And again, people weren't supposed to be
(13:58):
using geometry, even root menary geometry at this point for
thousands of more years, and yet these people were doing it.
Some of the other things that they figured out, as
the limestone did come from the area, but it still
came from hundreds of meters away, right, So these you said,
sixteen feet about five and a half meters ten tons
(14:21):
of rocks carved out of the limestone bedrock and then
carried over to this site and then raised. That takes
a lot of people, even using like logs and rollers
and things like that it still takes a lot of coordination,
and yeah, it takes a lot of determination too. And
to me, the fact that those columns are smaller and
(14:42):
smaller the more recent you get, and then bigger further
down almost suggests that there was like a loss of
enthusiasm over time.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
They got worn out.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
I think so, yeah, over thirteen hundred years or yeah,
thirteen hundred.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Years, they're like, hey, those inner levels look great, but
do we really need that much headroom? The tallest one
among us is five and a half feet.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Right, Yeah, they were shorter back then, I think.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
But here's the thing. Everything you mentioned there is possible
that limestone is pretty soft as stone goes, and the
flint tools that they had back then could have been
used to do something like this. And depending on who
you talk to, some people will say, like, you know,
it may have taken a few hundred very determined people
to move these things. Other people Olivia found this one
(15:31):
guy and archaeologist named Edward Banning from the University of
Toronto that said, nah, give me, give me twenty crown men,
and I could do this even without rollers.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
Yeah. Watch, yeah, no one ever called us bluff. Should
we take a break yeah, let's take a break.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
All right, great setup, everyone's on the edge of their
limestone seat and we'll be right.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Back, okay, Chuck. So one of the things that I
(16:23):
mentioned earlier is that these people not only created these
huge pillars and walls and enclosures, they also put they
carved them. There's a lot of symbols on this stuff,
and essentially they're pictograms like they're symbols that directly represent
(16:43):
the thing they are. There's not any encoded meaning to it,
like if it's a bird, it's supposed to be a bird.
And there's a lot of really readable symbols, like they're
it's not like, wow, it's photo realistic, but you can
clearly see this is a bird, this is a gazelle,
this is a fox, this is a scorpion. And they
(17:04):
started to notice that some of the enclosures were essentially
dedicated to one kind of animal. But the biggest enclosure
enclosure D was there's a bunch of different animals on
the like scratched or carved into the different kind of
pillars and walls and everything, And there's a lot of
interpretation just in that stuff alone.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Yeah, for sure, like the ones where it's just like nothing,
but Foxes. They think could have been a specific clan
because it was part of the clan system, like clan
of the cave Bear, it would have carved a bunch
of cave bears. So if it was a fox clan,
they may have just carved foxes. But it might make
sense that the biggest one because you know, there's still
you know, as we pointed out, guessing as to what
(17:47):
even was going on and what all this stuff was
used for and what it all meant. So I think
it just sort of makes sense that maybe the biggest
one was maybe where groupings of clans came, so they
were all represented by their favorite football pretty much.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Yeah. One of the things also that gave away that
fox enclosure is that one of the carvings says foxes
rule and it's foxz, So clearly they were pretty yeah, exactly.
So those pillars too, sixteen feet five and a half
meter ten ton pillars at the largest if you look
(18:23):
at them, they actually represent people, but they represent like
a really non descript type of person.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Yea.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
So these are T shaped pillars. So at first I
just assume, well, that's like you know, shoulders, and then
like the head's carved into the middle of the shoulders. Wrong.
The tea itself is actually the head viewed from the side,
so that when you look at the narrow ends on
each side of that top of the tee, that's the
face in the back of the head. I thought that
was a really strange artistic decision.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Yeah, for sure. The other thing too, is I don't
think we mentioned that kind of One of the first
theories was that, or maybe we did, that it was
kind of ritual based, because I think when they find
anything from this time, they think, well, this wasn't a
permanent settlement because they didn't have those, so this was
just a place where they did rituals and maybe sacrifices
(19:17):
or whatever, prayed to whatever God. They did find things
like masks that maybe were ceremonial that at least lent
itself to the idea that that could have been going
on there. They did find some other images that weren't
as straightforward as the sort of clear ones that you described,
like birds with human legs, and they speculate that could
(19:40):
have been like maybe people in costume at a ritual
or a rite that we're displaying here in this little story,
and the fun part about all of this is that
they seem to have been drinking beer at the time,
because there were beer brewing vats nearby.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
Like huge fats. It could brew tens and tens of
gallons at a time, and that supports this idea that
this was a ritual place. I mean, just the fact
that they went to the trouble of making this, and
then the fact that they added these symbols to these
huge monolists that they raised, and then the fact that
there was beer strongly supports that they were essentially partying
(20:18):
in one way or another at Go Beckley Tepee. Right.
But in addition to that, in those very obvious pictograms
or pictographs, there's also some straight up symbols that are
not immediately obvious that does suggest that there was meaning
and coded in it, which would make it writing. There's
(20:41):
a what looks like a capital ie that keeps popping
up here. There. There's also a capital H that's usually
associated with the capital ie, and they think it's possible
that represented the summer solstice in the winter solstice or
day and night because it's just used so repeatedly. One
(21:01):
of the other reasons they think that is a guy
named Martin Sweatman, who's an engineering researcher from the University
of Edinburgh. He he analyzed one of the one of
the pillars and there's a bunch of different markings on them,
and he interpreted them as essentially a calendar that not
(21:22):
only you could track the year with, but he took
it to be like a timestamp for a potential common
impact that allegedly set off the younger driest mini ice age.
So if that's true, that means that they were proto
writing seven thousand years before the Sumerians came up with
the what's considered the first alphabet seven thousand years Yeah.
(21:46):
And then in addition to that, they they were able
to track the procession of Earth, that they were able
to account for the wobble that changes the time and
days throughout the year enough that they could create a
lunar calendar, and they supposedly, if this actually is a
(22:06):
time stamp, they were able to date things that were
like major celestial events like meteor showers or again a
potential commet strike.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
Yeah, and this is like, I mean, I guess we'll
talk about the significance of calendars in a couple of
ways here and later. But one thing to think about
is like, if you're hunter gatherers and you're not around
very long, like, what do you need a twelve month calendar? For?
Another way of looking at it, and this kind of
(22:37):
kind of lends itself to some of the later theories
is that, well, maybe we'll hold on to that. That'll
be a nice little teaser.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Actually even I'm teased, but we.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Can talk about this right now, which is the fact
that they found remnants of bones and wild plants and
things that pretty much clearly indicate that they had been
butchered and cooked. There mostly gazelle, about sixty percent were gazelle,
but they also add sheep and deer and wild boar
and birds like geese and ducks and cranes and things
(23:09):
like that, So they were it seems like they were
eating and drinking pretty well here they were.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
This also supports Chuck because if they were not farmers
and they were just hunter gatherers who would come to
this area, you know, occasionally, and they were making beer,
that supports that idea that we've talked about before that
bread was actually invented as a portable beer starter.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Oh yeah, because of that, Old Jim.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
This says that beer came before farming, then if this
is what's going on here, for interpreting this correctly, so
that is very significant too. The bones and the plants
that they found at the site are all wild and
that strongly suggests to researchers, not just us, that these
(23:56):
were these were hunter gathers. They weren't farmers at all.
There was no sign of domesticated animal bones. And even more,
if you look at all of the animals on any
of the engravings or carvings or sculptures, they are all
wild animals too. There's not a single sheep or pig
or anything like that, any domesticated animal to be found,
(24:16):
Like even the pig is the wild boars. They're just
all wild animals. And that will become a little more
significant in a second.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Yeah. The other thing too we didn't mention is that
lends itself to the idea that things were still very transient.
Was they didn't find things that you normally find, at
least at this point as a permanent settlement, like trash,
like big buried mounds of trash, or any indication that
there were homes there, or like a hearth where someone
(24:48):
might have burned a fire repeatedly over and over in
the same home like place. So they're not finding that stuff,
they're finding other things that kind of contradict that you
mention those human like carvings. There were other ones that
had like pretty clear symbolism of death, like a fully
(25:09):
carved human sculpture where they intentionally cut off the head.
So it wasn't just like, you know, hey, look it's
a person without a head. They would carve it into
a person, cut off the head, and then place that
head somewhere else. That was significant to them, clearly symbolization, symbolization,
(25:29):
symbolizing something. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Sure, yeah. So you put all that stuff together, and
what you have is this hypothesis that Klaus Schmidt came
up with. Remember he's the guy who essentially discovered this
place and kept going until twenty fourteen. His hypothesis was this,
because there's no evidence of permanent habitation, right like you
(25:53):
were saying, because all of this stuff is wild game
and wild plants that's left over, and because these structures
don't appear to ever have been roofed, like these enclosures
were always open air. You put all that together, this
was not a permanent settlement. It was a settlement that
was created for religious purposes or spiritual purposes or something
(26:16):
like that, symbolic purposes by hunter gatherer groups, and every year,
a couple of years or whenever, a bunch of them
from all around the area would come together and they
would party, they would eat, they would drink a bunch
of beer, and they would carve out these pillars and
raise them. And then weirdly, Schmid also added, they would
(26:38):
fill these enclosures in with rubble ceremonially, because when they
discovered them, all the enclosures were well filled in with rubble.
So he interpreted that to mean that that was part
of this ceremony. They would cover one up and then
they'd build another one on top.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
He said it was Coachella.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Do they fill things in with rubble at Coachella?
Speaker 1 (26:59):
No, of course not. The Indio Polo grounds are very nice, actually,
But he did sort of say, like, hey, this is
the kind of thing that we think they just met
here occasionally over decades, maybe even hundreds of years. Maybe
these rituals sort of evolved over time to maybe, you know,
because there's clear sort of death symbolism in places to
(27:21):
honor people that were important to the community maybe help
establish their identity somewhat as wandering tribes. And that's what
he thought, you know, one of the keys to this
whole thing, Yeah, was that to do something like this,
they would have had to had you know, even if
they were hunters and gatherers, they had to have had
(27:42):
a lot of people there that stayed there for long
enough time to get this done.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Yes, and that over time, over those decades or centuries,
it just attracted more and more and more people to
the area. And so rather than the monumental structures and
religion arising from farming, Klaus Schmidt said, coming together to
create this religious structure actually essentially trap people in the
(28:10):
area where they became farmers. We had it totally backwards.
That was Schmidt's hypothesis.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
Yeah, it was like a geological geological chicken or the
egg or I guess archaeological chicken or the egg.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Yes, but the chicken came first.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
That's right, that's right.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
You know, that's the answer to that question.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
Oh, yeah, we've covered it.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
Okay, we're not going to again. I'll tell you that.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
No. Heck no, why reach read something?
Speaker 2 (28:42):
So do you want to take another breaker? Is it
too soon?
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Well, let's take a break right after this, because there
was one other thing that we should point out is
some of the other things sort of supporting this idea
of Schmidt was they didn't see a water source anywhere,
which wouldn't be a good place for people to permanently be.
And what else. I already mentioned the garbage dumps and
(29:06):
the lack of houses, so I guess the only thing
I didn't mention was the water source.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
Right. The thing is Klaus Schmidt was I think he
formed this hypothesis, you know, within a couple of years
of starting excavation, and it held up at least until
his death. But after his death, some new evidence came
to light that caused people to go back and re
look at some of the original evidence too, or some
of the original artifacts and data, and they were like,
(29:34):
we're not quite sure Klaus Schmidt had it right. And
we'll talk about what they came up with the new
hypothesis right after this.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
One person we need to shout out besides Olivia is
a journalist named Andrew Curry. By the way, he's kind
of the guy that has invested He's kind of like
the Schmidt on the journalism side. For decades and decades,
this guy's been writing about most of the popular stories
about the Gibilecki, Giblic Giblick, Glavin, the Schenectady Tepe, the
(30:35):
big shout out, big shout out there. But before we
broke you mentioned new ideas coming along post Schmidt. In
twenty seventeen, his successor Won Lee Claire of the German
Archaeological Institute or the DAI. They built a German shorthand
(30:56):
for that, they constructed a big old canopy over the
whole thing so they could dig more, because I don't
think we mentioned for many, many years they were digging
in the spring and fall because summer was too hot,
winter was too wet.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
Yeah, just four months a year, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
So they could dig dig more with this big canopy
over it, shielding from the sun and rain and in
order to build I mean, this is kind of one
of those dumb luck kind of things that they probably
would have gotten to eventually, but it expedited the situation
when they realized to make this big canopy not just
like a pop up with sandbags, They needed to like
root this thing into the ground. So they dug down
(31:31):
deeper than they ever had before to make supports and
had some interesting fines down there.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
Yeah, and just not deeper than anyone in the world
ever had before, just in this area. Right.
Speaker 1 (31:45):
Oh yeah, did you think I mean they take the
dug the defice hole ever.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
Yeah, they just kept going. They're like, well, we're already
this far, we might as well set a record.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
They so they found they were able to take samples
from those pillar holes. I think they went down even
below the lowest layer they could possibly find. So when
they took those samples, they were like, oh, here's all
the stuff that Klaus Schmidt based his hypothesis on. Because
they were missing garbage dumps, hearts, evidence of homes. We
found a cistern eventually, like a thirty foot diameter cistern
(32:22):
that held a bunch of rain water, all the stuff
you would need to support a permanent settlement.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Yeah. I can't decide. When I read this part of
the story, I immediately was like, oh, no, Like I
wonder if because Schmid died a few years earlier, I
wondered if he because at first, off, I'm glad that
he wasn't around to see that because it was kind
of proved him wrong. But then I thought Now, Schmidt
seems like the kind of guy that would have like
(32:49):
loved knowing that he was wrong. Well, maybe not loved it,
but loved knowing that they were on the right track
to getting the accurate picture there.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
So that's funny. I interpreted him differently. I imagined him
showing up at Lee Claire's tent in the middle of
the night as a ghost, going, Lee, how could you
betray me?
Speaker 1 (33:09):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (33:10):
Maybe I think that actually happened too. I saw it
on ancient aliens.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
Oh okay, perfect.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
So so here's the new hypothesis. They're like, okay, Kaus,
he was working with what he had to work with
at the time. But now that we have all this
other stuff, what we realize is that part of this
site might have actually been permanently occupied by some people,
But that doesn't mean that it wasn't also like a
ritual site, like clearly it was. This is not just
(33:39):
how people built houses back then. People weren't even supposed
to build these kind of complexes back then. One of
the things that they're like, Okay, Klaus definitely got this
wrong was the idea that part of the rituals were
filling these enclosures in with rubble and then starting a
new one on top. Somebody noticed that if you look uphill,
(33:59):
the that are on the uphill side of the enclosure
are usually damaged, whereas the walls opposite are fine, which
strongly suggests landslide damage. There's also a lot of earthquakes
in that area, so they're like, actually, we think that
this stuff just kept getting destroyed. But the site was
so important that for thirteen hundred years after an earthquake
(34:23):
came through, they would come and rebuild, Like that's how
important the.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
Site was to them. Yeah, and this is where it
gets super interesting to me. Claire and some other people,
some of her colleagues and others thought hey, maybe what
this was was something created because agriculture and people settling
down may have already been happening, and this was sort
(34:47):
of created as part of the backlash against that. So
people were domesticating plants and animals nearby, and they were
still like, no, we want to be hunter gatherers, but
we want to have this place maybe where we where
we come and meet seasonally.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
Yeah, or this is where we live. Like we're like,
this is our this is our habit our settlement, but
we're not going to farm. We're still going to you.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Know, hunt and gather exactly.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
And one interpretation by a guy named Thomas Zimmerman, who
is an archaeologist from bill Kent University, he sees this
as a place that was populated by staunchly conservative, male
dominated population, and there's a lot of stuff to support that. Right. So,
first of all, if you have a group of people
(35:37):
who are railing against these new sweeping changes to society
that's going in ways, they don't like it, and they're
they're going against that, that automatically makes them conservative. And
then also if you look around at the iconography and imagery,
it is very male centric. There's a lot of foulacies
sticking up. There's all of the figures that are depicted
(35:59):
are men. I read that wherever a wild animal that's
carved into one of the pillars is gendered, it's invariably male,
and it makes a lot of sense. And then simultaneously
Thomas Zimmerman is like, I think that this was this
was meant to be a place of It was kind
of agro place where like you would come and like
(36:23):
put some young hunters through their scary first rights. Like
it was not a place of peace. It's a if
you look at most of the animals, they're snarling, they're dangerous.
This is not it is not meant to be a
calm place. And Thomas Zimmerman, I hope he can unwind
one day, right for his sake and the sake of
people around him.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
Yeah, he kind of described it as I don't know,
like the birthplace of m M A and like, you know,
kind of a lot of stuff we're seeing in the
news today.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
Yeah, the birthplace of people who watch ancient aliens.
Speaker 1 (36:59):
Yeah, pretty much. Here's the thing, though, we still don't
know so much. I believe they're what like over fifty
percent of it has still not been excavated.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
Oh no, ninety to ninety five percent is unexcavated.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
Oh I thought that was just ninety percent was underground
and they had been doing stuff underground now.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
So yeah, so it's kind of confusing, and maybe you're right.
But what I saw is that the whole site is
ninety to ninety five percent unexcavated, but that the enclosures
that they've been able to find, only half of them
are even partially excavated. So they know that there's enclosures
down there, they just haven't gotten to them yet.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Yeah, all right, I like this last theory in twenty
twenty one. That was a book called The Dawn of
Everything by an anthropologist and an archaeologist David Graeber and
David wind Grow, respectively, and they said, all right, here's
what we think is that maybe it was just a
(37:59):
non aggricate cultural society, and maybe they were just a
lot more diverse than we thought they were. We kind
of had this locked in idea that everyone was like this,
and then everyone was like this, and they were like,
maybe there was just a lot more overlap and sort
of a spectrum of rituals and behaviors and things that
(38:22):
people did, and it's just not so clear that things
were like this until they stopped and then they were
like this.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
Yeah, And now I remember I got off track earlier
when I was talking about the pre Pottery Neolithic group
that I have seen this era of people and earlier
human beings their culture essentially likened to that of like
bonobos or chimps. That that's like the level of like
introspection or material culture or contributions that they would make
(38:53):
that they were that backwards. And yeah, Graybor and Weingar
are like, we got this all wrong. And so one
of the things, the ways that Gebeckley Teppe ties into
this is those the two Davids, that's what I call them.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
They looked at some current hunter gatherer groups, which are
obviously not perfect analogies, but what they found is that
some groups have hierarchical structures during some parts of the
year where they're sedentary, and then in other parts of
the year where not times of plenty where you have
(39:31):
to like spread out and go find food, they break
up into smaller bands of hunter gatherers, and they suspect
that Gebecley Teppe was a place where they all came
together again and enjoyed times of plenty, like where there
are tons of gazelles to hunt, lots of nuts and
grains and stuff just for the picking, and that they
(39:53):
didn't have to farm, but that they were capable of
being sedentary while they were also hunter gatherers for the
other part of the year.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
Yeah, and not only capable of being sedentary, but capable
of having a fairly complex society as they settled for
that season, you know, before they went out. And you know,
I love this idea because you picture them just sort
of barely surviving and moving on until they find better
(40:22):
places to hunt or a source of water, whereas this
posit's just a just sort of a a better way
of life that anyone thought they lived to such that
they could be like, Hey, we're going to brew beer
and we're going to party and we're gonna have fun
because you know, we're all doing pretty well out here.
Guys look around, let's like enjoy this season of settlement,
(40:47):
I guess.
Speaker 2 (40:48):
Yeah, or plenty, right, Yeah, And there's a lot of
beasting seasons still today in human culture around this time
of year, around late fall, like after the Hord, say,
even through whether exactly and I don't know if it
was from the two David's or somebody interpreting their work,
but they were saying, there's a really good chance or
(41:11):
at least a chance that our holiday seasons, right, is
an ancient or remnant of that ancient seasonality where we
would come together and share in times of plenty and
then when you know, throughout the rest of the year,
we'd spread out and go do our own thing. But
during those times, community is emphasized, family is emphasized, coming
(41:35):
together is all very much emphasized during that time of year,
and they wonder if that's just a like, we're just
unaware that that is a really ancient tradition that we're
taking part in. Still, we just kind of transmuted into
our own thing.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
You know. It really missed a great opportunity for a deep,
deep cut what David and David I could have said.
David and David looked around and they were like, hey,
welcome to the Boomtown.
Speaker 2 (42:02):
What is that?
Speaker 1 (42:04):
It's the only hit song by David and David.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
What's Welcome to the Boomtown?
Speaker 1 (42:10):
The only hit song by David and David.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
Okay, well, let's hear some of it sing it. Sing
it like Sammy Davis.
Speaker 3 (42:16):
Oh, I said, welcome babe, Welcome to the boom town. Man,
all those what makes such a succulent sound?
Speaker 1 (42:28):
Welcome to the boom Town.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
I half suspect you're making this up as you go along.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
It was a great, great one hit wonder from back
in the day by.
Speaker 2 (42:39):
David and David.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
David and David, that's would have been talking about this
all time, And now it makes sense that you never
knew what I was talking about time I did.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
It's still a good joke just because I got you
to sing like Sammy Davis Junior.
Speaker 1 (42:50):
We all appreciate that it's a great song. It really is, So.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
I'm gonna go listen to that. But first, there were
just a couple of more things I wanted to say
about this, the David and David interpretation of how people
were way more complex than we give them credit for
in the past. One of the things they point to
her ancient burials like twenty six thirty thousand years old,
where there's like grave goods and people and beaded headdresses,
(43:18):
like clearly being treated differently than other people would have
been buried. So obviously are hierarchical structures, like maybe they
were mystics or shaman or something like that. And then
there was another interpretation of Beckley Tepe itself that I
thought was worth mentioning by archaeologists Anna Fagan from the
University of Melbourne, and she was like, sill your role,
(43:39):
Thomas Zimmerman. I actually think that all these depictions of
death and mayhem and scary animals is actually symbolic of
life and death and regeneration. And she makes some pretty
good points, and I like her interpretation a little more
because it doesn't alter anything else. This is still a
(44:02):
hunter gathered tribe and they could still even be railing
against farming. But that doesn't mean that they have to
be like agro and and you know, want to just
kill everybody essentially.
Speaker 1 (44:13):
Yeah, I love it.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
I do too. Let's just keep talking about Black Beckley
Teppie forever.
Speaker 1 (44:20):
It's a good one. And but now all I can
think about is getting that theory officially named the Welcome
to the Boomtown theory. Okay, I think that's because it
fits in every way.
Speaker 2 (44:29):
Yeah, for sure, it really does. Chuck. I think if
the two David's here this, they're going to be into that.
Speaker 1 (44:35):
You remember that song, Miss Christina drives a non full four.
No I have the first line.
Speaker 2 (44:41):
No idea what you're talking about.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
Well, I just sad it to you. It's a great song.
Speaker 2 (44:46):
Okay, thanks man. Well, since Chuck's on me a song,
obviously he's just triggered listener name.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
That's right. This is from Siara and it's about the
Ford Motor Company because her works there as a Michigander. Hey, guys,
one thing I thought I'd mentioned about that is you
mentioned that the Ford Motor Company has been around since
nineteen oh three and is still standing. But I think
one of the coolest things about our company is that
the what was it, the Rouge site. Yeah, yeah, the
(45:15):
Rouge River site that you also mentioned in the episode
is still standing and today builds f one fifties. In
its history, the Rouge has built the Model B, the Mercury,
the Thunderbird, and multiple generations of the Mustang. The site
itself has so much history in the henry Ford Museum
that the henry Ford Museum offers a Rouge Factory tour
that actually takes you into one of the manufacturing buildings
(45:37):
of the site to see the assembly line from a
set of mezzanines. One last thing you didn't mention was
that he was a supporter of prohibition, and it always
reminds me of this funny quote from him. If Booze
ever comes back to the United States, I am through
with manufacturing. I wouldn't be interested in putting automobiles into
the hands of a generation soggy with drink. Thanks for
(46:00):
all the knowledge that you share in keeping me company
on my compute, and that is from CR.
Speaker 2 (46:05):
Thanks CR. That's awesome. We appreciate all the extra info
and if you want to be like CRRA and show
off your knowledge of extra info by sharing it with us,
we would love that. Just send it off to stuff
podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (46:24):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (46:26):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and Chuck's
here and it's just us and that's fine, and this
is stuff you should know. One of my favorite types
of addition is the Distant Past Let's figure it out
edition and it's so surprising edition.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Oh man, you've always loved this stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Huh, I certainly have it. Jazz is me at least
as much as Earth's science.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Yeah, I think you know the age old question like
if you could, you know, have a real wayback machine
and go back and go to like any concert. Your
answer would be like m something where tuk took like
took bones and banged it on rocks just so I
could see what was going on.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Ah yeah from a distance, as long as you didn't
know I was there, because I assume I would get
beaten to death by that same guy.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
You know you're like that. And craft Works first tour.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
I saw craft Work in the Disney like concert hall
in La No.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
I'm very jealous of that show.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
I'll tell you about that every time. Man. That was
a great show.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Looks amazing.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Yeah, they had like a three D light display and
everything one day. Yeah, one day. They're still touring as
far as I know.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
So yeah, they don't get around here that much, you know, No,
but when they do, go see them, No for sure.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Also, while we're on recommendations, I watched a movie that
I've just been passing over for years now that is
actually worth the watch. It's a mind bending horror movie
called Triangle. I think it's Australian because I'm pretty sure
just about everybody in it's Australian, but they're pretending to
be American. But it's it's you know how often like
(01:54):
mind bending movies that like mess with like just reality
and stuff like just fall apart at some point. This
one stayed tight from beginning to end.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
It. Wow.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yeah, it was a good movie. I would definitely recommend it.
I mean I don't think it won any Oscars or
anything like that, but it was definitely worth watching.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
You know what, you can take the Oscar Award and
stick it right up the collective butt of the world.
This is just called Triangle.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Just Triangle.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Yes, all right, okay, never heard of it.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
You all hang out here, you go watch it and
then come back and we'll talk about it.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Two thousand and nine British film is what it says?
Is that possible?
Speaker 2 (02:32):
I thought it was like twenty eighteen. Does it look
like there's a person wearing like a bag over their
head in the on the poster?
Speaker 1 (02:39):
No, that's another one trying.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
I want to say twenty eighteen.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Fear Comes in Waves. Probably, Yes, it looks very b movie.
But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
That's what I thought too.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
That can be good.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
I totally thought it looked be too. And then I
was like, this is really good. This movie hasn't gotten
enough credit from me.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Okay, all right, I'll check it out.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Okay, So all of the archaeology and anthropology fans are like,
shut up and start talking about go Beckley tepee. I
don't know why that was hard. It's really actually a
very easy word to say, or a pair of words.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
Yeah, I saw tepee. Actually, I don't know how specific
that gets though.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
That's spoken by people who raise their pinkies when they
drink their tea.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Yeah, but a tepee is is like a mound or
a hill. Correct.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Yeah, go Beckley means belly, so people take it to
basically mean pop belly hill.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Yeah, and this this is a place in Turkey, and
it is an a place where a lot of archaeological
digging is still going on, and it was one of
these places that is. And I know you love this
kind of thing more than anything, but like when an
archaeological find kind of up ends traditional thought of how
(03:57):
we thought things were, and this is one of the
eight examples of that.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Yeah, especially when it's true and not like pseudoscience, like
somebody's like it was ancient aliens.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Right, Well, where's the proof?
Speaker 2 (04:07):
They're like, it's ancient aliens? Man, don't don't harsh my mellow.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
Well you want to hear something funny? What part of
what I watched on YouTube about this was from the
show Ancient Aliens.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of like pseudo archaeology that
surrounds this that you have to kind of be careful of. Yeah,
for sure, this is like true, like this truly has
upended our current or yeah, I guess still basically our
current understanding. And that is thus we've told this story
many many times on this podcast, and it turns out
(04:40):
that it's probably at least oversimplified, if not just outright
and correct, But the whole basis of what we're talking
about has to do with the Neolithic Revolution, which says
that somewhere around ten eleven thousand years ago, people in
the Fertile Crescent Mesopotamia started to settle down, raise crops,
and as they were able to support more people, more
(05:02):
and more people came and moved to that area. They
domesticated animals, cities sprung up, and then from the city's
hierarchies grew and then we had kingdoms and wars and
all sorts of stuff, and also arts, culture, architecture. All
that stuff developed from the people first settling down in
domesticating cross becoming sedentary, like transitioning from hunter gathers to
(05:26):
farmers essentially, and that that was the start of all
the other stuff that followed. Go Beckley Teppe turns that
on its head essentially.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
That's right. And this was one of those discoveries that,
like I said, really sort of upends everything that we
thought to be true. The real discovery and you know,
we'll kind of get to what had happened before this,
But the big, big find was in nineteen ninety four,
and that's when you know, archaeologists started really literally digging
(05:57):
into it. It had been known to local there, you know,
for a while obviously, because it's sort of like the
Sherpa that are like climb this mountain all the time.
There were people living nearby and Turkey in the nineteen
sixties even that were finding pretty cool stuff here. But
it wasn't until nineteen ninety four that they made the big,
(06:18):
big discovery and really, like I said, started digging in
and forming opinions over and you know, we'll get to
these because they still haven't settled on exactly what gebecley
Tepe was.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
No, they haven't, which explains why we haven't said what
it is yet. But that nineteen sixties survey found a
bunch of slabs of limestone, but they mistook what they were.
They mistook their significance. They thought they were gravestones from
a medieval cemetery, and it would turn out that they
were about eleven thousand years older than that, because what
(06:54):
go beckley Tepe was when they started digging it up
in the nineties under the leadership of a guy named
Klaus Schmidt, who was the guy who saw this and
was like, this is not a natural formation, this is
clearly human made. Let's see what's underneath this hill. He
found that this was essentially a Neolithic settlement that dates
back at its earliest spot as far as we know,
(07:15):
to about eleven thousand, six hundred years before today.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
Yeah, and you know, the significance of all of this,
if we haven't been clear enough, is that basically they're
dating this long before like hundreds maybe even a thousand
years before what we thought was when people started settling
down and becoming farmers, which led to all the you know,
(07:41):
modern advances eventually that we know today that, like you mentioned,
so this was a long long time before that when
we were like no, no, no, At the time, people were
just moving around hunting and gathering and kind of just
I don't know about struggling to survive, but subsistence living,
you know, from season to season, that kind of thing.
(08:02):
And ninety four, like you said, was when Schmidt came
in there and he got pretty excited, like so excited
that he bought a house nearby and set up camp
and said, all right, this is going to be the
base for me and my small team. Anytime students are
coming over here, they can stay here, and this is
now the official home base of this extraordinarily interesting archaeological site.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Yeah, and he would go on to lead the dig
at Gobeca Teppe until his death I think at age
sixty in twenty fourteen. If I'm not mistake anybody or else,
you know, well, this was like he was like, well,
here's my career. This is what I'm doing for the
rest of my life. Like they're totally they They've been
digging at Gebecley Tepping now for what thirty years. They've
(08:51):
easily got another fifty years of excavation left unless some
huge new technological advance and archaeology comes along, but using
current practice says they have decades left of exploration to
do of this site. But what Schmidt found from the
outset just didn't make sense because, like you said, they
think that they were building this before people even started
(09:13):
to settle down and start farming, which means it was
thousands of years before people should have been able to
create things like this, like massive structures. That it takes
a lot of people in a coordinated manner to come
up with a coherent plan and then build this stuff
and then also imbue it with symbolism as we'll see,
(09:36):
it just did not make sense. But the date the
radiocarbon dating was right and so Klaus Schmidt was smart
enough to be like, we might have this whole Neolithic
revolution story wrong.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
Yeah, for sure, so just sort of brass tacks. It
is in southern Turkey. It's located at the highest point
of the Germis germ Us unfortunately named Mountain range, which
is right on the edge of the Fertile Crescent there
not coincidentally, and the mound itself is about fifty feet tall,
(10:07):
covers about twenty two acres and it was kind of
one of these things where basically he had gone there
he knew that people nearby had dug up some things
that looked like tools and stuff like that. He was like, well,
this is pretty interesting. And when he stood back and looked,
he was like, that hill up there doesn't look like
the rest of these sort of flatish plateaus. It's more
(10:28):
rounded and it looks like clearly formed by humans. And
that's when everyone, you know, all the locals in their language,
said no, duh, we've known this for a while. So
he said, all right, you know, I'm going to set
up shop here, and they got to work, starting with
that uppermost level, which was what did we figure it
(10:48):
was like ten thousand ish years ago.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Yes, so the most recent use of it was ten
thousand years ago. And Olivia helps us with this, and
she pointed something out that I thought is definitely worth mentioning.
The go Beckley Tepe site was older to the people
who built the pyramids at Giza and Stonehenge. Then the
(11:12):
people who built the pyramids and Stonehenge are to us.
It's that ancient, that like, it was, yeah, thousands and
thousands of years old. That ancient when the people started
building the pyramids. It's just yeah, like you said, it's
a brain breaker, like how old this thing was, and
then what they were able to do and what they're
(11:33):
able to do. So, by the way, no one knows
what culture this is, because again it's not supposed to
be a culture from our understanding of people at the time.
I've seen interpretations of communities at around this time what's
called the pre pottery Neolithic, which is a specific era
(11:53):
in the Fertile Crescent where there wasn't pottery. Pottery existed
elsewhere in the world, like Japan was making a maze
using conk shell pottery around this time. China has twenty
thousand year old pottery, but just in the fertile Christ
and they hadn't started making pottery yet, so they're called
the pre pottery Neolithic group essentially. But suffice to say,
(12:17):
this group got together and decided to build this at
least as far back as eleven six hundred years ago,
and then they stopped using it about ten thousand years ago.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Yeah, so they started top down, like you said, the
most recent use would be the stuff on top, obviously,
and they started to notice, wow, there are actually buildings
here with straight walls, so that means that somebody shaped those.
It wasn't just by pure chance or luck that those
walls ended up being straight. They found these limestone pillars.
(12:49):
There were about two meters high on this upper level.
Some of them had decorations on them. These upper ones
had etchings of lions. And then they started going down.
Obviously things are getting a little bit older, and then
they said, wow, these pillars are getting a lot bigger
than the ones on top. Some of these things are
fifteen to eighteen feet high, weigh about ten tons, and
(13:13):
they look like they're arranged in very specific ways. There
were at least twenty circles or ovals that had these
that basically made up these enclosures, and there were you know,
some of them actually were shaped in such a way
that they wondered, like, it's no accident that they're shaped
in the form of a triangle. If you connect them,
(13:33):
like it might be like a stone hinge kind of
thing happening.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
Yeah, that's definitely one theory is that at least part
of this was a cosmic observatory. And yeah, like you said,
the settlement overall the site forms it like some of
the columns form an equilateral triangle, and then the center
of the site bisects that triangle perfectly. So it's just
it's not accidental. And again, people weren't supposed to be
(13:58):
using geometry, even root menary geometry at this point for
thousands of more years, and yet these people were doing it.
Some of the other things that they figured out, as
the limestone did come from the area, but it still
came from hundreds of meters away, right, So these you said,
sixteen feet about five and a half meters ten tons
(14:21):
of rocks carved out of the limestone bedrock and then
carried over to this site and then raised. That takes
a lot of people, even using like logs and rollers
and things like that it still takes a lot of coordination,
and yeah, it takes a lot of determination too. And
to me, the fact that those columns are smaller and
(14:42):
smaller the more recent you get, and then bigger further
down almost suggests that there was like a loss of
enthusiasm over time.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
They got worn out.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
I think so, yeah, over thirteen hundred years or yeah,
thirteen hundred.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Years, they're like, hey, those inner levels look great, but
do we really need that much headroom? The tallest one
among us is five and a half feet.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Right, Yeah, they were shorter back then, I think.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
But here's the thing. Everything you mentioned there is possible
that limestone is pretty soft as stone goes, and the
flint tools that they had back then could have been
used to do something like this. And depending on who
you talk to, some people will say, like, you know,
it may have taken a few hundred very determined people
to move these things. Other people Olivia found this one
(15:31):
guy and archaeologist named Edward Banning from the University of
Toronto that said, nah, give me, give me twenty crown men,
and I could do this even without rollers.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
Yeah. Watch, yeah, no one ever called us bluff. Should
we take a break yeah, let's take a break.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
All right, great setup, everyone's on the edge of their
limestone seat and we'll be right.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Back, okay, Chuck. So one of the things that I
(16:23):
mentioned earlier is that these people not only created these
huge pillars and walls and enclosures, they also put they
carved them. There's a lot of symbols on this stuff,
and essentially they're pictograms like they're symbols that directly represent
(16:43):
the thing they are. There's not any encoded meaning to it,
like if it's a bird, it's supposed to be a bird.
And there's a lot of really readable symbols, like they're
it's not like, wow, it's photo realistic, but you can
clearly see this is a bird, this is a gazelle,
this is a fox, this is a scorpion. And they
(17:04):
started to notice that some of the enclosures were essentially
dedicated to one kind of animal. But the biggest enclosure
enclosure D was there's a bunch of different animals on
the like scratched or carved into the different kind of
pillars and walls and everything, And there's a lot of
interpretation just in that stuff alone.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Yeah, for sure, like the ones where it's just like nothing,
but Foxes. They think could have been a specific clan
because it was part of the clan system, like clan
of the cave Bear, it would have carved a bunch
of cave bears. So if it was a fox clan,
they may have just carved foxes. But it might make
sense that the biggest one because you know, there's still
you know, as we pointed out, guessing as to what
(17:47):
even was going on and what all this stuff was
used for and what it all meant. So I think
it just sort of makes sense that maybe the biggest
one was maybe where groupings of clans came, so they
were all represented by their favorite football pretty much.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Yeah. One of the things also that gave away that
fox enclosure is that one of the carvings says foxes
rule and it's foxz, So clearly they were pretty yeah, exactly.
So those pillars too, sixteen feet five and a half
meter ten ton pillars at the largest if you look
(18:23):
at them, they actually represent people, but they represent like
a really non descript type of person.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Yea.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
So these are T shaped pillars. So at first I
just assume, well, that's like you know, shoulders, and then
like the head's carved into the middle of the shoulders. Wrong.
The tea itself is actually the head viewed from the side,
so that when you look at the narrow ends on
each side of that top of the tee, that's the
face in the back of the head. I thought that
was a really strange artistic decision.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Yeah, for sure. The other thing too, is I don't
think we mentioned that kind of One of the first
theories was that, or maybe we did, that it was
kind of ritual based, because I think when they find
anything from this time, they think, well, this wasn't a
permanent settlement because they didn't have those, so this was
just a place where they did rituals and maybe sacrifices
(19:17):
or whatever, prayed to whatever God. They did find things
like masks that maybe were ceremonial that at least lent
itself to the idea that that could have been going
on there. They did find some other images that weren't
as straightforward as the sort of clear ones that you described,
like birds with human legs, and they speculate that could
(19:40):
have been like maybe people in costume at a ritual
or a rite that we're displaying here in this little story,
and the fun part about all of this is that
they seem to have been drinking beer at the time,
because there were beer brewing vats nearby.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
Like huge fats. It could brew tens and tens of
gallons at a time, and that supports this idea that
this was a ritual place. I mean, just the fact
that they went to the trouble of making this, and
then the fact that they added these symbols to these
huge monolists that they raised, and then the fact that
there was beer strongly supports that they were essentially partying
(20:18):
in one way or another at Go Beckley Tepee. Right.
But in addition to that, in those very obvious pictograms
or pictographs, there's also some straight up symbols that are
not immediately obvious that does suggest that there was meaning
and coded in it, which would make it writing. There's
(20:41):
a what looks like a capital ie that keeps popping
up here. There. There's also a capital H that's usually
associated with the capital ie, and they think it's possible
that represented the summer solstice in the winter solstice or
day and night because it's just used so repeatedly. One
(21:01):
of the other reasons they think that is a guy
named Martin Sweatman, who's an engineering researcher from the University
of Edinburgh. He he analyzed one of the one of
the pillars and there's a bunch of different markings on them,
and he interpreted them as essentially a calendar that not
(21:22):
only you could track the year with, but he took
it to be like a timestamp for a potential common
impact that allegedly set off the younger driest mini ice age.
So if that's true, that means that they were proto
writing seven thousand years before the Sumerians came up with
the what's considered the first alphabet seven thousand years Yeah.
(21:46):
And then in addition to that, they they were able
to track the procession of Earth, that they were able
to account for the wobble that changes the time and
days throughout the year enough that they could create a
lunar calendar, and they supposedly, if this actually is a
(22:06):
time stamp, they were able to date things that were
like major celestial events like meteor showers or again a
potential commet strike.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
Yeah, and this is like, I mean, I guess we'll
talk about the significance of calendars in a couple of
ways here and later. But one thing to think about
is like, if you're hunter gatherers and you're not around
very long, like, what do you need a twelve month calendar? For?
Another way of looking at it, and this kind of
(22:37):
kind of lends itself to some of the later theories
is that, well, maybe we'll hold on to that. That'll
be a nice little teaser.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Actually even I'm teased, but we.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Can talk about this right now, which is the fact
that they found remnants of bones and wild plants and
things that pretty much clearly indicate that they had been
butchered and cooked. There mostly gazelle, about sixty percent were gazelle,
but they also add sheep and deer and wild boar
and birds like geese and ducks and cranes and things
(23:09):
like that, So they were it seems like they were
eating and drinking pretty well here they were.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
This also supports Chuck because if they were not farmers
and they were just hunter gatherers who would come to
this area, you know, occasionally, and they were making beer,
that supports that idea that we've talked about before that
bread was actually invented as a portable beer starter.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Oh yeah, because of that, Old Jim.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
This says that beer came before farming, then if this
is what's going on here, for interpreting this correctly, so
that is very significant too. The bones and the plants
that they found at the site are all wild and
that strongly suggests to researchers, not just us, that these
(23:56):
were these were hunter gathers. They weren't farmers at all.
There was no sign of domesticated animal bones. And even more,
if you look at all of the animals on any
of the engravings or carvings or sculptures, they are all
wild animals too. There's not a single sheep or pig
or anything like that, any domesticated animal to be found,
(24:16):
Like even the pig is the wild boars. They're just
all wild animals. And that will become a little more
significant in a second.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Yeah. The other thing too we didn't mention is that
lends itself to the idea that things were still very transient.
Was they didn't find things that you normally find, at
least at this point as a permanent settlement, like trash,
like big buried mounds of trash, or any indication that
there were homes there, or like a hearth where someone
(24:48):
might have burned a fire repeatedly over and over in
the same home like place. So they're not finding that stuff,
they're finding other things that kind of contradict that you
mention those human like carvings. There were other ones that
had like pretty clear symbolism of death, like a fully
(25:09):
carved human sculpture where they intentionally cut off the head.
So it wasn't just like, you know, hey, look it's
a person without a head. They would carve it into
a person, cut off the head, and then place that
head somewhere else. That was significant to them, clearly symbolization, symbolization,
(25:29):
symbolizing something. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Sure, yeah. So you put all that stuff together, and
what you have is this hypothesis that Klaus Schmidt came
up with. Remember he's the guy who essentially discovered this
place and kept going until twenty fourteen. His hypothesis was this,
because there's no evidence of permanent habitation, right like you
(25:53):
were saying, because all of this stuff is wild game
and wild plants that's left over, and because these structures
don't appear to ever have been roofed, like these enclosures
were always open air. You put all that together, this
was not a permanent settlement. It was a settlement that
was created for religious purposes or spiritual purposes or something
(26:16):
like that, symbolic purposes by hunter gatherer groups, and every year,
a couple of years or whenever, a bunch of them
from all around the area would come together and they
would party, they would eat, they would drink a bunch
of beer, and they would carve out these pillars and
raise them. And then weirdly, Schmid also added, they would
(26:38):
fill these enclosures in with rubble ceremonially, because when they
discovered them, all the enclosures were well filled in with rubble.
So he interpreted that to mean that that was part
of this ceremony. They would cover one up and then
they'd build another one on top.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
He said it was Coachella.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Do they fill things in with rubble at Coachella?
Speaker 1 (26:59):
No, of course not. The Indio Polo grounds are very nice, actually,
But he did sort of say, like, hey, this is
the kind of thing that we think they just met
here occasionally over decades, maybe even hundreds of years. Maybe
these rituals sort of evolved over time to maybe, you know,
because there's clear sort of death symbolism in places to
(27:21):
honor people that were important to the community maybe help
establish their identity somewhat as wandering tribes. And that's what
he thought, you know, one of the keys to this
whole thing, Yeah, was that to do something like this,
they would have had to had you know, even if
they were hunters and gatherers, they had to have had
(27:42):
a lot of people there that stayed there for long
enough time to get this done.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Yes, and that over time, over those decades or centuries,
it just attracted more and more and more people to
the area. And so rather than the monumental structures and
religion arising from farming, Klaus Schmidt said, coming together to
create this religious structure actually essentially trap people in the
(28:10):
area where they became farmers. We had it totally backwards.
That was Schmidt's hypothesis.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
Yeah, it was like a geological geological chicken or the
egg or I guess archaeological chicken or the egg.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Yes, but the chicken came first.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
That's right, that's right.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
You know, that's the answer to that question.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
Oh, yeah, we've covered it.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
Okay, we're not going to again. I'll tell you that.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
No. Heck no, why reach read something?
Speaker 2 (28:42):
So do you want to take another breaker? Is it
too soon?
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Well, let's take a break right after this, because there
was one other thing that we should point out is
some of the other things sort of supporting this idea
of Schmidt was they didn't see a water source anywhere,
which wouldn't be a good place for people to permanently be.
And what else. I already mentioned the garbage dumps and
(29:06):
the lack of houses, so I guess the only thing
I didn't mention was the water source.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
Right. The thing is Klaus Schmidt was I think he
formed this hypothesis, you know, within a couple of years
of starting excavation, and it held up at least until
his death. But after his death, some new evidence came
to light that caused people to go back and re
look at some of the original evidence too, or some
of the original artifacts and data, and they were like,
(29:34):
we're not quite sure Klaus Schmidt had it right. And
we'll talk about what they came up with the new
hypothesis right after this.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
One person we need to shout out besides Olivia is
a journalist named Andrew Curry. By the way, he's kind
of the guy that has invested He's kind of like
the Schmidt on the journalism side. For decades and decades,
this guy's been writing about most of the popular stories
about the Gibilecki, Giblic Giblick, Glavin, the Schenectady Tepe, the
(30:35):
big shout out, big shout out there. But before we
broke you mentioned new ideas coming along post Schmidt. In
twenty seventeen, his successor Won Lee Claire of the German
Archaeological Institute or the DAI. They built a German shorthand
(30:56):
for that, they constructed a big old canopy over the
whole thing so they could dig more, because I don't
think we mentioned for many, many years they were digging
in the spring and fall because summer was too hot,
winter was too wet.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
Yeah, just four months a year, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
So they could dig dig more with this big canopy
over it, shielding from the sun and rain and in
order to build I mean, this is kind of one
of those dumb luck kind of things that they probably
would have gotten to eventually, but it expedited the situation
when they realized to make this big canopy not just
like a pop up with sandbags, They needed to like
root this thing into the ground. So they dug down
(31:31):
deeper than they ever had before to make supports and
had some interesting fines down there.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
Yeah, and just not deeper than anyone in the world
ever had before, just in this area. Right.
Speaker 1 (31:45):
Oh yeah, did you think I mean they take the
dug the defice hole ever.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
Yeah, they just kept going. They're like, well, we're already
this far, we might as well set a record.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
They so they found they were able to take samples
from those pillar holes. I think they went down even
below the lowest layer they could possibly find. So when
they took those samples, they were like, oh, here's all
the stuff that Klaus Schmidt based his hypothesis on. Because
they were missing garbage dumps, hearts, evidence of homes. We
found a cistern eventually, like a thirty foot diameter cistern
(32:22):
that held a bunch of rain water, all the stuff
you would need to support a permanent settlement.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Yeah. I can't decide. When I read this part of
the story, I immediately was like, oh, no, Like I
wonder if because Schmid died a few years earlier, I
wondered if he because at first, off, I'm glad that
he wasn't around to see that because it was kind
of proved him wrong. But then I thought Now, Schmidt
seems like the kind of guy that would have like
(32:49):
loved knowing that he was wrong. Well, maybe not loved it,
but loved knowing that they were on the right track
to getting the accurate picture there.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
So that's funny. I interpreted him differently. I imagined him
showing up at Lee Claire's tent in the middle of
the night as a ghost, going, Lee, how could you
betray me?
Speaker 1 (33:09):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (33:10):
Maybe I think that actually happened too. I saw it
on ancient aliens.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
Oh okay, perfect.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
So so here's the new hypothesis. They're like, okay, Kaus,
he was working with what he had to work with
at the time. But now that we have all this
other stuff, what we realize is that part of this
site might have actually been permanently occupied by some people,
But that doesn't mean that it wasn't also like a
ritual site, like clearly it was. This is not just
(33:39):
how people built houses back then. People weren't even supposed
to build these kind of complexes back then. One of
the things that they're like, Okay, Klaus definitely got this
wrong was the idea that part of the rituals were
filling these enclosures in with rubble and then starting a
new one on top. Somebody noticed that if you look uphill,
(33:59):
the that are on the uphill side of the enclosure
are usually damaged, whereas the walls opposite are fine, which
strongly suggests landslide damage. There's also a lot of earthquakes
in that area, so they're like, actually, we think that
this stuff just kept getting destroyed. But the site was
so important that for thirteen hundred years after an earthquake
(34:23):
came through, they would come and rebuild, Like that's how
important the.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
Site was to them. Yeah, and this is where it
gets super interesting to me. Claire and some other people,
some of her colleagues and others thought hey, maybe what
this was was something created because agriculture and people settling
down may have already been happening, and this was sort
(34:47):
of created as part of the backlash against that. So
people were domesticating plants and animals nearby, and they were
still like, no, we want to be hunter gatherers, but
we want to have this place maybe where we where
we come and meet seasonally.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
Yeah, or this is where we live. Like we're like,
this is our this is our habit our settlement, but
we're not going to farm. We're still going to you.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Know, hunt and gather exactly.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
And one interpretation by a guy named Thomas Zimmerman, who
is an archaeologist from bill Kent University, he sees this
as a place that was populated by staunchly conservative, male
dominated population, and there's a lot of stuff to support that. Right. So,
first of all, if you have a group of people
(35:37):
who are railing against these new sweeping changes to society
that's going in ways, they don't like it, and they're
they're going against that, that automatically makes them conservative. And
then also if you look around at the iconography and imagery,
it is very male centric. There's a lot of foulacies
sticking up. There's all of the figures that are depicted
(35:59):
are men. I read that wherever a wild animal that's
carved into one of the pillars is gendered, it's invariably male,
and it makes a lot of sense. And then simultaneously
Thomas Zimmerman is like, I think that this was this
was meant to be a place of It was kind
of agro place where like you would come and like
(36:23):
put some young hunters through their scary first rights. Like
it was not a place of peace. It's a if
you look at most of the animals, they're snarling, they're dangerous.
This is not it is not meant to be a
calm place. And Thomas Zimmerman, I hope he can unwind
one day, right for his sake and the sake of
people around him.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
Yeah, he kind of described it as I don't know,
like the birthplace of m M A and like, you know,
kind of a lot of stuff we're seeing in the
news today.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
Yeah, the birthplace of people who watch ancient aliens.
Speaker 1 (36:59):
Yeah, pretty much. Here's the thing, though, we still don't
know so much. I believe they're what like over fifty
percent of it has still not been excavated.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
Oh no, ninety to ninety five percent is unexcavated.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
Oh I thought that was just ninety percent was underground
and they had been doing stuff underground now.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
So yeah, so it's kind of confusing, and maybe you're right.
But what I saw is that the whole site is
ninety to ninety five percent unexcavated, but that the enclosures
that they've been able to find, only half of them
are even partially excavated. So they know that there's enclosures
down there, they just haven't gotten to them yet.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Yeah, all right, I like this last theory in twenty
twenty one. That was a book called The Dawn of
Everything by an anthropologist and an archaeologist David Graeber and
David wind Grow, respectively, and they said, all right, here's
what we think is that maybe it was just a
(37:59):
non aggricate cultural society, and maybe they were just a
lot more diverse than we thought they were. We kind
of had this locked in idea that everyone was like this,
and then everyone was like this, and they were like,
maybe there was just a lot more overlap and sort
of a spectrum of rituals and behaviors and things that
(38:22):
people did, and it's just not so clear that things
were like this until they stopped and then they were
like this.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
Yeah, And now I remember I got off track earlier
when I was talking about the pre Pottery Neolithic group
that I have seen this era of people and earlier
human beings their culture essentially likened to that of like
bonobos or chimps. That that's like the level of like
introspection or material culture or contributions that they would make
(38:53):
that they were that backwards. And yeah, Graybor and Weingar
are like, we got this all wrong. And so one
of the things, the ways that Gebeckley Teppe ties into
this is those the two Davids, that's what I call them.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
They looked at some current hunter gatherer groups, which are
obviously not perfect analogies, but what they found is that
some groups have hierarchical structures during some parts of the
year where they're sedentary, and then in other parts of
the year where not times of plenty where you have
(39:31):
to like spread out and go find food, they break
up into smaller bands of hunter gatherers, and they suspect
that Gebecley Teppe was a place where they all came
together again and enjoyed times of plenty, like where there
are tons of gazelles to hunt, lots of nuts and
grains and stuff just for the picking, and that they
(39:53):
didn't have to farm, but that they were capable of
being sedentary while they were also hunter gatherers for the
other part of the year.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
Yeah, and not only capable of being sedentary, but capable
of having a fairly complex society as they settled for
that season, you know, before they went out. And you know,
I love this idea because you picture them just sort
of barely surviving and moving on until they find better
(40:22):
places to hunt or a source of water, whereas this
posit's just a just sort of a a better way
of life that anyone thought they lived to such that
they could be like, Hey, we're going to brew beer
and we're going to party and we're gonna have fun
because you know, we're all doing pretty well out here.
Guys look around, let's like enjoy this season of settlement,
(40:47):
I guess.
Speaker 2 (40:48):
Yeah, or plenty, right, Yeah, And there's a lot of
beasting seasons still today in human culture around this time
of year, around late fall, like after the Hord, say,
even through whether exactly and I don't know if it
was from the two David's or somebody interpreting their work,
but they were saying, there's a really good chance or
(41:11):
at least a chance that our holiday seasons, right, is
an ancient or remnant of that ancient seasonality where we
would come together and share in times of plenty and
then when you know, throughout the rest of the year,
we'd spread out and go do our own thing. But
during those times, community is emphasized, family is emphasized, coming
(41:35):
together is all very much emphasized during that time of year,
and they wonder if that's just a like, we're just
unaware that that is a really ancient tradition that we're
taking part in. Still, we just kind of transmuted into
our own thing.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
You know. It really missed a great opportunity for a deep,
deep cut what David and David I could have said.
David and David looked around and they were like, hey,
welcome to the Boomtown.
Speaker 2 (42:02):
What is that?
Speaker 1 (42:04):
It's the only hit song by David and David.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
What's Welcome to the Boomtown?
Speaker 1 (42:10):
The only hit song by David and David.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
Okay, well, let's hear some of it sing it. Sing
it like Sammy Davis.
Speaker 3 (42:16):
Oh, I said, welcome babe, Welcome to the boom town. Man,
all those what makes such a succulent sound?
Speaker 1 (42:28):
Welcome to the boom Town.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
I half suspect you're making this up as you go along.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
It was a great, great one hit wonder from back
in the day by.
Speaker 2 (42:39):
David and David.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
David and David, that's would have been talking about this
all time, And now it makes sense that you never
knew what I was talking about time I did.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
It's still a good joke just because I got you
to sing like Sammy Davis Junior.
Speaker 1 (42:50):
We all appreciate that it's a great song. It really is, So.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
I'm gonna go listen to that. But first, there were
just a couple of more things I wanted to say
about this, the David and David interpretation of how people
were way more complex than we give them credit for
in the past. One of the things they point to
her ancient burials like twenty six thirty thousand years old,
where there's like grave goods and people and beaded headdresses,
(43:18):
like clearly being treated differently than other people would have
been buried. So obviously are hierarchical structures, like maybe they
were mystics or shaman or something like that. And then
there was another interpretation of Beckley Tepe itself that I
thought was worth mentioning by archaeologists Anna Fagan from the
University of Melbourne, and she was like, sill your role,
(43:39):
Thomas Zimmerman. I actually think that all these depictions of
death and mayhem and scary animals is actually symbolic of
life and death and regeneration. And she makes some pretty
good points, and I like her interpretation a little more
because it doesn't alter anything else. This is still a
(44:02):
hunter gathered tribe and they could still even be railing
against farming. But that doesn't mean that they have to
be like agro and and you know, want to just
kill everybody essentially.
Speaker 1 (44:13):
Yeah, I love it.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
I do too. Let's just keep talking about Black Beckley
Teppie forever.
Speaker 1 (44:20):
It's a good one. And but now all I can
think about is getting that theory officially named the Welcome
to the Boomtown theory. Okay, I think that's because it
fits in every way.
Speaker 2 (44:29):
Yeah, for sure, it really does. Chuck. I think if
the two David's here this, they're going to be into that.
Speaker 1 (44:35):
You remember that song, Miss Christina drives a non full four.
No I have the first line.
Speaker 2 (44:41):
No idea what you're talking about.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
Well, I just sad it to you. It's a great song.
Speaker 2 (44:46):
Okay, thanks man. Well, since Chuck's on me a song,
obviously he's just triggered listener name.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
That's right. This is from Siara and it's about the
Ford Motor Company because her works there as a Michigander. Hey, guys,
one thing I thought I'd mentioned about that is you
mentioned that the Ford Motor Company has been around since
nineteen oh three and is still standing. But I think
one of the coolest things about our company is that
the what was it, the Rouge site. Yeah, yeah, the
(45:15):
Rouge River site that you also mentioned in the episode
is still standing and today builds f one fifties. In
its history, the Rouge has built the Model B, the Mercury,
the Thunderbird, and multiple generations of the Mustang. The site
itself has so much history in the henry Ford Museum
that the henry Ford Museum offers a Rouge Factory tour
that actually takes you into one of the manufacturing buildings
(45:37):
of the site to see the assembly line from a
set of mezzanines. One last thing you didn't mention was
that he was a supporter of prohibition, and it always
reminds me of this funny quote from him. If Booze
ever comes back to the United States, I am through
with manufacturing. I wouldn't be interested in putting automobiles into
the hands of a generation soggy with drink. Thanks for
(46:00):
all the knowledge that you share in keeping me company
on my compute, and that is from CR.
Speaker 2 (46:05):
Thanks CR. That's awesome. We appreciate all the extra info
and if you want to be like CRRA and show
off your knowledge of extra info by sharing it with us,
we would love that. Just send it off to stuff
podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (46:24):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (46:26):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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