World's Oldest Toy Car - Could This 7500-Year-Old Discovery Be The Earliest Evidence Of The Wheel?

MessageToEagle.com - Today parents buy their children electric car toys to play with, but thousands of years ago the situation was somewhat different.
Yet, this ancient discovery reveals our ancestors were aware of the wheel 7500 years ago!
A stone car with two axles and 4 wheels dating from about 7500 years ago was found during excavations in the Kiziltepe district of the southeastern province of Mardin, are now on display at the Mardin Museum, Turkey.
Archaeologist Mesut Alp said that the toy car, which is made out of stone, dates back to the late Stone Age and is thought to be 7,500 years old.


The world’s earliest toy car (L) and title deed, unearthed at excavation sites in Mardin’s Kiziltepe district, are on display at the Mardin Museum. (Photo: Cihan)

According to the Culture and Tourism Director of Mardin, Davut Beliktay, the car is like a copy of cars today. He also points out that the shape of this ancient toy resembles a tractor.Beliktay also revealed that toy dolls and whistles, also made of stone, were found at sites in the area, "we believe that the whistles and dolls are 5,000 to 6,000 years old. The whistles are still in working condition," he said.

In display was also an ancient stone tablet inscribed with writing.
Following exhaustive historical analysis, the writing on the 5 centimeter stone, which was uncovered at an excavation site at the Girnavas Mound, 4 km from the historic district of Nusaybin -was deemed to be the content of an ancient title deed.

Is this little ancient toy the earliest evidence of the wheel? Beliktay said that the writing on the historic tablet had managed to remain intact over the years because of excellent preservation techniques. The script, he explained, had been scraped on to the clayish surface with a nail and then the tablet had been placed in a burner.

Its shape resembles a tractor, archaeologists say. Archaeologist Alp explained that the title deed is 2,800 years old and pertains to the selling of a garden. The content of the deed he added refers to a fruit garden, and the fruit trees within, which are to be split between the three sons of the owner. The deed refers to "Nabulu" which Alp explained was in fact the old name of current Nusaybin. Beliktay has confirmed that comprehensive information on the two finds will be provided soon.
Still, the most fascinating item is the ancient car toy. Some have suggested it is not a car, but rather a chariot. However, chariots usually have only two wheels and pulled by an animal.
Evidence of ancient knowledge of wheel can be found in other time periods.
Rock engravings, the handful of wagon models and the wagon depictions incised onto clay vessels are no longer our only proof for the use of wagons. The archaeological record has been enriched by new categories of evidence.

It would appear that the earliest variant of wagon models is represented by a combination of wheels and the draught animal. Altyn Depe, Turkmenistan - http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/
The first comprehensive overview of Copper Age wheel models was written by Marin Dinu in his study "Clay Models of Wheels Discovered in Copper Age Cultures of Old Europe Mid-Fifth Millenium B.C." Dinu pointed out that the use of wheeled vehicles could thus be dated much earlier than previously assumed.

Left figure: Very little is known about this intriguing model save for the fact that it was found somewhere in the Ukraine and that it can probably be dated to the period between 3950 and 3650 BC (CUCUTENI TRYPILLIA, Cat. no. U-102, 263). Right: figure: A two-wheeled cart made around the turn of the 3rd and 2nd millennium BC from Pakistan.

Yet, archaeological record provides undisputable evidence that wheels were known across the greater part of Europe and Anatolia from the earlier 4th millennium BC onward.
However, nothing as astonishing as the ancient toy car kept at the Mardin Museum has ever been found.
So the question remains: Is this little ancient toy car perhaps the earliest evidence of the wheel?
Copyright © MessageToEagle.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed in whole or part without the express written permission of MessageToEagle.com.


Read more: http://www.messagetoeagle.com/worldsoldesttoycar.php#ixzz33fW3jkvc

Gobekli Tepe: Fantastic New Photos Of 11,000 Year Old Temple Complex, The Oldest Known

Gobekli Tepe, the world’s oldest known temple, dates back more than 11,000 years and is located near the ancient city of Şanlıurfa.

Göbekli Tepe is an early Neolithic sanctuary located at the top of a mountain ridge in the Southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey, northeast of the town of Şanlıurfa (formerly Urfa / Edessa). It includes massive stones carved about 11,000 years ago by people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery 

Overview of the Gobekli Tepe archaeological site.

The history of Şanlıurfa is recorded from the 4th century BC, but may date back to 9000 BC, when there is ample evidence for the surrounding sites at Duru, Harran and Nevali Cori. It was one of several cities in the Euphrates-Tigris basin, the cradle of the Mesopotamian civilization. According to Turkish Muslim traditions Urfa (its name since Byzantine days) is the biblical city of Ur of the Chaldees, due to its proximity to the biblical village of Harran. However, based on historical and archaeological evidence, the city of Ur is today generally known to have been in southern Iraq, and the true birthplace of Abraham is still in question. Urfa is also known as the birthplace of Job.

Location of Gobekli Tepe and Urfa

The tell has a height of 15 m (49 ft) and is about 300 m (984 ft) in diameter. It is approximately 760 m (2,493 ft) above sea level. It was first noted in a survey conducted by Istanbul University and the University of Chicago in 1964. The survey recognized that the rise could not entirely be a natural feature, but postulated that a Byzantine cemetery lay beneath. The survey noted a large number of flints and the presence of limestone slabs thought to be grave markers. The hill had long been under agricultural cultivation; generations of local inhabitants had frequently moved rocks and placed them in clearance piles, possibly destroying much archaeological evidence in the process. 

Klaus Schmidt, chief archaeologist of Göbekli Tepe, is of the view that religion and the mobilization of labor behind the building of religious centers like Göbekli Tepe were the chief factors driving the development of civilization and the transition from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic ages

An idealized view of Gobekli Tepe as it might have looked during construction.

A view looking down into the main dig at Gobekli Tepe. 

Schmidt, now of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, was working as part of a team at a nearby site but at the same time looking for another site to dig leading a team of his own. He reviewed the archaeological literature on the surrounding area, found the Chicago researchers’ brief description of Göbekli Tepe, and decided to give it another look. “Within minutes”, he said, he realized that the flint chips on the surface of the tell were prehistoric. The following year (1995) he began excavating there in collaboration with the Şanlıurfa Museum. T-shaped pillars were soon discovered. Some had apparently undergone attempts at smashing, probably by farmers who mistook them for ordinary large rocks.

Schmidt’s view, shared by most experts, is that Göbekli Tepe is a stone-age mountain sanctuary. Radiocarbon dating as well as comparative, stylistic analysis indicate that it is the oldest religious site found to date. Schmidt believes that what he calls this “cathedral on a hill” was a pilgrimage destination attracting worshipers up to 100 miles (160 km) distant.

A carving of a lion and a boar on the stele at Gobekli Tepe. 

 Butchered bones found in large numbers from local game such as deer, gazelle, pigs, and geese have been identified as refuse from food hunted and cooked or otherwise prepared for congregants

Göbekli Tepe is regarded as an archaeological discovery of the greatest importance since it could profoundly change the understanding of a crucial stage in the development of human society. Ian Hodder of Stanford University said, “Göbekli Tepe changes everything”.  

 David Lewis-Williams, professor of archaeology at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, has said, “Göbekli Tepe is the most important archaeological site in the world.” It shows that the erection of monumental complexes was within the capacities of hunter-gatherers and not only of sedentary farming communities as had been previously assumed. As excavator Klaus Schmidt puts it, “First came the temple, then the city.

Not only its large dimensions, but the side-by-side existence of multiple pillar shrines makes the location unique. 

There are no comparable monumental complexes from its time. Nevalı Çori, a Neolithic settlement also excavated by the German Archaeological Institute and submerged by the Atatürk Dam since 1992, is 500 years later; its T-shaped pillars are considerably smaller, and its shrine was located inside a village. The roughly contemporary architecture at Jericho is devoid of artistic merit or large-scale sculpture, and Çatalhöyük, perhaps the most famous Anatolian Neolithic village, is 2,000 years younger.

Göbekli Tepe’s Totem by Krsanna Duran

At present, though, Göbekli Tepe raises more questions for archaeology and prehistory than it answers. It remains unknown how a force large enough to construct, augment, and maintain such a substantial complex was mobilized and compensated or fed in the conditions of pre-sedentary society. 

Scholars cannot “read” the pictograms, and do not know for certain what meaning the animal reliefs had for visitors to the site. The variety of fauna depicted, from lions and boars to birds and insects, makes any single explanation problematic. 

As there is little or no evidence of habitation, and the animals pictured are mainly predators, the stones may have been intended to stave off evils through some form of magic representation. Alternatively, they could have served as totems.

About 20 of these large oval and circular rooms have been found with diameters of about 30 meters.

 The assumption that the site was strictly cultic in purpose and not inhabited has also been challenged by the suggestion that the structures served as large communal houses, “similar in some ways to the large plank houses of the Northwest Coast of North America with their impressive house posts and totem poles.” It is not known why every few decades the existing pillars were buried to be replaced by new stones as part of a smaller, concentric ring inside the older one.

In the center of each of the oval rooms stands a large T-shape pillar

 Human burial may or may not have occurred at the site. The reason the complex was carefully backfilled remains unexplained. Until more evidence is gathered, it is difficult to deduce anything certain about the originating culture or the site’s significance.

Each of the pillars is decorated with animals and abstract symbols are carved into the pillars indicating cultural memory and a symbolic world existing in society 12,000 years ago. 

The carved pillars are proof of awesome and accomplished skills in stoneworking by our ancestors 12,000 years ago.  

The T-shape pillars are though to be stylized representations of human beings with their arms outspread. 

Many of the pillars are carved with 3-D reliefs in a naturalistic style 

The assumption that the site was strictly cultic in purpose and not inhabited has also been challenged by the suggestion that the structures served as large communal houses, “similar in some ways to the large plank houses of the Northwest Coast of North America with their impressive house posts and totem poles.” It is not known why every few decades the existing pillars were buried to be replaced by new stones as part of a smaller, concentric ring inside the older one.

 

Human burial may or may not have occurred at the site. The reason the complex was carefully backfilled remains unexplained. Until more evidence is gathered, it is difficult to deduce anything certain about the originating culture or the site’s significance.

Future plans include construction of a museum, and converting the environs into an archaeological park, in the hope that this will help preserve the site in the state in which it was discovered.

In 2010, Global Heritage Fund (GHF) announced it will undertake a multi-year conservation program to preserve Göbekli Tepe. Partners include Klaus Schmidt and the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, German Research Foundation, Şanlıurfa Municipal Government, and the Turkish Ministry of Tourism and Culture.

The stated goals of the GHF Göbekli Tepe project are to support the preparation of a site management and conservation plan, construction of a shelter over the exposed archaeological features, training community members in guiding and conservation, and helping Turkish authorities secure UNESCO World Heritage Site designation for Gobekli Tepe.

Oldest known full size statute of a man

 One theory about Gobekli Tepe is the nearby holes were part of a scenario where statues were placed in the larger holes and small fires were lit in the small holes.”

Sources:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8yAiUCdzj53U2w5aEJaZXVFcVU/edit
https://www.facebook.com/gobeklitepe

My source: http://beforeitsnews.com/blogging-citizen-journalism/2013/08/gobekli-tepe-fantastic-new-photos-of-12000-year-old-temple-complex-the-oldest-known-2448608.html

Fascinating 9,000-Year-Old Depiction Of Volcanic Eruption And Birds-Like View Of Town - Did Someone Witness The Event From Above?

MessageToEagle.com - 9,000-year-old painting depicts an explosive and catastrophic volcano eruption located approximately 130 km northeast of Çatalhöyük, in central Turkey and a birds-eye view of a town plan in the foreground.
According to researchers the finding may be the oldest known map.
In the early 1960s, James Mellaart (1925 - 2012), one of the most controversial archaeologists of the 20th century, discovered Çatalhöyük, the world's largest Stone Age city that contained not only the earliest textiles and pottery known to man but also the earliest paintings found on walls, reportedThe Telegraph.

Çatalhöyük - artist's view of the site. source
Çatalhöyük ruins
"Mellaart explained that the original murals had proved impossible to remove or preserve. They were damaged, he said, and been impossible to photograph before they crumbled to plaster dust."

"Indeed, the only evidence of their existence were hurried sketches made by Mellaart and not released to public examination until 1989, when they only added to the debate." There was no independent way of testing the accuracy, even the existence, of these frescoes, but according to Mellaart - they depicted erupting volcanoes, scenes of men sowing and tending livestock and formalised patterns of animals, birds and human figures." Now, Axel Schmitt from the University of California Los Angeles and colleagues analyzed rocks from the nearby Hasan Dagi volcano in order to determine whether it was the volcano depicted in the mural from ~6600 BC in the Catalhöyük.

To determine if Hasan Dagi was active during that time, scientists collected and analyzed volcanic rock samples from the summit and flanks of the Hasan Dagi volcano.
The analysis confirmed the interpretation that residents of Çatalhöyük may have recorded an explosive eruption of Hasan Dagi volcano.

Location of the Çatalhöyük Neolithic site, Hasan Dagi, and other Holocene volcanoes in Anatolia.

This Çatalhöyük mural is thought to represent a nearby volcanic eruption. New scientific evidence confirms a contemporaneous eruption at nearby Hasan Dag.

The dating of the volcanic rock indicated an eruption around 6900 BC, which closely overlaps with the time the mural was estimated to have been painted in Çatalhöyük. The overlapping timeframes indicate humans in the region may have witnessed this eruption.

   
    Cyber Archaeology

Alternative interpretations of the mural include the depiction of a leopard skin, consistent with other art at the Çatalhöyük site.
"We tested the hypothesis that the Çatalhöyük mural depicts a volcanic eruption and discovered a geological record consistent with this hypothesis. Our work also demonstrates that Hasan Dagi volcano has potential for future eruptions," Schmitt said.
The research work confirms the eruption between 9,500 and 8,400 years ago—a timespan including the era that the mural was likely painted.
"Our data are the first evidence for a volcanic eruption of Hasan Dagi coeval with human presence at Çatalhöyük," inform scientists in their paper.

MessageToEagle.com

Temple Complex In Turkey Rewrites Human History

By Patrick Symmes | Newsweek.com

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

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

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

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

The new discoveries are finally beginning to reshape the slow-moving consensus of archeology. Göbekli Tepe is "unbelievably big and amazing, at a ridiculously early date," according to Ian Hodder, director of Stanford’s archeology program. Enthusing over the "huge great stones and fantastic, highly refined art" at Göbekli, Hodder—who has spent decades on rival Neolithic sites—says: "Many people think that it changes everything…It overturns the whole apple cart. All our theories were wrong."

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



Video from: YouTube.com

This theory reverses a standard chronology of human origins, in which primitive man went through a "Neolithic revolution" 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. In the old model, shepherds and farmers appeared first, and then created pottery, villages, cities, specialized labor, kings, writing, art, and—somewhere on the way to the airplane—organized religion. As far back as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, thinkers have argued that the social compact of cities came first, and only then the "high" religions with their great temples, a paradigm still taught in American high schools.

Religion now appears so early in civilized life—earlier than civilized life, if Schmidt is correct—that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it, less a revelation than a genetic inheritance. The archeologist Jacques Cauvin once posited that "the beginning of the gods was the beginning of agriculture," and Göbekli may prove his case.

The builders of Göbekli Tepe could not write or leave other explanations of their work. Schmidt speculates that nomadic bands from hundreds of miles in every direction were already gathering here for rituals, feasting, and initiation rites before the first stones were cut. The religious purpose of the site is implicit in its size and location. "You don’t move 10-ton stones for no reason," Schmidt observes. "Temples like to be on high sites," he adds, waving an arm over the stony, round hilltop. "Sanctuaries like to be away from the mundane world."

Unlike most discoveries from the ancient world, Göbekli Tepe was found intact, the stones upright, the order and artistry of the work plain even to the un-trained eye. Most startling is the elaborate carving found on about half of the 50 pillars Schmidt has unearthed. There are a few abstract symbols, but the site is almost covered in graceful, naturalistic sculptures and bas-reliefs of the animals that were central to the imagination of hunter-gatherers. Wild boar and cattle are depicted, along with totems of power and intelligence, like lions, foxes, and leopards. Many of the biggest pillars are carved with arms, including shoulders, elbows, and jointed fingers. The T shapes appear to be towering humanoids but have no faces, hinting at the worship of ancestors or humanlike deities. "In the Bible it talks about how God created man in his image," says Johns Hopkins archeologist Glenn Schwartz. Göbekli Tepe "is the first time you can see humans with that idea, that they resemble gods."

The temples thus offer unexpected proof that mankind emerged from the 140,000-year reign of hunter-gatherers with a ready vocabulary of spiritual imagery, and capable of huge logistical, economic, and political efforts. A Catholic born in Franconia, Germany, Schmidt wanders the site in a turban, pointing out the evidence of that transition. "The people here invented agriculture. They were the inventors of cultivated plants, of domestic architecture," he says.

Göbekli sits at the Fertile Crescent’s northernmost tip, a productive borderland on the shoulder of forests and within sight of plains. The hill was ideally situated for ancient hunters. Wild gazelles still migrate past twice a year as they did 11 millennia ago, and birds fly overhead in long skeins. Genetic mapping shows that the first domestication of wheat was in this immediate area—perhaps at a mountain visible in the distance—a few centuries after Göbekli’s founding. Animal husbandry also began near here—the first domesticated pigs came from the surrounding area in about 8000 B.C., and cattle were domesticated in Turkey before 6500 B.C. Pottery followed. Those discoveries then flowed out to places like Çatalhöyük, the oldest-known Neolithic village, which is 300 miles to the west.The artists of Göbekli Tepe depicted swarms of what Schmidt calls "scary, nasty" creatures: spiders, scorpions, snakes, triple-fanged monsters, and, most common of all, carrion birds. The single largest carving shows a vulture poised over a headless human. Schmidt theorizes that human corpses were ex-posed here on the hilltop for consumption by birds—what a Tibetan would call a sky burial. Sifting the tons of dirt removed from the site has produced very few human bones, however, perhaps because they were removed to distant homes for ancestor worship. Absence is the source of Schmidt’s great theoretical claim. "There are no traces of daily life," he explains. "No fire pits. No trash heaps. There is no water here." Everything from food to flint had to be imported, so the site "was not a village," Schmidt says. Since the temples predate any known settlement anywhere, Schmidt concludes that man’s first house was a house of worship: "First the temple, then the city," he insists.

Some archeologists, like Hodder, the Neolithic specialist, wonder if Schmidt has simply missed evidence of a village or if his dating of the site is too precise. But the real reason the ruins at Göbekli remain almost unknown, not yet incorporated in textbooks, is that the evidence is too strong, not too weak. "The problem with this discovery," as Schwartz of Johns Hopkins puts it, "is that it is unique." No other monumental sites from the era have been found. Before Göbekli, humans drew stick figures on cave walls, shaped clay into tiny dolls, and perhaps piled up small stones for shelter or worship. Even after Göbekli, there is little evidence of sophisticated building. Dating of ancient sites is highly contested, but Çatalhöyük is probably about 1,500 years younger than Göbekli, and features no carvings or grand constructions. The walls of Jericho, thought until now to be the oldest monumental construction by man, were probably started more than a thousand years after Göbekli. Huge temples did emerge again—but the next unambiguous example dates from 5,000 years later, in southern Iraq.

The site is such an outlier that an American archeologist who stumbled on it in the 1960s simply walked away, unable to interpret what he saw. On a hunch, Schmidt followed the American’s notes to the hilltop 15 years ago, a day he still recalls with a huge grin. He saw carved flint everywhere, and recognized a Neolithic quarry on an adjacent hill, with unfinished slabs of limestone hinting at some monument buried nearby. "In one minute—in one second—it was clear," the bearded, sun-browned archeologist recalls. He too considered walking away, he says, knowing that if he stayed, he would have to spend the rest of his life digging on the hill.

Now 55 and a staff member at the German Archaeological Institute, Schmidt has joined a long line of his countrymen here, reaching back to Heinrich Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy. He has settled in, marrying a Turkish woman and making a home in a modest "dig house" in the narrow streets of old Urfa. Decades of work lie ahead.

Disputes are normal at the site—the workers, Schmidt laments, are divided into three separate clans who feud constantly. ("Three groups," the archeologist says, exasperated. "Not two. Three!") So far Schmidt has uncovered less than 5 percent of the site, and he plans to leave some temples untouched so that future researchers can examine them with more sophisticated tools.

Whatever mysterious rituals were conducted in the temples, they ended abruptly before 8000 B.C., when the entire site was buried, deliberately and all at once, Schmidt believes. The temples had been in decline for a thousand years—later circles are less than half the size of the early ones, indicating a lack of resources or motivation among the worshipers. This "clear digression" followed by a sudden burial marks "the end of a very strange culture," Schmidt says. But it was also the birth of a new, settled civilization, humanity having now exchanged the hilltops of hunters for the valleys of farmers and shepherds. New ways of life demand new religious practices, Schmidt suggests, and "when you have new gods, you have to get rid of the old ones."

Article from: Newsweek.com

 

Source: http://www.altering-perspectives.com/2013/06/temple-complex-in-turkey-rewrites-human.html?m=1