we have been thinking all along that Sumer was the first civilization, but this is beginning to be clearly false as excavations have been going on in recent years, and is still continuing, in present day Turkey, Iraq, etc., which is uncovering a previous civilization which pushes everything back another 5000 years at least.
giant stone pillars up to 20 meters tall which were used as part of temples to which people came from hundreds of kilometers to worship are being unearthed, and the date of their construction is said to be somewhere around 10,000 BC. (5000 years before the Sumerians in Mesopotamia).
this was related to me by a friend keen on such matters over some bad sushi saturday night, and has been on my mind ever since. i've been doing a bit of googling but i think none to very little information is available at this point as the excavations are still under way.
in archaeology circles it is certainly the norm for dates to be pushed back and back time and again as new discoveries surface, and people have been conjecturing about this for sometime, but I was still very much surprised to hear of it -- even though it does make sense somehow.
presumably agriculture and centralized power and written language existed in this civilization... i can't wait for them to finish digging and release some information...
giant stone pillars up to 20 meters tall which were used as part of temples to which people came from hundreds of kilometers to worship are being unearthed, and the date of their construction is said to be somewhere around 10,000 BC. (5000 years before the Sumerians in Mesopotamia).
this was related to me by a friend keen on such matters over some bad sushi saturday night, and has been on my mind ever since. i've been doing a bit of googling but i think none to very little information is available at this point as the excavations are still under way.
in archaeology circles it is certainly the norm for dates to be pushed back and back time and again as new discoveries surface, and people have been conjecturing about this for sometime, but I was still very much surprised to hear of it -- even though it does make sense somehow.
presumably agriculture and centralized power and written language existed in this civilization... i can't wait for them to finish digging and release some information...