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- I read that as "man riding turkey", but why would he wear a leopard, Brain? Narf.by a3w
- He would wear a leotard because he is a wrestler.by jeltz
- "riding" and "leopard" are doing a lot of work here
he might be standing and holding it, but that's a nice find
- I spent so much time looking at it, how do they see a leopard there?by huseyinkeles
- What a downgrade. We were riding leopards back then!
- I'm inclined to think that this was art not documentary.by erikig
- And leopards were riding humans. Image on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karahan_Tepeby ks2048
- > Since systematic excavations began in 2019, a number of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figural sculptures have been found at Karahan Tepe, often in unusual combinations. Several examples of a human carrying a leopard on his back. The leopards in these sculptures are not slung on the man’s back as if he had killed them in the hunt or tamed them enough to carry them, but rather are depicted snarling, with teeth bared, very much alive and very much unfriendly.
Interesting that "you've got a monkey on your back" is a commonly-used expression in English. I could imagine these people saying the exact same thing, with "leopard" substituted in.
"Bro, I gotta get this leopard off my back..."
by adriand - more like, "bruh, do I even keep riding this Leopard?"by schainks
- No, you have it reversed, the leopards have the monkey on their back.by jollyllama
- I don't think he's sitting on the leopard.by analog8374
- Leopard seems to have had some sort of religious meaning to them. They have also found other sculptures where humans were carrying live leopards on their back in the same region.
https://arkeonews.net/a-unique-11000-year-old-statue-of-a-hu...
by silverFork - >> Less than 12 miles away from Karahan Tepe, a high relief of a man gripping his phallus flanked by two roaring/biting leopards carved into the stone is the earliest narrative scene ever discovered.
So, er, what is the um narrative conveyed by this scene?
- No cougars were hurt during filming that scene.
- The simple joys of being a man.by dyauspitr
- Man gripping his phallus was a popular character in Karahan Tepe in the old times.
See his 2.6 meter statue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karahan_Tepe#/media/File:Karah...
by ozgung - There are pictures available.
I’m certainly not an expert but he’s holding his stomach in one hand, giving himself a good tug with the other and looks somewhere between scared and confused. The leopard on the left is all smiles.
There’s another dude standing a few figures away with his back turned to old tug-a-lug. He’s holding something and looks kind of ashamed though I could be reading that into the image since it’s not really well carved… Tug-a-lug is the best carved of all and must be the centrepiece of the story.
If this is another great flood narrative, I sure prefer the Hebrew great flood story.
by hluska - Depends on the nature of the grip.
He could be trying to protect his junk from the leopards, or taunting the leopards by jerking at them. So many options. The past was just as juvenile and perverse as modernity.
by bena - It’s a cautionary tale: man who jerks his meat in the woods risks getting eaten by leopards.by samudrijan
- I've been to Gobeklitepe. Amazing place. What has been dug so far is a small fraction of what's under the surface yet.
These round structures are intriguing. It's thought to be temporary. People came from all directions, built these, stayed for a while, ate a lot of hunted animals, and they buried these structures to never use again. Why? We don't know.
I should visit Karahantepe too. Looks as interesting.
by bgnn - Potbelly Hill in Turkey dates back to 10,000BCE and it is an amazing story
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe#/media/File:...
the modern people who first looked at it thought it was just a graveyard with stone markers on the graves
then someone dug down much further and those stone markers were several meters high
by ck2 - The aesthetics of this sculpture look very similar to the Moai on Rapa Nui (Easter Island).by Nicholas_C
- They remind me of Cycladic sculptures:
- In a recent Irving Finkel interview he talks about Gulbekle Tepe and the proto-writing that was way older then even Sumerian.by janandonly
- The ancient Sumerians invented cuneiform writing about 5000-5500Y ago.
This is as long before ancient Sumer as ancient Sumer is before us today.
Mind-boggling.
by lproven - nitpicking: Sumerians were the oldest civilization to have been found using cuneiform or scripted writing. The actual civilization to have truly invented writing is not known.by nashashmi
- Not sure what is mind boggling. The homo sapiens exists in the _current_ form ( physiologically and brain size, etc ) since at least 250k years. about 50k year ago abstract art was already in vogue.by ccozan
- Writing seems like it should be far more ancient than we ought to assume. You make some tally marks to count something, show someone else how to read your tallys, now you have a proto writing system. All you need is to iterate more symbols describing more things to scale it out, and this sort of thing seems like it would snowball over time and generations.
Seems like there ought to be countless ancient proto writing systems not just in our species either. I guess most species aren't in situations where storing information like this offers much of a selective advantage. Maybe you can count an animal scent marking out its territory as a sort of proto writing system; it is only somewhat different than the plat map in your city hall.
EDIT: Apparently neanderthals are thought to have used tally marks... (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-did-neanderth...)
by asdff - one of those mind-boggling timeline comparisons I sometimes think about is Cleopatra and the Pyramids. The Giza pyramids were built around ~2600 years _before_ Cleopatra. And she's about 2000 years removed from us today.
So to think that Egyptians and Romans in Cleopatra's era went to visit the Pyramids as a kind of tourist thing from a civilization 2 millennia removed from them is quite astounding.
I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire.
by Insanity - The original caretakers of the Australian continent have been telling the same stories orally for 40,000 years.
Let that sink in!
It is extraordinary to me that they don't get as much clout as they deserve for maintaining human civilization for so long. They literally evolved cryptologically sound techniques for maintaining their history - through fires, floods, calamity and Mother Nature.
We can't even keep our stories straight in the modern era for longer than 8 months.
by MomsAVoxell