Alright Veeky Forums, is it likely that there were advanced civilizations before Sumeria...

Yep, for a given value of "advanced". There's older cities than Ur and the like. Check out Çatalhöyük and Göbekli Tepe.
They did. The Chinese had kites and those sky lantern things.

Was Tepe residential?
I thought it was some kind of religious site that nomadic peoples would convene at periodically.

no. no evidence to suggest that anywhere at all.

>I somehow know everything about the universe and our world

Well OP's image is of Tepe, so presumably it counts.

>Answers the question "Is it likely..." with a no
>Oh, you must be claiming it's an absolute fact!

But even in op's image, non of those structures look particularly residential.
Does anyone know if there was any kind of permanent settlement in or around Göbekli Tepe?

You misunderstand me. I'm assuming this counts as civilised enough for OP, if he thought it was a good OP pic.

>you cant know nuthin! what if there is evidence of live in the mariachi tranch???

no evidence found
when its found, we will talk

There is plenty of evidence of life in the MariANA trench you moron.

Clearly meant human civilization. Am I supposed to format even my strawmen in such a way as to not allow nitpicking?

Well that's interesting, something similar had occurred to me, but op said >Rome-tier
In my personal opinion I've always thought Göbekli Tepe was a more impressive coordinated feat of engieneering than Stonehenge, and Stonehenge didn't need a Rome tier civ behind it to git 'er dun.

>Subject is about the universe and the world
>Not even a mention of humans in the last four replies
>"I-I didn't mean it, honest!"

Civilization is eight extra characters you fucking mouthbreather.

Advanced civilizations? No.
Civilizations? Yes.

We barely know anything about Gobekli Tepe, let alone the rest of the fucking middle east

>question: is there civilization before sumeria
>answer: no evidence to suggest so
>moron: u dont kno nutthin
>moron bashing: i bet you think there is evidence in this absurd place
>moron: OF COURSE THERE IS LIFE THERE

You are silly, arguing semantics with a strawman of yourself in an attempt to rationalize that you won an argument online. I am done here.

Eridu.

In the Sumerian King List, Eridu is named as the city of the first kings.
It all comes back to Eridu and the Abzu.

Read Kriwaczek's "Babylon" if you're interested.

I am.
Any other suggestions? Ancient/Pre-history is my goddamn shit.

>sumer
>real
I bet you think the dinosaurs were real too huh

haha dude lmao you r funy!

This.

I mean, we were running around for a ~100,000 years with fire, agriculture, shelter building, and social hierarchies - everything you need to make a civilization. It's a little hard to believe no one put that together until the last 5% of that, and then we all did so, everywhere at once, even in places with absolutely no contact between one another. Climate change alone doesn't explain that - as it's true across the world, regardless of climate.

The amount of land we lost during that time, if you mooshed it all together into a continent, would be about the size of Africa, and it was all coastal, and thus potentially ideal.

Underwater archeology is just horribly expensive though, and quite limited. We've not even dragged out all the treasures of Alexandria yet, and it went under well within recorded history.

Not suggesting super-tech Atlantis style bullshit, mind ye, but probably a whole lotta agrarian settlements, and maybe some simple cities and temples - enough to fuck with the Holocene line.

This.

>I mean, we were running around for a ~100,000 years with fire, agriculture, shelter building, and social hierarchies - everything you need to make a civilization. It's a little hard to believe no one put that together until the last 5% of that

I mean, we were running around for 1.9 million years with bipedalism, larger brain capacities, controlled use of fire, and social hierarchies - everything you need to develop agriculture. It's a little hard to believe no one learned how to put seeds in the ground until the last 5% of that, and then we all did so, everywhere at once, even in places with absolutely no contact between one another.

>reddit spacers

I enjoy this kind of idea.
If we were to make an educated guess for where in the world these submerged civs might have developed what would be the best bets?
I'm still tempted to say somewhere between southwest Asian and north east Africa just because it seems to be the fuckkin spot for early civs that we do know about.

Any links to what a world map might've looked like later in that ~100,000 year span you mentioned?

Tee hee, fair point.

The sea between England and Denmark was land, I think.
Not sure about climate so far north, but thats a place where we could search.

Also notice how its a "coincidence", that the earliest cities and civilization we found are in desert, the climate that best preserves things.
Maybe there were more in jungles, but we wouldn't know, would we? Hard to see from above, humidity and vegetation ruin and cover everything.

I want to believe this.

Yeah, aren't we only just now figuring out that there was a whole ancient civ in the Amazon we just couldn't see underneath all that jungle until now?

It's shit, but meh.

>reddit spacers
Ya know... I keep seeing this, but the one time I went to Reddit, to ask a question about some retro-game, I couldn't make proper paragraph spacing. I had a few header-termish things in the question, and I had to use shift+enter to force a break at all. I suppose maybe it was just that board, and I never spent enough time there to realize where this comes from.

But ignoring the meme and as to the comment itself, the evidence seems to suggest that primitive agriculture, if not agriculture proper, actually came about a whole lot more gradually and more scattered than civilization. Though it is true, the earliest evidence points to us going a long time without as you suggest, but then again, it's also a lot harder to find evidence for.

Meanwhile, all the proto civilizations in both hemispheres all cropped up within 3000 years of each other over maybe 5000 years, which is just, odd.

Meh, maybe some sorta 100th monkey effect.

Well, Uruk is considered the oldest city in the world, and has been founded 6500 years ago.

Let's accept for a minute that there's been an older city.
Let's say it's been founded 10.000 years ago.
Assuming it's been built with wood and mud bricks, would it still be possible to find remains?
I mean, those materials are not very hardy, are they?

>Not sure about climate

That's because you're a moron. Doggerland would have been uninhabitable tundra.

No, Uruk is the oldest city in Sumer, but Jeriocho is as much as 10,000 years old. Civilization flourished in Mesopotamia, but agriculture began in the hills and mountains to the north of Sumer, where regular rains ensured a good crop.

>Indus River Valley
3300BC start date

Uruk period 4100 BC start date...

The closest you will find is the Ubaidians, it is very likely they made Sumerian civilization and in the later periods most people who were living in near by swamps at the time become the Sumerians.

>be year 5000
>watch ancient Star Wars movie
>A long time ago
>Far far away
>Oh I guess it really happened then

>dude DMT lmfao

What do you mean Rome-tier? Sumeria wasnt rome tier at all in the time period you suggest.

There were certainly contemporary cities and its not impossible for there to be earlier cities but so far we have no evidence.

We have alot of knowledge on what the environment was like and the general locations where cities originated. These happen to usually be heavily populated even today.

If any evidence exists it would likely be in places like that.

There are of course places where the sea had overtaken the land but I doubt significant cities existed, at least for the time period of the original question.

HAHAHA

>ubaiads
>you will never attend a dig at Tel Zaidan

jdimsa

tha's beyond the point, friend.

The Holy Roman Proto-Finnic Khaganate and the Hwan Empire are good examples, but they destroyed each other.

Yes, before the Flood.

...

>Abzu
Is this where man was created?

Jericho was founded in 9800 BC according to Wikipedia

it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe

this

it's not a matter of figuring out how to farm, it's a matter of whether it was necessary. early agriculturists villages were absolutely terrible. we can tell they were severely malnourished from their bones and cereal crops would rot their teeth. they ate grain simply because it was easy to store. the first true farming villages didn't pop up at random from some smart human figuring shit out, they pop up in fringe zones where cereal crops didn't occur in the wild in enough abundance to feed themselves.

Göbekli Tepe is impressive but little more than stacked rocks, OP's talking about big cities

No, there was not *a* whole single civilization, AYYYLMAO.

But yes there were likely several agricultural (or mostly stationary hunter/gatherer) societies over time. In particular on the eastern side of the Andes in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil. This is where peanuts were domesticated, for example. Fruit trees were selectively grown, and raised plots of land were 'seeded' with pottery shards and charcoal for stabilization in floods and extra carbon.

Some of the more 'primitive' hunter/gatherer tribes in the Amazon today are known to be descended from farming populations several hundred years ago.

Think of the Amazon as a huge mud puddle, overgrown with vegetation. The soil is actually mostly rather poor. There are little to no rocks or soil over most of it, especially the 'deeper' into the Amazon you are. These things limit civilization.

Plus, as mentioned, jungle vegetation grows very quickly to cover structures.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Relatively advanced hominids have been around for a few million years. Even Australopithecus is smarter than any other creature on Earth until the more advanced homos (teehee) like us showed up.

The key was that overall numbers were relatively small. Disease, starvation, predation, inter-group conflicts (over access to food or pussy, as usual), traumatic accidents or climatic shifts and so on all took their toll. Additionally, if you're a relatively small hominid group and a few antelope, caribou, river fish or steppe horses will sustain you very nicely per week, then there is no need to be stationary, collecting and eating seeds like some pussy ass bird. Follow the game and you'll eat just fine.

The first early agriculturalists were probably laughed at and viewed as inbred manlet weirdos by the more robust hunter-y nomadic cousins. The agriculturalists of course have had the last laugh, as this method paid off in the long run.