9500 year old obsidian bracelet shows exceptional craft skills

Past Horizons ^ | Tuesday, December 27, 2011 | LTDS press release

[SunkenCiv]

Researchers have analysed the oldest obsidian bracelet ever identified, discovered in the 1990s at the site of Asikli Höyük, Turkey.

A high level of technical expertise

Using high-tech methods developed by LTDS to study the bracelet's surface and micro-topographic features, the researchers have revealed the astounding technical expertise of craftsmen in the eighth millennium BCE.

Their skills were highly sophisticated for this period in late prehistory, and on a par with today's polishing techniques. This work is published in the December 2011 issue of Journal of Archaeological Science, and sheds new light on Neolithic societies.

Dated to 7500 BCE, the obsidian bracelet studied by the researchers is unique. it is the earliest evidence of this kind of obsidian working, which only reached its peak in the seventh and sixth millennia BC with the production of all kinds of ornamental objects, including mirrors and vessels. it has a complex shape and a remarkable central annular ridge, and measures 10 cm in diameter and 3.3 cm wide.

Discovered in 1995 at the exceptional site of Asikli Höyük in Turkey and displayed ever since at the Aksaray Archaeological Museum, the bracelet was studied in 2009, after Mihriban özbasaran, Professor at the University of istanbul's Department of Prehistory, resumed excavations at the site.

[mylife]

One would think so

[SunkenCiv]

There's plenty of room on the calendar for the equivalent of our civilization to have come and gone a bunch of times, and as you said, glaciers would do a job on anything humans can build. And any small artifacts ("out-of-place" or OOPs) found would be (are?) dismissed out of hand.

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Plato Prehistorian: 10,000 to 5000 B.C. Myth, Religion, Archaeology by Mary Settegast paperback

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[mylife]

Anybody could do it! LOL!

LOL!!

[MaxMax]

Biometric coded key? They should release a MRI and a full 3d image.

[SunkenCiv]

In her Plato Prehistorian: 10,000 to 5000 B.C. Myth, Religion, Archaeology, Mary Settegast reproduces a table which shows four runic character sets; a is Upper Paleolithic (found among the cave paintings), b is Indus Valley script, c is Greek (western branch), and d is the Scandinavian runic alphabet.

[Explorer89]

I am of the mind that whatever was built was (as GraceG said) was clustered around the rivers and sea shores, and subsequently inundated. Witness the Chesapeake Bay, which is actually the Susquehanna River basin.....flooded. Right before the river enters the bay, it cuts through a gorge (part of which is flooded behind the Conowingo Dam). There is a sign along one of the trails that says that the gorge was cut by the meltwaters from the glaciers. It must have been fantastic, as the sides of the gorge are granite.

[SunkenCiv]

They were just way ahead of their time. Y’know, whomever they were. :’)

[SunkenCiv]

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The Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age by Richard Rudgley

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[Explorer89]

Meh, can’t find an e-book of it! Rats.

[mylife]

I fixed a multi million dollar surveillance system using a piece of chipped obsidian to splice a cable.

I’m kind of a jerk that way.

[mosesdapoet]

Did you happen to read, “Fingerprints of the Gods” by Graham Hitchcock? The whole book is about the possibility of civilizations existing before what is commonly accepted. He went off the rails when he asserted that they had been concentrated on Antartica,

I happen to agree with that assumption. Where what we call Antartica before the tectonic plate separations existed is in a temprate/ tropic hospitable area for habitation for eons than what it was today. Many of the finds that have been discovered in Africa are in a region which was connected to that land mass.

Where and when that possibility of a prior suggestion of a civilization can only be reinforced is when there are more finds on the periphery of land masses prior to that massive upheaval on previous pieces of that super continent. The point being we should keep an open mind on discovery

[sten]

Their skills were highly sophisticated for this period in late prehistory, and on a par with today's polishing techniques.

OR.... it means today's polishing techniques suck

[Explorer89]

Ok, I had to dog out my book to recall just what about the Antarctica theory made me roll my eyes. Hitchcock had been proposing some dramatic continental displacement of Antarctica almost instantaneously. (last year’s Japanese earthquake did move Japan by a couple of meters.)

I am willing to accept that something may have gone on in Antarctica, but I do not know where it fit in Pangea, or what its state was during the Ice Age. My gut feel is that modern humans do date to within a couple hundred thousand years, so the continents would have generally been where they are now.

Hitchcock starts the book describing old Venetian maps that show Antarctica’s coastline......without ice, and the maps are generally correct, as modern technology can map the coastline without the ice covering. The hypothesis was that at some point, Antarctica was without the ice, and those sections of maps were copied and recopied through long stretches of time. Definitely one of those things that makes you go hmmmmmmmm.

[BIGLOOK]

.....and then some early Neolithic kid got hold of mom’s bracelet, played around with it and invented the wheel.

[SunkenCiv]

:’) The old way is sometimes the best.

[SunkenCiv]

:’)

[steveab]

This may be of interest to some:
‘I found two independent researchers, a geologist and a machine tool manufacturer, to see what the stone artifacts could tell us, and what the marks left behind by precision machine tools looked like.’

‘Ivan Watkins is a Professor of Geology, Department of Earth Sciences, at St. Cloud University in St. Cloud, Minnesota. He is investigating the finished surface of Inca stonemasonry. He says the surface of stone, at the microscopic level, indicates how it was, or wasn’t, worked. “And you can rule out the standard issue explanations when it comes to ancient Inca stonemasonry, which is very similar to that of Egypt,” he says.’

‘Now let me introduce you to our guest who reads the signature of precision machine tools, even when he sees them in places that just ‘can’t be,’ according to Egyptologists. And read them he did, from core drills more efficient that our diamond bits today, to “space- age precision” planing, to intersecting lathe marks.’

http://www.lauralee.com/articles/stonecut.htm

Check it out

[Tainan]

Ancient alien technology made it possible.
I think I learned that from the history channel.

Dale...is that you?

[Fresh Wind]

Obsidian was great for arrow and spear points, too.

[6SJ7]

Much of the evidence of human civs before 12,000 BC could be laying under the mud and sediment of river deltas that are now hundreds of feet under ocean waters.

Like the recently unearthed ruins at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey; dated to about 12,000 B.C, these sites are likely just the tip of the iceberg of past civilizations. Fascinating stuff.