"The 3,000-year-old tombs of a wealthy clan, including the remains of warriors and warhorses that seem to have been sacrificed at their funerals, have been unearthed in an ancient capital city of China." Source: Live Science.
"The complex of 24 tombs was discovered at an archaeological site within the city of Anyang in Henan province, less than 2 miles (2.4 km) from the UNESCO World Heritage archaeological site of Yinxu at the city's center. The ruins there are from the ancient city of Yin, the capital of the Shang dynasty, which ruled between about 1600 B.C. to 1046 B.C. — the earliest dynasty ever recorded in China.
"The newfound tomb complex includes several pits that hold war chariots, the remains of horses that drew them and the remains of warriors. Some of the warriors were wearing hats decorated with strings of shells when they died, while the foreheads of some of the horses were decorated with gold veneer and a bronze backing, according to a statement [Chinese language only with lots of pictures] from the government's Xinhua news agency."
Note: There is evidence that ritual suicides and voluntary live burials were conducted at this and other Shang dynasty sites:
According to a Penn State study, "A sizable portion of the oracle bones uncovered in Shang archaeological sites contain script specifically concerning human sacrifice ...These written records are also corroborated by the discovery of numerous sacrificial mass-graves in those sites. In most Shang sacrificial rituals, only animals and valuable chattels (such as bronze wares) would be used as offerings. There were only two exceptional circumstances where human sacrifices were made: xunzang 殉葬 and renji 人祭. Xunzang 殉葬 (lit. 'burial sacrifice') refers to the practice in which personal slaves and servants of Shang king, upon their master’s death, were expected to commit ritual suicide or to 'volunteer' themselves to be buried alive alongside with their master. While the practice of committing ritual suicide upon the master’s death has lingered throughout Chinese history, the second type of human sacrifice, renji 人祭 (lit. 'human offering sacrifice') is practiced only during the Shang dynasty period, and also the most massive in scale in terms of number of people killed in a typical renji ceremony."
"A 4,300-year-old city, which has a massive step pyramid that is at least 230 feet (70 meters) high and spans 59 acres (24 hectares) at its base, has been excavated in China, archaeologists reported in the August issue of the journal Antiquity." Source: Live Science.(2018)
"The remains of numerous human sacrifices have been discovered at Shimao [the name given to the city]. 'In the outer gateway of the eastern gate on the outer rampart alone, six pits containing decapitated human heads have been found,' the archaeologists wrote."
"Before the introduction of the domestic horse in Mesopotamia, valuable equids were being harnessed to ceremonial or military four wheeled wagons and used as royal gifts, but their true nature remained unknown. According to a palaeogenetic study, these prestigious animals were the result of a cross between a domestic donkey and a wild ass from Syria, now extinct. This makes them the oldest example of an animal hybrid produced by humans." Source: Science Daily.
Comment: This theory is speculative, but the idea that Roman soldiers ended up in China isn't totally implausible. The general scenario of how it could have happened goes like this:
In 53 BC, the Roman politician and general Marcus Crassus (115-53 BC) was killed at the Battle of Carrhae when he led his army into a trap during his ill-advised invasion of Parthia, an empire which bordered on China:
This map shows the location of Parthia when it was part of the Median Empire around 600 BC. Parthia is in the upper part of the yellow region just to the right of the Caspian Sea.
Crassus' invasion of Parthia was a complete disaster:
"In a slaughter known as the battle of Carrhae the Romans lost nearly their entire army and Crassus was killed. [The story is that the Parthians captured Crassus, the richest man in Rome, and executed him by pouring molten gold down his throat.] The remaining 10,000 or so Roman legionaries were captured." Source: War History Online.
The Parthians apparently used their Roman prisoners as border guards along the eastern frontiers:
"The Parthians had a standard practice of employing captured soldiers as border guards. By transferring the 10,000 legionaries to the eastern borders they prevented any realistic chance of escape for the Romans who likely would have simply accepted their new lot in life. Record of the soldiers vanish for about 17 years when the battle of Zhizhi was fought as a Chinese army under Chen Tang assaulted a border town known today as Taraz, located in Kazakhstan near the border of Kyrgyzstan." (War History Online)
According to the story, some of these former Roman soldiers and Parthian border guards fought as mercenaries at the battle of Zhizhi. They were either captured or defected to the Chinese, who were impressed by their fighting abilities and -- like the Parthians -- stationed them in a border town to guard the frontier:
"Anywhere from 100 to 1,000 or more soldiers established themselves in this town that was known by the Chinese as Liqian/Li-Jien, which is pronounced as 'legion'." (War History Online) "...It seems these Romans lived peacefully in Liqian, and 2,000 years later we have DNA evidence that over 50% of the villagers in modern day Liqian have Caucasian ancestry including green and blue eyes, increased average height and other distinguishing characteristics such as distinctly Roman noses."
If this story is true, then these Roman soldiers who fought under Crassus at Carrhae (and their descendants) had an extremely wild and strange destiny, to say the least. But is the story true?
First of all, there's no doubt that the inhabitants of the region of Liqian, China, have some kind of European ancestry. According to Wikipedia, "The area of the former Liqian city is known for the distinctive physical appearance of its inhabitants. The population has higher frequencies of traits prevalent in Europe, such as aquiline noses, blonde or light-colored hair, blue or green eyes, and relatively fair skin tones."
Who were these Europeans and where did they come from? The idea that they were Roman soldiers or their descendants isn't all that farfetched, but it's still controversial:
"A hypothesis by the sinologist Homer H. Dubs, according to which Roman legionaries clashed with Han troops during the battle and were resettled afterwards in a Chinese village named Liqian, has been rejected by modern historians and geneticists on the grounds of a critical appraisal of the ancient sources and recent DNA testings of the village people. However, this hypothesis has been supported by prominent scholars like Lev Gumilev."
It's possible that the people of Liqian are descended from Caucasoid Indo-Europeans who were living in the region long before the Romans went to war with Parthia:
You can always trust the experts to mess up a good story, but I've got to admit that some of these Chinese do look like they have Roman ancestry. The people in Liqian are trying to use their supposed relationship with the Romans to boost their tourism industry and who can blame them? Whether the story is true or not is a different matter altogether.
"Much like modern humans, the Neanderthals roamed widely throughout Europe. We know because they left behind extensive evidence, usually bones or tools.
"But their cousins, the Denisovans, are more mysterious. Until recently, they were conclusively linked only to a single cave in southern Siberia, called Denisova Cave, between Kazakhstan and Mongolia. There, scientists had found a finger bone, three teeth, and a piece of skull, which tipped them off to the existence of a whole new lineage of ancient human.
"Now, scientists have uncovered more of the range of the Denisovans, says Diyendo Massilani of the Max Planck Institute in Germany. His team turned up evidence the ancient humans occupied a high-mountain cave on the Tibetan plateau, called Baishiya cave." Source: Scientific American (Dec. 2020).
According to the Siberian Times (2015), this piece of prehistoric jewelry "is intricately made with polished green stone and is thought to have adorned a very important woman or child on only special occasions. Yet this is no modern-day fashion accessory and is instead believed to be the oldest stone bracelet in the world, dating to as long ago as 40,000 years.
"Unearthed in the Altai region of Siberia in 2008, after detailed analysis Russian experts now accept its remarkable age as correct."
Hancock discusses this bracelet and other Denisovan artefacts starting at approximately 4:04.
"An international team, led by researchers from the Universities of Vienna and Tubingen, and the Max Planck Society, has identified five new human fossils from the key site of Denisova Cave in southern Siberia. The remains, which include three Denisovans and one Neanderthal, were found in a secure and well dated ~200,000-year-old context. Surrounded by archaeological remains such as stone tools and food refuse, the finds shed light on the adaptation strategies of these early hominins as they spread across Eurasia." (Archaeology News Network)
"Hunter-gatherers might have built the world's oldest known temple on a precise geometric plan, according to new findings." Source: Live Science (May, 2020).
"The Neolithic site, known as Göbekli Tepe, is perched atop a limestone mountain ridge in southeastern Turkey. The site's T-shaped pillars, which are carved with mystic drawings of animals, abstract symbols and human hands [next video], are arranged in giant circles and ovals — each structure is made up of two large central pillars surrounded by smaller inward-facing pillars."
In this study, researchers used a computer to analyze the layout of the site:
"They found that the two centermost pillars aligned exactly with the midpoint of the circular structures. What's more, when they drew an imaginary line connecting the centerpoints of three of the structures, they found that it made a nearly perfect equilateral triangle, or one with three equal-length sides.
"This suggests that these three structures were planned together in advance and built according to a 'geometric design,' [one researcher] said. Archaeologists believe that the hunter-gatherers must have excavated and moved the limestone rocks from a stone quarry nearby."
Video from 2011.
Comment: Gobekli Tepe is a very strange place. It dates back to the early Neolithic, before (or just at the beginning) of the rise of agriculture, the domestication of animals and presumably the first settled communities. The dating seems to be well established, but beyond that "all statements about the site must be considered preliminary, as less than 5% of the site has been excavated..." (Wikipedia) One way or another, the megalith isn't the kind of place you'd expect to find from that time period and it's still a mystery how it was constructed:
"The construction of Göbekli Tepe implies organization of an advanced order not hitherto associated with Paleolithic, PPNA, or PPNB societies ... Archaeologists estimate that up to 500 persons were required to extract the heavy pillars from local quarries and move them 100–500 meters (330–1,640 ft) to the site. The pillars weigh 10–20 metric tons ... with one still in the quarry weighing 50 tons."
It's hard to understand how primitive hunter-gatherers could have built a massive megalithic temple like this (if it was a temple). If that's what happened, it implies that the hunter-gatherer bands in the area were either much larger than commonly believed [1] or that several of them joined together for this particular project, something that would be pretty remarkable considering their generally nomadic lifestyle.
[1] "Hunter-gatherer groups tended to range in size from an extended family to a larger band of no more than about 100 people." (National Geographic)
Small nomadic groups following a subsistence lifestyle would presumably have been spread out over a large area. You'd think they wouldn't have had that much contact with each other, but if they came together to construct Gobekli Tepe that means that they must have had enough contact to visualize and join together in a common purpose requiring a huge amount of time and labor. On the other hand, if one particular group of hunter-gatherers was large enough to build the temple (if it is a temple) on their own, does it make sense to call them "hunter-gatherers" anymore? Whatever the case, it's hard to understand how they could have acquired the knowledge of stonework and heavy transportation techniques that would have been required to quarry, move, raise and carve these gigantic stones, not to mention the knowledge required to design the site in the first place.
The improbability of all this has naturally led to speculation that Gobekli Tepe was built by some lost civilization.
Normally I don't believe in the existence of lost, highly advanced (for the time) ancient civilizations, but Gobekli Tepe is so strange that it makes me wonder if something like what Graham Hancock is talking about in the above video might have actually happened.
Whatever the case, the existence of Gobekli Tepe proves without a doubt that something is wrong somewhere. Either the dating of the site is incorrect or the people who built it were a lot more advanced than we think, in which case our current picture of the early Neolithic, at least in this part of the world, is inaccurate. This one site could revolutionize our whole understanding of human development:
"Göbekli Tepe is regarded by some as an archaeological discovery of great 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'. If indeed the site was built by hunter-gatherers as some researchers believe then it would mean that the ability to erect monumental complexes was within the capacities of these sorts of groups, which would overturn previous assumptions. Some researchers believe that the construction of Göbekli Tepe may have contributed to the later development of urban civilization, or, as excavator Klaus Schmidt put it, 'First came the temple, then the city.'"
"Göbekli Tepe put a dent in the idea of the Neolithic revolution, which said that the invention of agriculture spurred humans to build settlements and develop civilisation, art and religion. There is no evidence of agriculture near the temple, hinting that religion came first in this instance."
Thought to have been built between 9500 and 9000 BC, Gobekli Tepe is one of the most enigmatic sites from the prehistoric world. It could have been an ancient observatory or a temple -- a center for a cult of the dead, perhaps -- but the truth is that no one really knows. It could have had some other purpose entirely:
"The assumption that the site was strictly cultic in purpose and not inhabited has been challenged as well 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.'" (Smithsonian Magazine (2008))
Apparently, there isn't any evidence that people lived at the site, either:
"...archaeologists have their theories — evidence, perhaps, of the irresistible human urge to explain the unexplainable. The surprising lack of evidence that people lived right there, researchers say, argues against its use as a settlement or even a place where, for instance, clan leaders gathered." (Smithsonian)
The theory that the positioning of some of Gobekli Tepe's pillars had astronomical significance seems plausible, but that still wouldn't explain the overall purpose of the site. The biggest mystery, though, is how this incredible site was built during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic when the inhabitants of the area (according to the conventional wisdom) were still hunter-gatherers just starting to make the transition to settled agriculture.
"The Great Wall of China — built over the course of two millennia to bolster China's northern frontier — is made of several overlapping walls that run parallel to each other. Collectively, they stretch over 13,000 miles (21,000 kilometers) — more than half the circumference of Earth. But did these extensive walls, with an average height of 25.6 feet (7.8 meters), actually protect China against the outside world?" Source: Live Science.
"The answer largely depends on how you define the wall's successes and failures. The Chinese built the wall as a masterpiece of defensive architecture, and while Chinese troops controlling these barriers certainly helped to thwart the attacks of some would-be invaders, the Great Wall was by no means impenetrable. In other words, sometimes it helped protect China, and other times it didn't."
Comment: Defensive walls have several weaknesses. They can be circumvented in some cases -- invaders can simply walk around them -- or they can be scaled or knocked down with various siege weapons. Ultimately, though, walls are only as good as the people who are guarding them. In the case of the Great Wall of China, the Ming Dynasty (for example) was defeated by the Manchus when a Ming general who had formed an alliance with the Manchus simply opened the gates and let the invaders in:
"Towards the end of the Ming, the Great Wall helped defend the empire against the Manchu invasions that began around 1600. Even after the loss of all of Liaodong, the Ming army held the heavily fortified Shanhai Pass, preventing the Manchus from conquering the Chinese heartland. The Manchus were finally able to cross the Great Wall in 1644, after Beijing had already fallen to Li Zicheng's rebels. Before this time, the Manchus had crossed the Great Wall multiple times to raid, but this time it was for conquest. The gates at Shanhai Pass were opened on May 25 by the commanding Ming general, Wu Sangui, who formed an alliance with the Manchus, hoping to use the Manchus to expel the rebels from Beijing. The Manchus quickly seized Beijing, and eventually defeated both the rebel-founded Shun dynasty and the remaining Ming resistance, establishing the Qing dynasty rule over all of China." (Wikipedia)