Unsolved Mysteries of History: The Questions Your Teacher Couldn’t Answer

I'm going to Gobekli Tepe tomorrow - a trip 30 years in the planning! I'm currently sitting in a hotel room in rainy Istanbul, watching videos about the site and bouncing with excitement. Can't wait to see it! Edit: Well, all I can say is it's worth the hype, and the 4 days travelling there and back. I've never seen anything like it, or felt the weight of time quite as strongly. It's magical. If anyone's interested in seeing it, I've uploaded a slideshow thingy to what is laughably called my "channel". I've never done it before, so please don't be too rude about it......

"Two cannibals walked into a restaurant in Prague...they asked for separate Czechs...."

Please do more videos like this! Historical mysteries are the best.

As of April 2024 there are also other settlements found in the area around Gobekli Tepe dated to the same time or older. These are more residential areas than Gobekli Tepe,

To answer your last point: Karahan Tepe, discovered right near by Göbekli seems to be from sround same period, or maybe even predate. It's a settlement carved directly into bedrock. Have a look at it. ;)

I do posts on Mesoamerica and consulting for History/Archeology channels: The Maya section has a lot of issues, and this has been a consistent issue with Simon's network of channels with Mesoamerican vids. Here, Teotihuacan is at 0:38 and 1:33 despite it very much not being a Maya city (though it did have some Maya artists and diplomats living in a specific part of the city, potentially), and to say the Maya "began" growing ~250AD is wrong: Kaminaljuyu and El Mirador were GIANT Maya cities from 400-100BC, while Aguada Fenix, Nakbe, etc were notable centers dating back to 1000-800BC. The biggest issues though with how the video talks about the Classic Maya Collapse. "The Entire civilization" did NOT suffer a "near complete political collapse" nor "the abandonment of nearly every major city" in the 9th century AD in the "Maya Collapse". The Classic collapse was just that, a collapse which marks the end of the Classic period. Simon does later walk those statements back by (correctly) noting that the Maya were still around at the arrival of the Spanish and millions of Maya people are around today, but this is still far overplaying the severity of the Classic Maya Collapse, which some researchers reject the label of entirely: it's really mostly only large cities in the Central and Southern Maya regions which decline: Medium and smaller sites were often fine, and the big cities in the Northern Maya regions actually GREW during/right after the period rather then decline: Chichen Itza is perhaps the most famous Maya city, yet it's heyday wasn't till centuries after the Classic Collapse. (The collapse was also a more gradual process then over 50 years like the video says, but that's a minor thing relatively speaking). The League of Mayapan, perhaps the largest Maya political network to ever form, was around primarily from ~1100 to the mid 1400s! Listing a Toltec invasion as a potential cause of the Collapse is also really incorrect. The Toltec, if they even existed, really only became a thing (~900 to 1100AD, give or take a century.) AFTER the end of Classic Maya Collapse. And as I alluded to, they may not have even really existed at all. Aztec accounts describe the Toltec as this great utopian civilization in their accounts, but these are clearly at least partly mythical, and while researchers used to believe that they were merely mythologized versions of a real grand historical empire, and pointed to similarities between Tula (a city in Central Mexico during the Early Postclassic period some accounts identified with the Toltec Tollan) and Chichen itza, alongside parts of the account like the Toltec lord Ce Acatl Topiltzin (associated with Quetzalcoatl) leaving to the east and Feathered Serpent cults being popular with the Itza Maya around the time as evidence for a Toltec conquest of the Yucatan, that is now mostly discredited. Tula, and almost certainly no other single Central Mexican city, did NOT have a massive empire spanning over all of Central Mexico and up into the Yucatan as shown at 4:19: Tula had a medium sized kingdom in Central Mexico, and while some researchers still believe there was some sort of direct connection between Tula and Chichen itza with trade or diplomacy, even that is suspect now and it's clear that a lot of the perceived connections and reading into the myths about the Toltecs don't hold up to scrutiny. "The Tula-Chichen-Tollan Connection" by Tlatollotl is a great writeup on this. And again, not only is the idea of a large conquering Toltec Empire itself not correct, again, the outdated idea of that still would have been AFTER the Classic Maya Collapse, not as a cause of it. I get that Simon's channels put out a ton of content on a regular basis and the team making them probably can't do a ton of research on every given thing, but almost every video touching on Mesoamerica has had both very basic (not as in small/minor, but as in "this should have been easy to catch, but it wasn't") and very large errors. I'm not sure what the production workflow is like, but I'd be down to help out potentially, or at least point you guys towards good resources and sources and maybe get you in touch with some researchers.

And NOW, Karahan Tepe... Pre agriculture Pre pottery Pre Pyramids Pre Stonehenge

0:40 - Chapter 1 - What happened to the maya ? 5:05 - Chapter 2 - What happened to alexander's tomb ? 8:05 - Chapter 3 - What caused the bronze age collapse 12:35 - Chapter 4 - Who build gobekli tepe ?

"You know -all that pyramid building and stuff -why are we doing that?" "Don't you know that? It's because... because... I have actually no idea at all." That was the beginning of the end of the Mayan Civilization.

6:23 ... And THAT my friends is why Elvis is still alive to this day!! Thank you .. Thank you very much!

There is actually a site older than gobekli teppe. The older site is called Boncuklu Tarla, and it is in the same part of turkey as gobekli teppe

Great content as always!

12,000 years ago our global sea level was about 400 ft lower. Any coastal cities that existed are under a lot of water. There were islands in the oceans and seas that are no longer visible.

There's a high chance we are missing alot of other structures of the same age or older as GT because they are under the sea, sea levels at that time were far lower than today and given the tendency even now to build along the coast theres a high chance they are hidding off shore

Never disappoints, another great video. A true inspiration to small history youtubers like myself

I love your channels. I always learn something new. Keep up the good work!

Fascinating! Thank you for this one. Hugs

In most cases if extreme change, its a combination of incidents and circumstances that create a bigger issue. There is a very real likelihood that a combination of war, drought, pests, disease, and social or religious beliefs could have combined to tear a civilization apart. They don't have to happen simotainiously. They can be consecutively. Drought or pestulance leading to war over resources, war leads to power struggles, famile opens the door to disease... see how one compounds or triggers the others?

Great video, I have both the MTT and AAT from that Era and never thought to compare the size. I am glad you did as it makes sense, however unfortunate that they are so small. Even more than the new wave of downsizing

great stuff