If we're going to argue that the Mahabharata is an account of nuclear war, we need to remember that it's extremely similar to the Irish Cattle Raid of Cooley. It's not an account of ancient Indian greatness; it's an account of the death of a previous civilization, which Proto-Indo-European-speaking peoples witnessed from the periphery, recording it in forms that became the garbled accounts surviving in India and Ireland.

We're not... comparing? We're trying to put every event in history into a context, to understand and track humanity's slow trajectory. This isn't about India vs. West (and you're getting downvoted because you're putting it in that context). This is about our earliest roots.

For reference, Mahabharata is closer in history to the iPhone, than it is to building of Gobekli Tepe. https://www.quora.com/How-old-are-the-Mahabharata-and-Ramaya...

Could be a great start for a Civilization game cheat/conspiracy theory edition with secret techs like neolithic atomic bomb or ancient aliens spacecrafts

What would you measure it against?

You wouldn't happen to be a fan of Stanislaw Szukalski, by any chance?

"known to have practiced and even have written transcripts of things"

While I agree with your disdain of the overly western attitude that "civilization" didn't arise until agriculture and other myopic views, I also think you should not be so quick to use their myopia to justify your own, and in that sense, I think your use of the word known is too strong.

I think language and writing are a particularly strong indicator of "civilization", whatever the various definition. Now, the problem with the gathas you refer to is that they are supposedly the written version of an oral tradition that is much older, but like the hebrew torah, the veracity of how old that spoken tradition really is, is very much hard to verify and dubious. It is known that many of the spoken word traditions often claim to be older than they really are, for various reasons. The old avestan, which the first gathas were written in, only date to not much before 1000 BC. That doesn't inherently mean the claims of being more ancient are wrong, but it's something to take into consideration, and to be fair, indus-script, the proto-writing in the indus valley (including the proto-elamite) have been dated to ~3500 BC.

The point is that I have heard these types of claims, mostly from Indians, that the veda's, etc, are simply the written traditions of 12k+ year old oral traditions, and I find such claims to not be backed up by evidence and are often used as some sort of national pride instead of based on the science. So be careful about wanting to have a claim to the oldest writing which offers some great insight into the ancient world when that isn't verified or verifiable.

Because if you wanted to go there, the oldest proto-writings aren't from the indus valley civilization (including the only ~3000 BC sumerian/egyption), but from 7000 BC China, 6000 BC Central/SouthEastern Europe, and 6000 BC Greece, in the Jiahu, Vinca, and Dispillo respectively.

So, to summarize, I am just as skeptical of stories about indus valley vedas actually knowing about nuclear war as I am about cannanite stories about the time of the angels who mated with man to produce giants (which they mostly stole from the sumerians anyway).

Now, if you just want to talk about erected structural dating, thats a different discussion, which is still why Gobleke Tepe is so unique, because imagine that if the oldest proto-writing is in China around 7000 years ago, Tepe was built roughly twice as long ago as that (14000 BC)!

That's why I really like the research on Gobleke Tepe. I have yet to see any really good sources on any older human structures than that.

Now, my personal and unverifiable conjecture is that Gobleke Tepe was a temple, but not the kind imagined, and instead was a temple of death or temple of the underworld, but how I came to that conclusion is a story for another time.