Gobekli Tepe now has to take a back seat to Boncuklu Tarla, another ancient settlement discovered in Turkey recently. Gobekli Tepe has been dated at between 11,000 and 12,000 years old, and has very sophisticated stonework and carvings. Boncuklu Tarla is dated at least 1000 years older and also has some pretty sophisticated stonework and carvings, along with thousands of beads found so far and carved medallions or pendants.
The largest buildings found at ancient sites are always called “temples”, as if that’s the only reason to have a large building. What about the home of the king? How about a community rec center? You think those people didn’t dance, play games, tell stories, have meetings, music and entertainment? It always has to be some pagan religion? Archaeologists have really limited imaginations. “Moreover, evidence suggests that the dead were buried under the floors of houses, possibly reflecting ancestral worship.” OR suggesting that they wanted to keep the memory of a loved one part of the home, OR suggesting that it was the safest place to bury the dead because of the constant presence of predators that would dig them up, OR because someone was important in life and having them under your floor was a status symbol. You can bet that these in-home burials were rare, and the bodies planted deep. Think of the odor and sanitation. These people weren’t technological but they weren’t stupid, either. I bet that the bodies were allowed to set out until they were reduced to bones before burial.
What’s really interesting to me about these discoveries is that they’re starting to push back to the time before the end of the last Ice Age. When this place was being built, it was just beginning to warm back up a little in Turkey, the glaciers were just starting to melt away and this area would have been just marginally habitable. It’s located beside a river and must have been forested back then, there would have been fish and plenty of game animals, but no reason to live there that I can see other than pressure from behind. This is a permanent settlement, not some hunter-gatherer camp, so there must have been other people and other settlements back the way they came. This place is way inland, too, further back from the ocean than Gobekli Tepe.
So as the climate warmed, they moved farther west. I’m betting that there are even older settlements to be found, east of this one. Maybe some day I’ll find out I was right.
I’ve long speculated that there were a good number of isolated civilizations during the Ice Age, some of them very primitive and some of them very creative and advanced. Discoveries have been made of objects of extreme age created with technology we can’t duplicate today.
