12,900 years ago something happened to the Earth that we call The Younger Dryas. I don’t know why that name, go look it up if it matters. The Earth was just starting to come out of over 100,000 years of Ice Age when it happened and a severe cooling trend took over that cooled the Earth down again for about 1300 years. It may have been caused by meteors, a continent-wide forest fire, no one knows. There’s theories and evidence for all of it.
Shortly after the calamity struck the planet, the large town/small city (they’re still digging with a long way to go) was built. The discovery of Gobekli Tepi, in Turkey, has proven that there was an advanced civilization in that part of the world, 12,000 years ago. That this town was a town, people lived in homes and practiced advanced farming techniques. There is also the fact, now known, that Gobekli Tepi was an end product. It was the remnants of a civilization that died there, not something new, but something very old.
Until Gobeki Tepi it was believed that humans didn’t know how to shape rock into pillars or farm cattle. Or farm anything. Or make clay pottery. Our genius anthropologists thought all humans were hunter-gatherers, scrabbling for food off the land and didn’t start figuring out how to do all that until about 6000 years later. This is why they so vehemently deny that the Pyramids are at least 12,000 years old in spite of all the evidence that they’re that old or older.
When the Younger Dryas period ended 11,600 years ago it was because the cyclical warming period that normally occurs between ice ages overcame the cold, the Earth kept getting warmer, the ice began melting rapidly and sea level, which was about 200 feet lower than now, rose rapidly, flooding all the towns and cities, if there were any, that would have existed along the coasts.
The existence of Gobekli Tepi isn’t proof that there were cities on those coasts but it presents a very good argument for the possibility and why this town or city was built on a mountain, up high. As the civilizations below were drowned, no one could have known how high the water would rise.
100,000 years of Ice Age followed by a rapid 200 foot rise in the ocean, that wipes out every single human coastal habitation on the planet, just can’t be very good for maintaining any sort of recorded human history. That we have a history is proven by the fact that we’re still here. It may prove to be a joke played on us all that because we find caves with 30,000 year old artwork on the walls, we think humans were all cavemen at that time, when the truth may be that they weren’t representative of humanity at all. It may be that on those submerged coasts was where the real action was before the floods came.
It’s fun to speculate and someday some remotely guided camera swimming around with it’s headlight on down there may spot a statue or a stone pillar and the historians will start writing new chapters.