Pillars on the archaeological website of Gobekli Tepe in Sanliurfa, Turkey, are seen in Could 2022. Situated on a rocky hill in southeastern Turkey, overlooking the plateau of historic Mesopotamia, Gobekli Tepe, is the world’s first identified sanctuary and should have housed the world’s oldest photo voltaic calendar.
Ozan Kose/AFP through Getty Pictures
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Ozan Kose/AFP through Getty Pictures
Pillars on the archaeological website of Gobekli Tepe in Sanliurfa, Turkey, are seen in Could 2022. Situated on a rocky hill in southeastern Turkey, overlooking the plateau of historic Mesopotamia, Gobekli Tepe, is the world’s first identified sanctuary and should have housed the world’s oldest photo voltaic calendar.
Ozan Kose/AFP through Getty Pictures
cover caption
toggle caption
Ozan Kose/AFP through Getty Pictures
At first look, the V-shaped symbols carved onto the pillars at Gobekli Tepe — an archaeological website in southern Turkey — don’t appear to be a lot in comparison with the adjoining animal shapes depicting the cycles of the solar and the moon.
However in accordance with researchers, the markings might be proof of two massive findings: The traditional pillar might be the world’s oldest lunisolar calendar, and it might function a memorial to a comet strike that hit Earth roughly 13,000 years in the past and triggered a mini ice age.
“It appears the inhabitants of Gobekli Tepe were keen observers of the sky, which is to be expected given their world had been devastated by a comet strike,” mentioned Martin Sweatman, a scientist on the College of Edinburgh who led the analysis workforce that got here up with the latest discovery.
The findings, printed final month in Time & Thoughts, recommend {that a} sequence of V-shaped symbols carved onto the pillars at Gobekli Tepe every represents a single day. When added up, they appear to report the date a swarm of comet fragments hit earth in 10,850 BC, triggering a 1,200-year ice age that led to the extinction of many giant animals, together with mammoths, steppe bison and different giant Pleistocene mammals.
“This event might have triggered civilization by initiating a new religion and by motivating developments in agriculture to cope with the cold climate,” Sweatman mentioned.
The doable comet strikehas lengthy been a supply of fascination — and disagreement — between scientists. If the V-symbol speculation is appropriate, it may present groundbreaking help for the speculation.
“Possibly, their attempts to record what they saw are the first steps towards the development of writing millennia later,” he mentioned.
