According to Martin Sweetman of the University of Edinburgh, the first calendar in history can be seen on the carved columns of one of the oldest known human structures, Gobekli Tepe. According to Sweetman, the columns commemorate a cosmic catastrophe that occurred 13,000 years ago.
Göbekli Tepe means “Potty Hill” in Turkish, which is a perfectly practical description. The site is an artificial hill 15 metres high on top of a mountain, concealing Neolithic buildings and sacred structures. The area was first investigated by archaeologists in 1963, but its true significance was recognised by Klaus Schmidt in 1994 – when German and Turkish specialists began excavating it. The site has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2018, as the oldest example of a sacred site built by humans.
According to carbon dating, it may have been built between 9,500 and 9,000 BC. The culture that flourished here created the first permanent settlements and erected distinctive T-shaped pillars, still living by hunting and gathering. Although no evidence of agriculture has been found, the processing of cultivated or wild-harvested grains was practiced. Ten thousand years ago, the site itself was a much wetter, more habitable and more fertile area than it is today.
Indiana and the Space Wolf
Columns of the earlier Neolithic civilization also appeared elsewhere in the region. Their T-shape sometimes represented a human figure, which was complemented by hands, a belt and a loincloth in the sculpture. On the other hand, the sculptures were richly covered with animals and abstract symbols. They depict snakes, boars, foxes, gazelles, mouflons, ducks and eagles. Among the figures, H-shaped motifs stand out, but also half-moon, circular, square and V-shaped motifs.
This richness opens the door wide for those who try to imagine the life of prehistoric man. Martin Sweetman is also such a person, his long-standing hobby is deciphering the symbols of Gobekli Tepe, and according to him, the pillars of the place, reminiscent of Stonehenge, but older, are related precisely to the sky and astronomical observations of that time.
While interpreting the decoration on one of the columns, Sweetman realized he was looking at a contemporary calendar. By counting the AV-shaped decorations, he got a lunar month of 30 days, 12 months from the squares below the decorations, and another 10 days from the new V-shaped shapes. With the eagle at the bottom of the figure, wearing a V-shaped shape on its neck and carrying the sun on its wings, the solstice, the 365-day year came about. The purpose of the calendar and the sacred space was to commemorate a natural disaster that had occurred not long ago, a catastrophe caused by the collision of pieces of a comet.
All of this would support the Dryas extinction hypothesis, according to which pieces of a comet hit the atmosphere over North America at the end of the last ice age, 12,900 years ago. The event caused the Gulf Stream to stop for a while, and the aerosols entering the air caused years of cooling, and the early human civilization that lived on the continent, the Clovis culture, also disappeared, along with a number of Ice Age animals.
The Dryas hypothesis is a highly contested hypothesis and is not well accepted in scientific circles, mainly because no traces of a previous impact have been found. Certainly a comet about 4 km across would match the consequences described.
Should have left a hole or drilled,
However, none of them have been found. On the other hand, the supposed event solved a great many problems: the extinction of the Ice Age animals, for example, may not have been necessary, and may have been caused by the deliberate burning of an underpopulated human population.
Although proponents of the Dryas hypothesis cite the extinction as an argument, it is unlikely to disprove or prove the theory per se, if one rejects that the sudden cooling at the end of the Ice Age killed off the Ice Age animals.
The strongest suggestion is that the comet exploded in the atmosphere, so instead of a crater, we can say that something like this could have happened based on indirect chemical signatures, such as the presence of platinum on the surface. Here, Martin Sweatman, who himself wrote a scientific paper on the chemical traces that could be found, as a supporter of the Dryas hypothesis, comes into the picture again. This may seem more scientific, as Sweatman is a physicist by training and teaches chemical engineering at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Technology (which also means that astronomy, anthropology or archaeology are not his area of expertise).
Of course, not everyone agrees with Sweatman’s ideas. Jens Notrow, who worked on the archaeological excavation at Gobekli Tepe, stressed in a social media post that the carved designs don’t necessarily have a deeper meaning.
There's this obsession that there must be some secret, some hidden code that can be deciphered – when only people from the past lived their lives.
He said.
If there is hidden knowledge, it is hidden deep in the ground at the moment: only a little over 5 percent of Göbekli Tepe has been excavated so far.
(Alert you!, New York Times, Popular Mechanics)
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