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Göbekli Tepe: Temples From 10,000 B.C.

wheels rotate - the same surface irregularities happen in a repeat pattern. Runners slide - the pattern doesn't repeat in the same way.

But, unless the same wheel, with the same irregularities, started the same journey from the same spot every time, the grooves would still wear down in a fairly consistent manner along their entire length.
We know the "chariot grooves" at Pompeii were worn down by wheeled transport but they still bear something of a resemblance (albeit nowhere near as old) to the grooves across Malta.
 
But, unless the same wheel, with the same irregularities, started the same journey from the same spot every time, the grooves would still wear down in a fairly consistent manner along their entire length.
We know the "chariot grooves" at Pompeii were worn down by wheeled transport but they still bear something of a resemblance (albeit nowhere near as old) to the grooves across Malta.

To answer my own question, I did some digging and this evidently knowledgeable site claims that evidence for transport methods during the construction of Göbekli Tepe have not (yet) been found, but they suspect wooden sledges.

https://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-te...-making-and-moving-monoliths-at-gobekli-tepe/
 
But, unless the same wheel, with the same irregularities, started the same journey from the same spot every time, the grooves would still wear down in a fairly consistent manner along their entire length.

heuristic rather than 100% :)
 
To answer my own question, I did some digging and this evidently knowledgeable site claims that evidence for transport methods during the construction of Göbekli Tepe have not (yet) been found, but they suspect wooden sledges.

https://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-te...-making-and-moving-monoliths-at-gobekli-tepe/
fascinating stuff. when i suggested sleds i was just idly wondering. thinking if i was in a world with no wheels, then 2 poles and a stretched skin would be a way to move heavy or bulky things.

but of course these are much much heavier. at least 10 tons. but whats interesting from your link is they didn't move them far. the quarry was so close that the furthest they had to go was half a kilometre.
 
Have to wonder about the relation of the abandoning of the site in relation to the time frame of domestication and agriculture.
Sure it wasn't a fast switch, but there does seem to be a link between the two.
 
Wikipedia gives the location as Slovenia:

sorry - I thought you were referring to Vinca Wheel from Serbia (you did mention Vinca culture and this is located in Serbia)

http://culture.serbia.travel/

1556111677326.png
 
Just been browsing some of the remarkable animal carvings at Göbekli Tepe. The majority are readily recognisable creatures - big cat, ox, vulture, boar, fox, scorpion, etc.
What could these two be though?
 

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eeeek!

maybe crocodile/alligator - is komodo dragon a possibility? And something dog or catlike.... so wolf or jaguar?
 
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eeeek!

maybe crocodile/alligator - is komodo dragon a possibility? And something dog or catlike.... so wolf or jaguar?

Certainly the teeth identify both as probable carnivorous predators, but the jaws are too short to be a crocodilian. A Komodo Dragon would be a long way from home! The first creature, in that wonderful raised relief, has an almost bear-like head, but the substantial tail rules out an ursine.
 
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I think they are both varieties of eeeeek!

Unless they kept them as pets and could study them at leisure, while they posed, I'm guessing that very scared people ran gibbering and traumatized to the sculptor who tried to produce identikit 3D versions of the eeeeks, which are also known as screaming habdabs! :willy:
 
Just been browsing some of the remarkable animal carvings at Göbekli Tepe. The majority are readily recognisable creatures - big cat, ox, vulture, boar, fox, scorpion, etc.
What could these two be though?
Lizard. Leopard.
 
Just been browsing some of the remarkable animal carvings at Göbekli Tepe. The majority are readily recognisable creatures - big cat, ox, vulture, boar, fox, scorpion, etc.
What could these two be though?

i instantly thought 'oh its a...' but what? it looks so much like something obvious yet isn't. huh.

those canine teeth look very much like an, um, canine or a big cat. or a dinosaur, obviously.
 
Turkish Government Funds Documentary Claiming Göbekli Tepe Was Built by Abraham’s Father and Destroyed by Abraham
1/10/2017

Remember how fringe writers including Andrew Collins and Graham Hancock have heavily implied that the ancient Turkish site of Göbekli Tepe had been constructed by a lost civilization related to or identical with the Nephilim and/or Atlantis? Well, it turns out that the Turkish government has done them one better by funding a documentary that claims the ancient temple site to be the work of the patriarch Abraham’s idol-worshiping father Telah, according to an account from the Turkish Hürriyet Daily News newspaper, the country’s oldest and most respected English-language news source.

Göbekli Tepe dates back at least 12,000 years, which would, by most religious chronologies, make it far too old be associated with Abraham, who is usually placed around 1800 BCE. Of course, if you are a religious fundamentalist, you probably don’t accept modern dating techniques.

The documentary was produced and funded by the Diyarbakir provincial governor’s office, the Turkish Development Ministry, and the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation, the nation’s public broadcaster.

According to a translation produced by Hürriyet Daily News, the narrator of the program describes the site and says the following: “Who can tell us that it was not Aser [Terah], father of Prophet Abraham, who built the statues in Göbeklitepe? Or can we claim that the temple where the idols that Prophet Abraham broke was not Göbeklitepe?” The documentary identified one broken pillar, featuring a sculpture of a fox, as the specific idol broken by the hand of Abraham himself.

The claim refers back to an Islamic tale, found in the Qur’an (21:51-71), and based on earlier Jewish folklore that Abraham’s father made idols which the young patriarch smashed in his zeal for monotheism. In the Qur’anic account, Abraham has a conflict with the people of Ur, in which they vouch for the efficacy of their idols. To prove them wrong, “in the people’s absence he went into the temple where the idols stood, and he brake them all in pieces, except the biggest of them; that they might lay the blame upon that” (21:58, trans. George Sale). The people of Ur then try to burn Abraham alive for his desecration, but God saves him from the flames. ...

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/t...t-by-abrahams-father-and-destroyed-by-abraham

More on Andrew Collins.

Meanwhile, I thought I would briefly discuss Andrew Collins’s Facebook postings from last week in which he claimed that Turkey was out to get him. If you subscribe to my weekly newsletter, I briefly mentioned it there, but it’s worth repeating for everyone. Collins says that his book From the Ashes of Angels was banned in Turkey and that he has himself been kicked out of Göbekli Tepe because of his controversial views about the site. No, not that it’s some sort of Nephilim-Denisovan afterlife computer. At first he said it was because he refuses to accept the Turkish line that Göbekli Tepe is the temple of idols that Abraham destroyed in the Qur’an, a claim that some Islamists in Turkey have been promoting with help from the Turkish government, as I reported years ago. (While Turkey’s media has promoted the claim, the government has done nothing to suppress actual archaeological research about the site’s history.)

Collins posted a YouTube video about the issue.


http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/andrew-collins-is-having-trouble-in-turkey#
 
Provocative article in today's Quora arguing that the Göbekli Tepe culture represents not only the earliest known example of an organised and peaceful society, but possibly the earliest written language (some 20 symbols are carved into the pillars), earliest use of advanced tools, earliest plant domestication and irrigation, earliest use of sleds for construction and possibly even the wheel and the earliest production of beer and bread.

https://www.quora.com/How-does-the-Göbekli-Tepe-find-change-our-view-of-human-history
 
Just been browsing some of the remarkable animal carvings at Göbekli Tepe. The majority are readily recognisable creatures - big cat, ox, vulture, boar, fox, scorpion, etc.
What could these two be though?

The 2nd one is a T-Rex or something similar
 
More on Andrew Collins.
(While Turkey’s media has promoted the claim, the government has done nothing to suppress actual archaeological research about the site’s history.)
This is very nice, butting religious - political beliefs aside and getting on with the science of the dig. Good point Ramon.
 
Just been browsing some of the remarkable animal carvings at Göbekli Tepe. The majority are readily recognisable creatures - big cat, ox, vulture, boar, fox, scorpion, etc.
What could these two be though?
The first is a crocodile and the second a saber-toothed cat.
The crocodile is most curious as these were obviously very non-local. That may explain the stylised oddness of the form. It also raises the possibility of visitation from or journeys to points far south. Transmission of the image raises all sorts of questions for all sorts of researchers.

For topical insights, I recommend reading Gordon White's Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits, which front-and-centres on the paradigm-busting quality of GT. White claims, rightly IMO, that GT is the most important arch. site on earth. It changes everything.

________________________________________________________________________
Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits
by Gordon White (Goodreads Author)
Rating 4.51/5
Rating details · 212 ratings · 37 reviews

A defining text of the new magical renaissance, Star.Ships addresses the question of who we are now by tracing where we come from, and by drawing out the stories and the spirits that have journeyed and evolved with us. The goal is, as Gordon writes, the restoration of context.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29214334-star-ships

A good review
 
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There's a TV-show called The Gift which appears to be about Göbekli Tepe.
 
The first is a crocodile and the second a saber-toothed cat.
The crocodile is most curious as these were obviously very non-local.

Skinny in ancient times the Nile crocodile had a more extensive range and were common in the nile delta where it meets the Mediterranean Sea. So I could see where they either ran across them during longer hunting excursions or weren't to far away from peoples who did. I see a resemblance to a crocodile as well.
 
Claims of hidden geometry and secret symbols.

Israeli researcher Gil Haklay and his Ph.D. advisor Avi Gopher from Tel Aviv University proposed that three circular enclosures at Göbekli Tepe had to have been planned and constructed at the same time because they form an equilateral triangle, which in turn had important social symbolic functions. Previously, most assumed that the temples were built in succession and buried as a new one was built.

The triangle being one of the simplest geometric shapes, I’m not sure that this is entirely true, or that it is quite so amazing as the original journal article implies. According to a map in the article, the claim derives from plotting presumed center points for the irregular circles and then connecting the dots to make a triangle. The authors argue that it is statistically unlikely that the center points could form an equilateral triangle by coincidence.

As we might imagine, you could equally well make the same shape years or centuries apart by using the center of the mound made from covering up the old temples, so the conclusion doesn’t necessarily follow from the evidence. The original authors used an algorithm to determine the mathematically most likely center point, but the irregular shape of the enclosures, which were remodeled several times, makes it rather unlikely that the people who erected them would have identified that exact spot, accurate to a centimeter, or found it again when they went to build the next circle. There is also the obvious question of why they would make an equilateral triangle accurate to a few centimeters but not bother to make the enclosures truly circular (in theory, easier than making a triangle), etc. ...

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/i...geometry-and-secret-symbolism-at-gobekli-tepe
 
Israeli researcher Gil Haklay and his Ph.D. advisor Avi Gopher from Tel Aviv University proposed that three circular enclosures at Göbekli Tepe had to have been planned and constructed at the same time because they form an equilateral triangle, which in turn had important social symbolic functions.
I hate to say it but this doesn't follow. Just because you start with an equilateral triangle doesn't mean that all three circles need to be raised at the same time, provided you keep the markers in place.
 
Not too sure on the triangle idea as you can take any three points and join them and get a triangle (of course not necessarily an equilateral one).
 
Claims of hidden geometry and secret symbols. ...

Here are the bibliographic particulars and abstract from the actual published research article:

Cambridge Archaeological Journal
Volume 30, Issue 2 May 2020 , pp. 343-357
Geometry and Architectural Planning at Göbekli Tepe, Turkey
Gil Haklay (a1) and Avi Gopher (a2)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774319000660

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 January 2020

Abstract
The site of Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey keeps fascinating archaeologists as it is being exposed. The excavation since 1995 has been accompanied by a lively discussion about the meaning and implications of its remarkable early Neolithic megalithic architecture, unprecedented in its monumentality, complexity and symbolic content. The building history and the chronological relations between the different structures (enclosures), however, remain in many ways a challenge and open to further analysis. The study presented here is an attempt to contribute in this direction by applying a preliminary architectural formal analysis in order to reconstruct aspects of the architectural design processes involved in the construction of the monumental enclosures. This is done under the premise that such investigation would shed light on the chaîne opératoire of the enclosures' construction and their history, thus enabling a fresh look as well as an evaluation of past suggestions regarding these structures and the people who built them. Indeed, the results of the analysis brought to light an underlying geometric pattern which offers a new understanding of the assemblage of architectural remains indicating that three of the stone-built large enclosures were planned and initially built as a single project.

SOURCE: https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour...-tepe-turkey/2CBAF416E33AFE6496B73710A2F42FF9
 
This SciTech Daily article provides some more context and details on the research.
Mysteriously Complex Geometric Architecture Discovered in Neolithic Temple – Built 6,000 Years Before Stonehenge

Hunter-gatherers built colossal Göbekli Tepe 11,500 years ago in today’s Turkey as a single structure of ritual significance, say Tel Aviv University researchers. ...

Researchers at Tel Aviv University and the Israel Antiquities Authority have now used architectural analysis to discover that geometry informed the layout of Göbekli Tepe’s impressive round stone structures and enormous assembly of limestone pillars, which they say were initially planned as a single structure.

Three of the Göbekli Tepe’s monumental round structures, the largest of which are 20 meters in diameter, were initially planned as a single project, according to researchers Gil Haklay of the Israel Antiquities Authority, a PhD candidate at Tel Aviv University, and Prof. Avi Gopher of TAU’s Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations. They used a computer algorithm to trace aspects of the architectural design processes involved in the construction of these enclosures in this early Neolithic site. ...

“Göbekli Tepe is an archaeological wonder,” Prof. Gopher explains. “Built by Neolithic communities 11,500 to 11,000 years ago, it features enormous, round stone structures and monumental stone pillars up to 5.5 meters high. Since there is no evidence of farming or animal domestication at the time, the site is believed to have been built by hunter-gatherers. However, its architectural complexity is highly unusual for them.” ...

FULL STORY: https://scitechdaily.com/mysterious...ic-temple-built-6000-years-before-stonehenge/
 
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