The Claim
There’s a 12000 years old settlement in Turkey that shouldn’t be there
Göbekli Tepe is the name given to this settlement, which means potbelly hill in Turkey, but its true name along with its purpose and how it got here in the first place remains unknown.
Finding an ancient site of some kind in Turkey really isn’t that unusual, as the country is covered in temples and castles and ruined settlements long forgotten by any document or person, so why is Göbekli Tepe so special.
The strangest thing about Göbekli Tepe is that it has been dated to be as old as 12000 years. For some comparison the great pyramid of Giza was built between 2550-2580 BC, making Göbekli Tepe almost 10,000 years older.
During this time in the region people were in the Pre-pottery Neolithic A period and thought to consist of hunter – gatherer tribes. The name suggests how advanced they were at the time, Pre-pottery means they didn’t even have a clay bowl, so how could they build a huge complex with dozens of 20 foot tall stone columns weighing up to 10 tons each?
The site itself is very impressive, even for something built much more recently. It consists of over 200 stone pillars arranged into around 20 circles, forming out what appear to be for religious areas. The column’s were fitted into sockets which were somehow drilled out of the solid bedrock and fit into place, an impressive result for people who didn’t even know how to use clay.
The site appears to have been used heavily during the Pre-pottery Neolithic A stage, which merged into the Pre-pottery Neolithic B era around 9000BC. It appears to have been constructed in 2 stages by people in the 2 different time periods. The “A” group were the ones who built the 10 tons pillars in the numerous circles, and group “B” built many more columned rooms, but this time in a rectangle shape with smaller pillars and well polished limestone floors.
After around 8000 BC the site appears to have been purposely buried in sand and forgotten until it was discovered in 1994. The entire mound that Göbekli Tepe’s hidden in seems to have been built entirely by hand. It ranges 980 feet wide and 49 feet high, which is a huge amount of effort to go through to hide such an impressive structure.
So how did they build it?
This is the main question, how could a group of people who had nothing more than flint and stone tools manage to build something so big and so well made, that included individual pieces of stone that weighed more than they could possibly lift?
For a little stone moving comparison, Stonehenge in England used stones that weighed up to 25 tons, but construction on that didn’t start until around the year 3000 BC, which is still 7000 years after Göbekli Tepe was built, and its believed it took over 1000 years to finish Stonehenge.
One of the explanations for how they moved the stone was that it does appear to be from local sources, with most estimates putting the original location of the stones used between 200 and 500 meters away. After carving them they could have placed a path of wet logs and built a sled to drag them along, using many people to help pull and push it into place, but its the carving in the first place that would be almost impossible.
The people who made Göbekli Tepe only had stone tools, meaning no metal of any kind and probably the most basic of rope. During the bronze age ancient Egyptians used to pour a line of sand over a piece of stone, then repeatedly drag a copper or bronze saw over it while adding more sand, eventually it would grind its way through. The saws would have to be replaced almost constantly, but after a long enough period it would produce a straight cut. They also used copper chisels and hammers, which again weren’t easy to use or efficient, but they worked.
Göbekli Tepe is thousands of years older than the ancient Egyptians and if they could only just do it with their basic metals, how was this settlement built without the builders even knowing what metal was?
So far no one has come up with a rational explanation as to how it got here, or who built it, or any real information on it for that matter. So far the site has only had a small portion of it unearthed, with many more layers to excavate and find more questions that probably wont ever be answered.
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