Pillars on the archaeological web site of Gobekli Tepe in Sanliurfa, Turkey, are seen in Might 2022. Positioned on a rocky hill in southeastern Turkey, overlooking the plateau of historical Mesopotamia, Gobekli Tepe, is the world’s first recognized sanctuary and should have housed the world’s oldest photo voltaic calendar.
Ozan Kose/AFP by way of Getty Photos
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Ozan Kose/AFP by way of Getty Photos
Pillars on the archaeological web site of Gobekli Tepe in Sanliurfa, Turkey, are seen in Might 2022. Positioned on a rocky hill in southeastern Turkey, overlooking the plateau of historical Mesopotamia, Gobekli Tepe, is the world’s first recognized sanctuary and should have housed the world’s oldest photo voltaic calendar.
Ozan Kose/AFP by way of Getty Photos
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Ozan Kose/AFP by way of Getty Photos
At first look, the V-shaped symbols carved onto the pillars at Gobekli Tepe — an archaeological web site 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 keeping with researchers, the markings may very well be proof of two massive findings: The traditional pillar may very well be the world’s oldest lunisolar calendar, and it could function a memorial to a comet strike that hit Earth roughly 13,000 years in the past and triggered a mini ice age.
“It seems the inhabitants of Gobekli Tepe had been eager observers of the sky, which is to be anticipated given their world had been devastated by a comet strike,” stated Martin Sweatman, a scientist on the College of Edinburgh who led the analysis workforce that got here up with the current 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 file 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 occasion may need triggered civilization by initiating a brand new faith and by motivating developments in agriculture to deal with the chilly local weather,” Sweatman stated.
The potential comet strikehas lengthy been a supply of fascination — and disagreement — between scientists. If the V-symbol speculation is right, it may present groundbreaking assist for the speculation.
“Probably, their makes an attempt to file what they noticed are the primary steps in direction of the event of writing millennia later,” he stated.
