Gobekli Tepe Page 16

  In addition to the evidence presented here, other scientific teams have uncovered similar evidence of microspherules at the Younger Dryas Boundary in Venezuela, South America, and various other parts of the world.9 It is thus clear that something very major did go down at this time and that it involved a series of bolides, most likely fragments of a comet that perhaps broke up during its slingshot orbit of the sun. The inhabitants on Earth would have seen all this—the arrival of the comet, or comets, in the sky, its reappearance and fragmentation, along with the incoming waves of fireballs and the terrifying air blasts as the fragments reached the lower atmosphere, causing maximum devastation on the earth itself.

  KILL, CHILL, ILL, AND NOW GRILL!

  The effects of the Younger Dryas Boundary impact event would have been felt on every continent, although the true extent of the damage can only be guessed at today. What we do know is that it coincided with the disappearance of the Ice Age megafauna, such as mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, dire wolves, and saber-toothed tigers. All of these animals existed in abundance until the end of the Allerød interglacial, then vanished with the onset of the Younger Dryas mini ice age. How exactly they disappeared remains a complete mystery, with three main theories being proposed: they died through overhunting (the overkill theory); they died because of the sudden change in temperature at the beginning of the mini ice age (the overchill theory); or they suffered some kind of mass epidemic, which wiped out whole species (the overill theory). Recently, a fourth contender has entered the debate, this being the over-grill theory, which proposes that they were decimated in the wildfires caused by the comet impact.

  None of these theories—kill, chill, ill, or grill—is ever going to account for the extinction of so many different Ice Age animals, and indeed there is a good chance that all four scenarios played some role in their demise.

  Also around the same time North America’s Paleo-Indians, represented by the Clovis culture, abruptly disappear from the archaeological record. With the knowledge that some of the larger fragments of the disintegrating comet are thought to have impacted with the Laurentide Ice Sheet—which had covered hundreds of thousands of square miles of North America for much of the last glacial age—causing the ice to vaporize and fall back to earth as acid rain, it becomes increasingly likely that the Clovis population might have been greatly reduced by the events of the Younger Dryas Boundary impact event.10

  That some kind of cataclysm really did occur at the Allerød–Younger Dryas Boundary seems inescapable, both from the evidence presented by science today,11 and from the wealth of catastrophe myths preserved in ancient texts and by indigenous societies worldwide. All of this tells us very clearly that something terrible happened in the world around this time, and very likely these legends refer, at least in part, to the same catastrophic event. Most likely a disintegrating comet was the culprit, although we cannot discount other possibilities, such as an asteroid or meteor impact, or a close supernova event. What is important, however, is its impact on the mind-set of the peoples existing in the Euphrates Basin at the termination of the Paleolithic age, for there is compelling evidence that a memory of this devastating cataclysm lingered on in the minds of the Göbekli builders themselves.

  18

  AFTERMATH

  One of the major problems for farmers in southeast Turkey is that the landscape is littered with basalt boulders of all shapes and sizes, making it difficult to plow or sow a piece of land unless the rocks are first moved to the edge of the field. Since many of these boulders can be anything between several hundred pounds and a couple of tons apiece, this can often be a near impossible task.

  The sources of these boulders are local volcanoes, which are known to have erupted in fairly recent geological history. Exactly when this might have been differs from volcano to volcano, although some kind of pattern might eventually emerge. One such volcano is Karajeddah Dağ, part of the Karaca Dağ massif, which lies between the cities of Diyarbakır in the east and Şanlıurfa to the west. It is Karaca Dağ, we should recall, that geneticists have identified as the point of origin of sixty-eight modern strains of wheat, suggesting that it was here, in the heart of the triangle d’or, that the Neolithic revolution had its inception.

  A BEDOUIN CATASTROPHE MYTH

  With this information in mind, it is interesting to find that Karajeddah Dağ is the setting for a highly significant folktale preserved by Bedouin tribespeople, who inhabit the area even to this day. The tale, told to the author in 2004 by a Bedouin driver as they came within sight of the mountain,1 speaks of how once, long ago, when humankind first began to till the land, a dragon with seven heads lived in a hole.

  One day, the tillers’ plows revealed the monster’s lair, making the creature extremely angry. It emerged into the light and began torching the forests with its fiery breath until all the trees had been razed to the ground. Fearing for their lives, the people called upon Allah to stop this misery. This he did by carrying the monster up through the seven heavens until it reached the highest one, and here the dragon exploded with a great burst of fire, scattering rocks across the entire region.

  SEVEN-TAILED COMET

  Even though this story exists to help explain the countless boulders ejected by the now-extinct volcano, elements within it hint at a meaning on a much deeper level. The aerial detonation of the great dragon in the seventh heaven smacks of the sudden entry into the atmosphere of a fiery bolide, a comet perhaps. The seven heads of the dragon suggest that the comet might have fragmented into seven pieces or that it had multiple tails. In 1907 Comet Daniel appeared in our skies with seven tails, leading one astronomer to refer to it as “this awesome, seven-tailed monster.”2 That the seven-headed dragon of the story torched the forests with its fiery breath until all the trees had been razed to the ground is another clear sign that this was more than simply the action of a volcano.

  If this Bedouin folktale does recall some memory of the Younger Dryas Boundary impact event, as well as an eruption of Karajeddah triggered at the same time, then this is very important indeed, especially as the mountain, although a full 50 miles (80 kilometers) away from Göbekli Tepe, is just about visible on the northeast horizon. Even more significant, however, is the reference in the story to the first tillers of the land disturbing the lair of the fiery dragon, resulting in it wreaking havoc on the world. Does this allude to the first people to begin cereal cultivation in the triangle d’or at the beginning of the Neolithic age? The fact that this tilling of the land was said to have triggered these catastrophic events need not worry us, as after thirteen thousand years confusion as to what happened in which order is understandable.

  Behind this archaic story is one final piece of useful information. The folktale tells us that it was the tillers’ actions that caused the release of the dragon. In other words, the inhabitants of the region, whose descendants we know became the first farmers, blamed themselves for the destruction it caused. If correct, then we can better understand why the Epipaleolithic hunter-gatherers of southeast Anatolia so feared a repeat of these events, for in their minds it was their actions that had caused the original catastrophe, in which case it could all happen again if they were not careful, the definition perhaps of Barbara Hand Clow’s catastrophobia. No wonder these people might have accepted the offer of an incoming elite to rid them of this constant fear, a decision that led, eventually, to the construction of Göbekli Tepe.

  PROFESSOR SCHMIDT’S OPINIONS

  Whether there is a connection between Göbekli Tepe and the Younger Dryas Boundary impact event is something the author put to Professor Klaus Schmidt during an impromptu interview in September 2012. His immediate response was an emphatic “no, no connection.” It was, however, pointed out to him that there was now firm evidence that the Natufian settlement at Tell Abu Hureyra on the Middle Euphrates, just 100 miles (160 kilometers) away, might have been an impact zone, and that in the opinion of the scientists who made this discovery, “the effects on that settle
ment and its inhabitants would have been severe.”3

  Schmidt’s dismissal of the subject is, however, understandable. Even if the proposed impact event of 10,900 BC really did occur in the manner described, then this was a full 1,400 years before the construction of the oldest known enclosures at Göbekli Tepe, ca. 9500 BC. Surely, the hunter-gatherers of the region would have forgotten what had happened so many centuries after this supposed catastrophe took place.

  This is a valid point, although scientific evidence indicates that something catastrophic continued to happen in the world for many hundreds of years after the commencement of the Younger Dryas cold spell. Drilled cores taken from the Greenland ice sheet reveal that ammonium levels in the atmosphere, arguably caused by the spread of wildfires, rose suddenly around 12,900 years ago, coincident to the proposed impact event, and then remained high for hundreds of years afterward.4 They then spiked again around 12,340 years ago, that is 10,340 BC, suggesting that something else occurred at this time, prompting Dr. Richard Firestone of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory of Nuclear Science and his coauthors in their book The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes to comment, “We think that [10,340 BC] may be the date of one of the impacts.”5

  In other words, we could be looking at another major impact on or around 10,340 BC, which brought to a climax a sequence of events that had been happening on and off since the initial impact some five centuries earlier. Firestone and his team propose that at least part of the ammonium content in the Greenland ice cores came from a disintegrating comet, the rest from the wildfires it caused.

  In addition to the massive spike in ammonium corresponding to a date of 12,340 years ago detected in the Greenland ice cores, the levels of nitrate they contain also peaked at exactly the same date—12,340 BP. Nitrate is another chemical produced by wildfires, although when the levels shoot up for both ammonium and nitrate together, it could mean that the fires in question were burning fiercely, as opposed to smoldering after the event.6

  Compounding the mystery still further is the fact that another chemical, oxalate, also spikes in the Greenland ice core samples for the date 12,340 BP, and this too is associated with wildfires. Apparently this peak is the highest on record for the entire four hundred thousand years covered by the ice cores.7 The importance of these findings is made clear by Firestone and his coauthors when they write, “The researchers tested a lot of ice, and they did not find any event as severe as that one, which spanned about four ice-age cycles. We think that it was no ordinary fire; it was a cosmic one.”8

  Whether a comet was responsible for the wildfires raging some 12,340 years ago remains a matter of speculation, although the ice core samples make it clear that the world was not at all stable at that time. Remember too that this is a full 560 years after the proposed Younger Dryas impact event of 12,900 years ago, and just 850 years, arguably less, before the construction of the first large enclosures at Göbekli Tepe.

  A REMEDY FOR CATASTROPHOBIA

  Mammoth building projects like Göbekli Tepe were initiated, most probably, after the inhabitants of southeast Anatolia came into contact with other parties, most likely displaced peoples from some other part of the ancient world. They perhaps brought with them a virtual messianic message explaining how they had the power to put an end to the prevailing state of fear. We have called them the Hooded Ones and suspect that it is their memory, and the memory of their own great ancestors, embodied in the T-shaped pillars erected at Göbekli Tepe. Most likely, this power elite was shamanic in nature and believed it had some special relationship with either the fox or the wolf, a connection that gave them control over the sky fox or sky wolf responsible for bringing destruction to the world.

  It is time now to examine the archaeological record in the hope of identifying this incoming group who would appear to have had such a big impact on the Epipaleolithic peoples of southeast Anatolia. Where did they come from, and how were they so easily able to convince communities of hunters to give up their free lives to build huge stone monuments, the oldest known astronomically aligned temples anywhere in the world? The answers, as we shall see in part four, might well lie on a different continent together, with that continent being Europe.

  PART FOUR

  Contact

  19

  THE REINDEER HUNTERS

  Dr. Alice Roberts is a British anatomist, anthropologist, and osteoarchaeologist (bone specialist), as well as an author and TV presenter. In her book The Incredible Human Journey (2009), written to accompany a BBC documentary series of the same name, she visited Göbekli Tepe and chatted at some length with lead archaeologist Professor Klaus Schmidt. During the interview Roberts made a poignant observation, based on a sound knowledge of ancient stone tool technologies. She noted that the toolkit in use at Göbekli Tepe “was similar to some of the tanged point cultures of Central Europe, in the late Paleolithic and Mesolithic.”1

  In response, Schmidt suggested that “perhaps there was some kind of connection or communication between the societies of Turkey and those around the Black Sea and the Crimea,”2 noting also a similarity between the style of game hunting in southeast Anatolia in the epoch of Göbekli Tepe’s construction and the “reindeer hunters of the North.”3 Yet as if, immediately, to distance himself from any proposed connection between Europe and Göbekli Tepe, Schmidt pointed out that there is nothing “even vaguely like it in Europe . . . until well into the Neolithic.”4

  TANGED POINT CULTURES

  This is true; there is absolutely nothing to compare with Göbekli Tepe anywhere in Europe or, indeed, anywhere else in the ancient world until much later, when megalithic architecture begins in earnest at places such as Malta, Sardinia, Brittany, Ireland, and, of course, Britain. Yet that doesn’t rule out the tantalizing possibility that the Göbekli builders came in contact with peoples from Europe, and from what Dr. Roberts and Klaus Schmidt were both implying, perhaps we should be looking toward the “tanged point cultures” and “reindeer hunters of the North” for some answers.

  In the late Upper Paleolithic age reindeer hunters who occupied the forests and plains of Northern Europe, often operating on the sandy terrains of loess left behind by the melting glaciers, started different hunting strategies because their perennial prize, the reindeer herds, were abandoning their old territories and moving ever northward and northeastward. The animals undertook these continual migrations so that they could remain within the forests and tundra (land with small trees and plants) essential for their continued survival. Even with the onset of the Younger Dryas mini ice age, ca. 10,900 BC, the reindeer kept moving, even though the worsening weather conditions were forcing human populations to migrate ever southward.

  As part of their change in strategy, the reindeer hunters at the termination of the Upper Paleolithic age, which in Europe quickly transformed into the Mesolithic age, adopted the use of a very specific type of weapon, usually made of flint and known as the tanged point. This is a type of arrowhead, either shaped like a willow leaf or geometric (that is, triangular) in form. These points have distinctive “shoulders,” or “tangs,” delicately chipped away from the base so that they could more easily be hafted onto an arrow shaft. Sometimes the points have only one tang, or shoulder, while at other times they have two. Clearly, the use of the bow and arrow gave Paleolithic hunters the advantage not only during the chase but also over human enemies.

  THE CASE OF MARY SETTEGAST

  So could there have been some kind of contact between these reindeer hunters of the North European Plain and the Epipaleolithic peoples of southeast Anatolia in the lead up to the construction of the first large enclosures at Göbekli Tepe? The answer is almost certainly yes. In 1987 a fascinating book entitled Plato Prehistorian, by archaeological writer Mary Settegast, attempted to paint a picture of the turmoil that might have existed in Europe in the aftermath of a global catastrophe at the end of the last ice age. Settegast linked this event with the account given by the Greek philosopher Plato in his works Timaeus and
Critias, written around 350 BC. He, of course, describes the destruction of a mythical island empire called Atlantis that was said to have existed beyond the Pillars of Hercules, out in the Atlantic Ocean.

  According to Plato the main island of Atlantis sank beneath the waves around 9500 BC following a day and night of earthquakes and floods, sent by the sky god Zeus to punish the Atlanteans for having become too haughty and arrogant. Prior to this time they had made incursions into the Mediterranean and attacked major city-ports as far east as Italy’s Tyrrhenian Sea, then under the control of the Athenians.

  Plato’s account of Atlantis might well be based on some kind of historical reality, although the wars between the Atlanteans and the Athenians are much more difficult to prove, especially given that Athens and its inhabitants, the Athenians, did not exist in 9500 BC. For this reason, some of Settegast’s proposals are quite obviously biased toward accepting the validity of Plato’s account. That said, the evidence she presents for bloodshed and turmoil in Europe at the end of the Ice Age is stunning.5

  THE SWIDERIAN CULTURE

  Crucially, Settegast recognized that during the Younger Dryas period, ca. 10,900–9600 BC, major migrations were taking place all over Europe, seemingly in the aftermath of the proposed cataclysm. Among those on the move was a specific group of reindeer hunters known as the Swiderians. They began pushing farther and farther eastward and southward until they were quite literally knocking on Anatolia’s door.

  Mary Settegast realized that as they moved across Europe at the onset of the Younger Dryas cold spell, the Swiderians left behind a noticeable trail of finely carved tanged points. It stretched all the way from the Carpathian Mountains of Central Europe right across to the Crimean Mountains, located on a peninsula immediately west of the Sea of Azov, a northerly extension of the Black Sea, in what is today Ukraine. She noted also that around this same time strikingly similar tanged points started to appear at Epipaleolithic and proto-Neolithic sites in the Near East, something that is unlikely to be a simple coincidence.6