Gobekli Tepe
About 115 km away from the city of Sanliurfa in South Eastern Turkey lies the prehistoric site of Gobekli Tepe, meaning ‘Pot Belly Hill’.
The site is dated to have been built between 10,000 and 8000 BC. It consists of twenty circular open roofed temples constructed of massive T-shaped limestone pillars up to 6 m (20 ft) tall and weighing between 7 and 10 tons. 
When the site was abandoned sometime in the 8th millenium BC each enclosure was deliberately buried in 300 to 500 cubic meters of refuse essentially entombing the temples. Originally the site was mistaken for a cemetery, but to date the exact details of Gobekli Tepe’s function remains a mystery.
Some of the T-shaped pillars have human arms carved on their lower half suggesting that they are intended to represent stylized humans. Other carvings include lions, snakes, boars, bulls, spiders, scorpions, cranes, vultures, and foxes.
Klaus Schmidt, a German archaeologist and pre-historian who led the excavation at Gobekli Tepe from 1996 to 2014, proposes that the findings at Gobeklitepe suggest a novel theory of civilization…
Academics have long assumed that only after people learned to farm and live in settled communities would they have had the time, organization and resources to build temples and create complicated social structures. However, the immensity of the undertaking at Gobekli Tepe suggests otherwise.
These monuments could not have been erected without hundreds of workers all needing to be fed and housed. Schmidt argues that the extensive, coordinated effort to BUILD the monoliths literally laid down the groundwork for the development of the complex societies. The question then remains, according to Schmidt, was what was so important for these early people that they gathered here to carve, erect and then bury rings of seven ton stone pillars??
Danielle Stordeur (National Center for Scientific Research in France) emphasizes the significance of the vulture carvings. She states that some cultures have long believed the high flying carrion birds transported the flesh of the dead up to the heavens.’
B.G. Sidarth, author of The Celestial Key to the Vedas, notes that astronomical events are like the calibrators of time. This certainly seems to be the case for Martin B. Sweatman (School of Engineering, University of Edinburgh) and Alistair Coombs (Department of Religious Studies, University of Kent) in their paper Decoding European Palaeolithic art: Extremely ancient knowledge of precession of the equinoxes.
Sweatman and Coombs use Gobekli Tepe among other ancient sites to conclude that the astronomical knowledge of ancient people enabled them to record dates, using animal symbols to represent star constellations, in terms of the precession of the equinoxes. They specifically note how the Vulture Stone can be viewed as a memorial to the proposed Younger Dryas event, a collision with cometary debris, which likely triggered the Younger Dryas period with all it’s catastrophic consequences.
As this century progresses, there is a growing awareness that ancient cultures had a level of knowledge and awareness that we do not have NOR do we really understand.
