Göbekli Tepe is a name that will be familiar to anyone interested in the ancient mysteries subject.Billed as the oldest stone temple in the world, it is composed of a series of megalithic structurescontaining rings of beautifully carved T-shaped pillars. It sits on a mountain ridge at the westerntermination of the Ante-Taurus range in southeast Anatolia (today part of the Republic of Turkey),just eight miles (thirteen kilometres) from the ancient city of Urfa, Abraham’s traditional birthplace.Here its secrets have remained hidden beneath an artificial, belly-shaped mound for the last tenthousand years. Agriculture and animal husbandry were barely known when Göbekli Tepe wasbuilt, and roaming the fertile landscape of southwest Asia were, we are told, primitive huntergatherers, whose sole existence revolved around survival on a day-to-day basis.So what is Göbekli Tepe? Who created it, and why? More pressingly, why did its buildersbury their creation at the end of its useful life?
13. Did a comet impact with the earth around 12,900 years ago? Did its aftermath result in the construction of GT? (Pic credit: USGC) Although scientists believe the largest and most intense impacts occurred on the American continent, various other areas of the world suffered as well. From Belgium across to Belarus, and from Egypt all the way down to Australia, an eight-centimetre (three-inch) thick layer of ash and fire debris is present in the geological record corresponding to a date of approximately 12,900 years ago. Known as the Usselo horizon (see Fig. 14), it has been found to contain microscopic evidence of an impact scenario, including magnetic spherules and nano-diamonds. These are usually created during extremely high temperature aerial 9
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What is more, compelling evidence of a close-proximity air blast at this same time has been found at an Epi-Paleolithic settlement site named Abu Hureyra, just 100 miles (160 kilometres) from Gbekli Tepe, showing that southwest Asia did not escape the devastation. triggered this Fig. 14. The eight-centimetre (three-inch) Usselo Horizon. This example of the boundary layer was found at Lommel, Belgium, and dated at 12,940 years ago. The same ash-rich layer has been found at sites all over the world (Pic credit: John B. Kloosterman).
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A Cycle of Catastrophes Yet even if this cataclysmic event did occur, how could it have instilled a sense of catastrophobia within inhabitants of southeast Anatolia, strong enough for them to build Gbekli Tepe? Well, the fact of the matter is that the Younger Dryas Boundary impact event, its official title among the scientific community, was not a lone event that took place on a single day. Ice core samples that following the initial event in around 10,900 BC, the northern hemisphere experienced incessant wildfires for hundreds of years afterwards, culminating with another spike of activity around 10,340 BC. the from Greenland
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Richard Firestone of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory of Nuclear Science and his co-authors in their book The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes (2006), which sets out the full extent of the Younger Dryas impact event, believes that 10,340 BC may be the date of one of the impacts. This brings us within eight hundred years of the construction of Gbekli Tepe and explains why there might well have been a lingering case of catastrophobia among the inhabitants of southeast Anatolia. If this was the case, then we can say with some certainty that one of its the principal purposes behind construction was to enable shamans to enter the sky-world and curtail the baleful actions of the cosmic trickster, which if not kept in check might well have brought about the destruction of the world.
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