Graham Hancock on Göbekli Tepe and a Lost Civilization
Picture North America during the ice age, buried under sheets of ice as much as two miles thick, running from somewhere around the Canadian border all the way north. About 12,800 years ago the first impacts struck that ice cap directly. A huge stretch of it melted almost at once, and the meltwater, bitterly cold, poured into both the Atlantic and the Arctic. That flood of freezing water threw off the ocean's circulation patterns, and the planet lurched into a deep cold snap that held for roughly 1,200 years.
The record points to a second encounter with the comet's debris stream around 11,600 years ago, and this round brought more catastrophic impacts. These came down in the oceans rather than on ice. Ocean strikes do two things: they throw up enormous tidal waves and flooding, and they loft vast quantities of water vapor high into the atmosphere. That moisture traps heat, and the warming it produced is what finally pulled the world out of the Younger Dryas.
So you have this strange window of time, 12,800 to 11,600 years ago, bracketed at both ends by violent flooding. And 11,600 years ago happens to be exactly when that puzzling megalithic site in Turkey was built, right as the Earth climbs out of the Younger Dryas. The timing is hard to shake off.
For a long time we assumed the oldest megalithic monuments on the planet were places like Stonehenge in England, at roughly 5,000 years old, or Mnajdra and Ħaġar Qim on Malta, which carried similar dates. Now Turkey has handed us a site that goes back 11,600 years, something on the order of 40 times the size of Stonehenge. The architecture is startlingly sophisticated, with carved pillars and monoliths weighing more than 20 tons, hundreds of them raised into place. Then the whole thing was deliberately buried, and it stayed buried until about 1996, when the German Archaeological Institute working in Turkey found it and started digging.
This is the part that resists easy explanation. A hunter-gatherer does not wake up one day and start building something on the scale of Stonehenge, only many times larger. Work like that demands a prior tradition, accumulated know-how, generations of practice. And the record of that background simply isn't there yet.
To my eye, Göbekli Tepe reads as the handiwork of survivors from a civilization we've lost track of. Here's the other curious thing. This is also the moment when agriculture is supposedly 'invented.' At the very point megalithic building 'appears' at Göbekli Tepe around 9,600 years ago, farming 'appears' too. I don't think either was an invention. I think we're watching a handoff, skills and technology passed from the survivors of that lost civilization to the people living at Göbekli Tepe.