Garden of Eden?

[woollypigs]

Do these mysterious stones mark the site of the Garden of Eden?  | Mail Online

This is amazing ...

The first is its staggering age. Carbon-dating shows that the complex is at least 12,000 years old, maybe even 13,000 years old.

That means it was built around 10,000BC. By comparison, Stonehenge was built in 3,000 BC and the pyramids of Giza in 2,500 BC.

Gobekli is thus the oldest such site in the world, by a mind-numbing margin. It is so old that it predates settled human life. It is pre-pottery, pre-writing, pre-everything. Gobekli hails from a part of human history that is unimaginably distant, right back in our hunter-gatherer past.

If this is true then all we take for granted have to be re:written. This so reminds me of seeing the underground burial site of Hypogeum on Malta which is from around 4-5000BC.

[andygates]

It's got competition from Nevali Cori which was found in 1933 and is of the same vintage

Göbekli Tepe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nevalı Çori - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Interesting that the temple site could have been the stimulus for the invention of agriculture, just by having too many people around it to sustain by foraging.

Eden?  Schmeden.  But very, very cool.

[Thor]

Fascinating stuff.  And only a tiny fraction of the site has been excavated, so there is much more to come.

[Charlotte]

Blimey.  That's intense.

[andrewc]

Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple? | History & Archaeology | Smithsonian Magazine

More stuff here.

[hulver]

I'm extremely sceptical about this. Those carvings are incredible. The preservation of them is almost too good to be true.

I'm not dismissing it out of hand (although I think the Garden of Eden thing is a bit of a stretch) but I'd need to see a lot more than an article written by somebody flogging a book to be convinced.

[Basil]

As far as I understand it, there are only stones (and some arrow heads) on the site.
How do you carbon date stone?  Surely it's as old as er.. stone?

I'm not disputing the report.  Just wondering how you date carving.

[bobb]

Yeah, I didn't like the way the guy wrote the article. He seemed to cherry pick "facts" from Genesis, but was happy to ignore the "fact" that if the dating of this site is correct, God didn't create the Earth for another 6,000 years!  

Bloody amazing place though!

[PeteB99]

I gather there was some charcoal found in the bottom layers which provided a 'habitation date'

It's also possible to date the limescale? deposits on the carved faces of rock to get a rough idea of how long it's been exposed to the atmosphere

A lot more research to be done though especially on why on earth they buried it

[andyoxon]

The Garden of Eden link really seems to be a 'media angle'...

Archaeologist Klaus Schmidt downplays extravagant spiritual interpretations of Göbekli Tepe, such as the idea, made popular in the press, that the site is the inspiration for the Biblical Garden of Eden. But he does agree that it was a sanctuary of profound significance in the Neolithic world. He sees it as a key site in understanding the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, and from tribal to regional religion.

The World's First Temple

[andygates]

Basil, you can date the surface from its quarrying-date.  That makes carvings hard, if the rock was exposed and then worked a thousand years later - a lot of that is done from analysis of either the toolmarks (and thus date the tools) or cultural crossreferences.

[woollypigs]

The very word 'Eden' comes from the Sumerian for 'plain'; Gobekli lies on the plains of Harran.

There could be some mix up here, the Eden we talk about could easy be another since it means plain.

What I find amazing is that the site was buried but someone, not just packed up and moved along to somewhere else, a natural disaster or war.

[rogerzilla]

The big problem I have in believing this is its source (not Woolly, the DM).

[woollypigs]

True I was not sure to post this link but as others have posted other links and I have found other links about this I'm happy to believe DM for once

[Bledlow]

I've been reading some of the comments on the Smithsonian article. Oh dear. An awful lot of Armenian nationalists saying "It's Armenian, not Turkish" - when nobody is saying it was built by Turks, any more than anyone reckons Stonehenge was built by Englishmen, & there was no such thing as an Armenian that long ago, followed by an assortment of loonies. Sad.