Gbekli Tepe: The Dawn of Civilization

[Warpy]

4. Interesting. A lot of archaeologists have discounted the temple idea

since there was no altar or any other indication that it was anything but a place people visited and ate lunch at.

Personally, what I see in those carvings is something that cries out for paint, They could easily have been clan origin stories, someplace men would visit with their sons on a yearly basis, freshening the paint and retelling all the stories. Quite likely the outer circles had been replaced as they became more difficult to cover over with roofing material and if I'm right about the paint, they'd have wanted the site covered with skins stretched on a frame or some sort of thatch.

I don't know whether or not anyone sampled the soil at the bases of the stones or if anything could be detected at this late stage of red ochre, yellow ochre, soot, ground quartz, ground malachite, and other pigments, perhaps bound with egg white to make them adhere for a while. I don't know if they even bothered to look, although I would have.

Likely as circles fell into disrepair or the stories disappeared, the old circles were filled in and new ones created. At the same time, farming and herding had begun and those didn't leave much time for carving, so it's no wonder later circles were crude in comparison.

A lot of current thinking says that the people didn't exactly disappear, they just morphed into the early settlements like Catahoyuk, where similar motifs have been found painted on walls. Instead of taking the kids to stone age Disneyland, they just read the walls.