Shiftless2
Well-known member
Imagine, for a moment, a carpenter opening his toolbox to find T-squared pillars, bas-relief animals, and carved serpents — and a plaque that reads, “Built by hunter-gatherers, ca. 9600 BCE.” If you were raised on a literal-days, literal-genealogies reading of Genesis (the sort that gives you a neat creation date of 4004 BCE), the plaque would be either an inconvenient nuisance or the beginning of a very polite existential crisis. This essay, written from an atheist, evidence-first angle with a wink at irony, asks the polite question: if the Bible’s literal chronology places “first people” a handful of millennia ago, who — in plain archaeological fact — built Göbekli Tepe? The short answer: prehistoric people long before the biblical “few thousand years” — organized, ritualizing, and sophisticated in ways that force us to rethink when and how complexity arose. The long answer is more interesting.
By Religion: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Göbekli Tepe: the polite bulldozer in the backyard of chronology
Göbekli Tepe sits on a gentle hill in southeastern Turkey and astonished the archaeology world when Klaus Schmidt and later teams revealed ringed enclosures built of huge T-shaped pillars, some carved with animal motifs and abstract symbols. Radiocarbon dates place construction and use of its monumental enclosures in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic — roughly between 9600 and 8200 BCE (often summarized as “about 11,000 years ago”), long before pottery, metallurgy, and — crucially for many lay readers — long before the dates implied by a literalist reading of biblical genealogies. The site’s scale and the craftsmanship of its pillars make it, arguably, one of the earliest known examples of large-scale communal architecture anywhere on Earth.
Those radiocarbon results were not a one-off fluke: multiple samples from contexts associated with the enclosures give dates in the 10th–9th millennia BCE. Archaeologists now routinely describe Göbekli Tepe as being erected and used by groups who were still primarily hunter-gatherers but who seasonally aggregated in large numbers for ritual or communal activity. That combination — mobile subsistence plus the capacity to marshal labor for monumental architecture — was not what most scholars expected thirty years ago. It rewrites a tidy, teleological story in which .....
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