The first Gobekli Tepe Temple appears to have been deliberately filled in about 10,000 years ago. We have no knowledge of why this earliest major sanctuary was buried, though the time was a period of significant change. We have vague ideas about the people living in the region at the time but do not understand them in detail. This isn’t a question of being “hidden”. Rather, this is a consequence of the early Neolithic in the region still being inadequately investigated.

However, it’s quite clear that whatever they were, they were not an urban society (which is what historians and archaeologists mean by “civilization”). Remains of various artifacts in the backfill indicate that whoever did it had fairly unremarkable early Neolithic technology like low-fired pottery but none of the hallmarks usually regarded as indicative of more sophisticated societies.

If Prophets Adam or Noah had lived at that time, it is possible that one of them might have influenced the polytheism people living in that area (about 10,000 years ago) to bury Gobekli Tepe.

Archaeologists in Turkey, digging at a sister site to the famous Göbekli Tepe Temple, have reached its lowest layer, unearthing incredible 11,500 year old carved pillars at a settlement called Karahan Tepe, showing that hunter gatherer societies were building elaborate communal gathering spaces before the invention of farming or the wheel.

The discovery comes from the Taş Tepeler region of southeastern Turkey, an area now recognized as home to multiple Pre Pottery Neolithic sites that are rewriting the timeline of human civilization. Karahan Tepe, located approximately 23 miles (37 kilometers) from Göbekli Tepe, features T shaped limestone pillars weighing up to 30 tons each, carved with stylized human arms, hands, belts, and animal figures including snakes, foxes, and birds.

The site also contains a large “building with a phallus,” a carved stone chamber used for what researchers describe as “bloody rituals,” and a basin that may have held water or offerings.

The architects of these structures were not farmers. They were hunter gatherers who returned to the same holy site generation after generation, lowering massive stones with ropes and wooden levers, carving symbols into solid rock using only flint tools.

This monumental discovery is rewriting history textbooks by flipping a century old assumption. For decades, archaeologists believed that agriculture came first: humans learned to farm, settled into permanent villages, and only then developed the surplus labor and social hierarchy needed to build temples. Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe reverse that sequence.

The desire for communal worship and spiritual gathering may have actually driven people to settle down and eventually........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)