Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Göbekli Tepe is regarded as an archaeological discovery of the greatest importance since it profoundly changes our understanding of a crucial stage in the development of human societies. It seems that the erection of monumental complexes was within the capacities of hunter-gatherers and not only of sedentary farming communities as had been previously assumed. In other words, as excavator Klaus Schmidt puts it: "First came the temple, then the city."[15] This revolutionary hypothesis will have to be supported or modified by future research.

Not only its large dimensions, but the side-by-side existence of multiple pillar shrines makes the location unique. There are no comparable monumental complexes from its time. Nevalı Çori, a well-known Neolithic settlement also excavated by the German Archaeological Institute, and submerged by the Atatürk Dam since 1992, is 500 years later, its T-shaped pillars are considerably smaller, and its shrine was located inside a village; the roughly contemporary architecture at Jericho is devoid of artistic merit or large-scale sculpture; and Çatalhöyük, perhaps the most famous of all Anatolian Neolithic villages, is 2,000 years younger.

This excavation lies 150 miles east of the Mediterranean Sea and fifty miles north of the Syrian border. I really was unaware of this site that was discovered around 1994 when the exctractions began.

Mounds, as human earthen works are found throughout the globe. All you have to do is note the Native American Mounds that can be seen on or near the Mississippi as it winds its way from Minnesota to Louisiana.

Gobekli Tepe in Turkish means: Potbelly Hill. Ha! http://www.newsweek.com/2010/02/18/history-in-the-remaking.html

What somehow led me to read up on this site was the link I received to a 3D documentary entitled

Cave of Forgotten Dreams. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11931869

It seems clear to the experts that the wondrous Chauvet Cave cave paintings depicted in the movie go back 31000 years.

As the article in NYT demonstrates, the oldest cave paintings on the planet are contained in this wondrous CAVE.

The author notes that the cave paintings may well represent the dawnings of modern man; the dawn of art.

Bones are strewn amongst the stalagmites and the stalagtites. The soot from the ancient fires that must have lit the prehistorical religious services lie on the floor of the cave and became part of the substances used to paint the masterpieces that adorn the three dimensional walls.

Werner Herzog notes that he was hesitant to use the 3D tech since his film was to center around these paintings. But then he realized that the original paintings were created in 3D. There are no flat surfaces making up the cave walls. The caveman's cathedral is, indeed three dimensional.

And these ancient artists took advantage of the natural contours of the cave walls as he/she had on the other caves throughout France and into Spain.

As I noted in previous blogs on this subject, it is clear that both men and women practiced their arts in these ancient cathedrals.

Göbekli Tepe

The wonder of Gobekli Tepe is its age as well as its art.

There are so many professional and amateur archeologists like John Anthony West who maintain for a number of reasons that the Great Sphinx at Gaza must be far older than 4500 years.

The age of this Turkish site may well give one pause to question those who maintain Homo Sapiens Sapiens was incapable of creating such structures until 2500 BCE.

They are telling us that many of the structures discovered at Goekli Tepe go back 11,000 years!

To put this in perspective, the later cave paintings found in Spain that are classified within this European cave -art genre are estimated to be 11,000 to 13,000 years old.

And the so-called Venus objects d'art found in conjunction with these cave sites and the sites in Turkey are aged in accordance with these dating figures.

Oh and to put this all in a different context; there shall always exist the ultimate question concerning the age of man!

I was taught that a creature who built fire places 750,000 years ago seems to have a lot of our traits. Homo Erectus is the term usually used for this species that traveled throughout Europe and China from Africa so many eons ago. He walked upright; he built boats and navigated the sea shores; he used stone tools; he fished the seas, the lakes and the rivers; he most probably used language. Even the 'lower' simians of today use language, just ask Jane Goodall.

But Homo Erectus might well be traced back twice as long ago in Africa. The Homo Erectus of 1.8 million years ago was different in his genetic make-up from the Homo Erectus of 750,000 years ago.

http://www.stanford.edu/~harryg/protected/chp22.htm

And the DNA make-up of Neandertal of 250,000 years ago demonstrates genetic evolution.

My point is that this morphing of the human genome did not stop 100,000 years ago. That is, Homo Sapiens Sapiens is conservatively estimated to be 100,000 years old. And the Homo Sapiens Sapiens of 100,000 years ago was different from the Homo Sapiens Sapiens who inhabited the 31000 year old cave which is the subject of Hertzog's masterpiece. Paleantologists confirm this with their examination of skulls dated throughout the millenia.

So too, the men and women who migrated through the areas encompassing Gobekli Tepe were probably a bit different from those who inhabited the …..cave.

OUR BRAINS MORPHED.

And it was not necessarily the case that our brains got bigger either. After all Neandertal had bigger brains than Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

No, it was the internal wiring that changed.

http://wiringthebrain.blogspot.com/2010/09/ancient-origins-of-cerebral-cortex.html

Two thousand years may not be enough time to provide evidence of genetic change but ten thousand years or thirty thousand years might well demonstrate some morphing of the human genome.

Surely there have been adaptability morphing of the human being simply due to climatic and other environmental change. In this context, Darwin is easy to understand.

We are what we eat. We are what we do to exercise. But the basic genome has not necessarily changed in any specific manner.

These types of changes are simply categorized as population shifts.

White moths 'morph' into black moths due to soot accumulations in London.

Once the soot is cleaned off the buildings and coal is no longer used in the individual abodes of the general population, the black moths 'morph' back into white moths.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution

But back to the magnificent finding in Turkey.

I have actually seen the remains of a two hundred year old log cabin up in these parts and the fact is that nature usually swallows up man's creations in the blink of an eye.

We are only presented with a minute percentage of evidence concerning man and his creations over the eons.

They say that it is written in stone because it is written in stone would make us believe that stone lasts forever. But even working in stone did not ensure preservation of human works. After all, graves are robbed. Walls and other edifices are torn down and taken to be used on other projects.

Great stone monuments are defaced due to changes in monarchies or invasions by foreign armies.

Volcanic eruptions bury entire cities.

Earthquakes swallow up villages; hell, entire islands.

Rising sea levels cover border settlements—something like 75% of man kind lives at or by the sea shores or lake shores.

This is why we must understand why Archeology is not an exact science.

A good archeologist is more like Sherlock Holmes; making educated guesses while examining evidence and being extremely careful not to damage this evidence.

TURKEY

The monoliths are decorated with carved reliefs of animals and of abstract pictograms. The pictograms may represent commonly understood sacred symbols, as known from Neolithic cave paintings elsewhere. The carefully carved figurative reliefs depict lions, bulls, boars, foxes, gazelles, asses, snakes and other reptiles, insects, arachnids, and birds, particularly vultures and water fowl. At the time the shrine was constructed the surrounding country was much lusher and capable of sustaining this variety of wildlife, before millennia of settlement and cultivation resulted in the near–Dust Bowl conditions prevailing today …

Few humanoid forms have surfaced at Göbekli Tepe, but include a relief of a naked woman, posed frontally in a crouched position, that Schmidt likens to the Venus accueillante figures found in Neolithic north Africa; and of at least one decapitated corpse surrounded by vultures. Some of the pillars, namely the T-shaped ones, have carved arms, which may indicate that they represent stylized humans (or anthropomorphic gods). Another example is decorated with human hands in what could be interpreted as a prayer gesture, with a simple stole or surplice engraved above; this may be intended to represent a temple priest

Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, Klaus Schmidt has made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time: massive carved stones about 11,000 years old, crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery. The megaliths predate Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. The place is called Gobekli Tepe, and Schmidt, a German archaeologist who has been working here more than a decade, is convinced it's the site of the world's oldest temple.

Prehistoric people would have gazed upon herds of gazelle and other wild animals; gently flowing rivers, which attracted migrating geese and ducks; fruit and nut trees; and rippling fields of wild barley and wild wheat varieties such as emmer and einkorn. "This area was like a paradise," says Schmidt, a member of the German Archaeological Institute. Indeed, Gobekli Tepe sits at the northern edge of the Fertile Crescent—an arc of mild climate and arable land from the Persian Gulf to present-day Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and Egypt—and would have attracted hunter-gatherers from Africa and the Levant. And partly because Schmidt has found no evidence that people permanently resided on the summit of Gobekli Tepe itself, he believes this was a place of worship on an unprecedented scale—humanity's first "cathedral on a hill."

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/gobekli-tepe.html#ixzz1NDXmT4xD

Humans have been around one hell of a long time surviving thousands of Armageddons. ha

I will continue this. I have already overstayed my welcome.

So stay tuned for chapter two or just check out some of these links!