The sector’s oldest sun calendar could have been unearthed in Turkey

Pillars on the archaeological web site of Gobekli Tepe in Sanliurfa, Turkey, are observed in Might 2022. Situated on a rocky hill in southeastern Turkey, overlooking the plateau of historic Mesopotamia, Gobekli Tepe, is the sector’s first identified sanctuary and could have housed the sector’s oldest sun calendar.

Ozan Kose/AFP by the use of Getty Photographs

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Ozan Kose/AFP by the use of Getty Photographs

Pillars on the archaeological web site of Gobekli Tepe in Sanliurfa, Turkey, are observed in Might 2022. Situated on a rocky hill in southeastern Turkey, overlooking the plateau of historic Mesopotamia, Gobekli Tepe, is the sector’s first identified sanctuary and could have housed the sector’s oldest sun calendar.

Ozan Kose/AFP by the use of Getty Photographs

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Ozan Kose/AFP by the use of Getty Photographs

To start with look, the V-shaped symbols carved onto the pillars at Gobekli Tepe — an archaeological web site in southern Turkey — don’t appear to be a lot in comparison to the adjoining animal shapes depicting the cycles of the solar and the moon. However consistent with researchers, the markings may well be proof of 2 giant findings: The traditional pillar may well be the sector’s oldest lunisolar calendar, and it’s going to function a memorial to a comet strike that hit Earth kind of 13,000 years in the past and induced a mini ice age. “It sounds as if the population of Gobekli Tepe have been willing observers of the sky, which is to be anticipated given their global have been devastated by way of a comet strike,” mentioned Martin Sweatman, a scientist on the College of Edinburgh who led the analysis workforce that got here up with the hot discovery.

The findings, revealed final month in Time & Thoughts, counsel {that a} sequence of V-shaped symbols carved onto the pillars at Gobekli Tepe each and every represents a unmarried day. When added up, they appear to file the date a swarm of comet fragments hit earth in 10,850 BC, triggering a 1,200-year ice age that resulted in the extinction of many massive animals, together with mammoths, steppe bison and different massive Pleistocene mammals. “This match may have induced civilization by way of starting up a brand new faith and by way of motivating traits in agriculture to deal with the chilly local weather,” Sweatman mentioned. The conceivable comet strikehas lengthy been a supply of fascination — and war of words — between scientists. If the V-symbol speculation is proper, it will supply groundbreaking fortify for the speculation. “Perhaps, their makes an attempt to file what they noticed are the primary steps against the advance of writing millennia later,” he mentioned.

Author: OpenAI