Discovery in eastern Turkey could shake up archeology [OPINION]

It is a cavity which contains a dozen phallic columns cut in the rock and which measure more than 2 meters. In the wall, a strange sculpted head grimacing like a gargoyle observes this ensemble. A human being, a demon, a god or a priest? We don't know… But this discovery in the dusty plain of Harran has amazed researchers. Because the site of Karahan Tepe, in the eastern borders of Anatolia, is 11 to 000 years old!

For comparison, the Great Pyramid of Gizey is 4500 years old.. The oldest human construction was, until now, the burial site of Barnenez in Brittany: 7000 years… So Karahan Tepe, with its cavity filled with phallic totems and all the other monuments which surround it – altars, shrines, cellars and courtrooms – challenges the assumptions of modern anthropology. Think! In Karahan Tepe, we step back in time, to a time when agriculture had not yet been mastered... It seems incredible that crude hunter-gatherers could build a sanctuary city equipped with canals to distribute food. 'water. And the surrounding hills could hide multiple similar sites. It would therefore be an immense network designed by man that the dust of this arid region had concealed since time immemorial! Archaeologists evoke the greatest discovery in the history of humanity, relates Sean Thomas in The Spectator (see his article in link).

It all started in 1994, thanks to a shepherd who stumbled upon curious outcrops of oblong stones. At the start, a large number of huge T-shaped stones are cleared. These megaliths have the particularity of being finely engraved: leopards, wild boars, vultures, foxes etc… sometimes accompanied by human faces. They depict men standing, hiding their genitals. The discoveries will be linked in a certain indifference until the discovery of this ritual chamber. It must be said that this site has provoked so many questions that scholars have struggled to accept what it seemed to say about our past.

It was the excavation of this ritual chamber that made specialists dizzy. It was believed that human groups came together once the basics of agriculture and animal husbandry had been learned. It was first, it was believed, the invention of agriculture that had allowed the emergence of civilizations, and its procession of major progress: the appearance of farms, pottery, and social hierarchies. Only then had men's minds been freed enough from the problems of survival to be interested in the afterlife. Karahan Tepe would indicate the opposite: the spiritual would be at the origin of the first human communities. The hunter-gatherers would have felt the need to gather to celebrate rites. And their regroupings would have made it necessary to develop agriculture to feed the community.

It was first in the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of monotheistic religions, that homo sapiens abandoned picking to work the land... The story of Adam and Eve expelled from the Garden of Eden is often seen as an allegory of the Neolithic revolution. Our ancestors abandoned their free hunter-gatherer way of life to laboriously take up farming. Learning about agriculture was very hard and the benefits were long in coming. We worked all day long, and illnesses increased because of the proximity of domestic animals. The archaeologist Klaus Schmidt saw in this extraordinary site, which he was the first to explore, a testimony to this crucial passage in the history of humanity. But the deeper you dig, the deeper the mystery becomes. What worship did they render around these phallic totems? One thing is established: around 8000 BC, those who frequented these ritual places buried them under rubble for an unknown reason. A chance: the monuments remained under cover and the digging is easy.

We now have proof that housing existed. So hunter-gatherers didn't just gather for rituals. They lived there. Remains of fermentation instruments for producing alcohol have recently been found. They were particularly sophisticated hunter-gatherers… Strange detail: the humans represented have 6 fingers. A genetic anomaly or a symbol?

Archaeologists estimate that only 1% of the entire site has been discovered. A burning question arises: how can it be imagined that these people could have designed and built such a vast and complex whole without knowing how to write? Nevertheless, this testimony dating from the end of the ice age tells us about the time when our ancestors left the Garden of Eden. It seems to show that the prime mover of the earliest civilizations was a more compelling spiritual appetite than the need to hoard food...

Ludovic Lavaucelle

source: The Spectator

This article is published from Selection of the day.