Gobekli Tepe is Much Younger than 12,000 Years

 

Many are familiar with the fantastic site of Gobekli Tepe in south-central Turkey. It is very near one area where I speculated the original garden of Eden was located. There is little doubt it is near to where true agriculture and animal domestication originated. It appears to have been a religious center where a series of large enclosed but roofless temples were constructed, used, and then deliberately buried over and over for a long period of time. 

The researcher who first popularized the site, a man named Schmidt, claimed that the site dated from the tenth millennium B.C., that is up to 12,000 years old. That date always bothered me a bit for reasons I will describe later. People like to think they have found "the oldest site of its kind" rather than say, the "the fifth oldest site of its kind". Researchers are humans and humans tend to look at the evidence in ways that are best for them. It turns out that the "tenth millennium B.C." date has been contested for years. We just don't know about the research because science media is so terrible and sensationalistic. 

A researcher named Dimitrios S. Dendrinos wrote a paper in 2016 claiming Gobekli Tepe was a much younger site, and was ignored. But the evidence kept coming in. He wrote a paper in 2021 making the case that Gobekli Tepe was a sixth millennium B.C. site. His logic is strong 

It is hard to date stone structures. So they got the date from dating things in the earth that was used to fill the structures when they were buried, and also some plaster that covered one of the pillars. The problem with that is that the dirt used to fill and cover could be much older than the structure itself. You can't use the oldest dirt you find in a fill to date the fill, the best you can do is find the youngest. In addition. the type of plaster they dated at the site is extremely prone to contamination. It is is buried from dirt that contained ashes from a campfire 12, 000 years ago, both the dirt and the plaster will show an C-14 date of 12,000 years even if the structure that was buried was much younger than that. 

Dendrinos dates Gobekli Tepe to the mid-sixth millennium B.C. In other words, around 5500 B.C. He does this by comparing the complexity of the structures and certain symbols found at the site to surrounding sites that are more firmly dated. It really makes sense that they would not start out with the most lavish and gigantic form at the beginning. 

Now onto why I found this of such interest. The focus of each enclosure was two immense T-shaped pillars. One of them was given anthropomorphic carvings, the other had carvings representing many animals. I had suggested in my book on Early Genesis that there is a connection between the two pillars which are central to each enclosure at this site and the "two trees" that were at the center of the garden of Eden. The ceremonies at Gobekli Tepe would then represent an attempt to "re-do" the garden with a more favorable result, choosing the Tree of Life (the God figure) over the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. As each attempt failed, they would bury it, construct a new one, and try it again for their generation. Please don't be confused because I am writing as if there were other people around besides Adam and Eve. I believe that scripture teaches this, and this video gives some of the reasons why. 

What had been nagging at me was the extremely ancient age ascribed to the original structures. Perhaps you have heard reports saying that this site was constructed around 10,000 B.C., or twelve thousand years ago. Others tried to pin it down a bit more and say 11,300 years ago or about 9,300 B.C. 

These dates are very early if what we see at Gobekli Tepe is indeed a response to Adam's fall. I consider the dates for Adam in the Masoretic text (4004 B.C.) to be too young. The numbers in the Septuagint (about 5,500 B.C.) may be correct, but it is also possible that these are only theoretical minimum dates for reasons I describe in this video. I suggested in my book that Adam could have lived as early as 10,587 B.C., but this near the extreme end of the possible range and I was really thinking a date sometime between this date and the Septuagint date of 5,500 B.C. would be more probable. Low and behold, along comes this paper pushing the date for Gobekli Tepe to quite near the Septuagint date for Adam. 

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