Gobekli Tepe

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Gobekli Tepe Summary

Prepared by Halbert, Claire Miller, and Andrew Myers with special thanks to Donna Whelan

[3/10/10]

In 1994, almost forty years after The Urantia Book’s 1955 publication, excavations began at the Gobekli Tepe archaeological site in Turkey. This site has produced over 50 Stonehenge-type rock carvings and other artifacts, some of which date back to at least 12,000 years ago. A full excavation to the bottom of the site has not yet occurred. The artifacts are especially inconsistent with prevailing theories about the development of civilization. Every place else in the world where ancient civilizations have built structures with enormous stones, there is also evidence that they were settled communities that practiced herding and farming. Prevailing theories about this region suggest that around 11,000 years ago, primitive man was just beginning to evolve from being a hunter-gatherer to a herder-farmer.

However, the discoveries at Gobekli Tepe are altogether consistent with The Urantia Book’s assertion that a well-developed herder-farmer civilization existed in this area, during this time period, and for more than 10,000 years previously. Additionally, there is strong evidence indicating that the site was intentionally buried about 8,000 years ago. This peculiar aspect of the Gobekli Tepe site, while difficult for archaeologists to explain, perfectly parallels The Urantia Book’s assertion that, at around this time, inferior and more barbaric tribes drove out this more peaceful and advanced, but declining, civilization.

The enormous Gobekli Tepe stones—at least 6,000 years older than Stonehenge and the pyramids—reflect a degree of cultural development and organization that defies explanation within the context of the more widely accepted theories on how civilization developed. And what further confounds scholars is that the stone structures get bigger as they get older. All of this is consistent with The Urantia Book’s version of history. It says the more advanced culture that lived in this area had been on the decline for over 10,000 years, as the result of a unique and unpredictable genetic shift that occurred in human history about 38,000 years ago.

Adding powerfully to the intrigue of this report is its interrelationship to the Adam and Eve Report and the Garden of Eden Report. These two reports involve some of the most impressive corroborations documented by UBtheNEWS. Because these three reports interrelate sequentially, it may be helpful to start at the beginning. The Adam and Eve Report, in particular, provides a foundation for appreciating The Urantia Book’s assertions about why and how a civilization with superior genetics got started around 38,000 years ago but was unable to maintain its distinctively advanced culture.

Gobekli Tepe Review

Gobekli Tepe is best known for being a discovery that defies explanation. Gobekli Tepe makes scholars reconsider the common sense reasoning behind theories on how civilization developed.

turkey gobekli tepe urantia book ubthenews Theories about the history of human civilization are based on evidence that strongly suggests a pattern of progress, both culturally and genetically, over extended periods of time. Progression is what seems to naturally occur; retrogression is the exception. “Survival of the fittest” and successive generations building on the achievements of previous generations are the basic models for genetic and cultural progress. Retrogression occurs, but it requires a special explanation: war, changing climate, unwise cultural practices, overpopulation, something. Gobekli Tepe provides evidence of a civilization long in decline that was eventually overrun or otherwise repopulated by an inferior civilization, but scholars are reluctant to hypothesize in this direction.

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What makes this report especially intriguing is that The Urantia Book, published in 1955, explains Gobekli Tepe decades before we even discovered that this mysterious site existed. The Urantia Book’s explanation is in terms of an Adam and Eve story that varies significantly from the Old Testament record, but which the authors assert is the basis for our religious traditions about Adam and Eve. This account describes them as living about 38,000 years ago and being genetically superior to the rest of humanity. The authors indicate that in some respects their descendants (“Adamites”) received decreasing benefits from this upgraded genetic heritage. This, along with migrations and increasing degrees of intermixing, is said to have eventually eliminated their status as a recognizably separate race.

According to The Urantia Book:

The Adamites greatly excelled the surrounding peoples in cultural achievement and intellectual development. They produced the third alphabet and otherwise laid the foundations for much that was the forerunner of modern art, science, and literature. Here in the lands between the Tigris and Euphrates they maintained the arts of writing, metalworking, pottery making, and weaving and produced a type of architecture that was not excelled in thousands of years.(1)

They [Adam and Eve’s children] were . . . long-lived, albeit longevity gravitated toward the human norm with each succeeding generation.(2)

Both the physical and spiritual visions of Adam and Eve were far superior to those of the present-day peoples. . . . These special senses were not so acutely present in their children and tended to diminish with each succeeding generation.(3)

Scholars are straining to come up with interpretations for Gobekli Tepe for a very good reason. They do well to avoid getting overly creative with their speculations and interpretations of archaeological and anthropological evidence and Gobekli Tepe requires thinking outside the box. With this in mind, we now turn to quotes from a variety of sources that describe and try to explain the mystery of Gobekli Tepe.

The German archaeologist who has been excavating the site since 1994 sums up four more months of digging. “In 14 years, we have uncovered barely five percent of what is here. There are decades of work ahead,” Klaus Schmidt says.(4)

The new discoveries are finally beginning to reshape the slow-moving consensus of archeology. Göbekli Tepe is “unbelievably big and amazing, at a ridiculously early date,” according to Ian Hodder, director of Stanford's archeology program. Enthusing over the “huge great stones and fantastic, highly refined art” at Göbekli, Hodder—who has spent decades on rival Neolithic [New Stone age] sites—says: “Many people think that it changes everything…It overturns the whole apple cart. All our theories were wrong.”(5)

[T]he structures not only predate pottery, metallurgy, and the invention of writing or the wheel; they were built before the so-called Neolithic Revolution, i.e., the beginning of agriculture and animal husbandry around 9,000 BC. But the construction of Göbekli Tepe implies organization of an order of complexity not hitherto associated with pre-Neolithic societies.(6)

Though not as large as Stonehenge—the biggest circle is 30 yards across, the tallest pillars 17 feet high—the ruins are astonishing in number. Last year Schmidt found his third and fourth examples of the temples. Ground-penetrating radar indicates that another 15 to 20 such monumental ruins lie under the surface. Schmidt's German-Turkish team has also uncovered some 50 of the huge pillars, including two found in his most recent dig season that are not just the biggest yet, but, according to carbon dating, are the oldest monumental artworks in the world.(7)

Schmidt and his colleagues estimate that at least 500 people were required to hew the 10- to 50-ton stone pillars from local quarries, move them from as far as a quarter-mile away, and erect them.(8)

Excavations have revealed that Göbekli Tepe was constructed in two stages. . . . Strangely enough, the later remains, . . . [from] about 8000 B.C., are less elaborate. The earliest levels contain most of the T-shaped pillars and animal sculptures. (9)

Before the discovery of Göbekli Tepe, archaeologists believed that societies in the early Neolithic were organized into small bands of hunter-gatherers and that the first complex religious practices were developed by groups that had already mastered agriculture. Scholars thought that the earliest monumental architecture was possible only after agriculture provided Neolithic people with food surpluses, freeing them from a constant focus on day-to-day survival. A site of unbelievable artistry and intricate detail, Göbekli Tepe has turned this theory on its head.(10)

Schmidt’s thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city.(11)

Some archeologists, like Hodder, the Neolithic specialist, wonder if Schmidt has simply missed evidence of a village or if his dating of the site is too precise. But the real reason the ruins at Göbekli remain almost unknown, not yet incorporated in textbooks, is that the evidence is too strong, not too weak. “The problem with this discovery,” as Schwartz of Johns Hopkins puts it, “is that it is unique.” No other monumental sites from the era have been found. Before Göbekli, humans drew stick figures on cave walls, shaped clay into tiny dolls, and perhaps piled up small stones for shelter or worship. Even after Göbekli, there is little evidence of sophisticated building.(12)

Schmidt . . . continues: “The really strange thing is that in 8,000 BC, during the shift to agriculture, Gobekli Tepe was buried. I mean deliberately – not in a mudslide. For some reason the hunters, or the ex-hunters, decided to entomb the entire site in soil. The earth we are removing from the stones was put here by man himself: all these hills are artificial.”(13)

The temples had been in decline for a thousand years—later circles are less than half the size of the early ones, indicating a lack of resources or motivation among the worshipers. This “clear digression” followed by a sudden burial marks “the end of a very strange culture,” Schmidt says. But it was also the birth of a new, settled civilization, humanity having now exchanged the hilltops of hunters for the valleys of farmers and shepherds. New ways of life demand new religious practices, Schmidt suggests, and “when you have new gods, you have to get rid of the old ones.”(14)

Hodder’s critiques, suggesting that Schmidt is over reaching in his analysis, have some appeal. On the one hand, his speculations about the dating could be considered over reaching on his part because various levels are being dated with more than one technique. And besides, they still have not reached the bottom and the trend is for it to get more sophisticated and bigger the deeper they go. On the other hand, “Who knows what else we might find later?” always seems like a good thing to keep in mind when it comes to archaeology. After all, who could have predicted Gobekli Tepe (aside from the authors of The Urantia Book)? But when scrutinized, it simply misses the major issues. Whatever additional sites may turn up, they are very unlikely to explain why Gobekli Tepe was on the decline for such a long time and then buried over.

The decline and burial of Gobekli Tepe is altogether consistent with and suggestive of some type of genetic degradation over time. The uniqueness of the site and its advanced qualities would indicate a more advanced race. But proposing such theories can be especially controversial and damaging to one’s professional reputation. This is why scholars feel forced to go in directions that are contrary to previous, longstanding, well-supported and common sense theories about human progress. Gobekli Tepe leads to speculations like:

First the temple, then the city.
Hunter-gatherers built complex structures using enormous stones without the benefit of the wheel, metal, or math.
Hunter-gatherers had a system of controlling slave labor in order to produce these results.
The transition to herder-farmer involves a loss of cultural sophistication in art and masonry.

The authors of The Urantia Book give these two reasons, among others, for providing the information contained in the book: “The restoration of important bits of lost knowledge concerning epochal transactions in the distant past.” and “The supplying of information which will fill in vital missing gaps in otherwise earned knowledge.”(15) The circumstances associated with Adam and Eve fit The Urantia Book’s definition of an epochal transaction in the distant past.

ubthenews gobekli tepe urantia book According to The Urantia Book, Adam and Eve were a genetically unique and superior couple. But unlike the regular, evolutionarily progressive nature of genetics generally observed with the evolution of humanity, Adam and Eve’s genetic contribution is said to have had a pattern of diminishing quality from generation to generation. Of course, such a statement raises more questions than it answers. But then, without The Urantia Book, so does Gobekli Tepe.

The Urantia Book goes to some length in describing an otherwise superior civilization that originated in the Mesopotamia region around 38,000 years ago, except that it was on a genetic, and therefore cultural decline. The development, decline, and eventual absorption, both culturally and genetically, of this once superior race is the subject of numerous chapters in The Urantia Book and includes a fully global account of their impact on the development of civilization up to the present.

The Urantia Book uses the term Andites to refer to the civilization that developed in Mesopotamia when significant mixing of the Adamites with the surrounding population occurred. Andites have a relatively high degree of the Adamic inheritance. Regarding Mesopotamia during the time period of Gobekli Tepe, it states:

The [Adamites] . . . retained the Edenic traditions of peacefulness for many millenniums, which explains their long delay in making territorial conquests. When they suffered from population pressure, instead of making war to secure more territory, they sent forth their excess inhabitants as teachers to the other races.(16)

These Andites inaugurated new advances throughout Eurasia and North Africa. From Mesopotamia through Sinkiang the Andite culture was dominant, and the steady migration toward Europe was continuously offset by new arrivals from Mesopotamia. But it is hardly correct to speak of the Andites as a race in Mesopotamia proper until near the beginning of the terminal migrations of the mixed descendants of Adam. By this time even the races in the second garden had become so blended that they could no longer be considered Adamites.(17)

The last three waves of Andites poured out of Mesopotamia between 8000 and 6000 B.C. These three great waves of culture were forced out of Mesopotamia by the pressure of the hill tribes to the east and the harassment of the plainsmen of the west.(18)

This is how The Urantia Book provides an explanation of human history that is altogether consistent with the otherwise perplexing discoveries that continue to be made at Gobekli Tepe—over forty years after it was written.

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Interestingly, the clue is hidden in plain site that suggests two different groups of people were involved and the superior culture was leaving. Schmidt notes that the “clear digression” was followed by a sudden burial. Why would people take the time to bury their temples? Because, perhaps, they did not want it desecrated by another group of people.

The Extended Study section of this report explores:

More specific details about Gobekli Tepe.
A broader perspective on The Urantia Book’s description of the Andites.
Why some scholars hypothesize a link between Gobekli Tepe and the traditions arising from the Old Testament story about the Garden of Eden.
How Gobekli Tepe compares to other ancient sites in the area.
Evidence related to the development of agriculture in the area.