Scots scientist uncovers catastrophe that sparked human civilisation

The next morning, the sky is dark. The day after, it’s darker still. The weather gets colder and colder. Soon the Earth seems to be dying, as the abundant fruits and berries found across this once-fertile land wither and die. Then animals begin to perish as there’s so little to eat.

Eventually, our ancestors begin dying too, from cold and hunger. Terror grips our Stone Age forebears.

Much wiser and more advanced than we give them credit for, however, they adapt.

They must, or humanity will die out. They take two courses of action.

First, they turn to the spirit world. A cult begins, a form of worship close to what we would now call a “religion”. This “faith” commemorates the day the fiery snakes darkened the skies, and seeks to hold off their return.

Secondly, our ancestors begin harvesting hardy grasses – early forms of wheat – and start cultivating the land so others crops can grow. With the ability to hunt and gather now drastically reduced by rapid climate change, they invent agriculture.

That, in a nutshell, is the startling hypothesis for the dawn of civilisation expounded by one of the most remarkable scientists working in Scotland today: Dr Martin Sweatman from Edinburgh University.

Dr Martin Sweatman

Discovery

For almost 20 years, he’s studied the mysterious ruins of Gobekli Tepe, which date back deep into prehistory. His investigations are part The Da Vinci Code and part Indiana Jones. Gobekli Tepe is found, after all, in a dangerous and inhospitable area. The journey there is treacherous.

The site was only excavated in 1994 but what was uncovered has revolutionised our understanding of the ancient past. In essence, Gobekli Tepe is a series of monumental buildings, with enclosures and ornately-designed pillars. However, it shouldn’t exist. Until its discovery, the accepted wisdom was that humans couldn’t have built such a place at such a time, and were still thousands of years from developing the skills needed to construct something on this scale.

When it was unearthed, Gobekli Tepe pushed back the understanding of when humans first began building fixed settlements by millennia. It’s an astonishing 11,500 years old. To put that in perspective, work on the main structure at Stonehenge began around 2400 BC, and the earliest pyramid went up about 2600 BC.

It’s thought that Gobekli Tepe was built in 9500 BC.

What makes Gobekli Tepe (which means “pot-bellied hill”) even more remarkable is that it completely revolutionised our understanding of how civilisation developed.

Until its discovery, we assumed that when it came to the dawn of civilisation, ancient humans invented agriculture first, then settled down and built villages, which became towns and finally cities.

But Gobekli Tepe went up either before or at the same time that agriculture was invented. It appears that whatever was the spur for our Neolithic ancestors to erect Gobekli Tepe was also the spur to till the land and plant and harvest crops.

So these ancient ruins have trashed conventional longstanding academic theories: primarily that agriculture was the driving force behind civilisation. So what was the impetus for this first great human building project, and the turn to farming which appears to have come with it?

Dr Martin Sweatman at the site

Comets

LET’S return to those fiery snakes in the sky. If Sweatman’s hypothesis is correct, those fiery snakes are, of course, comets. He contends that the strange inscriptions found on the stones of Gobekli Tepe show multiple comets – in the guise of snakes – hitting the Earth. Not only that, he says, but the inscriptions – a form of hieroglyphics – encode a specific date for when these snakes, these comets, came from the sky. Using an elaborate system which places specific celestial constellations in a defined pattern with the Sun and the summer solstice, our ancient ancestors were deliberately pointing to a set period – around 10,800 BC – which held great importance for them.

This is the date when what’s known as the Younger Dryas period began, a mini-Ice Age which froze the planet for more than 1,000 years, pushing humanity to near extinction.

And here’s the kicker: what’s known as the “Younger Dryas impact hypothesis” contends that the Ice Age was caused by multiple objects, probably disintegrating comets, hitting the Earth.

Are those snakes on the stones of Gobekli Tepe a memorial to the day scores of comets struck the Earth and brought humanity to the brink? Sweatman thinks so.

He has been piecing this nearly 13,000-year-old puzzle together for many years. Since 2017, he’s written five academic papers on the significance of Gobekli Tepe, and published the book Prehistory Decoded: A Science Odyssey Unifying Astronomy, Geochemistry and Archeology. Sweatman is a physicist by training and teaches engineering at Edinburgh University.

I spent an afternoon with him as he explained his complex theory. The starting point to unravelling Gobekli Tepe is this, he says: “It’s one thing to suggest Gobekli Tepe is the first step towards civilisation, but then you have to ask why: what prompted these people to build this site?”

Gobekli Tepe

Clues

THE only clues left to us are the symbols engraved in the stones. “It appears some of these symbols talk about – or are a memorial to – the Younger Dryas impact,” he says. They’re a form of code.

So two huge strands of Earth’s history are being pulled together. “You have one strand of academia searching for the origins of civilisation and finding Gobekli Tepe, and a completely different strand of research looking at this ancient impact and its consequences.”

Sweatman is the scientist who’s pulled both strands together into a unified theory.

The Younger Dryas impact was like a celestial “shotgun” fired at the Earth. There was no single comet, but “a distributed impact, with lots of fragments”. It’s believed the strike came from what’s known as the Taurid meteor stream. “We can still see it in our skies,” Sweatman explains. In November, it’s found in the area of the Pisces, Aries and Taurus constellations.

The Taurids contain “swarms of debris” formed around 20,000-30,000 years ago from the breakup of a giant comet trapped in the inner solar system. “It’s those fragments that collided with Earth in roughly 10,850 BC.”

At the time of the comet strikes, our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, travelling in tribes of around 100-200, following big game and taking resources from the land.

The Younger Dryas impact is believed to have primarily hit the American continent, although there are some signs that strikes could have happened near what later became Gobekli Tepe.

Ice Age

ONE theory has it that the multiple impacts broke up ice sheets in the Artic, “disrupting ocean circulation transporting heat from the southern oceans which keep the northern continents warmer than they would be otherwise”. Such an event would be “catastrophic”.

“However, at the same time, there’s another effect, a kind of nuclear winter, or impact winter, where lots of debris is thrown into the sky – soot and ash. That would obscure the su,” says Sweatman. There could have been “complete darkness for many weeks”.

Evidently, these events would have terrified and bewildered our ancestors. The climate began to change relatively quickly resulting in “megafaunal extinction”. It’s in the following time period that creatures like the giant sloth in the Americas die out, along with sabre-tooth cats and mastodons. Ancient humans hunted many of these huge creatures.

“This would have been a really traumatic time,” Sweatman explains. “Humans would have had to adapt, meaning new strategies for obtaining food.”

Although the impact clearly wasn’t an “extinction-level event” for humans, it was nonetheless devastating. “It would have had a profound effect on the way they thought. The universe would have seemed a very dangerous place. It would have been natural to inquire about what happened, and how they could have prevented that happening again.”

After the Black Death, art and literature in medieval Europe became obsessed with mortality and disaster. It’s likely that our ancient ancestors experienced a similar cultural shift, with their collective imagination darkening considerably.

Death cult

UNTIL Sweatman, it was believed that Gobekli Tepe was the site of some “skull cult”, a place of ancestor worship which became so important humans built a temple. It was supposed this led to the birth of agriculture, as members of the cult were staying in one place and needed to develop dependable food sources all year round.

But skull cults existed long before Gobekli Tepe, Sweatman explains. “They would have been relatively common and didn’t result in places like Gobekli Tepe.” Key to Sweatman’s theory “is that this dramatic impact event explains the sudden appearance of Gobekli Tepe”.

Some radio-carbon dating has been conducted at Gobekli Tepe. It dates construction to about 1,000 years after the impact strike.

However, there are earlier parts of Gobekli Tepe not yet radio-carbon dated which could push its foundation back, much closer to the date of the strike.

Nor, says Sweatman, could Gobekli Tepe – which is highly sophisticated in terms of its structure – have been built by humans unskilled in architecture and mathematics.

“If you think about its grandeur, it’s a really impressive feat. That’s clearly not going to happen overnight from a standstill. It’s going to take hundreds, if not thousands of years, of development, thought and organisation to get to that point.”

So what we see today is probably later building work, which sits adjacent to other structures, not yet discovered, that had been constructed much earlier. Similar has been found at Stonehenge. The monument we see in England today was predated by much earlier buildings.

The earliest radio-carbon dated part of Gobekli Tepe is known as “Enclosure D”. However, it seems there were different “construction phases of Enclosure D – that it was reconstructed over many hundreds, perhaps thousands of years”.

This earlier construction work on Enclosure D has not yet been dated. “Excavations are still quite limited,” Sweatman explains. As such, the time gap “between the impact and the earliest date doesn’t concern me very much”, he adds.

 T-Shaped pillars are seen at the Gobekli Tepe archaeology site on September 18, 2018 in Sanliurfa, Turkey

Religion

HOWEVER, Sweatman contends it would also have taken the passage of hundreds of years between the impact strike and the foundation of Gobekli Tepe for humans to both create the new religion which was centred on the site, and learn the rudiments of farming.

After the strike, humans “would have been extremely afraid”. He adds: “Fear is a very powerful organising force. With fear and wonder, this new cult or religion began. Eventually, maybe 1,000 years later, it leads to these very dramatic temple-like constructions. Perhaps it takes thousands of years to go from impact to developing this cultic centre.”

He references the time span between the period in which Jesus Christ was meant to have lived and the founding of the great medieval cathedrals. “Those cathedrals are referencing a date over 1,000 years before they were built. I’m suggesting that Gobekli Tepe is referencing a date 1,000 years before at least part of it was constructed.”

Sweatman explains that “the earliest signs of agriculture were found about 30 kilometres from Gobekli Tepe”. The latest research indicates humans were “beginning to develop agriculture about the same time” as Gobekli Tepe was founded. Until recently, “the accepted story” had been that agriculture came first. “The most recent reports are saying actually, the foundation of Gobekli Tepe and the birth of agriculture look like they go together in terms of timing.”

It’s thought that Gobekli Tepe wasn’t just a temple, but also somewhere people lived. Part of the building appears to be “dwellings”. Sweatman speculates these could have been “meeting places for important folk, the shamans in control of the larger enclosures”. The larger enclosures were likely “places where festivals, important ceremonies and cultic practices occurred”.

It appears these festivals were dark and forbidding.

“Think of something like Halloween. It may well be the impact event was remembered by some kind of festival like the Day of the Dead.” It seems alcohol was fermented at Gobekli Tepe, and played a part in rituals.

Sweatman’s studies have shown how central astronomy was to the builders of Gobekli Tepe – especially the notion of a calendar, using the solstices to mark the passage of time. The site is even placed in a prime location to survey the stars.

The code

WE now come to the heart of Sweatman’s research. It’s complex, but once it falls into place, his theory is rather elegant. Sweatman believes that the codes and hieroglyphics found in Gobekli Tepe commemorate the huge shift in human history caused by the Younger Dryas comet strikes. Not only that, he believes the symbols tell us the actual date of the strikes. And it’s a date which accords precisely with the period when scientists believe the impact took place. It’s a stunning concept.

Let’s start with what’s called the Vulture Stone, the most celebrated of Gobekli Tepe’s pillars. It contains the symbol of the Sun, easily identifiable and repeated on other pillars, together with the symbol for the Moon. Three other “handbag-shaped” semicircular symbols appear on the stone, together with numerous images of animals, in particular a large vulture with wings outstretched.

The hypothesis is that the Sun symbol stands for the summer solstice, and the three handbag symbols represent the winter solstice, and the spring and autumn equinox. These are also vital points in the year for farming, evidently.

The animals, according to the hypothesis, represent star constellations. Now, what’s curious is that the vulture-shaped symbol sits in a very specific position to the sign for the Sun and the summer solstice.

Sweatman wondered if the symbols might in some way be trying to signal a date, using what’s known as “the procession of the equinoxes”. It gets complicated here but stay focused, as once the theory settles in your brain, it’s dazzling.

The procession of the equinoxes is the slow rotation of the stars across the sky. It takes 26,000 years roughly for a full circuit.

This law of nature fixes “the position of the Sun on the summer solstice in relation to the constellations”.

In other words, if we know that a specific constellation is in a specific position relative to the Sun at the time of the summer solstice, then we can pin down a very exact timeframe. “What I’m suggesting, and it’s quite bold,” says Sweatman, “is that Gobekli Tepe is representing a date using the procession of the equinoxes.”

That in itself is revolutionary as until now it was believed the Ancient Greeks discovered the theory of the procession of the equinoxes around 150 BC. It means our Stone Age ancestors were incredibly advanced in “naked-eye astronomy”.

The secret

BUT even more astonishing is the next secret Sweatman unlocked: there’s a date encrypted in the stones. “And it’s referring to the day of the impact,” he says. “It’s a memorial.” His contention is that this is something like a Stone Age cenotaph, commemorating the date of some terrible event.

There are other key symbols on the pillars: a headless man, symbolising death and destruction; and snakes leaping from the bodies of an array of different animals. The animals are believed to represent constellations, and the snakes and the comets that hit Earth.

So it appears that this is how the people of Gobekli Tepe explained – or recorded – what their own ancestors witnessed in the sky when everything changed: comets flying from the direction of these star constellations, hitting Earth and bringing death and disaster on such a scale that it altered human history forever, triggering an Ice Age and leading to the birth of civilisation.

The key to the code is the image of the vulture with outstretched wings. If we examine the night sky, the closest equivalent constellation shaped like a vulture is what the Ancient Greeks called Sagittarius. We still use the shape today.

“If you use astronomical software and look along the path of the Sun, for a constellation which has this kind of geometry – the head, the wings – the only thing you find is Sagittarius. So I suggest this bird of prey is a precursor to the Sagittarius constellation.”

Sweatman then wondered what would happen if he looked for the timeframe when “the position of the Sun on the summer solstice relative to Sagittarius was in the same position as the symbol representing the “un at Gobekli Tepe is relative to the bird of prey. We tried matching the two”.

He ran the software again. “You find it’s somewhere around 10,950 BC – within 100 years or so of the estimated time of the impact event. We can be that accurate.”

Star constellations stay in approximately the same position for many hundreds of years. This allows scientists to fix the period when they’re in position to a specific timeframe.

The headless man symbolising death and destruction, the snake-like comets flying from positions in the night sky, and now this seemingly highly specific date.

All are encoded on the pillars of Gobekli Tepe and, Sweatman believes, reveal the reasons for the dawn of civilisation.

So let’s put this in simple terms: the symbols, if Sweatman is correct, pinpoint – to a very close margin – the date of the comet strikes which caused the mini-Ice Age and led to the foundation of both the religion centred at Gobekli Tepe and the rise of agriculture, and thus civilisation.

Discoveries

SWEATMAN has made more discoveries, however. He has decoded what appears to be a sophisticated calendar on the stones of Gobekli Tepe. A series of symbols accord with what seems to be a lunar cycle, marking periods of both 29 and 30 days, with other markings for additional days. The symbols, when added up, come to 365

– the number of days in a year – and the cycle includes what appears to be 12 months. This seems very close to our modern calendar.

Significantly, one of the “day symbols” at Gobekli Tepe represents the summer solstice and is found at the neck of a bird of prey – again referencing the constellation we now know as Sagittarius, and reinforcing the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis.

“It’s mind-boggling,” Sweatman says. “They’re using a calendar and counting days in a very clever way. It’s their way of ensuring the meaning of the pillars couldn’t be misunderstood.”

Just as Nasa scientists placed symbols which could be decoded by any advanced alien civilisation onboard the Pioneer spacecraft – such as diagrams referring to the properties of hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe – Sweatman believes the people of Gobekli Tepe left their codes for future generations. Their use of the Sun, star constellations, days of the year, and solstices are a “constant of nature” that we can unravel.

The shape of constellations is effectively unchanging as they transit the night sky over millennia. Indeed, the entire complex at Gobekli Tepe could be one “giant calendar”, a highly sophisticated and complex system known as a “lunar solar calendar” which operates according to the cycles of both the Sun and Moon.

Sweatman knows that his hypotheses are “paradigm-changing as they challenge so many assumptions – assumptions about the Younger Dryas climate change, extinction events, the origins of civilisation, and notions we had about the history of astronomy”.

Disappearance

HE’S now embarking on exploring what effect Gobekli Tepe had on the rest of prehistory. It was abandoned around 8000 BC. Some think it was deliberately covered over for unknown reasons by the inhabitants. Sweatman favours the theory that earthquakes destroyed it.

Following its disappearance, Sweatman believes the symbols found at Gobekli Tepe echoed on through the ages.

Is it coincidental that the symbols used for constellations by the people of Gobekli Tepe are similar to the way later cultures, such as the Ancient Greeks, came to label the shapes stars make? He thinks not.

A symbol known as the “Master of Animals” was found at a site near Gobekli Tepe recently. It’s reasonably contemporaneous with the main excavation area.

The symbol shows a human with two “opposing animals”. We next see it in ruins dated to around 7000 BC. It occurs again in Mesopotamia in approximately 4000 BC, and is seen in the early civilisations of the Indus Valley, and then ancient Egypt. It appears during the Bronze Age, Iron Age, and in ancient Greece.

Might this be some reference to an important astronomical event, date, or constellation which had significant meaning for the people of Gobekli Tepe – and then carried on with different interpretations for different civilisations through millennia?

There are even echoes of Sweatman’s theory much closer to home. He believes that astronomy is also the key to unlocking the mystery of Pictish symbols, found on stones all over Scotland.

One symbol, nicknamed the Pictish Beastie, “looks like an aquatic goat”. There’s speculation it could represent Capricorn. For now, though, this theory remains “rather speculative”, Sweatman admits.

However, he adds: “Wherever we now find ancient animal symbols, we need to think that they are more than simply representing real creatures. They could be symbols for constellations and specific time periods.”

The greatest echo of Gobekli Tepe, however, may still be felt to this day. Sweatman contends that many world religions, especially the Judeo-Christian religions originating in the Middle East, are all filled with “catastrophic images” like the flood and the end of the world.

“Are there echoes of the Younger Dryas impact – that catastrophe – still there at the heart of those religions?” Earlier religions – such as the faith of the Sumer people who built the first cities like Uruk around 4500 BC – are filled with mythical catastrophes. The Sumer legend known as the Epic of Gilgamesh tells a similar story to that of Noah.

Sweatman is now looking back in time to see if earlier humans – in the deep Stone Age – were using symbols similar to the people of Gobekli Tepe. He’s written papers suggesting that the famed cave paintings in places like Lascaux may also have astronomical significance.

When the iconic bull images on the cave walls were painted in 15,000 BC

– that’s 6,000 years before Gobekli Tepe was likely built – it was the constellation we now call Capricorn which aligned with the summer solstice.

On the day of the summer solstice, it’s thought that the topography of the time meant that the last rays of the sun entered the cave and illuminated the bull drawings. The star pattern in the night sky which we call Capricorn – the goat – could quite easily have been interpreted by the ancient people of Lascaux as bull-shaped.

“It appears that the symbols we see at Gobekli Tepe didn’t start then,” Sweatman concludes. “They were already in existence. People were already using animal symbols as constellations. The mystery now is: how far back did this all begin?”