Pillars at the archaeological site of Gobekli Tepe in Sanliurfa, Turkey, photographed in May 2022. Located on a rocky mountain in southeastern Turkey overlooking the ancient Mesopotamian plateau, Gobekli Tepe is the world's first known sanctuary and may have housed the world's oldest solar calendar. Ozan Kose/AFP via Getty Images Hide caption
Toggle caption Ozan Kose/AFP via Getty Images
Pillars at the archaeological site of Gobekli Tepe in Sanliurfa, Turkey, photographed in May 2022. Located on a rocky mountain in southeastern Turkey overlooking the ancient Mesopotamian plateau, Gobekli Tepe is the world's first known sanctuary and may have housed the world's oldest solar calendar. Ozan Kose/AFP via Getty Images Hide caption
Toggle caption Ozan Kose/AFP via Getty Images
At first glance, the V-shaped symbol carved into a pillar at the ancient site of Gobekli Tepe in southern Turkey seems insignificant compared to the animal shapes next to it that depict solar and lunar cycles.
But the researchers say the inscription could provide evidence of two major discoveries: The ancient pillar could be the world's oldest lunisolar calendar, and it could serve as a memorial to the cometary impact that struck Earth about 13,000 years ago and sparked the Little Ice Age.
“The inhabitants of Göbekli Tepe seem to have been avid sky watchers, which is not surprising given that their world was devastated by a cometary impact,” said Martin Sweatman, a scientist at the University of Edinburgh who led the research team that led to the recent discovery.
A study published last month in the journal Time & Mind found that a series of V-shaped symbols carved into the pillars of Göbekli Tepe, each representing a day, together appear to record the date when a swarm of cometary debris struck Earth in 10,850 BCE, triggering a 1,200-year ice age and resulting in the extinction of many megafauna, including mammoths, steppe bison, and other large Pleistocene mammals.
“This event may have marked the beginning of a new religion, encouraged the development of agriculture to cope with the cold climate, and may have sparked civilization,” Sweatman said.
The possibility of a cometary impact has long been a source of intrigue and disagreement among scientists, and if the V-sign hypothesis is correct, it could provide groundbreaking support for that theory.
“Perhaps their attempt to record what they saw was the first step towards the development of writing thousands of years later,” he said.
