gobekli tepe - genesis of the gods (25 page)

Gokihar ably takes the place of the Fenris Wolf in the Norse myths, although in the Bundahishn there is a strange twist—the comet, or bolide, personified as a supernatural wolf, actually becomes a cleansing agent, clearing away the wicked in order to make the world “immortal forever and everlasting.”
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It is a disturbing account of a past that is to be repeated in the future, and if all this is true, then the cataclysm that Donnelly envisaged as having taken place in some former epoch of humankind must have been so powerful, so all encompassing, that it affected not just a few isolated communities here and there, but human populations all over the world. What then was this event, and how did it come to affect the mind-set of the Epipaleolithic peoples that occupied southeast Anatolia in the age immediately prior to the construction of Göbekli Tepe?

As we see next, those who lived in the Near East at this time might have had every reason to be suffering from catastrophobia (as publisher, visionary, and mysteries writer Barbara Hand Clow so aptly put it in her book of the same name
²²
), for the great cataclysm did not pass them by. Instead, it engulfed them in a quite terrifying manner that the scientific world is only now piecing together for the first time.

17

A DARK DAY IN SYRIA

T
ell Abu Hureyra is an archaeological site of great importance on the Middle Euphrates of northern Syria. It was occupied from the late Epipaleolithic age, ca. 11,340 BC, to the Neolithic age, ca. 5500 BC, although today it lies beneath the waters of Lake Assad, created in 1973 following the completion of the Tabqa Dam.

Investigation of Abu Hureyra began in 1972 under the leadership of Andrew Moore from the University of Oxford. Yet as the rising waters began to lap around the base of the tell during the second digging season, the excavation changed into a frantic salvage operation as the British archaeologist’s team desperately attempted to understand the significance of the occupational mound before its final submergence.

THE BIG CHILL

Even after the first season’s expedition it was clear that Abu Hureyra was a quite extraordinary site that would reveal much about the transition from the age of the hunter-gatherer to the establishment of settled farming communities across the Near East. The second year of excavation, along with the subsequent work continued both in Syria and at various foreign universities, enabled Moore to get a pretty good picture of what had been going on at the site at the end of the Paleolithic age. He concluded that the first people to occupy the region arrived as the climate warmed during the Allerød interstadial, which heralded the end of the last ice age, around 13,000 BC.

In the two thousand years that followed there was a population boom throughout the Fertile Crescent, and it was during this new golden age that Abu Hureyra was established. Its inhabitants—who belonged to the Natufian culture, which inhabited the Levant region, ca. 12,900–9500 BC—lived mainly by hunting, fishing, and cultivating lentils and wild cereals, such as einkorn, emmer, and rye.

With the onset of the big chill, known as the Younger Dryas, around 10,900 BC, there was a sudden and unexpected disruption to migratory animals across the region. One animal that all but disappeared from the Fertile Crescent was the Persian gazelle, which until that time had formed a major part of the diet of the hunter-gatherers at Abu Hureyra.

Adding to the problems of the Epipaleolithic hunter-gatherers was the disappearance of forageable foods, such as wild grain and pistachio nuts, almost certainly caused by the rapid climate change, which had brought with it a severe drought, revealed by an analysis of plant remains recovered from Abu Hureyra. In the end, its inhabitants were left with no alternative but to seek warmer climes. It was the same throughout the Fertile Crescent, Natufian settlements being abandoned to the elements, their distinctive style of living vanishing completely.

The mini ice age lasted for approximately 1,300 years. After its cessation around 9600 BC, just before the creation of the first large enclosures at Göbekli Tepe, the temperatures began to rise again. A new community was established at Abu Hureyra, which built mud brick houses on the site of earlier dwellings. The inhabitants, now classed as members of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A culture, used much fatter grain seeds for cultivation, making this perhaps one of the oldest sites where the domestication of cereal crops is thought to have occurred.
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MICROSPHERULES AND SLOS

Theories about Tell Abu Hureyra and its role in the birth of agriculture at the point of transition from the Epipaleolithic age to the earliest Neolithic farming communities remain controversial. Yet none of the scholars attempting to understand the evolution of the site, and its place in the emergence of the PrePottery Neolithic world, can have been prepared for what an eighteen-member international team of researchers, including James Kennett, professor of earth science at the University of California, found after examining sediment materials removed from the site during Moore’s excavations in 1972 and 1973.

Soil taken from a depth of 11.8 feet (3.6 meters) below the surface revealed, quite astonishingly, that it contained large quantities of almost nano-sized magnetic and glass balls known as
microspherules,
along with something called
SLOs,
short for “siliceous scoria-like objects.” These are microscopic glassy particles up to a quarter of an inch (roughly 6.5 millimeters) in size that are highly porous and
vesiculated,
which means they are full of small sacs created by gas bubbles. In appearance the SLOs resemble
scoria,
the name given to jagged rock fragments ejected from volcanoes.

What is so remarkable about SLOs is that they form only under incredibly high temperatures, in the range of 3,100 to 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit (1,700 to 1,980 degrees Celsius),
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which, believe it or not, is the boiling point of quartz, a form of silica. This, in its molten form, is one of the main constituents of SLOs, which can appear dark brown, green, white, or black. The extraordinary heat needed to create these glassy objects rules out their manufacture by either human activity or volcanic action—or by any other natural process connected with the earth itself.

Also discounted was the possibility that the tiny glass objects were produced in space, then fell to earth as micrometeors. Results show that 90 percent of the microspherules and SLOs are composed of elements not only distinct from cosmic material, but also closely match the geochemistry of the rocks and sediment in the area of their recovery, clearly indicating their
terrestrial
origin.

MELT PRODUCTS

The microspherules and SLOs are also geochemically and morphologically comparable with each other; in other words, they derive from the same or very similar source materials. More significantly, they both show evidence of “high-energy interparticle collisions” of the sort that occur inside impact plumes.
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Both are also comparable with
melt products,
tiny objects of molten glass, found at Meteor Crater, Arizona, the site of an impact event around fifty thousand years ago, and also at tektite-strewn fields in Australasia (
tektites
are glassy objects created from a mixture of terrestrial and extraterrestrial matter ejected during impacts).

More disturbingly, the SLOs found at Abu Hureyra and two other sites in the United States (Blackville, South Carolina, and Melrose, Pennsylvania) resemble “high-temperature materials”
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found at the Trinity site, which forms part of the Alamogordo Bombing Range, New Mexico, following the detonation there of the first atomic bomb in 1945. Apparently, the thermal blast melted 0.5–1 inch (1–2.5 centimeters) of the desert floor for a radius of approximately 500 feet (150 meters) and left puddles of melted silica glass objects across a wide area.

MULTIPLE IMPACTORS

Nature herself creates such unbelievably high temperatures only during lightning strikes. Under such conditions microspherules and SLOs can result, although when this occurs, the lateral spread of glassy objects is only around 60 inches (1.5 meters); none generally reach beyond this point. However, the SLOs discovered at Abu Hureyra indicate a minimum spread of 14.5 feet (4.5 meters), ruling out lightning as their cause.

All this supports the slightly disturbing conclusion that the microspherules and SLOs found at Abu Hureyra were the product of an unimaginable impact plume or fireball cloud. Moreover, the fact that similar microparticles were discovered at three of the eighteen sites where evidence of an impact event was found by the team tells us there must have been “multiple impactors,” air blasts caused by a fragmenting comet or asteroid, most likely the former.
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Most significant to this debate are the final words in the published paper containing the findings of the international team:

Because these three sites in North America and the Middle East [i.e., Syria, where SLOs were found] are separated by 1,000–10,000 km, we propose that there were three or more major impact/airburst epicenters for the YDB [Younger Dryas Boundary] impact event. If so, the much higher concentration of SLOs at Abu Hureyra suggests that the effects on that settlement and its inhabitants would have been severe.
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The Younger Dryas Boundary (or YDB) impact event is the name given to this proposed comet collision with Earth, which is believed to have occurred around 10,900 BC. This date marks the “boundary” or “horizon” between the Allerød interstadial and the Younger Dryas mini ice age. The glass microspherules and SLOs found at Abu Hureyra were located at this Younger Dryas Boundary, immediately beneath an organic-rich layer referred to as the “black mat,” which, the report claims, has been found at a number of sites in North and South America, Europe, and now Syria.

TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT

We can only imagine how the Epipaleolithic hunter-gatherers of Abu Hureyra felt around 12,900 years ago, gazing out of their subsurface round houses and seeing one or more blinding balls of fire crossing the open sky (like the meteor caught so spectacularly on film as it passed over Russia’s Chelyabinsk region in February 2013) before exploding shortly before impact with the ground and as a result causing thunderous explosions, unlike anything ever imagined before in the lives of these people. Moments later, everything—livestock, buildings, and people—are hit by a shock wave of soaring heat and wind that peppers everything in its path with microscopic glassy objects, like the discharge of a hundred thousand shotguns all fired at once.

This is just a glimpse of what might have happened at one location on the Euphrates River, but other Natufian settlements in the Levant and elsewhere could also have been affected by the Younger Dryas impact event. Indeed, we have no real idea just how widespread the proposed devastation might have been, with the only clue being the Usselo horizon. This is a “charcoalrich layer” measuring 8 inches (20 centimeters) in thickness that has been detected at the Allerød–Younger Dryas Boundary at sites in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Belgium, Belarus, Poland, India, South Africa, Egypt, and Australia.
⁷

This strange black layer has been found to contain magnetic grains, microspherules, iridium (an element commonly found in cosmic impactors), and nanodiamonds,
⁸
that is, pure carbon, all of which supports the conclusion that the Usselo horizon is the result of multiple impact events that sent ash, soot, and other debris high into the atmosphere. This mixture would eventually have fallen back to earth to create the Usselo horizon, which now becomes a telltale marker for the effects of the impact event around 12,900 years ago.

In addition to the evidence presented here, other scientific teams have uncovered similar evidence of microspherules at the Younger Dryas Boundary in Venezuela, South America, and various other parts of the world.
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It is thus clear that something very major did go down at this time and that it involved a series of bolides, most likely fragments of a comet that perhaps broke up during its slingshot orbit of the sun. The inhabitants on Earth would have seen all this—the arrival of the comet, or comets, in the sky, its reappearance and fragmentation, along with the incoming waves of fireballs and the terrifying air blasts as the fragments reached the lower atmosphere, causing maximum devastation on the earth itself.

KILL, CHILL, ILL, AND NOW GRILL!

The effects of the Younger Dryas Boundary impact event would have been felt on every continent, although the true extent of the damage can only be guessed at today. What we do know is that it coincided with the disappearance of the Ice Age megafauna, such as mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, dire wolves, and saber-toothed tigers. All of these animals existed in abundance until the end of the Allerød interglacial, then vanished with the onset of the Younger Dryas mini ice age. How exactly they disappeared remains a complete mystery, with three main theories being proposed: they died through overhunting (the overkill theory); they died because of the sudden change in temperature at the beginning of the mini ice age (the overchill theory); or they suffered some kind of mass epidemic, which wiped out whole species (the overill theory). Recently, a fourth contender has entered the debate, this being the over-grill theory, which proposes that they were decimated in the wildfires caused by the comet impact.