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... what about BONCUKLU TARLA? | Uncovering the real star of Middle Eastern archaeology. | 23:21The Prehistory Guys | 63.2K subscribers | 305,710 views | May 10, 2023

Mystery of the fat Venus The Dominion Post | Monday, 9 April 2007 WORLD OF SCIENCE - BOB BROCKIE We all know about those hand-sized Ice Age women carved in stone – those plump ladies with huge breasts and behinds, tiny heads, artful hairdos and no faces. They're known as Palaeolithic Venuses and they raise a lot of puzzling questions: How come these almost identical figurines were found all the way from France to Siberia? How come this stylised carving tradition was practised and passed down over 20,000 years? What purpose did they serve? There are as many answers to...

At a prehistoric archaeological site in Turkey, researchers have discovered two 8,500-year-old human teeth, which had been used as pendants in a necklace or bracelet. Researchers have never documented this practice before in the prehistoric Near East, and the rarity of the find suggests that the human teeth were imbued with profound symbolic meaning for the people who wore them. During excavations at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey between 2013 and 2015, researchers found three 8,500-year-old-teeth that appeared to have been intentionally drilled to be worn as beads in a necklace or bracelet. Subsequent macroscopic, microscopic and radiographic...

Animal fat on ancient pottery reveals a nearly catastrophic period of human prehistory -- A bit more than 8000 years ago, the world suddenly cooled, leading to much drier summers for much of the Northern Hemisphere. The impact on early farmers must have been extreme, yet archaeologists know little about how they endured. Now, the remains of animal fat on broken pottery from one of the world’s oldest and most unusual protocities -- known as Çatalhöyük -- is finally giving scientists a window into these ancient peoples’ close call with catastrophe... Today, Çatalhöyük is just a series of dusty, sun-baked...

Examples of (a) Upper Paleolithic signs, and characters in three of the early written languages which resemble the Paleolithic marks: (b) Indus Valley signs, (c) Greek (western branch), (d) Runic... Correlation of the symbols found accompanying Magdalenian cave art with symbols from other ancient cultures shows a nearly-complete match, after Forbes and Crowder, "The Problem of Franco-Cantabrian Abstract Signs: Agenda for a New Approach." World Archaeology 10 (1979): 350-66... These illustrations show (a) the collection of symbols that accompany the Magdalenian cave art in France, from 20,000 years ago or less, and characters in three of the early written languages...

Study indicates a correlation between the ancient mural image and date of the Hasan Dagi volcanic eruption. First discovered and excavated in the 1960's by British archaeologist James Mellaart, the world-famous 9,000-year-old Neolithic site of Catälhöyuk in Central Anatolia, Turkey, has provided a unique window on the lives of humans at the transition from hunter-gatherer to settled agriculture societies. Among the spectacular finds was a mural or wall-painting dated to about 6600 BCE and described by its discoverer and others as depicting a volcanic eruption. Arguably regarded as the first map or graphical representation of a landscape, it featured "a...

Chauvet-Pont D'Arc cave, in southern France, is one of the world's oldest and most impressive cave-art sites. Discovered in 1994 and popularized in the Werner Herzog documentary 'Cave of Forgotten Dreams', Chauvet contains hundreds of paintings that were made as early as 37,000 years ago. Fearsome animals such as woolly rhinoceroses, cave lions and bears dominate Chauvet's imagery. But one of its innermost galleries -- named after a giant deer species, Megaloceros, that is depicted there -- also contains a series of mysterious spray-shaped drawings, partly covered by the Megaloceros painting. A nearby gallery holds similar spray imagery, as does...

The largest so far known in the Middle East amount of grain of the Neolithic period in a perfect state of preservation has been discovered by Polish archaeologists in Çatalhöyük, a famous archaeological site in Turkey... In total, from each of the two studied containers archaeologists recovered almost 5 kg of grain. Such amount and such a good state of preservation is a global scale phenomenon. In addition, a different grain cluster was discovered in the room. Archeobotanical analysis showed that it was an extinct species of wheat, popular in Neolithic times in the Middle East and Europe. The room...

Magli simulated what the sky would have looked like from Turkey when Göbekli Tepe was built. Over millennia, the positions of the stars change due to Earth wobbling as it spins on its axis. Stars that are near the horizon will rise and set at different points, and they can even disappear completely, only to reappear thousands of years later. Today, Sirius can be seen almost worldwide as the brightest star in the sky -- excluding the sun -- and the fourth brightest night-sky object after the moon, Venus and Jupiter. Sirius is so noticeable that its rising and setting...

The first interesting form is the scorpion, which might first be thought to represent is known as Scorpius, but this does not appear to be the case.  This is due to the presence of the three birds to the middle right (A, B, C), these three most clearly correspond to the “Summer Triangle” stars, the three birds, one represented by each star: Cygnus, Aquila (aka Vultur volans), and Vultur cadens (Lyra).  The shape of the Aquila constellations holds the same general appearance as bird A, the angle of the Cygnus stars matches the shape of the body of bird B,...

"Wow," exclaims the visitor from New Zealand, a place, after all, with a human history shorter than most. For from a wooden walkway we’re gazing down at an archaeological site of giddying age. Built about 9000 BC, it’s more than twice as old as Stonehenge or the Pyramids, predating the discovery of metals, pottery or even the wheel. This is Göbekli Tepe in south-eastern Turkey, generally reckoned the most exciting and historically significant archaeological dig currently under way anywhere in the world, and there are neither queues nor tickets to get in. Wow for a number of reasons, then, though...

Gobekli Tepe is located in southern Turkey near the modern-day city of Urfa. It contains at least 20 stone rings (circles within a circle) that date back more than 11,000 years. T-shaped limestone blocks line the circles and reliefs are carved on them. Long ago, people would fill in the outer circle with debris before building a new circle within... Ancient blades made of volcanic rock that were discovered at what may be the world's oldest temple suggest that the site in Turkey was the hub of a pilgrimage that attracted a cosmopolitan group of people some 11,000 years ago....

If National Geographic had more stories like this one, I’d be inclined to subscribe. This is fascinating stuff.Seven thousand years before Stonehenge was Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey, where you’ll find ring upon ring of T-shaped stone towers arranged  in a circle. Around 11,600 B.C. hundreds of people gathered on this mound, year after year, possibly for centuries.There are plenty of mysteries on this hill.  Some of the rocks weigh 16 tons, but archaeologists can find no homes, no hearths, no water source, and no sign of a town or village to support the hundreds of workers who built the rings...

Ancient structures uncovered in Turkey and thought to be the world's oldest temples may not have been strictly religious buildings after all, according to an article in the October issue of Current Anthropology. Archaeologist Ted Banning of the University of Toronto argues that the buildings found at Göbekli Tepe may have been houses for people, not...gods. The buildings at Göbekli, a hilltop just outside of the Turkish city of Urfa, were found in 1995 by Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute and colleagues from the Şanlıurfa Museum in Turkey. The oldest of the structures at the site are immense...

We used to think agriculture gave rise to cities and later to writing, art, and religion. Now the world’s oldest temple suggests the urge to worship sparked civilization. Every now and then the dawn of civilization is reenacted on a remote hilltop in southern Turkey. The reenactors are busloads of tourists—usually Turkish, sometimes European. The buses (white, air-conditioned, equipped with televisions) blunder over the winding, indifferently paved road to the ridge and dock like dreadnoughts before a stone portal. Visitors flood out, fumbling with water bottles and MP3 players. Guides call out instructions and explanations. Paying no attention, the visitors...

This site is 12,000 years old, the most advanced strutures ever found. Several video's on the link

A temple complex in Turkey that predates even the pyramids is rewriting the story of human evolution. They call it potbelly hill, after the soft, round contour of this final lookout in southeastern Turkey. To the north are forested mountains. East of the hill lies the biblical plain of Harran, and to the south is the Syrian border, visible 20 miles away, pointing toward the ancient lands of Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, the region that gave rise to human civilization. And under our feet, according to archeologist Klaus Schmidt, are the stones that mark the spot—the exact spot—where humans...

Do these mysterious stones mark the site of the Garden of Eden? By TOM COX For the old Kurdish shepherd, it was just another burning hot day in the rolling plains of eastern Turkey. Following his flock over the arid hillsides, he passed the single mulberry tree, which the locals regarded as 'sacred'. The bells on his sheep tinkled in the stillness. Then he spotted something. Crouching down, he brushed away the dust, and exposed a strange, large, oblong stone. The man looked left and right: there were similar stone rectangles, peeping from the sands. Calling his dog to heel,...

It's more than twice as old as the Pyramids, or even the written word. When it was built, saber-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths still roamed, and the Ice Age had just ended. The elaborate temple at Gobelki Tepe in southeastern Turkey, near the Syrian border, is staggeringly ancient: 11,500 years old, from a time just before humans learned to farm grains and domesticate animals. According to the German archaeologist in charge of excavations at the site, it might be the birthplace of agriculture, of organized religion — of civilization itself.

Running until the end of October at the Palazzo della Cancelleria in the Vatican, the exhibition, "Cucuteni-Trypillia: A Great Civilization of Old Europe," introduces a mysterious Neolithic people who are now believed to have forged Europe's first civilization... Archaeologists have named them "Cucuteni-Trypillians" after the villages of Cucuteni, near Lasi, Romania and Trypillia, near Kiev, Ukraine, where the first discoveries of this ancient civilization were made more than 100 years ago. The excavated treasures -- fired clay statuettes and op art-like pottery dating from 5000 to 3000 B.C. -- immediately posed a riddle to archaeologists... "Despite recent extensive excavations, no...