THE ONCE AND FUTURE SKY GOD? – From Göbekli Tepe to The Zodiac – and Beyond…

[Voyageur]

Have yet to read your last entry, however did read what you wrote on the bottleneck and the Northwest Coast - Vancouver Island Kwakwakawakw (Kwakwaka’wakw) and Bella Coola Kusiut, and have been around these tribes and have photos from years ago of ceremonies brought inland to the interior. Had never though of the ceremonies in this way, nor the links to said societies presented by you. This is something - brings up many things.

Noticed also here, if not seen, some old photos of the Hamatsa (very strange) and a dance below:

Hamatsa Ceremony

Hamatsa Heyhliwey Masks worn by the Hiligaxste' and the Hamat'sa, Kwakiutl, Northwest Coast, North America.

www.chaz.org

Hamsamala (Dance of the Hamatsa Masks)​

Here is a paper of the masks of Bella Coola (SFU).

http://archpress.lib.sfu.ca/index.php/archpress/catalog/download/41/13/589-1?inline=1

And this describes the Bella Bella in more depth.

Revenge, trespass, violation of custom, and seasonal shortages of food were common causes of war

Heiltsuk-Nuxalk-Kwihdichchuhahtx-Nuuchah nulth-Quileute-Chinook

Bella Bella-Bella Coola-Makah-Nootka-Quileute-Chinook. Bella Bella (`Be l `Be l ) is a term dating from 1834 that does not refer to an aboriginal self-designation. The Bella Bella (made up of at least three subgroups: the Kokaitk, Oelitk, and Oealitk), Haihais, and Oowekeeno are sometimes referred…

luonnonkansat.livejournal.com

This made me think of the Haida Gwaii find (out from Bella Coola) that was reported to be 400 ft. below sea level and 13,800 years old. What was going on back then?

13,800-year-old Haida site found 400 ft. underwater in Canada -- Sott.net

Estimates of people's presence in the Americas have ranged from about 12,000 to 50,000 years. A new study by a team of archaeologists that has been researching the subject, has found a site dating back 13,800 years, now underwater in the Juan...

www.sott.net

As an aside, there is also a modern day connection to the Kwakwaka’wakw by Jordan Peterson with his friend, as seen in this video, followed by controversy as explained in this hit piece.

There is another article that deals with a lost link (possibly 10,000 years) to a village near Bella Bella:

Canada: Ancient Settlement May Have Been Discovered on British Columbia Coast -- Sott.net

Vancouver - Oral traditions of the Heiltsuk people tell of the ancient village of Luxvbalis, abandoned after a small pox epidemic in the late 1800s and lost because so few were left to tell the tale. The village may just have been discovered on a...

www.sott.net

Which lines up with this article:

A wasteland of the dead: When Europeans first came to B.C., they stepped into the aftermath of a holocaust -- Sott.net

Everywhere they looked, there were corpses. Abandoned, overgrown villages were littered with skulls; whole sections of coastline strewn with bleached, decayed bodies. "The skull, limbs, ribs and backbones, or some other vestiges of the human...

www.sott.net

This area and history, all so strangely unknown.

 

[Michael B-C]

Göbekli Tepe – terrorist site of ideological indoctrination

1. INTRODUCTION



Ficus sycomorus, called the sycamore fig or the fig-mulberry sycamore, seen at the highest point of Göbekli Tepe in 1995 before the excavation of the mound began in earnest.

Then to Adam [Yahweh] said, “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it’:​

​

“Cursed is the ground for your sake;​

In toil you shall eat of it​

All the days of your life.​

…In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread​

Till you return to the ground,​

For out of it you were taken;​

For dust you are,​

And to dust you shall return.”​

​

Genesis 3:17, 19, New King James Version​

Cursed is the ground for your sake …In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread Till you return to the ground.

Some traditions claim that the Tree of Knowledge Eve enticed Adam to taste the fruit thereof was a Fig. An ancient Armenian legend, however, states that whilst its bough was indeed of heavenly grace, its fruit of temptation was in fact an ear of wheat.

Give us this day our daily bread…​

Among the many, many enigmatic finds unearthed at Göbekli Tepe, I think the following tiny object may well prove to be one of the most meaningful:




A tiny green plaquette with the sombre air of a crucifixion scene: the central figure, arms stretched aloft, is at once human-like in form whilst also reminiscent of a tree or a branching pillar. To its left a writhing serpent stands tall upon its tail, its head turned inwards to confront the suspended figure (and are those 6 or 7 dots to its left intentional or merely the grime of millennia past?) Upon the right hand, a bird, wings bent back in flight, its direction of resolve upwards at great speed towards the heavens.

This cryptic trinity - human/tree (God-man?); serpent; bird in flight – predates Christian iconography by some 10,000 years. It is in fact far closer in time to maybe its true companion piece, the legendary cave scene at Lascaux which we touched upon earlier and which scholar Mary Settegast suggested as being the Calvary scene for the fast fading Golden Age.



I will return in time to the implications behind these musings.

Before then I will seek to unpack and distill for you a myriad of threads I have been yanking on as I’ve further researched the mystery that is Göbekli Tepe. This will take quite a series of posts, so hopefully you can bear with me on the journey; I think you will find it worthwhile in the end.

To do this I need to begin by placing the site within a much wider geographical, historical and even cosmic context. For though it garners nearly all the headlines, Göbekli Tepe does not stand alone as if an island. Far from it. The sudden and apparently fully formed emergence of Enclosure D in and around 9,700-9,500BC did not happen by chance but rather was, as we will see, but a single standout element within a wider sea-change towards the imposition of a dominant ideology that in under 1,500 years drove the hunter gatherers of ancient Anatolia to cast aside their harmonious wanderings inherited from their many ancestors and to settle instead for a baleful sedentary life of agricultural sweat and toil upon the land. All this happened many thousands of years before the first city-state appeared further south in Mesopotamia, where hitherto it was an established truth that the centralisation of authority led to agriculture as a means by which to sustain and manage urban growth. That predominant theory has now collapsed beneath the wealth of recent evidence that irrefutably proves agriculture came first with dense urban dwelling following on long after as an inevitable seeming by-product of the demands of the growing complexity of the compressed - and I suspect heavily indoctrinated and closely watched over - communities that took up this new way of life.

Thus ideology - a change of consciousness and mind and action - emerged first. And out of this acted upon ideology, this change of mind, grew first of all a unique and highly revealing, awareness-framing architecture of monumentally sculptured stone, like some epoch defining set of New Commandments.

I have previously suggested that:

• According to the C’s, the transition period out of the Ice Age and into the Neolithic saw significant structural changes take place to earth’s hitherto all-pervading cosmic environment, including an increase in the level of gravity, the loss of a suspended vapour canopy and some form of shift in orbital pattern. The planet that emerged was therefore fundamentally changed above-and-beyond the series of relatively short-term calamities that its inhabitants went through inside this deeper transition.
• Beginning as early as 20,000BC something unknown and non-localised (perhaps emanating from the information field itself as a result of all the above?) disrupted human fertility leading to a sustained upsurge in the global ratio of females to males being born which by the end of the Younger Dryas cold spell (around 9,600BC) had already seen this disproportion grown to an 8 to 1 ratio (a figure that was to extend out to a massively unaligned ratio of 17 to 1 by 5,000BC before near instantly receding once more).
• In line with the thesis of Prof. Hayden, terrorist secret societies were active as early as the late Epipalaeolithic, and that near-east cultures bridging the Younger Dryas and the PPNA, such as the Zarzians of Kurdistan, (circa. 18,000 – 9,000BC) and the Natufians of the Levant (circa. 15,000–11,000BC) already reveal tell-tell signs of manipulative STS intrusion into the path of their development.
• Dating back to 18,000 BC, if not before, sporadic outcrops of seasonally incipient settlements, husbandry and early attempts at fostering grains, began to crop up in random seeming hot spots between North Africa and the Levant. Though these shifts in orientation did not take hold long-term, they are witness to both attempts to respond to a slowly warming yet ever changing climate as well as likely the first implementation of nefarious ideas that had already begun to germinate out of deep cave complexes and other enclosed environments where survivors of the climate holocaust previously gathered for safety.
• Beneath all this and driving changes in human thought and practice, the long ecological fall out from repetitive climatic events leading up in to and then out of the Younger Dryas calamity of 10,900BC, left both the natural environment and human consciousness deeply traumatised and ripe for the plucking, with the likely repetitive return of the cosmic engines of destruction an ever present reality and reminder of the existential threat from above.

We'll start off afresh with a series of maps. In understanding the course of this narrative, grasping the importance of geography and geology is essential if one is to keep hold of the complex strands that weave together to make up the web of our story.


Top left: the arch of the Fertile Crescent. Top right: the spread of significant rooted settlements that emerged during the PPN A-B down to around 7,500BC. Beneath: the geographic coverage of Natufian activity throughout the Levant and up to the southern reaches of Anatolia, a pivotal culture that bridges the pre Younger Dryas and post Younger Dryas worlds.

Just about everyone has heard of the so called ‘Fertile Crescent’, though many assume it simply refers to the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in modern Iraq that saw the rise of the later Sumerian, Akkadian and Babylonian civilisations after circa 6,000 BC. However, as you can see it in fact covers a huge swathe of territory stretching from the boarders of Egypt, up through the entire Middle East, across the lower regions of Turkey and down through northern Iraq and on into Iran. This is the region that saw an eruption of settlements and activities in the post Younger Dryas period of the Pre Pottery Neolithic (PPN), which is typically broken down into two distinct periods:

• the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) between ca. 9,500 BC and 8,500 BC,
• with the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) following on between ca. 8,700 BC and 6,000 BC

leading into the Pottery Neolithic, ca. 6,400–4,500 BC, when “neolithization” fully kicked in.

From Wikipedia:

Fertile Crescent - Biodiversity and climate

As crucial as rivers and marshlands were to the rise of civilization in the Fertile Crescent, they were not the only factor. The area is geographically important as the "bridge" between North Africa and Eurasia, which has allowed it to retain a greater amount of biodiversity than either Europe or North Africa, where climate changes during the Ice Age led to repeated extinction events when ecosystems became squeezed against the waters of the Mediterranean Sea.

The Fertile Crescent had many diverse climates, and major climatic changes encouraged the evolution of many "r" type annual plants, which produce more edible seeds than "K" type perennial plants. The region's dramatic variety in elevation gave rise to many species of edible plants for early experiments in cultivation. Most importantly, the Fertile Crescent was home to the 8 Neolithic founder crops important in early agriculture (i.e., wild progenitors to emmer wheat, einkorn, barley, flax, chick pea, pea, lentil, bitter vetch), and 4 of the 5 most important species of domesticated animals - cows, goats, sheep, and pigs; the fifth species, the horse, lived nearby. The Fertile Crescent flora comprises a high percentage of plants that can self-pollinate, but may also be cross-pollinated. These plants, called "selfers", were one of the geographical advantages of the area because they did not depend on other plants for reproduction.

While much of the focus of the YD impact and fall out has understandably been on the Americas, it was as we know a truly global event. Among other things, the 1,300-year cold spell that followed led to significant climactic shifts all over the planet with localised ecologies transitioning into states more akin to northerly or southerly norms.



In ancient Anatolia, conditions turned cold, very dry and arid, with lake levels dropping dramatically, sometimes by as much as 260 meters, with water also turning more saline. It was a harsh world - a landscape with few trees and precious little shelter above ground. Concurrent with this, rolling volcanic activity and earthquakes are likely to have been a constant reality, especially in the tectonically challenged region of Anatolia. The constant shaking, out gassing and eruptions would have added greatly to the perpetual seeming instability and ‘anger’ of the environment even as the cold gradually relented.


However, pollen studies do show it took several hundred years for Anatolia to turn more arid which must have given survivors enough time to evolve their food gathering practices with the changing climate and landscape. Again, at the end of the Younger Dryas, even when the rains returned, it took many centuries for woodland expansion to really take hold; the slow return of wet winters saw lake levels dramatically rise again, pistachio shrubs become more abundant across the landscape - more so than trees - and wild grasses, plants and crops begin to reclaim the land.

In an effort to keep abreast with all these changes, in particular the large herds of prey that dominated the plains of the Levant and the steppes of Anatolia, (and which hunter-gatherers so relied on), gradually changed their breeding and migration patterns and moved in great numbers with the climate into regions further north that better suited their needs. The resultant unreliability and unpredictability of primary foodstuffs in the region is of utmost importance in understanding the slow breakdown of the deep faith – for that is what it was – in the righteous and sacred bond between the hunter, the hunted and the benevolent womb of the natural world itself.

With the cessation of the post YD mini ice age ca. 9,600 BC, the temperatures precipitously rose, bringing about a slow blossoming of new flora and fauna in the region. No better environment could be seeded for new growth allowing for the emergence of agriculture on the Middle Euphrates and further south within the Levantine corridor. But this was some way up ahead; in the early 10th millennium the primary food sources remained for many more centuries wild game such as gazelles, red deer, wild boar, auroch, and wild sheep, supplemented with copious amounts of almonds and pistachios.

Hunter-gatherers would work together in small bands to fulfill their primary functions in life, with these being hunting wild game, foraging for various types of food, and ensuring the well-being and safety of their extended family group. They created temporary settlements that they occupied only at certain times of the year; for the rest of the time the hunters followed the migrational routes of herd animals. They relied on these animals for food; clothes; fat for balms, fires, and lamps; bone, horn, and antler for weapons, tools, and items of personal adornment; and sinew (thin shredded fibers of muscle tendons) for use as cordage, binding points on arrow shafts, and as a backing material on bows.​

​

Epipaleolithic (that is, transitional Paleolithic) hunters used established campsites and work stations, kitted out with basic facilities, before moving on to the next site, and the next site, and so forth, until eventually they returned to their original place of departure. This was their cycle of life, and it would have remained so had neolithization not gotten in the way.​

​

Gobekli Tepe: Genesis of the Gods: The Temple of the Watchers and the Discovery of Eden, Andrew Collins, 151-152​

(As an aside, I would not normally rely on Andrew Collins for anything – but I have no hesitation in giving the above work a high recommendation, for it is to my mind his one stand out offering, bringing together into one volume so many of the important wider threads that others so ignore. Yes, his deductions can be hamstrung by certain blind spots, but overall he comes closer in this work than anyone I have read to grasping the pivotal role the ideology merging on Göbekli Tepe played in the future direction of the world)

This then is our brief overview of the multi-faceted environmental context of the time. As we move forward from here, I will be increasingly drawing in our focus to specific geographic areas of interconnecting developments as per the following:

1. ARMENIA: This tortured land of the people of the horse, long ignored and in truth persecuted to near extinction at times, has perhaps the rightful claim to holding the most ancient clues to the matrix cradle of our story.
2. THE PLAIN OF MUŞ: if anywhere on earth has the right to lay claim to being the terrestrial model for Paradise and the Garden of Eden, then it is this wondrous valley plain, where I suspect once upon a time the young Gurdjieff came in search of esoteric knowledge long hidden in its ancient monasteries, which before the Armenian genocide of 1915, so graced its surrounding mountain slopes.
3. UPPER TIGRIS BEGINNINGS: Here at the upper reaches of the Tigris River, the late Epipalaeolithic/early PPNA settlements of Hallan Çemi and Kortik Tepe shaped the Anatolian beginnings of what would spread west before long to Göbekli Tepe.
4. THE PLAIN OF HARRAN – around which our story crystallizes at the sites of Göbekli and Karahan Tepe.
5. NORTHERN REACHES OF NATUFIAN LAVANT INFLUENCE – here in Northern Syria, even as the Younger Dryas impact event shook the land, at sites such as Tell Abu Hureyra shoots of Southern Levantine influence reached out to the very boarders of where later agricultural imperatives were to take firm root.
6. PAUL OF TARSUS – and by way of the immensely long reach of our story, let us not forget in passing that ten millennia later a man named Paul was to emerge from this crucible by way of his home city of Tarsus with a story to tell by way of a means to save humankind from its ignominious Fall from Eden.

To be continued.

 

[rrraven]

The ratio thing has me intrigued, its been spinning in my head since I first read it here
So many implications , total rethink of what l imagined life in ancient times was like
So if the male female ratio was what it was ...does that mean the workforce to build all those monuments was mainly female ? Or was the building a result of sudden increase of males being put to work by the womenfolk to keep them out of trouble
Feeding and clothing her family and build shelters has always been a womans role and males ofen just get in the way so we sent them ,,hunting ,, as in go and kill something with your mates , just keep out of camp making a mess , don't come back untill you have something to bring back
Apparently native women were able to feed the whole fam with 3 hours of gathering or fishing per day , what the hunters brought back was just bonus
Speaking of australian natives now , Anatolia was no doubt very different

 

[Michael B-C]

The ratio thing has me intrigued, its been spinning in my head since I first read it here
So many implications , total rethink of what l imagined life in ancient times was like
So if the male female ratio was what it was ...does that mean the workforce to build all those monuments was mainly female ? Or was the building a result of sudden increase of males being put to work by the womenfolk to keep them out of trouble
Feeding and clothing her family and build shelters has always been a womans role and males ofen just get in the way so we sent them ,,hunting ,, as in go and kill something with your mates , just keep out of camp making a mess , don't come back untill you have something to bring back
Apparently native women were able to feed the whole fam with 3 hours of gathering or fishing per day , what the hunters brought back was just bonus
Speaking of australian natives now , Anatolia was no doubt very different

Yes rrraven, a total rethink is indeed implied. Obviously when it comes to the onset of this phenomenon, and for the first few thousand years of its growing reality, we are scrabbling around in the dark with barely a match to light the way. One thing that stands out is that for a significant period of the first stages of the PPN post 9,500BC there are next to no images relating directly to the female crafted anywhere in the region we are exploring; at the sites we will soon look at in detail such as Göbekli and Karahan Tepe, every power image - be it human seeming, anthropomorphic or recognisably animal (at least in symbolic form) - focuses in on its male aspect. The emergence of widespread so called 'goddess/fertility' imagery of the near-east Neolithic doesn't really begin much before around the turn of the 6th millennium BC, (coinciding perhaps not coincidentally with the beginning of the rapid return to a closer parity of female to male births of around 3 to 1), and that period delivered the essentially victorious, unshakable stage of agricultural imposition - as if human agriculture had taken on the mantle of the all giving divine nature that must now be fully relied upon by the female to ensure her own divine fertility. It's most strange - almost as if once the war of minds was finally decided, the 'power' was switched off and down fell the ratio at precisely the time of STS stage 1 mission accomplished. Its only after that we see the rise of goddess iconography once more alongside male figures becoming the norm.

The paradox of course is that agriculture did the opposite of what it was ideologically espoused as delivering; the increasing amount of skeletal remains found as we move forward in time reveal an extraordinarily high level of maladies, nutritional and vitamin deficiencies, teeth decay and abscess, crippling injuries from hard labour, and above all an untimely death. In fact some of the earliest data on this matter comes from an important late PPNB site we will look at anon called Çayönü Tepesi which is one of the first agriculturally focused and sedentary driven settlements of any significant size and longevity; here the average life span of male remains was in their mid 50s whilst the female's was between 20-25!! This, among other signs, makes me suspect that females were treated very differently to males. Dare one say almost dispensably so. Boy children must have been seen as priceless, whilst girls were 12 a penny and essentially worthless other than as work horses. It is likely their breeding worth started as young as 11-12 and after multiple births and few surviving offspring, they died a tragically spent force. I also suspect that with the birth rate ratio way out of kilter, all efforts went into maintaining the boys lives at the expense of the girls, so the mortality rate of girls from birth onward must have been awfully high. There is later evidence we will look at that violence towards women - and in particular via head injuries which is seen by anthropologists as signs of ritual punishment and control - was high as well as evidence that strongly suggests men were fed differently to women with a far higher percentage of meat and fat in their diets (especially among the elite). Also as we will see shortly, the architecture of living arrangements became extremely male (or maybe increasingly left brain driven - which I think is actually the most important consciousness shift that was going on aka 'The master and his emissary'/'The matter with things' by Iain McGilchrist) and we will see how the circular design of shelters spread out with space between to breathe in slowly became swapped out for the rectangular box shape, rammed in one on top of the other. This is one of the essential signs of the transition from PPNA to PPNB that archeologists note happened everywhere but no explanation for this profound shift in spatial relationship is ever given. Again I believe it was ideological and had to do with control and herd management (as well as symbolically representing a hitherto alien way of viewing the world via living and cult spaces). Then there is the issue of how such comparative scarcity - and therefore intrinsic value - would have been placed on males per say, allied to the likely high level of competition between females for the prime place at the table, all of which offered a perfect environment for those Cluster B gene carriers to flourish undetected and uncontrolled.

The battle for control over human consciousness has been long and hard, yet even today the seed of the original way of harmony and balance refuses to go quietly, so its worth baring in mind that the introduction of this new way of being must have met considerable resistance (as it has repeatedly done down through the ages since and long after it had firmly established itself as the seeming norm). That's why the pressure exerted at this early stage was so intense and bizarre - (think COVID propaganda on steroids!) - because it went against nature from the outset, or rather set up and magnified an aspect of nature into a binary opposition with the rest of reality, and that's why I think the people took so long to succumb - but succumb enough they did and the rest followed on to where we are today. Still fighting the long defeat!

 

[Mark7]

...the imposition of a dominant ideology that in under 1,500 years drove the hunter gatherers of ancient Anatolia to cast aside their harmonious wanderings inherited from their many ancestors and to settle instead for a baleful sedentary life of agricultural sweat and toil upon the land. All this happened many thousands of years before the first city-state appeared further south in Mesopotamia, where hitherto it was an established truth that the centralisation of authority led to agriculture as a means by which to sustain and manage urban growth. That predominant theory has now collapsed beneath the wealth of recent evidence that irrefutably proves agriculture came first with dense urban dwelling following on long after as an inevitable seeming by-product of the demands of the growing complexity of the compressed - and I suspect heavily indoctrinated and closely watched over - communities that took up this new way of life.

Left alone, I suspect people would have adapted agriculture slowly, and organically as it suited their needs instead of relatively fast and on such a massive scale. Sort of like the way people, given a choice, would probably slowly and organically give up fossil fuels, (like there was an actual need), instead of all in at the start of what looks like a severe winter. But orders 'come from above' in this long age.

Interesting stuff, looking forward to learning more about these early 'social engineers'.

 

[Michael B-C]

Göbekli Tepe – a terrorist site of ideological indoctrination

2. THE NATUFIAN CONNECTION



The Cambridge World Prehistory (2014)

3.9 Anatolia: From The PPN to the End of The Early Bronze Age (10,500 – 2,000 BCE) Mehmet ÖzdoğAn

Pre-Pottery Neolithic and the problem of origins

At present, designating an origin for the PPN cultures of Anatolia is rather difficult – the main problem being the paucity of remains that are ascribed to the final stages of the Upper Paleolithic Period. This particular cultural stage, defined as either Epi-Paleolithic, Mesolithic or Final Paleolithic, with the exception of coastal areas, is poorly represented in most of Anatolia. Even in the most intensively surveyed areas in the inner parts of the Anatolian Peninsula, whatever has been ascribed to this period consists mainly of ad hoc pieces with no sign of any complexity that could be the origin of later Pre-Pottery cultures (Özdoğan 2008a).

The issue of “origins” has to be considered separately for southeastern and central Anatolia. In the southeastern parts, where the cultural setting is more or less similar to that of the Levant, it has been conventional to trace the origins back to Natufian and Kebaran horizons; in central Anatolia, however, designating an origin is more complicated as common elements with the Levant are less apparent then they are in the southeast.

At present in central Anatolia, between the final stages of the Mesolithic cultures, as best documented at Öküzini (Yalçınkaya et al. 2002), and the earliest known Pre-Pottery settlements in the same region, there is a time gap of at least two thousand years with no apparent links, implying that they were genetically unrelated to each other, leaving open the question of origins. … there are almost no common elements among the cultural assemblages of Mesolithic Karain or Öküzini and the Neolithic sites such as Bademağacı or Höyücek that are close to each other…

The beginning of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic culture in south-eastern Turkey is at least a millennium earlier than in central Anatolia. There, as in northern Syria and Iraq, it appears almost suddenly, fully developed with no detectable predecessors. The early stages of PPNA are now known from Hallan Çemi, Körtik Tepe, Gürcütepe, all sharing similar but at the same time rather sophisticated assemblages.

… considering the homogeneity and the high level of sophistication, it seems obvious to surmise that there must have been a long period for it to develop earlier. In our view, the early cultures of the southern Levant lack the degree of sophistication to be the ancestral stage of these cultures; only future research will show whether or not the PPNA culture came to south-eastern Turkey after developing fully elsewhere.

Respected Turkish Prof. Mehmet ÖzdoğAn is one of the few leading scholars in the field still willing to break cover and point out the gorilla in the room that, with the evidence available to us today, all the signs are that something unique and unsettling to the status quo took place in southern Anatolia right at the very beginning of the PPNA. On the one hand he acknowledges the over 2,000 year break in continuity in central Anatolia between the final stages of the Mesolithic cultures and the emergence of the earliest known PPN sites in the same region, whilst on the other he admits to the disconcerting truth that meanwhile next door in the southern Anatolian districts something came from ‘elsewhere’ and from its first emergence appeared essentially fully formed and ready to go, more than 1,000 years sooner than its near neighbour. To cap it all, the only known possible nearby source – the Natufians of the Levant – did not come close in sophistication to explain this dramatic and near instant acceleration in cultural complexity so soon after the Younger Dryas hiatus.

This final point is essentially true. However, that does not mean that southern influences were not in the mix or that the Natufians were as pedestrian and ‘innocent’ by comparison as he intimates.


NATUFIAN: OLD TIES vs SECRET SOCIETY INFLUENCE

The Natufians of the Levant, (one of those makey-up names created by archaeologists to give seeming singular identity and purpose to disparate yet interconnected stages of widespread cultural development), first emerged during the Bølling-Allerød warming around 13,000 BC but only came into stark relief as they started to partially settle in numbers from circa 12,000 BC onwards, gaining momentum as a distinctive set of cultural tropes right up to the Younger Dryas boundary when much of what made them distinctive was so abruptly upended.



The Levant hosts more than a hundred kinds of cereals, fruits, nuts, lentils, and other edible parts of plants, and the flora of the Levant during the Natufian period was not the dry, barren, and thorny landscape we know today, but rather was covered in food and game sustaining woodlands interlaced with migratory game tracks. In particular, they principally chose to settle on or near by to water courses and this is something of importance to note going forward, for as Prof. Hayden has referenced, the use of inland waterways was an essential tool of Secret Society intrusion into diversely spread cultures, enabling the shaping and control over time of trade and networking economies across large areas of land as well as the spreading of ideas and the maintenance of titular oversight. Again, it will be no mere coincidence that the first early settlements of the PPNA in southern-Anatolia appeared on or close to major river networks.

There is considerable evidence that by the height of their development, trade links spanned the whole region north to south which in particular was driven by the widespread obsession with Turkish sourced Obsidian, the pitch-black, razor sharp volcanic glass-stone so prized by elite hunters (think a cross between a weapon of mass destruction and a sacred gift from the gods of fire), which will play such a pivotal role in our story going forward:



Natufian Foragers in the Levant: Terminal Pleistocene Social Changes in Western Asia

Chapter 15: Obsidian in Natufian Context: The Case of Eynan (Ain Mallaha), Israel by Hamoudi Khalaily and Francois R. Valla

The Levantine archaeological record has shown that obsidian was traded up to 900 km south of its origin in the late prehistoric periods and was one of the desirable materials among Near Eastern prehistoric societies. These studies have shown that most of the Levantine obsidian originated from several geological outcrops located in central and eastern Turkey (Cauvin et. al. 1998).

The earliest evidence of long-distance ex-change in obsidian occurs during the late-glacial period, among Epipaleolithic hunting and foraging groups around the Fertile Crescent and the Iranian hills (Blackman 1984), while the earliest obsidian finds in the northern Levant were reported from the Natufian occupations at Abu Hureira 1 (Moore 1991:279), Mureybet IA and EI Kowm (Cauvin 1991). Further south, isolated pieces were found in the Judean desert (Neuville 1951:15).

… In conclusion, the presence of obsidian artifacts in the Final Natufian of Mallaha in large quantities suggests that such commodities were introduced to the southern Levant before the beginning of the Neolithic from Turkey. Hence, the long distance cultural contacts between the pre-historic cultures were well-developed, although at different levels of intensity.

We will come back to Obsidian later.

Whilst maintaining many traditional hunter-gatherer practices, the Natufians were a step up from the norm to date and herald the title of being a complex hunter-gatherer society; it is proclaimed by historians of the period that they established comparatively large, and for the first time, sedentary communities alongside more mobile communities; they practised a broad spectrum of hunting and foraging but also some of the first intensive plant exploitation as well as developing more elaborate mortuary practices, with an increasing particular focus on the skull (which we will come on to).

As previously mentioned, the Natufians marked several other pivotal firsts; the world's oldest evidence of bread-making in Jordan's north-eastern desert; the oldest known evidence of beer production at the Raqefet Cave in Israel (dating to approximately 11,000 BC… one wonders at both the location and the timing right on the YD boundary…?); and most importantly in the late North Syrian site of Tell Abu Hureyra, (whose demise we will explore further below), the cultivation of cereals, specifically rye, being the earliest evidence of deliberate agriculture in the world, for which we can add yet another first to the list, though it appeared late in the day during the early years of the PPNA (as if the ‘industry’ was showing signs of becoming entrenched and getting up an economic head of steam).

Evidence for food storage and pre-domestication granaries 11,000 years ago in the Jordan Valley

Food storage is a vital component in the economic and social package that comprises the Neolithic, contributing to plant domestication, increasingly sedentary lifestyles, and new social organizations. Recent excavations at Dhra′ near the Dead Sea in Jordan provide strong evidence for sophisticated, purpose-built granaries in a pre-domestication context ≈11,300–11,175 cal B.P., which support recent arguments for the deliberate cultivation of wild cereals at this time. Designed with suspended floors for air circulation and protection from rodents, they are located between residential structures that contain plant-processing instillations. The granaries represent a critical evolutionary shift in the relationship between people and plant foods, which precedes the emergence of domestication and large-scale sedentary communities by at least 1,000 years.

Interpretive reconstruction of Structure 4, phase 1, Dhra′, Jordan. The exposed area illustrates the upright stones supporting larger beams, with smaller wood and reeds above, and finally covered by a thick coating of mud. The suspended floor sloped at 7° and served to protect stored foods from high levels of moisture and rodents (Illustration by E. Carlson).

Alongside all this, wherever they settled they were also renowned for some of the first acknowledged portable ‘ritual’ sculpture as well as idiosyncratic circular stone architecture.



Material Images of Humans from the Natufian to Pottery Neolithic Periods in the Levant (British Archaeological Reports International Series. 2014),

Estelle Orrelle, P44-45

Natufian Architecture

Natufian structures are circular, made of stone, and many are partially sunk into the ground. Postholes in some sites are assumed to have supported roofs. Bar-yosef notes that these were first referred to by Perrot as “pit-houses” in the terminology used for dwellings of some American indigenous people. This assumption that such structures were dwellings led excavators to interpret sites as the remains of villages and the Natufian was regarded as a sedentary or semi-sedentary culture and considered a forerunner of later Neolithic farming communities. Goring-Morris and belfer-cohen note that ritual activities at some early Natufian hamlets is suggested by the presence of monoliths, as at for example Wadi Hammeh, eynan and rosh Zin, and the presence of other mobile symbolic items. Occupations were both in caves and in open territory. Features of the architecture, I suggest, support an interpretation of ritual activity addressing both underground (chthonic) and celestial deities.

Natural penetrations of the earth’s surface such as caves, crevices and niches in bedrock are common locations for communication with the underworld. I suggest that features of the Natufian such as cave occupations, subterranean construction, bedrock mortars and cupholes simulate these natural features and provide such liminal locations. Ascent symbols such as monoliths, trees, towers (PPNa) and mountain locations are traditionally associated with communication with both the celestial and underground worlds.

…Evidence for posts in the Natufian may indicate not roof supports, but worship of celestial gods whose burnt offerings required roofless structures and which allow smoke from burnt offerings to ascend. Deposition of human remains in relation to post holes suggests sacrifice to such celestial gods e.g. a posthole intrudes into the grave of an elderly female at Eynan.

Natufian sites are characterized too by installations such as pavements, hearths, graves and pits. The largest Natufian sites contain several structures. Both the ritual significance in Natufian structures and the labour required for their construction support their description as monumental architecture.

From Wikipedia:

The habitations of the Natufian were semi-subterranean, often with a dry-stone foundation. The superstructure was probably made of brushwood. No traces of mudbrick have been found, which became common in the following Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA). The round houses have a diameter between three and six meters, and they contain a central round or subrectangular fireplace. In Ain Mallaha traces of postholes have been identified. Villages can cover over 1,000 square meters. Smaller settlements have been interpreted by some researchers as camps. Traces of rebuilding in almost all excavated settlements seem to point to a frequent relocation, indicating a temporary abandonment of the settlement. Settlements have been estimated to house 100–150 people, but there are three categories: small, medium, and large, ranging from 15 sq. m to 1,000 sq. m.

As you may have detected I have some serious questions relating to all these ‘assumptions’ and ‘interpretations’, as does Emeritus Professor Dimitrios S. Dendrinos of the School Of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Kansas. In a 2016 paper critiquing many of the architectural assumptions made by archaeologists with regard to dating as well as identifying the urban purpose of ancient buildings in the region, he states:

… On the Natufian culture’s architecture, we have a number of examples where structures (both private and public) are shown... they contain some stone foundations, yet no mud brick structures.

In these Natufian settlements, one comes across examples of pre-systematic agriculture practices especially in animal husbandry and in cereals. Fisheries was an important part of their diet, and locations close to rivers were apparently at a premium... their construction details and morphology consists of relatively round or arch shaped small scale structures... These type houses are apparently huts, made out of timber… and clay plaster resting on roughly assembled unfinished stones from local origin or quarries. However, the relative permanency of the foundations may indicate that this was a structure belonging to a member of the upper class. Certainly, less durable homes were then in existence, non-durable huts belonging to the then plebeians.

… possibly a rudimentary hierarchy must have existed within a region, defined as an area that would allow economic and social interaction among its members (not necessarily all peaceful interaction), where some small number of relatively high population levels (possibly around 300 individuals) would be on top of the hierarchy with exponentially decreasing in size settlements
thereafter.

Here the professor is identifying a basic flaw in all the benign, egalitarian assumptions concerning the Natufian’s sudden proclivity for settled life (but only some of them and only sometimes it seems…) with an immediate leap to stone foundation buildings, (without any signs of mud brick which would be a far more likely first stage or at least a supporting tool), which are assumed to be examples of normal Natufian housing. However, a close look at the density of many of these settlements as centrally demarked by these unique stone foundation and floored buildings suggests a volume of inhabitants that would have been far too low to justify or deliver upon all the upsurges in new technologies and practices, let alone the need or independent imagination and cohesion to come up with them. His basic observation is thus that what has come down to us are the stone foundations of elite buildings which would have been surrounded by many more ‘plebeian’ structures – like the typical wigwams that other Natufian’s (who remained mobile) lived in all year round, and which were made of destructible materials, and which therefore have long since disappeared into the landscape without a trace.




This is a pattern we will meet over and over again. Central, more complex stone-based buildings surrounded – like bees around a honey pot – by lesser status buildings, often temporary or more rudely constructed, which coagulate around ground breaking economic and surplus based activities that are connected in a network to other such outcrops (whilst meanwhile ‘normal’ hunter-gatherer activities come and go in the wider environment).

Therefore, we have:

• The knowing cultivation of grains
• The development of bread
• The arrival of beer (in a cave).
• The beginnings of sedentary labour
• The building of specialist surplus retention buildings
• The signs of sacrifice (including possibly human)
• Small enclosed stone buildings at the centre of activity
• Post holes that may have contained ritual emblems
• The proximity of waterways
• High status Obsidian trading with Anatolia.

Hmmmm…?! Sounds like a bait-and-switch set up to me…

Let us briefly return to Prof. Hayden on the matter:


THE POWER OF RITUAL IN PREHISTORY: SECRET SOCIETIES AND ORIGINS OF SOCIAL COMPLEXITY

BRIAN HAYDEN, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, P306-308

The Near East

Although almost none of the archaeologists working in the Near East have interpreted their excavated materials in terms of secret societies (exceptionally, K. Wright (2000:116) has discussed male “sodalities”), there are a number of prime archaeological candidates for secret societies, beginning in the Late Epipaleolithic and continuing into the Neolithic and probably later periods.

The Late Epipaleolithic

One of the earliest indications of likely secret society existence comes from a quite small cave located high above a wadi floor and at some distance from any known settlement of the time. This is the Late Natufian site of Hilazon Tachtit, occupied c . 12,000 bp. The core Natufian sites in the region had rich resources, significant sedentism, permanent architecture, and a wide array of prestige items exchanged in a regional network that belie important inequalities. Thus, they constitute a prime example of a complex, or transegalitarian, hunter/gatherer society that could produce surpluses (Hayden 2004, 2014).

While there was evidence of occasional use of the Hilazon cave, perhaps by ritualists, the main feature of this cave is the burial of an older woman accompanied by the remains of a feast including at least fifty tortoise carapaces and parts of wild cattle, wild boar, and an eagle wing. Of further note were faunal remains of leopard, eagle, and marten – typical power animals – as well as an articulated human foot (Grosman et al. 2008; Munro and Grosman 2010). Other indications of human sacrifice have been recovered from Natufian sites (Hayden 2001, 2004), and, as we have seen, ethnographic secret society members in other culture areas often either engaged in human sacrifice or used body parts from dead individuals for various purposes (evidence for human sacrifice is even more compelling in the following Prepottery Neolithic A period..)

However, the fundamental question that Hilazon raises is why one single person, or even several people, were buried in such a remote, isolated, difficult- to-access location with so much ceremony. The vast majority of Natufians were buried at the major habitation sites, often under house floors. Why was this person so different? There are few compelling answers to such a question. Perhaps she was a shaman as Grosman and Munro suggest. They also suggest that the burial was a communal event orchestrated to maintain or increase social integration of a community. In view of the small, remote, difficult-to-access location, this seems highly dubious. I think it far more likely that she was an important member of a secret society (Hayden 2017). Society members in other areas commonly went to considerable lengths to secretly bury their most powerful leaders to maintain the fiction that they still lived, or so that their remains would not be pilfered for power amulets (see Chapters 7 and 9). It might also be coincidental, but several secret societies used tortoise carapaces in their rituals, even lining areas with them for initiates to lie within (Chapter 9). Turtle shells appear to have had strong symbolical roles in Mesopotamia (Berthon et al. 2016). All of these factors seem to point to the burial of a powerful secret society member at Hilazon Tachtit. Elsewhere, at Zawi Chemi Shanidar in Iran, Rose Solecki (Solecki and McGovern 1980) excavated a single structure (perhaps the only structure at the site), with abundant remains of raptor wings. These may have been used in secret society rituals in a structure dedicated to society use.

I previously mentioned that the Natufians were also renowned for their portable ‘ritual art’ and a strange proclivity for focussing in on the skull during mortuary practices. Given the age of the period, the finds are few and far between, but those we have are revealing in that the process of representation and symbolic relationship was coming out of the cave and in to the light of day for the first time and seemed to be integral to their very being.

In line with the pre-existing model of the production of ‘art’ or ‘religious’ artefacts, the Natufians base line approach was to enhance objects taken from the natural world:



The Natural Inspiration for Natufian Art: Cases from Wadi Hammeh 27, Jordan

The practice of collecting or lightly modifying natural forms reflects a widespread phenomenon that
Marshack (1997a) believed is ubiquitous in our species. Indeed, the ability to recognize animate forms in inanimate objects may be an integral part of the human condition (Marshack 1997a; Onians 2007). Evidence for this capability appears widely in time and space; for example, the subtle modifications made to European cave walls and stalagmites in the Upper Palaeolithic to enhance their representational value (Bahn & Vertut 1997, 105–6) and the embellishment of elongated stone objects to elaborate their phallic form by Indigenous Australians (McCarthy 1976, 70; Mountford 1939; 1960).

Natufian art is small and intimate (hence handheld). Geometric patterns (circa 80%) vastly outnumber representational or zoomorphic artefacts. The patterning continues to baffle scholars as to its source, be it ‘discovered in the natural world, experienced under the influence of plant derivatives with hallucinogenic properties, or conceived internally through neuro-physiological processes’. Of course, the idea that they could well have been witnessed in the heavens never seems to cross scholar’s minds.

Some geometric motifs continue over from the Early and Middle Epipalaeolithic into the Natufian, and even beyond. For example, the so-called ‘ladder-pattern’ found on Early Epipalaeolithic Kebaran stone work is strikingly paralleled on a Natufian plaque from Wadi Khawwan.




Kebaran, Engraved Ladders, Ein Qashish Jezreel Israel - c. 23-16kb


Both this design and the Natufian forms have been suggested by scholars to represent an esoteric language only understood in its deeper meaning by the beholder and was not for public consumption. Ladder symbology is heavily associated with the original ‘God’ of the North Pole and states of plasma formation.

Where there are zoomorphic depictions or animal – with the specific species often unclear - representations always occur on tools such as sickles, mortars and pestles. As these items were the implements of the new ways of hard labour, this smacks of some form of power motif, even of a slow burn indoctrination, for its likely to my mind that the inspiration for these ‘animal’ forms existed as much in the above and not solely down below (especially as many of them also have abstract geometric forms incorporated into their design)


What is important though is that animal/zoomorphic representations, even in miniature form, were being realised in objects that could for the first time in millennia be transported and shared (representational images made by the Natufian were always rendered in the round, rather than engraved on to static flat surfaces), something that had not happened previously in the Near-east.

The same applied to the first fully realised small-scale representations based on the human form, and this is where things start to get really interesting. Firstly, certain Natufian burial practices became increasingly and notably ornate:



Fig. 3a Skull with tusk shell headdress, Early Natufian, El Wad from Garrod and Bate 1937 PL. VII.2.

Fig. 3b Hip girdle of fox teeth, Early Natufian, Hayonim, from Braun 2002 PL.1 courtesy of IAA.

Fig. 3c Sash of tusk shells, Early Natufian, Eynan, courtesy of The Upper Galilee Museum of Prehistory.

Fig. 3d Gazelle horn headdress, Late Natufian, Eynan, from Perrot and Ladiray 1988, Fig. 32, courtesy
of Julien Loiseau, CRFJ

Sartorial Vestments in the Southern Levant: Headwear, Footwear, Girdles, Sashes and Shrouds, 15,000-5,900 BP cal.,
Janet Levy, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

The Natufian site of El Wad (Fig. 2a) attests to ca. 100 burials in tight groups of which five, including a child, feature headwear, each a discrete combination of bone beads manufactured from kitchen midden debris and hollow Dentillium sp. shell beads…The most elaborate, worn by an adult male; a symmetrical triple row, double fan-like construction spreads across the skull from the temples to the forehead and crown (Garrod and Bate 1937: 18, PL. VII.2) (Fig. 3a). Considerable effort was expended in collecting and assembling shells of identical dimensions to achieve the ascetic result.

The Cave of Hayonim with both early and late Natufian layers evidences ca 50 burials, four of which are decorated. A female, one of a small group features a belt of polished, paired, oval, bone pendants and an adult male from a single burial features hundreds of dentilium in the region of the neck and thorax and a girdle of fox teeth across the pelvis (Fig. 3b) (Belfer-Cohen 1995: 13). A flute with incised bands manufactured on the wing of a vulture, initially defined as a handle was also recovered from the site (Bar-Yosef and Tchernov 1970: 145; Shaham 2012: 202, Fig. 2).

Eynan, an open air site with early, late and final Natufian phases evidences more than 100 burials of which 10 are decorated although most configurations cannot be reconstructed. Also from the same site a late burial group features an adult female with two gazelle horns positioned at the back of the head (Perrot and Ladiray 1988: 59, Fig. 32) (Fig. 3d).The tight association suggests that they were attached to the head at the time of burial.

It intrigues me how archaeologists and anthropologists, so excited by their finds, never stop to ask why it is that they only find say 100 skeletons deliberately buried (with only say 10% finely adorned) and with such outstanding care and attention from a site that likely saw significant ongoing habitation for many, many hundreds of years.

The high status of these individuals is therefore obvious, as is the language of symbolic gesture that distinctly marks them out for such unique burial, with the head/skull being very much at the core of the matter. And so we come to this, the most striking and advanced of but four distinct head representations by Natufians (or are they?) that have thus far been unearthed.:


NATUFIAN Late – Nahal Ein Gev II - 10,000 BC



Carved into a limestone pebble, the sculptor has very subtly altered the form of the stone to enhance its likeness to a human head with the only significant addition being the relief carving of an eyebrow ridge and nose. Note the total absence of eyes, ears and mouth. This small pebble, like the green plaquette from Göbekli Tepe I previous posted, is to my mind a standout find that will have immense implications going forward.

It is widely assumed that this image marks the beginning of self-recognition, of a fascination with the human form, and in effect is nothing more than a self-portrait or mirror of man as he sees himself. This given, translational idea is then carried forward by scholars to determine their assessment of the meaning behind the swathe of later finds that follow a similar intrinsic pattern of design. I believe this to be a critical misunderstanding right from the outset, one that in particular goes onto distort all comprehension of the real meaning behind later, similar and increasingly more overt representations at places like Göbekli and Kerahan Tepe.

I believe this face represents a primary connection of cosmic understanding between the Natufians and the later northerly Anatolians where this shape and form will come back to haunt us again and again some 1,000 years later. For now I will suggest that, yes this is ‘man’ shaped in stone but it is not ‘man’ in its deepest meaning – or rather it is, but only in terms of that old Christian saying, God the father (‘him’), God the son (‘us’), made in his likeness both in spirit and in form. And the crux of the matter is that the only and singular motif within the face that really mattered, (being clearly the whole purpose of the depiction in the first place), is what we know today as the letter ‘T’, originally denoting what we call the Tau Cross, the bridge and union between left and right hemispheres of the brain, the very meeting place of the cosmic above and the below, and the battleground that was to be used against us in setting up an oppositional binary (and increasingly material v spirit) view of the world…



If one looks at the three earlier Natufian versions I think we can see the complex schematic being worked through between what was witnessed in the heavens, the way it unfolded and what it represented in terms of personalisation in the minds (and representational heads) of the watching/participating humanity below.

• The nose being the body of god/man as a mighty mountain/ pillar/tree
• The nose itself also holding symbolic resonance in place of the body, out of the centre of which emerged creation as if it were a male giving birth (the original female and male merged as one belief having by now become subsumed to the dominant male form – perhaps a subtle sign of our shift in birth rates issue, leading to the increasing importance and pre-eminence of the male…?)
• The linear eyebrow ridge as the arms of the outstretched and normally elevated ‘bull’s horns’ upon which rested the head of the divine being which having abandoned us, becomes an invisible space in the centre of the forehead (where in passing we may note that the pituitary gland sits… and where later in the Rosicrucian version of the same idea the Rose/comet power symbol of death and regeneration will come forth from…)

Sounds a right old jumble I know, but it is actually a highly consistent lexicon of meanings that will become clearer I hope when we get to PNNA Anatolia. For now let me just place it side by side with that later plaquette from Göbekli Tepe with its serpent on the left and bird on the right…



My hunch is that the Natufian stone on the left is STS Secret Society code, the planquette on the right its later STO antidote, both likely highly secret signs, both likely only shared with the very few as teaching prompts; the first for nefarious purposes, the second in a later attempt to keep the truth alive and the oppressed hopeful….

Our final Natufian episode took place in Northern Syria on the banks of a tributary of the river Euphrates, where at a settlement on the very fringes of Anatolia called Abu Hureyra a comet fragment came calling one autumn in circa 10,800 BC.



The site of Abu Hureyra is now under Lake Assad in northern Syria, and has been since the 1970s when the Taqba Dam was built across the Euphrates River. However, before the dam was built archaeologists extracted and described parts of houses, food and tools that proved it to be the location of the all-important human transition to agriculture around 13,000 years ago.


A Cosmic Impact and the Beginning of Farming at Abu Hureyra in Syria
Andrew M. T. Moore

Then 12,800 years ago (10,800 BCE) a catastrophe struck. In its orbit around the Sun the Earth intercepted a fragmenting comet. Across much of the world explosions and firestorms incinerated the landscape. One of these airbursts took place near Abu Hureyra itself. The explosion generated a blast of enormous heat that engulfed the village in flames, destroying it and its inhabitants.

As our study of the plant remains, artifacts, and chronology proceeded we could also see that the transition from hunting and gathering to initial cultivation of rye then wheat and legumes took place precisely at the moment when a dramatic, near-instantaneous change in climate and vegetation occurred as the warm, moist conditions of the Late Glacial gave way to a cold, dry Ice Age-like climate that persisted for over 1,200 years. This episode of Northern Hemisphere cooling is called the Younger Dryas.

… the crucial samples came from a level of heavy burning that I had previously interpreted as the remains of cooking fires. It radiocarbon dated to precisely 12,800 years ago, the same date as the comet collision. This level contained a variety of materials that were produced by the heat of the impact: nanodiamonds, spherules, meltglass, and traces of iridium, platinum, nickel and cobalt that came from the comet itself. All of these have been found and described at many other sites, thus recording the effect of this impact throughout the world. The platinum traces, in particular, are important because they also occur in a contemporary, well-dated layer in an ice core from the Greenland ice sheet that independently documents this event. The meltglass was formed by melting of the silica in the subsoil at temperatures over 2,000°C that could only have been reached in an airburst explosion. At Abu Hureyra the meltglass was splattered throughout the soil samples from the impact level as minute discrete lumps and on pieces of animal bone and building clay

So in the end, the above intervened in the push to agriculture down below. The wrath of the gods, summoned perhaps by the hubris of those who thought they could tame his creation and turn it to their STS uses…

Yet despite the thousand plus years of Younger Dryas cold that followed, these seeds were now well and truly sown and the dice were well and truly cast for the future…

 

[Michael B-C]

Göbekli Tepe – terrorist site of ideological indoctrination

3. THE NORTHERN CAUCASUS & ZAGROS MOUNTAIN CONNECTION – via UKRAINE and SIBERIA

The overhead comet fragment explosion at Abu Hureyra was not an isolated event. Evidence suggests that the northern Levant and elsewhere in the near-east took a cosmic pounding and as a result much of the area went archeologically dead for nigh on 1,000 years. How the slow accrual of the game changing, agricultural-leaning way of being that emerged over time in the Levant up to 10,900BC was then transferred to Anatolia 1,000 years later as the planet again warmed post the YD cold spell, therefore remains something of a mystery. Throughout the long intervening period of repeated trauma and unending seeming cold, the environment simply would not support furtherance of plant cultivation as a sustainable way of life and any survivors therefore reverted back to the old way of life as the only means of survival. Yet someone, somewhere, somehow remembered, and around 9,500 BC the process of slow transformation began all over again, this time further north in Anatolia.

We know there was a form of network that provided continual contact between north and south throughout the many centuries preceding the YD due to the obsessive trade in Turkish Obsidian, reaching even into the southernmost reaches of the Levant, 900kms from its source. This is also suggestive that a cohesive mining, preparation and distribution network was pre-existent in Anatolia and that further suggests control and management of a prized resource surplus having all the hallmarks of possible secret society oversight.

With this precious item came an esoteric-ideology of meaning and through that meaning, leverage over those who longed to possess it (and be possessed by it). So perhaps in the end the Natufian stone foundation houses were actually not Natufian at all and not houses, but Anatolian sourced Trojan Horses masquerading as ritual and trading outposts, strung out one by one along a network of waterways and acting as proselytizing enablers of a new set of ideas from north to south rather than south to north. After all, throughout all that time pre the YD event, the Levant rather than the northern mountain planes of Anatolia was where nature flourished the most, with a host of lush habitats rich in food and a growing human resource, (somewhat of a Garden of Eden like environment), full of rich pickings for those of a serpent minded disposition.

Yet paradoxically, from the point of view of an expansive, incipient agricultural ideology, as a result of the ecological flourishing of the region from around 13,000 BC on during the Bølling-Allerød warming, there was actually an absolute glut of game animals of all kinds and in particular of the Goitered Gazelle, the number one target of the late Palaeolithic hunters.



This graceful creature was quite simply the wheat of its day. Almost inconceivably large numbers roamed the entire region in gargantuan herds that likely dwarfed the numbers of Wildebeest seen on the planes of modern day Africa. This was the staple food of the people of the time and there was way more than enough to go round. Yet by 4,000 BC, they were entirely decimated and today are categorized in the IUCN Red List as a Vulnerable species. This species collapse owes in some small degree to the changes in ecology during and post the YD, but principally has been driven by excessive human predation beginning in the late Pleistocene and gaining huge momentum during the early PPN. We will come back to this matter anon (and yes, I know that by now I have a long list of matters to ‘come back to’!) but it is important here to plant in your mind the impact that Kite-technology not only had on these animals but on the mindset of hunter-gatherers of the time, and I suspect the nefarious ‘organization’ that came up with the idea before rolling it out across the near east.

To put it in a grain-shell (sic), I suspect security of food tenure provided by Gazelles was to become seriously problematic competition in the minds of some, and so somewhere, somehow they implemented a long-term final solution.



Kites were essentially structured and micro-managed killing fields into which at any one time immense numbers of gazelle could be driven before being ritually annihilated – yes, annihilated is the only word, and in such volume that it would have been impossible for the crazed killers and their dependents to consume the sheer volume of dead carcasses that resulted.

Archeologists are only now beginning to grasp (a) their very existence, being previously long lost in the desert sands and only visible from the air (b) the implications of the impact they had on PPN/Neolithic communities down through the ages (c) the industrial scale usage and geographic spread across the entire near-east of these killing fields, and perhaps most importantly (d) the date by which they were first in use.

The preference is for a timeline beginning in the PPN B and then reaching its height during the Neolithic but I think this is classic avoidance because in truth they admit they do not actually know a start date because of the paucity of carbon dating finds that enable accurate calibrating at the literally hundreds of sites now uncovered. The greatest clue to my mind lies in their known distribution:



Every black dot on the location map above is a Kite site. The intense usage in the Levant stretching right down into Saudi Arabia is obvious. However, the areas I have highlighted by white rings are to clear anomalies, separated from the main kite territory of the Levant by multiple near impenetrable mountain ranges. The likelihood of them randomly spreading north from here beyond the bounds of the Caspian Sea is remote. More plausibly, (especially given the fact that in the YD period the herds migrated further north), this map is a giveaway that this lethal and highly organized technology – for that is what it was – traveled from north to south and originated way back in time in the Russian territories around the northern Caspian Sea and also in the Armenian Caucuses before transporting with certain new arrivals down towards Anatolia and the northern Levant.


FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE…

Mapping Post-Glacial expansions: The Peopling of Southwest Asia (2017)

Daniel E. Platt, et al

Y-chromosome analysis has identified highest frequencies for J1 haplogroup to be most common in the Saudi Peninsula marking the Muslim expansion with J2 being common in the coastal Levant, and identified early on as a possible marker of the European expansion of the post-Neolithic expansion, while their origins have been identified roughly within Iran, Armenia, Georgia, and/or Eastern Turkey.

… Our Y chromosome and autosomal analysis identified genetic signatures of three likely centers of isolated evolution followed by population expansions. These modern centers correspond to archaeologically known LGP refugia in Southwest Asia. The first, identified by Obsidian sourcing as an expansion center in Georgia/eastern Turkey. Clear evidence of trade, and tool cultures mark the second refuge in the northern Levant… Archaeologically, the time period marking post glacial population expansions through Southwest Asia is associated with the early and middle Pre-Pottery Neolithic B, the increased reliance on domesticated plants and animals, increased evidence of trade and exchange along the earlier established obsidian trade routes, and coastal to inland trade of marine resources.

… Our study has identified the Caucasus refugium as the likely source for the J1 and J2 haplogroups that now dominate Southwest Asia, and previously appeared to mark the Neolithic Revolution’s expansion into Europe.

In June 2022 Semih Güneri, a retired professor from Caucasia and Central Asia Archaeology Research Center of Dokuz Eylül University, and his colleague, Professor Ekaterine Lipnina, presented the findings of their long research to colleagues at the ‘Proto-Turks Bearing Culture to the World Workshop” held in Istanbul.

Calling it the ‘Siberia-Göbeklitepe hypothesis’, they presented evidence that by tracking the spread of sophisticated and highly distinctive micro-blade technology, a clear connection could be made between ice age cultures in Siberia and the 12,000-year-old site of Göbekli Tepe, implying that the origins of the famous PPNA site could well have been influenced by people migrating thousands of miles from the north-east.



Their suggestion is the migration first started in Siberia 30,000 years ago and slowly moved all over Asia, including westward along the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor as far as the Zagros Mountain region and from there they mixed with the Hunter-Gatherers of SE Anatolia.

“There seems to be a relationship between Siberian hunter-gatherers and native Zagros hunter-gatherers… The results of the genetic analyses of Iraq’s Zagros region confirm the traces of the Siberian/North Asian indigenous people, who arrived at Zagros via the Central Asian mountainous corridor and met with the Göbeklitepe culture via Northern Iraq…”

Prof. Semih Güneri

In their presentation, the two professors pointed to the evidence for three waves of such migration during the transition out of the ice age and going on into the Holocene, including to Turkey/Anatolia in the first wave. They also pointed out that there are strong indications that there was a technology and tool transfer from southern Russia to the Göbeklitepe region during the period surrounding the transition from Ice Age to Holocene.


Late Pleistocene human genome suggests a local origin for the first farmers of central Anatolia (2019)

Michal Feldman, et al., 2019

Anatolia was home to some of the earliest farming communities. It has been long debated whether a migration of farming groups introduced agriculture to central Anatolia. Here, we report the first genome-wide data from a 15,000-year-old Anatolian hunter-gatherer and from seven Anatolian and Levantine early farmers. We find high genetic continuity (~80–90%) between the hunter-gatherers and early farmers of Anatolia and detect two distinct incoming ancestries: an early Iranian/Caucasus related one and a later one linked to the ancient Levant. Finally, we observe a genetic link between southern Europe and the Near East predating 15,000 years ago. Our results suggest a limited role of human migration in the emergence of agriculture in central Anatolia.

The subject of DNA tracking throughout the region is mighty complex but it is clear from testing of PPN human remains at early sites around Göbekli Tepe, that whilst the first Anatolian farmers were 80-90% genetically indigenous, 10-20% of their DNA came from partially from a gene pool related to early Iranian Zargros sources and also from the Caucasus region, with both these tracing back in time to more northerly roots. In other words, people originating from somewhere far, far away did interbred with local Anatolians in significant enough numbers to introduce widespread DNA markers, albeit comparatively small, that had no real business being there.

So who could these remarkable travelers be and why did they come in such small but significant enough numbers to leave still a recognizable genetic, technological and likely cultural trace of their outlandish origins?

Let us begin with the Caucuses link.

SUSPECT NO.1: THE SWIDERIANS - HUNTERS FROM THE NORTH

“…perhaps there was some kind of connection or communication between the societies of Turkey and those around the Black Sea and the Crimea… there is a similarity between the style of game hunting in southeast Anatolia in the period of Göbekli Tepe’s construction and the reindeer hunters of the North.”

These remarkable comments made during a 2009 BBC documentary by original director and excavator of the site Klaus Schmidt have been since ignored by most archaeologists and historians and he never again elucidated further on them. However In the late Upper Paleolithic age, reindeer hunters who occupied the forests and plains of Northern Europe, often operating on the sandy terrains of loess left behind by the melting glaciers, started using different hunting strategies as the reindeer herds abandoned their old territories and moved ever northward and north-eastward. Even with the onset of the Younger Dryas mini ice age, ca. 10,900 BC, the reindeer kept moving, even though the worsening weather conditions were forcing human populations to migrate ever southward.

As part of their change in strategy, the reindeer hunters adopted the use of a very specific type of weapon, usually made of flint and known as the tanged point. These points have distinctive “shoulders,” or “tangs,” delicately chipped away from the base so that they could more easily be attached to an arrow shaft. Clearly, the use of the bow and arrow gave these Paleolithic hunters the advantage not only during the chase but also over any human competitors.

In her book Plato Prehistorian, Mary Settegast, recognized that during the Younger Dryas period major migrations were taking place all over Europe, and among all those on the move was a specific group of reindeer hunters known as the Swiderians. All evidence suggests that as they pushed further and further eastward and southward, they left behind a noticeable trail of finely carved tanged points, stretching all the way from the Carpathian Mountains of Central Europe right across to a northerly extension of the Black Sea, in what is today Ukraine (or should I say Russia) and even on into Georgia right on the borders of the Armenian northern edge of Anatolia. She noted also that around this same time strikingly similar tanged points started to appear at Epipaleolithic and proto-Neolithic sites in the Near East, something that is unlikely to be a simple coincidence.


Eastern and southerly migration of tanged/shouldered points belonging to the Swiderian culture, which emerged ca. 11,000 BC.

The standard explanation as to what exactly these Paleolithic hunters were up to journeying so far from their home territories is that they were simply forced by ecological changes to follow the changing migratory patterns of their prey. Yet as Settegast herself noted, many of their campsites show very little evidence of spoils of the hunt, so clearly something else was driving them on. And let us not forget, the reindeer were moving ever north as these reindeer hunters moved ever south.

Supporting the idea that the Swiderians reached even beyond the Caucasus Mountains is, as noted by Mary Settegast, the fact that a great many tanged points strikingly similar to those manufactured in Europe have been found at Epipaleolithic and early Neolithic sites across the Near East. Indeed, leaf-shaped tanged points that easily compare with those created as part of the Swiderian tradition have been found at Göbekli Tepe. There is also the important evidence that pressure flaking was being used in eastern Anatolia by the PPNB (ca. 8,700 BC-6,000 BC) and was present in numbers at the Neolithic proto-city of Çatal Höyük by 7,000 BC.

Anatomically speaking, the Swiderians have been described by the likes of Marija Gimbutas as being unusually tall and at least some of them having rather unsettling cranial and facial features. In 1956 she detailed the discovery of a partial cranium, (uncovered minus its lower jaw), at Kebeliai, near Priekulė in Lithuania and dating to the end of the Palaeolithic age, when Swiderian settlements covered the area. She described it as being:

“..massive, dolichocephalic [that is, long headed], with strong proclivity of the forehead, prominent and massive brow ridges and a narrow forehead.”

In her opinion the strange skull “was sapiens, but had Neanderthaloid elements, in other words, [it] was a Neanderthal-sapiens hybrid.” Gimbutas also described a “closely related” cranium dating again to the end of the last glacial age, this one discovered on the Skhodnia River, northwest of Moscow, where Swiderian groups are known to have existed at the time.

Whatever the complex issues that undoubtedly exist concerning interbreeding between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, the reality is Neanderthal markers do exist somehow in human DNA and as we all know, they are possibly - or even very likely - the source of human emergent psychopathological traits. Well, here we have a group of suspect hunters heading south from the Russian/Ukrainian steppes with perhaps members of their elite (?) possessing physical features that to Gimbutas at least are highly suggestive of significant residual signs of previous Neanderthal-sapien crossbreeding; and these may be some of the very people who made their way down the Caucuses to Anatolia bringing with them a totally new mind-set about how to deal with the world post the Younger Dryas.

Among the recent finds (but still not widely known) at the lesser reported on site of Karahan Tepe, (a near neighbour of Göbekli Tepe), is this highly unsettling, large scale carving of a head in which we should note the elongated, long and narrow faced skull and the highly prominent and massive brow ridges :



I will come back to the implications of this fearsome face in a future post as well as the clear similarity to the elongated head that the top of the famous T-pillar’s likely in part at least represents:






Central T Pillar, Enclosure D (Left) so called Kilisik Sculpture (Right)

It should also be noted that the Swiderians are also possibly inheritors in some way of the knowledge and technology of the much earlier Solutreans who also mastered the use of surface pressure flaking to create highly unique willow-leaf-shaped projectile points and much larger, laurel-leaf-shaped lance heads, which share similarities to the Swiderians’ own leaflike points. The fact that a number of these unique blades have been found in groups within caches and are regularly made of nonlocal, exotic materials has led to speculation that they were not used for any practical purpose but instead served some ritual or symbolic function.

The other think to note about the Solutreans is that they are the only known culture of the Palaeolithic to carve immaculate animal images into stone friezes in caves.



The above, found in the vallée de l'Echelle, in France, were first discovered in 1927 and dates to around 17,000 BC, which could make them within striking distance of the Magdalenian art of Lascaux. Yet whilst Magdalenian cave art is painted, these animal images are exquisitely carved into the sandstone rock faces of caves to a level of expertise we will not see realised again until some 7,000 years later at Göbekli Tepe. Whilst it is impossible to imagine such skills being transferred, seemingly unused in the intervening period, over such inordinate lengths of time, it does raise questions considering the close similarity of profile representation, sculpting technique and subject matter.



Of particular note is this freeze above, which shows the body of a bison (large bull) whose head is suggested by archaeologists to have been re-carved into the face of a wild boar. The implicit relationship between the bull and the boar may well come back to haunt us at Göbekli Tepe. As will this highly distinctive form below of a semi-crouching ‘human’ whilst being threatened by a horned bison:





For anyone fascinated by these remarkable images, I recommend a look at this page where multiple quality images are analysed.

In 1996, whilst proposing a single grouping for the various North European cultures that thrived in the Upper Paleolithic, Lithuanian archaeologist Rimutè Rimantienè did not in the end include the Swiderians yet he still admitted that “the relations with the Solutrean are outstanding, though also indirect.” The reason he failed to include them was simple – the Swiderian culture did not enter the scene until the beginning of the Younger Dryas period, ca. 10,900 BC, 3,500 years after the Solutreans vanished from the pages of European history, to either make way for the Magdalenians or perhaps, as some have suggested, depart France for the North European Plains when the reindeer herds migrated northward at the end of the last ice age. It is of course from here that the Swiderian’s were to emerge at the height of the Younger Dryas.

Fascinatingly, others have also claimed they were expert mariners and have entertained the possibility that they took to the high seas, ending up in North America, having navigated the southern limits of the sea ice, re-emerging in time as the doomed Clovis culture of the Younger Dryas comet impact event, which also produced laurel-leaf-shaped blades very similar to those manufactured in Western Europe. But that’s a whole different story.

SUSPECT NO.2: THE SIBERIAN CONNECTION

Paleolithic stone tool expert Bruce Bradley, Ph.D., of the University of Exeter, and his colleagues have proposed that the Solutreans’ highly sophisticated stone technology originated among a culture which thrived between ca. 30,000 BC and 19,000 BC and covered a region stretching from the cold forest steppes of the Black Sea as far north as Siberia. Known as the Kostyonki-Streletskaya or Kostyonki-Borshchevo, these advanced people produced stone tools and projectile points with close parallels to those manufactured by both the Solutreans in central and southwest Europe and the later Swiderians.



At a Kostyonki-Streletskaya site on the Klyazma River on the outskirts of the city of Vladimir, a hundred miles northeast of Moscow, three remarkable human burials were uncovered in 1956 dating to around 30,000 BC. Among many anomalies, one of the skulls, with its prominent brow ridge and pronounced jaw, bore a striking resemblance to the Neanderthal-human Swiderian hybrid skulls found elsewhere in Russia and Lithuania and dating much later.

One of the twentieth century’s most notable prehistorians, V. Gordon Childe, hypothesised in his landmark book The Prehistory of European Society that both the Swiderians and Solutreans did indeed derive their characteristic toolmaking capabilities from the Kostenki-Streletskaya culture of northern and central Russia.

A cluster of 25 seemingly interconnected sites with occupation for thousands of years have been discovered on the western banks of the River Don.

• Stage 1 dates from 34,000 to 30,000 BC
• Stage 2 is 30,000 to 25,000 BC
• Stage 3 is 23,000 to 18,000 BC

Stage three is technically Gravettian but much of the archaeological assemblages show no Gravettian characteristics at all.

They constructed large scale, circular highly complex mammoth bone buildings that show no signs of having been domestic housing and are termed ‘special purpose’ buildings as with those at Göbekli Tepe. They also carved many so called 'Venus' statues, some of them in limestone; this one dating to 23,000 BC has remarkable overtones of what was to come later in Anatolia at Göbekli Tepe.



Note for now the position of the arms (clearly crooked at the elbow though now lost) and resting on what appears to be a fully pregnant belly. Note the interesting circular like ‘chain’ device around this area and the oversized, prominent ‘belly button below. I have said previously that I am convinced these figures are not meant to represent humans; whist using familiar human representational forms concerning that dreaded word ‘fertility’, they are rather cosmic (and in that sense asexual or even hermaphrodite in intention) and are not grounded in some narrow, gender derived terrestrial concept.

The artisanship of these people was remarkable; here again something or note, being a delicately carved headband:



What strikes me is the similarity in close-up to a very important geometric detail on the infamous Pillar 43 (Vulture Stone) at Göbekli Tepe (version for comparison at the bottom, below).



One final telling Kostyonki example that again shouldn’t be there is the below image, taken from a Russian archaeological book from the 70s (hence the poor quality picture) which shows examples of Kostyonki miniature carved heads.



Now where have we seen this distinctive Tau T-nose and eye ridge with big, mostly blank crescent lower jaw before…?




Previously we explored the Natufian version (bottom left) – which I now suspect wasn’t actually Natufian in origin but came south with certain ‘instructors’ from further north – well you may not be surprised by now to learn that the later Anatolian PPN A sites are also laden with them (three of many examples, right).


(to be continued below in next post)

 

[Michael B-C]

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE… (cont'd)

Along with many anthropomorphic carvings this pierced pillar rod with its large vacant hole through the head area will be something we will AGAIN come back to!



It clearly had some very deep meaning to the people because it was found in several burials already deliberately broken in half, and in this example above, buried with a highly decorated, high-status young person.

Note again the multi-layering design of the ‘cap’ which is a feature that appears on multiple ‘Venus’ figures in the area as well as the more famous version found 1,0000s of miles to the west in Europe (see below)



This also brings us to our final Siberian link - the similar Mal’ta-Buret culture of south eastern Siberia named after the two principal archaeological sites, Mal’ta and Buret, discovered on the Upper Angara River in the area west of Lake Baikal.





Here we have very similar cultural developments including semi-subterranean stone foundation circular housing, stone animal carvings, bizarre polka dot artwork and many so called Venus figurines.



As we can see from this striking comparison between a Mal’ta-Buret snake like design (above left) and those found later distinctively swarming over many a pillar at Göbekli Tepe (below, blacked out for definition by me) as well as at several other PPN sites in the area, the motifs are near identical and very likely carry very similar meaning; it may not surprise you to know that I do not think it relates directly to any earth bound Serpentes!

Also note yet again the centrally placed hole in the Mal’ta-Buret snake design which when you reverse reveals a series of large and small polka dot labyrinths/spirals – these polka dots with also reappear again in later Anatolia where they are deemed to be either snake or leopard spots….. but we think not.... oh how our plot continues to thicken…!


Central European ‘Venus (Left) and Eastern Siberian (right)

As for the Venus figurines, the shear distance between near identical ‘strangely particular’ designs again reemphasizes for me that these figures were of universal ‘cosmic, religious’ significance and had nothing to do with local fashion as archaeologists claim! (once again note on the above ‘female’ version the crooked arm gesture (over or under the breasts, demarcating a Torus with a curved crescent above or below) which is an archetype we have met before and that will appear over and over including on the central T-pillars at Göbekli and Karahan Tepe).



But for now I digress…

The tell-tell signs of meaningful exchange between extreme north and south are simply too strong to ignore, despite the geographic and time gaps.



Whether by the straight down route through central Russia, from further west in Russia via the caucuses and Armenia or from Eastern Siberia via the Zagros Mountains, the road to Göbekli Tepe region from the north may have been long in both geography and time, but trodden it certainly was by some very influentially minded people, for those who came along it brought with them a world view that seems to have contained knowledge of both STO and STS perspectives that by the time it emerged in Anatolia around 9,500 BC was to shape into a new binary mentality that would forever change the world.

 

[Tuatha de Danaan]

Heavens above Michael B-C, I wait with bated breath for each new instalment and then I feel the pressure of too much information. Add to this all the "anon's" you have still to uncover and it's quite breath taking.

One reread will not suffice and I can honestly say you are giving a panoramic view both of time and space which comes alive in a very real sense. It's almost as if you are stirring long lost memories and who knows maybe you are. You delivery, mixing amazing details, humour and 'anon's' with such wonderful photos is captivating.

I would like to thank you for the amazingly hard work you have undertaken and to express my appreciation. Sign me up for your next instalment please,.!!

 

[Michael B-C]

Heavens above Michael B-C, I wait with bated breath for each new instalment and then I feel the pressure of too much information. Add to this all the "anon's" you have still to uncover and it's quite breath taking.

One reread will not suffice and I can honestly say you are giving a panoramic view both of time and space which comes alive in a very real sense. It's almost as if you are stirring long lost memories and who knows maybe you are. You delivery, mixing amazing details, humour and 'anon's' with such wonderful photos is captivating.

I would like to thank you for the amazingly hard work you have undertaken and to express my appreciation. Sign me up for your next instalment please,.!!

And I want to thank you Tuatha de Danaan for your warm and generous feedback. I really do appreciate it. There are times during the strange solitude of this exploration in the dark that I question my sanity! I mean really, I'm half expecting you all to say 'get on your bike with this nonsense!', so to hear that some of you out there at least find it of interest and worth pursuing helps to keep me going. I'll also admit that in this craziest of times both at home and abroad I need something like this to give me a purpose and to keep the old grey matter from atrophying. As someone who spent their life as a professional story teller, the real excitement has always come from sharing in the hope that the 'audience' gets as much from the process as the maker. So I'm glad to hear that you for one find the ride worthwhile. It gives me the belief to keep going and I promise that what's still to come in time should raise the old hairs on the back of the neck! And I'll stop with the 'anons' for everyone's sake! No test or homework owing from the reader I promise - I think they will all register and land well enough in good time. And obviously do please bring your own thoughts to the conversation - I really didn't set out intending this to be any form of bleedin' monologue (God forbid!)

Anyway, thank you again and on to the next installment!

 

[Wandering Star]

mean really, I'm half expecting you all to say 'get on your bike with this nonsense!'

Exactly my thoughts with each and every one of my contributions to this forum.

 

[Tuatha de Danaan]

And obviously do please bring your own thoughts to the conversation - I really didn't set out intending this to be any form of bleedin' monologue (God forbid!)

Michael B-C, I only meant the laugh symbol to refer to the comment above "bleedin'monologue".

As someone who spent their life as a professional story teller, the real excitement has always come from sharing in the hope that the 'audience' gets as much from the process as the maker

This comes through loud and clear in your narration and you take me to wonderful places, thank you.

 

[brandon]

This comes through loud and clear in your narration and you take me to wonderful places, thank you.

Absolutely! I've been finding each post in this thread utterly fascinating.. every time I see the thread's been bumped I go "ooh!". Haven't replied before because I'm way out of my depth with this stuff, but it all makes sense to me so far - you seem to be doing a great job of piecing it all together Michael, and are very good at talking us through it, to someone like me who often gets quite lost in ancient history topics (nowhere near well-read enough yet!).. Your Tolkien-ish conversational tone is really helpful I find..

I was trying for a bit to find possible connections in Australian aboriginal rock art (since that's my local rock art - and I've heard there are some similar symbols used at Gobekli Tepe) but, didn't find anything yet that really jumped out at me.. It seems a bit difficult (or maybe impossible) to find deep info on some aboriginal stuff online.. maybe since it's an active culture with stories and sites that are still kept secret.. Or maybe I just don't know where/how to look..

 

[Michael B-C]

Göbekli Tepe – terrorist site of ideological indoctrination

4. A NORTHERN JADE LION CUB & THE ZARGROS ZARZIAN TRICKSTER FOX CONNECTION

As I hope you are gathering by now, there were some strangely dark things going on in the Near-East long before the Younger Dryas threw the world back into icy chaos for a further 1,300 years. With the relentless, millennia long programming of normalcy bias, the move towards the advent of agriculture is today accepted as the miraculous leverage by which the great leap forward occurred, propelling what we know today as the inevitable march of ‘progress’, and that the grandeur of human civilization simply would not have happened but for these first few brave pioneers. From our perspective here we can perhaps see things differently, however. I am of course not proposing that it would have been preferable to remain in some stone-age-luddite utopia, but the road we would have traveled without the drive of agriculture would likely have led to a quite different world today, with the victory of the square (i.e. triangle) over the circle during the PPN being perhaps the greatest single defeat humanity has suffered since the original Fall over 300,000 years previously. But then again, we wouldn’t all be here now trying to learn by picking up the final pieces of the jigsaw, so isn’t that a strange thing to consider!

Whatever the case, I cannot over emphasize how alien and how ‘other’ this new idea must have seemed to the hunter-gatherers of the day. When you consider that the Russian Kostyonki-Streletskaya civilisation survived everything nature threw at it for over 10,000 years without any sign of warfare, imperialism, psychopathic oppression or apparent degradation of a unifying, evolving, harmonious belief system, whilst at the same time expressing profoundly deep concepts of human existence through their art and culture, it does make one wonder. It took extreme circumstances, repeated negatively impacting traumatic events, and I believe above all else some very devious minds freshly cooked up in the wake of a cosmic calamity, to persuade the surviving people of Anatolia at the time to inch by inch abandon their world view and take on a way of being and thinking that went against everything they knew and hitherto believed in. Yes we know that ‘naïve’ cultures when first meeting ‘advanced’ and mischievously minded higher seeming beings can succumb to foolery - who can ever forget those images of native americans, north and south, falling for the con-man’s trick of marbles, matches and jumping metal frogs - but this was even more insidious than that. These people did not want to steal their lands – they wanted to steal their minds. And bit by bit, steal them they did.

I think we have already seen the hints that this process had begun in the Levant long before the YD and we have also noted that some strange new travelers came from the North and whether by luck or design ended up in Turkey just at the right time post the YD. The connection North to South is doubly fascinating because in truth they were in effect returning home in that in the far distant past they had originally traveled from this middle eastern homeland north to Russia and Siberia, and it seems likely – if incredible – that some kind of ancestral memory drove them on to once more seek out this southerly place of warmth and plenty precisely at the time it was to truly bear fruit (with some among them hitching a ride for other purposes it seems). It is even possible that the north-south connection was kept alive, by trade and by travel throughout the many millennia that separated these journeys. Here I remind you that according to Profs Semih Güneri and Ekaterine Lipnina, there are strong indications that there was a technology and tool transfer from southern Russia to the Göbekli Tepe region during the period surrounding the transition from Ice Age to Holocene.


NORTHERN JADE

During the 2012 autumn excavation season at Göbekli Tepe, a small figurine (5.1×2.3×2.7 cm) was handed in as a surface find from the north-western hilltop of the tell. The meaning represented by the discovery remains a mystery to archaeologists to this day, being just yet another singular and out of place find. Well I think differently and regard it as one of a number of vital confirmatory pieces of imagery in a chain of evidence we will explore in detail anon.



Heavily eroded on one side, we see a ‘human’ figure squatting on some form of rock (or mountain?), a substantial erect phallus between ‘his’ legs both of which ‘he’ grips with our increasingly familiar crooked-elbow arms, as ‘he’ stares enigmatically up at the heavens.

What is easy to miss, however, is the strange creature who has seemingly hitched a ride by firmly attaching itself to the figure’s left shoulder.



We will in time come back to this beautifully carved, seemingly perversely placed feline cub!

For now, what we should note is that the statute is apparently made from green nephrite, one of only two distinct minerals commonly known as jade. Nephrite, a gem-quality silicate mineral in the tremolite–actinolite series of amphiboles, is the more common form of jade but that doesn’t mean it’s widespread, and as far as is known, it has no place being in southern Turkey, especially so early in prehistory.

The nearest pure supply of this harder and more durable form of the mineral (hence the survival of the sculpture near intact almost 10,000 years later) is in either a familiar territory in Siberia:

The most important deposits of nephrite are in northern British Columbia, Canada; in Xinjiang, China and near Lake Baikal in Siberia.

or perhaps from Poland or Turkistan (modern day Kazakhstan), east of the Caspian sea in southern Russia. Either way, there is no other piece of jade like it yet found at Göbekli Tepe and its whole conceptual feel is unique, almost as if it were a primer that came from somewhere else, along with a story, a long, long time ago…


THE ZARZIAN CONNECTION

There is one final pre PPN culture that deserves a mention before we move on that may serve as an intermediary in this suggestion of age old north to south connection, namely the rarely studied Zarzians of Kurdistan/Zagros mountains, (circa. 18,000 – 9,000BC).



Precious little is known about these enigmatic hunter-gatherers who also show signs of northern influence with their microliths taking on short and asymmetric trapezoids, and triangles with hollows similar in some ways to those used by the Reindeer hunting bow-wielding Swiderians from the north.

The Zarzian in the Context of the Epipaleolithic Middle East (2011)

Deborah I. Olszewski

Many of the Zarzian sites are interpreted as temporary camps, including Warwasi, Palegawra, and Pa Sangar, where selected parts of the carcasses of animals hunted and killed in the valleys below the rockshelters or in the steeper topography closer to the rockshelters were brought to be butchered and consumed. Such sites are thought to represent short-term summer occupations when higher temperatures would have facilitated higher elevation activities during an otherwise cold paleoclimate. Other Zarzian sites have been interpreted as longer-term base camps, for instance, Shanidar Cave (Hole and Flannery, 1967: 163) and Mar Gurgalan Sarab (Mortensen, 1993: 165)... Overall, the Zarzian appears to represent a relatively highly mobile way of life, perhaps with seasonal movements between valleys, foothills, and mountains.

…There are shifts through time (although the length of time is currently unknown) from a nongeometric microlith emphasis to one that increasingly incorporated geometric microliths; these are initially mainly scalene triangles, but later include increased numbers of curved forms, including lunates, at the end of the Zarzian sequence.

One of the most striking material culture similarities between the Zagros and Levantine Epipaleolithic is the shift from non-geometric to geometric forms in the microlithic component of the lithic assemblages…In both regions, the appearance of geometric microliths is accompanied by the use of microburin technique…

Both regions document the incorporation of ground stone implements into tool kits, although with the exception of the Levantine Early Natufian complex, these tools tend to be few, suggesting that if they were used for processing plant foods such as wild cereals and acorns, these food resources may have been mainly a minor component in the diet for much of the Epipaleolithic sequence in both regions.

Evidence for either long distance transport or informal trade and exchange relationships is found in both the Zagros and Levant in the form of marine shells that are made into beads and pendants for personal ornamentation…This type of far-ranging interaction on the part of mainly mobile hunter-gatherer groups has been described for the Levantine Kebaran, Nebekian, and Geometric Kebaran complexes as also incorporating the exchange of “concepts, knowledge and ideas” (Richter et al., 2011: 108…

The lack of small villages during the climatic optimum in the Zagros may reflect in part the more steppic habitat (analogous to the Early Natufian in the eastern Levant) in which reforestation was delayed compared to the Levant, the presence of such villages at lower elevations which have not yet been more thoroughly investigated, or a combination of these and other factors such as different cultural trajectories in the two regions.

The Zarzian’s were thus for a while contemporary with the Natufians and whilst they appear to have essentially followed a traditional hunter-gatherer subsistence strategy focused on Asiatic wild ass, red deer, mountain goats and goat-antelopes, they seem to have participated in the early stages of what archaeologists term the broad-spectrum revolution. In particular, they are associated with the domestication of the dog and most importantly with the introduction of the bow and arrow to the south.

In Chapter 23 of his book Göbekli Tepe: Genesis of the Gods - Temple of the Watchers and the Genesis of Eden, Andrew Collins makes a very strong case for a long term trading connection and cultural exchange going on for generations between all these distant cousins from the Swiderians in the North to the Zarzian’s in the south.

EUROPEAN TAKEOVER

…if the trade in obsidian was indeed regulated by some kind of elite group, is it possible that Swiderian peoples entered eastern Anatolia from the north during the Younger Dryas period and assumed control of the regional obsidian trade, introducing new forms of tool manufacture, such as the pressure flaking technique? Curiously, this is the exact same time that the local culture, the Zarzian, vanish from the scene, having thrived in the region for as much as nine thousand years.

The Zarzians are a very compelling group. Not only were they to become the founders of Hallan Çemi, but evidence suggests they also domesticated dogs. In addition to this, they were one of the first cultures in the Middle East to employ the use of bows and arrows… They kept on the move, living mainly in temporary campsites, and most important of all, they had access to major obsidian sources in the Armenian Highlands.

Obsidian has been found at various Zarzian camps as far south as the Zagros Mountains, including the cave of Zarzi (the culture’s type site), near Sulaymaniah in Iraqi Kurdistan, and the Zawi Chemi Shanidar settlement site, which overlooks the Greater Zab River in northern Iraq. It was here during the 1950s that American archaeologists Ralph and Rose Solecki discovered the wings of seventeen large predatory birds, mostly vultures, along with the skulls of at least fifteen goats and wild sheep. Although this ritual deposit is assigned to the proto-Neolithic community that occupied the site, chances are it represents a continuation of beliefs and practices that had been prevalent among the Zarzian peoples, whose legacy lived on among the proto-Neolithic populations of southeast Anatolia and northern Iraq. In other words, the Zarzians were most likely carriers of the tradition that included the utilization of the vulture in shamanic practices, something that later appears at cult centers such as Göbekli Tepe and Nevalı Çori. This is despite the fact that the Swiderians held specific knowledge regarding bird-and canine-related shamanism derived, at least in part, from both their suspected Solutrean background and their likely contact with the descendants of the Kostenki-Streletskaya culture of the Russian steppes and plain, whom they would have encountered on their journey to eastern Anatolia. Yet their beliefs and practices do not appear to have included the use of the vulture as a primary symbol of birth, death, and rebirth. That seems to have come from the Zarzian peoples, who occupied the region before their arrival.

As to their origin, British archaeologist James Mellaart felt that the Zarzians had started their journey on the Russian steppes, then moved gradually southward into the Caucasian Mountains and Armenian Highlands, before eventually reaching the Zagros Mountains of northern Iraq and northwest Iran. Yet this was a migration that had started as early as 19,000 BC, as much as nine thousand years before the Swiderians would appear to have travelled exactly the same route to reach eastern Anatolia during the Younger Dryas period.

So did the Swiderian hunters overrun Zarzian camps, decimating the inhabitants? Certainly, there is compelling evidence that some kind of power struggle occurred around this time in the Zarzian territories of Gobustan in Azerbaijan, right where the eastern termination of the Caucasus Mountains meets the Caspian Sea.

… Mary Settegast, the author of Plato Prehistorian, argues that the Gobustan rock art shows the arrival of incoming warriors, most likely bow-and-arrow-wielding reindeer hunters from Europe. So are we looking at Swiderians seizing control of Zarzian territories? Whoever these warriors represent, their presence would not seem to have been greeted cordially, for some of the engraved panels show open conflict between two separate groups of individuals.

Even if the Gobustan rock art does show Swiderian hunters coming up against their Zarzian counterparts, there is no reason to assume that one decimated the other. Perhaps after some initial skirmishes, the two factions came to some kind of understanding regarding the exploitation of the region’s rich mineral resources, including the all-important obsidian. In doing so, it is possible that the Zarzians amalgamated with the incoming European hunters to become the driving force behind the emergence of the proto-Neolithic world at key settlements like Hallan Çemi in the Eastern Taurus Mountains.

DISTANT COUSINS

If the Zarzians did come originally from the Russian steppes, as James Mellaart suspected, sometime around ca. 19,000 BC, the chances are they were related to the highly advanced Kostenki-Streletskaya culture, which disappears around exactly the same time. So if the Solutreans and their proposed successors, the Swiderians, really were related to the Kostenki-Streletskaya culture (as was proposed by V. Gordon Childe), then it means that the Zarzians were in fact distant cousins of the Swiderians, a factor that might just have allowed them to find some common ground.

Both used bows and arrows, and both might well have domesticated dogs and/or wolves, while the Kostenki-Streletskaya culture is thought to have held a special interest in the fox, one of the primary totemic animals seen at Göbekli Tepe. For example, a male burial uncovered at Sungir in Russia in 1956 (designated Sungir 1) had a number of perforated arctic fox teeth on his cranium when uncovered, suggesting they were sewn into a cap of some sort. Another burial of a boy aged around thirteen (Sungir 2), interred in a shallow grave head-to-head with an adolescent female (Sungir 3), was found to have around 250 drilled arctic fox teeth around his waist. These probably came from a decorated belt, similar to those seen on the central pillars in Göbekli Tepe’s Enclosure D. Burials at Kostenki itself have also been found to contain unusual amounts of teeth and bones of the arctic fox. This includes the 150 fox teeth found wrapped around the head of a child, aged about six to seven years old, uncovered at a site known as Kostenki 15. Covering the burial was a huge mammoth scapula (shoulder blade), a feature common also among the contemporary, and unquestionably related, Pavlovian culture of Moravia.

… Although the use of wolf and arctic fox remains as items of personal adornment among the Eastern Gravettians, ca. thirty-two thousand to twenty-one thousand years ago, might easily be attributed to the large-scale capture of these carnivores for their meat and pelts, the presence in the graves of unperforated fox teeth hints at the importance of this animal on a cosmological level. Arguably the arctic fox, and the wolf also, was seen as an otherworldly creature that needed to be appeased by the newly dead on their journey into the afterlife.

Such ideas, if realistic, might easily have been inherited by the descendants of the Eastern Gravettians, including the Swiderians, who came to occupy the same territories during the Younger Dryas period. Should this quite fantastic scenario prove realistic, then it seems likely that incoming Swiderian groups entered eastern Anatolia and assumed control of the obsidian trade, giving them direct access to settlement sites not just in the Eastern Taurus range and Zagros Mountains, but also in southeast Anatolia, much closer to Göbekli Tepe. Now they were in a position to introduce their own religious ideologies to the local inhabitants, which would seem to have included new ways to counter the baleful actions of the cosmic trickster in its guise as the sky wolf or sky fox.

The last matter I will briefly touch on is the mysterious part that underground cave cities may have played in the successful survival of peoples in Anatolia as the Younger Dryas rolled on by overhead. Turkey is absolutely riddled with below ground cave complexes:



Distribution of underground caves in Anatolia

Along with multiple natural deep cave complexes, Turkey has an astonishing 36 underground cities, most of them in Cappadocia, with perhaps the most famous of all being at Derinkuyu in Nevşehir Province.



Carved out of the bedrock by hand and extending to a depth of approximately 85 metres (279 ft) it is an ancient multi-level underground complex large enough in its final form to have sheltered as many as 20,000 people together with their food stores. Whilst it is the mainstream view that it was built initially by the Phrygians in the 8th–7th centuries BC, local guides and experts insist it was originally started much, much earlier in the early Neolithic, perhaps even before, and was only reclaimed and enlarged by later peoples in times of equal need. These claims are of course dismissed by western ‘experts’ but I find their argument convincing and though undoubtedly would have been originally much, much smaller, may well be one of the final missing pieces in our preliminary puzzle. For what better place than underground would ideas slowly gestate and flourish and a people traumatized by the heavenly wars above be slowly indoctrinated generation by generation into an entirely new world view when devoid of first-hand experience of the fullness of nature due to the closeted sanctuary of an all-enveloping darkness? Here you have everyone’s full attention; here new mythologies and carved stone icons could be perfected. For as we will see, subterranean mentalities, cave thinking gone wrong, and the use of spooking in the dark, will soon raise their ugly head in the open air of Anatolia as a brave new world beckoned.

I think we have just about laid out our turf. Next up we start to get into the very meat of the matter.

 

[Channa]

what a pleasure to read you - a big thank you
Channa