Gobeki Tepi

Gobeki Tepi which lies in Southern Turkey is said to be the oldest temple on earth. At least it is the oldest one discovered to date. One of the reasons it can be dated accurately is because the temples got filled in with earth from time to time. The result was a lot of carbon material was mixed in with the stones which provided a means for carbon dating. Most ancient temples are found in locations that are open to the elements and only the stones remain. Obviously stones cannot be carbon dated, but because Goberki Tepi was deliberately buried, carbon materials were mixed into the arid soil where they remained contemporary with the megaliths unearthed at the site. At other megalithic sites, later cultures often moved in bringing with them carbon artifacts of a later date making the site appear have a more recent origin. Because this temple was deliberately buried, the complex is unique among megalithic sites which have been discovered around the world. It is dated at over 12,000 years which shows the presence of civilized man 6,000 years earlier than here-to-fore thought. This has shown that the dawn of human development happened much earlier than academics imagined possible. It harkens back to a much earlier epoch in the distant past where our hunter gather ancestors emerged from the ice age and began to settle down, forming more permanent communities. It has stretched the time line to an earlier date and archeologists are running around with their hair on fire to reconcile their long held paridines with the irrefutable evidence being unearthed.

One of the perplexing questions about Gobeki Tepi is why the worshipers went to all the trouble to move massive stones and build these towering and elaborately carved structures only to bury them again long before their design life ended. It appears they spent as much time burying them as they did building them. None of the answers being offered makes much sense so I'll add in my two cents. I'll call this the Womb Hypothesis.

The concept of being born again is a common theme of the New Testament. John the Baptist immersed those who came to believe that in order to achieve eternal life one had to be reborn. By being immersed in the river Jordan, a symbolic death was achieved and those Baptized were born again into the kingdom of God.

In looking at Gobeki Tepi the temple like structures look to be a representation of the womb of Mother Earth. Initiates were likely taken into this temple structure and reborn into a higher state of awareness and religious belief. When they emerged they were "Born Again." As with a human female the period of fertility has a span of utility until replaced by a new generation. In a physical sense this new generation had to recreate the temple womb periodically in order to continue the cycle of spiritual procreation. Hence, after a period of time the old facility was deemed to reach the end of its service life and had to be retired and replaced with a new one. The old one was buried, as a funerary protocol, analogous to burying a human being and the process continued for the next iteration.

So there you have it... the gospel according to Percy Goodfellow as to why the worshipers buried the temples at periodic intervals and built new ones atop the old. Am I good or what?