gobekli tepe - genesis of the gods by andrew collins Page A

pole stars, ca. 16,500–13,000 BC.
    Yet even if this unprecedented vision of the beliefs and practices of those who inspired the construction of Göbekli Tepe in the tenth millennium BC is correct, why go to all this trouble in order to avert the baleful influence of comets? What was the real motivation behind all this work and effort, which must have completely changed the lifestyles of the hunter-gatherers of the region? Why did anyone at the end of the Upper Paleolithic age live in fear that a sky fox, or indeed a sky wolf, might disrupt the turning mechanism of the heavens and in so doing bring about the destruction of the world?
    The answer would seem to be that in the minds of the Göbekli builders, there was a genuine fear that if they did not do everything in their power to curtail this perceived threat from the sky, then something bad would happen. Whatever that “something” was, it was so deeply entrenched in the collective psyche of the peoples of southeast Anatolia that they were willing to abandon their old lifestyles and adopt new ones in order to deal with the problem.
    Accepting such a scenario only makes sense if there had already been a terrifying incident involving the sky fox or sky wolf—one that had brought chaos to the world during some former age of humankind. As we see next, a search through the folklore, myths, and legends of the ancient world tells us that just such a catastrophe might well have taken place in fairly recent geological history.

17
    A DARK DAY IN SYRIA
    T ell Abu Hureyra is an archaeological site of great importance on the Middle Euphrates of northern Syria. It was occupied from the late Epipaleolithic age, ca. 11,340 BC, to the Neolithic age, ca. 5500 BC, although today it lies beneath the waters of Lake Assad, created in 1973 following the completion of the Tabqa Dam.
    Investigation of Abu Hureyra began in 1972 under the leadership of Andrew Moore from the University of Oxford. Yet as the rising waters began to lap around the base of the tell during the second digging season, the excavation changed into a frantic salvage operation as the British archaeologist’s team desperately attempted to understand the significance of the occupational mound before its final submergence.
    THE BIG CHILL
    Even after the first season’s expedition it was clear that Abu Hureyra was a quite extraordinary site that would reveal much about the transition from the age of the hunter-gatherer to the establishment of settled farming communities across the Near East. The second year of excavation, along with the subsequent work continued both in Syria and at various foreign universities, enabled Moore to get a pretty good picture of what had been going on at the site at the end of the Paleolithic age. He concluded that the first people to occupy the region arrived as the climate warmed during the Allerød interstadial, which heralded the end of the last ice age, around 13,000 BC.
    In the two thousand years that followed there was a population boom throughout the Fertile Crescent, and it was during this new golden age that Abu Hureyra was established. Its inhabitants—who belonged to the Natufian culture, which inhabited the Levant region, ca. 12,900–9500 BC—lived mainly by hunting, fishing, and cultivating lentils and wild cereals, such as einkorn, emmer, and rye.
    With the onset of the big chill, known as the Younger Dryas, around 10,900 BC, there was a sudden and unexpected disruption to migratory animals across the region. One animal that all but disappeared from the Fertile Crescent was the Persian gazelle, which until that time had formed a major part of the diet of the hunter-gatherers at Abu Hureyra.
    Adding to the problems of the Epipaleolithic hunter-gatherers was the disappearance of forageable foods, such as wild grain and pistachio nuts, almost certainly caused by the rapid climate change, which had brought with it a severe drought, revealed by an analysis of plant remains recovered