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

from Abu Hureyra. In the end, its inhabitants were left with no alternative but to seek warmer climes. It was the same throughout the Fertile Crescent, Natufian settlements being abandoned to the elements, their distinctive style of living vanishing completely.
    The mini ice age lasted for approximately 1,300 years. After its cessation around 9600 BC, just before the creation of the first large enclosures at Göbekli Tepe, the temperatures began to rise again. A new community was established at Abu Hureyra, which built mud brick houses on the site of earlier dwellings. The inhabitants, now classed as members of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A culture, used much fatter grain seeds for cultivation, making this perhaps one of the oldest sites where the domestication of cereal crops is thought to have occurred. 1
    MICROSPHERULES AND SLOS
    Theories about Tell Abu Hureyra and its role in the birth of agriculture at the point of transition from the Epipaleolithic age to the earliest Neolithic farming communities remain controversial. Yet none of the scholars attempting to understand the evolution of the site, and its place in the emergence of the PrePottery Neolithic world, can have been prepared for what an eighteen-member international team of researchers, including James Kennett, professor of earth science at the University of California, found after examining sediment materials removed from the site during Moore’s excavations in 1972 and 1973.
    Soil taken from a depth of 11.8 feet (3.6 meters) below the surface revealed, quite astonishingly, that it contained large quantities of almost nano-sized magnetic and glass balls known as microspherules, along with something called SLOs, short for “siliceous scoria-like objects.” These are microscopic glassy particles up to a quarter of an inch (roughly 6.5 millimeters) in size that are highly porous and vesiculated, which means they are full of small sacs created by gas bubbles. In appearance the SLOs resemble scoria, the name given to jagged rock fragments ejected from volcanoes.
    What is so remarkable about SLOs is that they form only under incredibly high temperatures, in the range of 3,100 to 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit (1,700 to 1,980 degrees Celsius), 2 which, believe it or not, is the boiling point of quartz, a form of silica. This, in its molten form, is one of the main constituents of SLOs, which can appear dark brown, green, white, or black. The extraordinary heat needed to create these glassy objects rules out their manufacture by either human activity or volcanic action—or by any other natural process connected with the earth itself.
    Also discounted was the possibility that the tiny glass objects were produced in space, then fell to earth as micrometeors. Results show that 90 percent of the microspherules and SLOs are composed of elements not only distinct from cosmic material, but also closely match the geochemistry of the rocks and sediment in the area of their recovery, clearly indicating their terrestrial origin.
    MELT PRODUCTS
    The microspherules and SLOs are also geochemically and morphologically comparable with each other; in other words, they derive from the same or very similar source materials. More significantly, they both show evidence of “high-energy interparticle collisions” of the sort that occur inside impact plumes. 3 Both are also comparable with melt products, tiny objects of molten glass, found at Meteor Crater, Arizona, the site of an impact event around fifty thousand years ago, and also at tektite-strewn fields in Australasia ( tektites are glassy objects created from a mixture of terrestrial and extraterrestrial matter ejected during impacts).
    More disturbingly, the SLOs found at Abu Hureyra and two other sites in the United States (Blackville, South Carolina, and Melrose, Pennsylvania) resemble “high-temperature materials” 4 found at the Trinity site, which forms part of the Alamogordo Bombing Range, New Mexico, following the detonation