This excellent article by Sean Thomas published by The Spectator has a lot of new information. Graham Hancock made us well aware that Gobekli Tepe was only the beginning, and that is becoming more obvious with time. Locals have even found a t-shaped pillar embedded into a wall, treated like any old piece of rock lying around.
We might be looking at a huge range of monuments, each with its own theme, and all buried so that – perhaps – they can be found later.
I figure the 6 fingered people is worthy of more investigation, a clue about the Atlanteans.
The following are all quotes from the article, and key aspects (in my opinion) in bold.
I am staring at about a dozen, stiff, eight-foot high, orange-red penises, carved from living bedrock, and semi-enclosed in an open chamber. A strange carved head (of a man, a demon, a priest, a God?), also hewn from the living rock, gazes at the phallic totems – like a primitivist gargoyle.
this entire perplexing place, known as Karahan Tepe (pronounced Kah-rah-hann Tepp-ay), which is now emerging from the dusty Plains of Harran, in eastern Turkey, is astoundingly ancient. Put it another way: it is estimated to be 11-13,000 years old.
many sister sites now being unearthed across the Harran Plains – collectively known as the Tas Tepeler, or the ‘stone hills’
archaeologists at Gobekli have also, more recently, found tantalising evidence of alcohol: huge troughs with the chemical residue of fermentation, indicating mighty ritual feasts, maybe.
These places, the Tas Tepeler, were not isolated temples where hunter gatherers came, a few times a year, to worship at their standing stones, before returning to the plains for the life of the chase. The builders lived here. They ate their roasted game here. They slept here. And they used, it seems, a primitive but poetic form of pottery, shaped from polished stone.
Another unnerving oddity is the curious number of carvings which show people with six fingers. Is this symbolic, or an actual deformity? Perhaps the mark of a strange tribe?
In Gobekli Tepe several skulls have been recovered. They are deliberately defleshed, and carefully pierced with holes so they could – supposedly – be hung and displayed. Skull cults are not unknown in ancient Anatolia… At a nearby, slightly younger site, the Skull Building of Cayonu, we know of altars drenched with human blood, probably from gory sacrifice.
Karahan Tepe is stupefyingly big. ‘So far,’ he says, ‘We have dug up maybe 1 per cent of the site’ – and it is already impressive. I ask him how many pillars – T stones – might be buried here. He casually points at a rectangular rock peering above the dry grass. ‘That’s probably another megalith right there, waiting to be excavated. I reckon there are probably thousands more of them, all around us. We are only at the beginning. And there could be dozens more Tas Tepeler we have not yet found, spread over hundreds of kilometres.’
Karahan too was definitely and purposely buried. That is the reason Necmi and his team were able to unearth the penis pillars so quickly, all they had to do was scoop away the backfill, exposing the phallic pillars, sculpted from living rock.