Twelve thousand years ago, in what's now southeastern Turkey, someone carved a message into stone. Not words — pictures. A vulture gripping a round disc. A headless human body. A scorpion. Strange symbols that no one alive can fully explain. This is Pillar 43 at Göbekli Tepe, and people call it the Vulture Stone. For most of history, we had no idea what it meant. We might now.
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Riddles of the Past·3/3·1′
The place
Göbekli Tepe
The Vulture Stone — A Cosmic Message?
A 12,000-year-old stone that may record a comet strike
Pre-Pottery Neolithic (c. 10,950 BC)Göbekli Tepe
Moral of the Story
“We keep underestimating our ancestors — the people who built the first temples may have understood the universe better than we ever imagined.”
Characters
N
Neolithic astronomers/priestsT
The Vulture (constellation figure)U
University of Edinburgh researchersK
Klaus Schmidt (excavator)Source
Sweatman & Tsikritsis, Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry (2017); Schmidt, Klaus, Göbekli Tepe: A Stone Age Sanctuary