Ancient carvings could be calendar depicting comet strike: Study

( NewsNation ) — Carvings deciphered at the Göbekli Tepe archaeological site in Turkey could suggest that the monument is a solar calendar built to commemorate a comet strike.

A new study published in the journal Time and Mind found that Göbekli Tepe, the world’s oldest temple, contains carvings of intricate symbols that represent what is possibly the world’s oldest calendar and depict an astronomical event that shifted human civilization.

The calendar was likely developed to record the date when a swarm of comet fragments hit the Earth about 13,000 years ago, according to scientists at the University of Edinburgh . The comet strike was known to have ushered in a miniature ice age.

One of the study’s lead authors, Dr. Martin Sweatman, said in a statement that it seems that those who inhabited the Göbekli Tepe were “keen observers” of the sky, which shows that their world had been devastated by a comet strike.

“This event might have triggered civilization by initiating a new religion and by motivating developments in agriculture to cope with the cold climate,” Sweatman said. “Possibly, their attempts to record what they saw are the first steps towards the development of writing millennia later.”

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