moses wrote:science dailyIn the ice ages the animals depicted at Gobleki Tepi represented constellations. My take on this is that the Earth was in a very elliptical orbit and the stars were now visible whereas in the previous configuration of planets the stars were not visible. So there was great interest in the stars and generations of people were able to see the precession of the pole through such observations.
Cheers,
Mo
Gobekli Tepe translates from ancient Turkic as "Hill of the Navel", so it's difficult to differentiate between astronomical/polar and shamanic/sacerdotal representations.
From the orientations of the structures though, it does seem that a Boreal influence was signifigant to the builders.
According to the article, there was a period of quite a few millennia between the famous cave artists and the knoll carvers.