In a slightly older article, the next earliest temple was thought to be a 9000-year-old temple
(German paper reports world’s oldest temple is in Şanlıurfa)
http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/arti ... wsid=33604
[...] previously a 9,000-year-old temple in Jordan was considered to be the world's oldest, the article said. Some parts of ancient history should be rewritten after this discovery?
World culture apparently stretches back much further than we had thought?
Keeping in mind the recent discovery in the Gulf of Cambay off India:
(Indian seabed hides ancient remains)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1345150.stm
Marine experts have discovered a clump of archaeological structures deep beneath the sea off India's western coast.
Although the discovery has not yet been accurately dated, the structures are said to resemble archeological sites belonging to the Harappan civilisation, dating back more than 4,000 years.
[...]
(Lost city 'could rewrite history')
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1768109.stm
The remains of what has been described as a huge lost city may force historians and archaeologists to radically reconsider their view of ancient human history.
Marine scientists say archaeological remains discovered 36 metres (120 feet) underwater in the Gulf of Cambay off the western coast of India could be over 9,000 years old.
The vast city - which is five miles long and two miles wide - is believed to predate the oldest known remains in the subcontinent by more than 5,000 years.
[...]
Debris recovered from the site - including construction material, pottery, sections of walls, beads, sculpture and human bones and teeth has been carbon dated and found to be nearly 9,500 years old.
[...]
The city is believed to be even older than the ancient Harappan civilisation, which dates back around 4,000 years.
Marine archaeologists have used a technique known as sub-bottom profiling to show that the buildings remains stand on enormous foundations.
[...]
"Cities on this scale are not known in the archaeological record until roughly 4,500 years ago when the first big cities begin to appear in Mesopotamia.
"Nothing else on the scale of the underwater cities of Cambay is known. The first cities of the historical period are as far away from these cities as we are today from the pyramids of Egypt," he said.
[...]
"There's a huge chronological problem in this discovery. It means that the whole model of the origins of civilisation with which archaeologists have been working will have to be remade from scratch," [Graham Hancock, {an investigator on the project?}] said.
However, archaeologist Justin Morris from the British Museum said more work would need to be undertaken before the site could be categorically said to belong to a 9,000 year old civilisation.
"Culturally speaking, in that part of the world there were no civilisations prior to about 2,500 BC. What's happening before then mainly consisted of small, village settlements," [Morris] told BBC News Online.
Dr Morris added that artefacts from the site would need to be very carefully analysed, and pointed out that the C14 carbon dating process is not without its error margins.
It is believed that the area was submerged as ice caps melted at the end of the last ice age 9-10,000 years ago
[block parenthetical items were my additions, for clarity.]
As I just ran across another article when searching on 12000 year old temples, I thought I'd share this snippet from Archaeology {Magazine?} wherein they share that it looks like Nazareth was a major cultural center 8000 years before the time of Christ?
(Pre-Christian Rituals at Nazareth)
http://www.archaeology.org/0311/newsbri ... areth.html
Archaeological investigations near Nazareth--Jesus' boyhood home--have revealed that the area was a major cult center 8,000 years before the time of Christ.
Excavations at Kibbutz Kfar HaHoresh, less than two miles from the town center, have so far unearthed strangely decorated human skulls and evidence for unusual, complex burials. "This is the first example in the Levant of a purely religious complex from this remote period," says excavation director Nigel Goring-Morris of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "This is a totally new type of site." The cult center seems to have serviced the religious needs of villagers a few miles away.
So far the remains of 65 people have been unearthed--but hundreds more are expected to be found as excavations continue. Many of the remains were interred as part of complex rituals. One partly disarticulated, headless man had been laid to rest on top of a pile of 250 aurochs (wild ox) bones, while at least four children were buried with fox mandibles. Several other individuals were interred with what may have been heirloom flint tools. Archaeologists at HaHoresh have also discovered a remarkable prehistoric "work of art": 50 human bones seemingly arranged in the shape of an animal, possibly an aurochs or a wild boar. This image was constructed, it seems, to mark the burial place of around a dozen people.
Three specially enhanced human skulls have also been discovered. Each of them had been deliberately defleshed after death and overlaid with lime plaster modeled to form facial features. Two of the skulls had then been painted red--one with red ocher, the other with a red pigment that must have come from quarries far to the north in what is now central Turkey. Red pigment, presumably signifying the blood of life, is known to have been painted onto corpses or skeletons in many ancient societies, probably as a form of sympathetic magic designed to help the deceased achieve life after death.
The discovery of several lime kilns at the site suggests that the plaster used for the skulls and for sealing many of the graves was manufactured on-site. Ten thousand years ago these burials must have been an extraordinary sight, for the white plaster grave surfaces--some covering up to 850 square feet--had been deliberately burnished by mourners or devotees to such an extent that the graves probably shimmered in the sun. Some burials were overlaid with up to three tons of plaster.
Even at this early time, 400 generations ago, society may well have been quite rigidly stratified. While at least a quarter of the population of the area at the time were thrown into village rubbish pits left in abandoned houses after death, others appear to have been taken to Nazareth, where their remains were treated with due deference.
Our human legacy is beginning to look nothing like that in the text books! And, frankly, it kind of freaks me out a little.
Not necessarily in a bad way, though!
Cheers,
~Michael Gmirkin