garden of eden

[christianmomof3]

interesting article http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...-mysterious-stones-mark-site-Garden-Eden.html

here is part of the article:

The site of Gobekli Tepe is simple enough to describe. The oblong stones, unearthed by the shepherd, turned out to be the flat tops of awesome, T-shaped megaliths. Imagine carved and slender versions of the stones of Avebury or Stonehenge.
Most of these standing stones are inscribed with bizarre and delicate images - mainly of boars and ducks, of hunting and game. Sinuous serpents are another common motif. Some of the megaliths show crayfish or lions.
The stones seem to represent human forms - some have stylised 'arms', which angle down the sides. Functionally, the site appears to be a temple, or ritual site, like the stone circles of Western Europe.
To date, 45 of these stones have been dug out - they are arranged in circles from five to ten yards across - but there are indications that much more is to come. Geomagnetic surveys imply that there are hundreds more standing stones, just waiting to be excavated.
So far, so remarkable. If Gobekli Tepe was simply this, it would already be a dazzling site - a Turkish Stonehenge. But several unique factors lift Gobekli Tepe into the archaeological stratosphere - and the realms of the fantastical.
The first is its staggering age. Carbon-dating shows that the complex is at least 12,000 years old, maybe even 13,000 years old.
That means it was built around 10,000BC. By comparison, Stonehenge was built in 3,000 BC and the pyramids of Giza in 2,500 BC.
Gobekli is thus the oldest such site in the world, by a mind-numbing margin. It is so old that it predates settled human life. It is pre-pottery, pre-writing, pre-everything. Gobekli hails from a part of human history that is unimaginably distant, right back in our hunter-gatherer past.

 

[christianmomof3]

and another article:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/gobekli-tepe.html?c=y&page=1

 

[champuru]

Their view of Eden seems quite different from Genesis. Interesting find none the less.

 

[philadiddle]

Carbon-dating shows that the complex is at least 12,000 years old, maybe even 13,000 years old.

Since radiometric dating has an error ratio of about 1 to 10,000 (or more) then this means it was built only a few years ago. It must have been made to look old.

 

[OldWiseGuy]

Since radiometric dating has an error ratio of about 1 to 10,000 (or more) then this means it was built only a few years ago. It must have been made to look old.

Or maybe these people just used old materials to make these artifacts. If I carved a stone that is 12,000 years old some overzealous archeologist might insist that it was done 12,000 years ago, when in fact I may have carved and buried it last week. Same for all the materials found at the site. Maybe I don't understand carbon dating but I don't see how it can determine when an old rock was actually carved on. Jes a thought.

owg

 

[gluadys]

Or maybe these people just used old materials to make these artifacts. If I carved a stone that is 12,000 years old some overzealous archeologist might insist that it was done 12,000 years ago, when in fact I may have carved and buried it last week. Same for all the materials found at the site. Maybe I don't understand carbon dating but I don't see how it can determine when an old rock was actually carved on. Jes a thought.

owg

You can't use carbon-dating directly on rock. It's not organic. So to date the site, they must have found some organic material (some wood or bone for example) for testing purposes. If it were carved and buried last week, it would almost necessarily contain some recent organic material.

It is true that for any artifact, carbon-dating can only tell you when the material was last alive. It can tell you when the tree died, for example, not when the wood was made into a table. But if they found organic material that was not made into artifacts (ashes from a fire-pit, bones left over from supper or in a burial chamber) that date would be accurate for the site.

 

[OldWiseGuy]

You can't use carbon-dating directly on rock. It's not organic. So to date the site, they must have found some organic material (some wood or bone for example) for testing purposes. If it were carved and buried last week, it would almost necessarily contain some recent organic material.

It is true that for any artifact, carbon-dating can only tell you when the material was last alive. It can tell you when the tree died, for example, not when the wood was made into a table. But if they found organic material that was not made into artifacts (ashes from a fire-pit, bones left over from supper or in a burial chamber) that date would be accurate for the site.

That's what I thought. I would like to know what exactly they carbon dated at the site. Also those relief carvings resemble the style of those found in central American.

owg