Have you seen the most recent NatGeo program on Gobekli Tepe?
Between the British or dutch movie that won the Cannes awards, which was a bunch of hooey, (and are the source of UCANSEE2’s screencap pictures above), the History Channel special , and the NatGeo special... along with reading on this since early 2010...
I am convinced the German and Turkish team that has worked on the excavation over the last 20 years has built a invalid hypothesis , and are now pretty upset that ‘outsiders’ are reinterpreting their results.
Thanks to the link someone gave me up there, I had the YouTube stream on during the late afternoon and into the evening, and the History Channel segment appears four or five times, along with a giant pile of inutterable BS.
There’s an audio-only one, some radio show with John Anthony West and some Dogon space alien crap guy; one thing that JAW said that makes sense (and on important stuff, he often does; on political stuff, he’s a dumbass) is that the site appears to have been built in at least two phases (and this isn’t controversial), and suggested that it had been abandoned for a time, then was given some remodeling by some also unknown group who entered the area and found it.
There are loads of animal bones which were cooked, then the meat was removed (or chewed off) and the bones discarded. I think those date from the later phase. The site was in use for 2000 years. I don’t for one second believe that the site was covered with sand once a year, then cleaned off for the next year’s rituals, then recovered with sand.