Gobekli Tepe in Turkey is revered for its megalithic pillars and intricate carvings, which showcase the architectural and artistic abilities of humans over 10,000 years ago.

A new study from scientists from Scotland proposes the 12,000-year-old structure was more than a ritualistic or ceremonial site composed of enormous stones.

In 1964, a team conducting a geographical survey at a site around 9 miles northeast of the Turkish city of Sanlıurfa was the first to record what would become Gobekli Tepe.

After years of excavations, Schmidt and his extensive team slowly unearthed the remains of an enormous site consisting of large pillars laid out in intricate circular formation.

Initial dating conducted at the site led researchers to suggest that it could be up to 11,000 years old, making it one of the oldest known man-made structures ever discovered.

Professor Schmidt, who worked on the site until his death in 2014, never believed Gobekli Tepe was a settlement. Instead, he was adamant the site in Anatolia was some kind of religious or ceremonial structure.

Now, a new study published in the journal Time and Mind proposes an entirely alternative theory.

The scientists meticulously examined the numerous carved symbols found at the site, suggesting that every “V” represents a day of the year. This thorough examination led them to suggest that one pillar featured 365 “V’s,” making it a total of one solar year.

According to the researchers, Gobekli Tepe’s function as a calendar is preoccupied with day, night, and seasonal changes that may have come following a cataclysmic event.

In a statement, Martin Sweatman, the lead study researcher from the University of Edinburgh’s School of Engineering, further emphasized their beliefs, suggesting that the ancient inhabitants of Gobekli Tepe were not just builders, but knowledgeable astronomers.

Sweatman continued, their observation of the sky “is to be expected given their world had been devastated by a comet strike. The event might have triggered civilization by initiating a new religion and by motivating developments in agriculture to cope with the cold climate.”

According to the scientists, the carvings suggest the inhabitants of Gobekli Tepe tracked the cycles of the Sun and the Moon, which pre-date all other known calendars by “many millennia.”

Archaeologist Jens Notroff was not immediately convinced about the new findings and questioned whether the markings held a deeper meaning.

The possible comet shape on Pillar 18 shares many of the characteristics of the Nebra sky disk, a second-millennium BCE artifact unearthed in modern-day Germany.

But not everyone is on board for the comet hypothesis. Some researchers suggest that the pillar depicts a mythological boat or a rainbow, Astronomy Magazine wrote in 2021.

Before the discovery of Gobekli Tepe, hunter-gatherer societies created the world’s oldest known calendar, a Mesolithic monument. The Mesolithic monument, which was found in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, by the National Trust for Scotland in 2004, dates back to around 8,000 BC.

Measuring time is one of the most important achievements made by humans, but when we “created” the concept of time is widely unknown. But knowing that communities long ago can shed light on how society has developed.

Researchers discovered that the Mesolithic monument was created by hunter-gatherers in Aberdeenshire nearly 10,000 years ago. The calendar appears to mimic the phases of the Moon.

The site that the ancient calendar, Warren Field, Crathes, also aligns on the Midwinter Sunrise, providing an annual astronomic correction to maintain the link between the passage of time.

“The evidence suggests that hunter-gatherer societies in Scotland had both the need and sophistication to track time across the years, to correct for seasonal drift of the lunar year and that this occurred nearly 5,000 years before the first formal calendars known in the Near East,” Vince Gaffney, Professor of Landscape Archaeology at the University of Birmingham, commented.

Dave Cowley, Aerial Survey projects manager at RCAHMS, said: “We have been taking photographs of the Scottish landscape for nearly 40 years, recording thousands of archaeological sites that would never have been detected from the ground.

Dr Richard Bates, of the University of St Andrews, comments: “St Andrews has an established reputation for remote sensing studies of early prehistoric sites in Scotland but the site at Warren Field is unique.

“This is the earliest example of such a structure and there is no known comparable site in Britain or Europe for several thousands of years after the monument at Warren Fields was constructed,” Bates noted.

In conclusion, the researchers propose that the carvings at Gobekli Tepe clearly showcase the ancient inhabitants’ recording of precise dates and following the movement of constellations.