by
Damien F. Mackey
“Göbkeli Tepe is in southeast Turkey, about 30 km from Karacadağ”.
Asle Rønning
Thanks to the wonderful research of Kenneth Griffith and Darrell K. White, we can now say, so I think, that Karaca Dağ, in the region of the spectacular Göbekli Tepe, is:
Noah’s Ark Mountain
(9) Noah's Ark Mountain
In that article acknowledging their find, I wrote:
The combined research of Ken Griffith and Darrell White has caused me … to move away from my former acceptance of Judi Dagh for the Mountain of Noah’s Ark Landing in preference for their choice of Karaca Dagh in SE Turkey. The pair have strongly argued for the validity of this latter site in their excellent new article:
A Candidate Site for Noah’s Ark, Altar, and Tomb.
(2) (PDF) A Candidate Site for Noah's Ark, Altar, and Tomb. | Kenneth Griffith and Darrell K White - Academia.edu
My main reason for entertaining this switch is that the latter site appears to have been the place, unlikely as it may look, for the world’s first agriculture, including grapes, and for the domestication of what we know as farmland animals.
For example, Ken Griffith and Darrell White write:
This mountain, Karaca Dag, is where the genetic ancestor of all domesticated Einkorn wheat was found by the Max Planck Institute.1 The other seven founder crops of the Neolithic Revolution all have this mountain near the centre of their wild range.2 This was so exciting that even the LA Times remarked how unusual it is that all of the early agriculture crops appear to have been domesticated in the same location:
“The researchers reported that the wheat was first cultivated near the Karacadag Mountains in southeastern Turkey, where chickpeas and bitter vetch also originated. Bread wheat—the most valuable single crop in the modern world—grapes and olives were domesticated nearby, as were sheep, pigs, goats and cattle.”3
….
Manfred Heun was the botanist who followed the DNA of domesticated wheat back to its source on Karaca Dag:
“We believe that the idea is so good—the idea of cultivating wild plants—that we think it might be one tribe of people, and that is fascinating,” said Manfred Heun at the University of Norway’s department of biotechnological sciences, who led the research team. “I cannot prove it, but it is a possibility that one tribe or one family had the idea [emphasis added].”3
A 2004 DNA study of wild and cultivated grapevine genetics by McGovern and Vouillamoz found the region where grapevines were first domesticated. Vouillamoz reports:
“Analysis of morphological similarities between the wild and cultivated grapes from all Eurasia generally support a geographical origin of grape domestication in the Near East. In 2004, I collaborated with Patrick McGovern to focus on the ‘Grape’s Fertile Triangle’ and our results showed that the closest genetic relationship between local wild grapevines and traditional cultivated grape varieties from southern Anatolia, Armenia and Georgia was observed in southern Anatolia. This suggests that the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the Taurus Mountains is the most likely place where the grapevine was first domesticated! ... . This area also includes the Karacadağ region in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent.” ….
[End of quotes]
Another fascinating article on virtually the same subject is this one, entitled:
https://www.sciencenorway.no/agriculture--fisheries-archaeology-forskningno/on-the-track-of-the-worlds-first-farmer/1448265
On the track of the world’s first farmer
Agriculture may have originated in this landscape in the southeastern corner of Turkey. This view of the highlands is from the archaeological site Göbekli Tepe. (Photo: Manfred Heun)
The very first farmer may have lived in a barren mountain landscape in Turkey over 10,000 years ago.
Asle Rønningjournalist
__________________________________________________________
PUBLISHED 31 JANUARY 2012 - 05:00
When and where did humankind first start cultivating the soil? The experts haven’t formed a single chorus on that issue, but a very good candidate for the site is found near the Mountain Karacadağ in Anatolia − in southeastern Turkey.
This is where the first humanly modified grain was developed − einkorn [literally: single grain] wheat.
The grain is now being more closely linked to one of archaeology’s major puzzles – the mysterious and ancient site Göbekli Tepe with its limestone megaliths decorated with bas-reliefs of animals. Nobody has been able to satisfactorily interpret their full significance.
Göbkeli Tepe is in southeast Turkey, about 30 km from Karacadağ.
T-shaped pillars with carved bas-relief animals at Göbekli Tepe. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Could hunter-gatherers have been the people who constructed this site 7,000 years before Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids of Egypt, and also become the first people to start cultivating the soil? Plant genetics can help answer that question.
Damien Mackey’s comment: I do not accept the over-inflated dating for Göbekli Tepe at 10,000-12,000 BC.
The article continues:
A significant find
Professor Manfred Heun at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (UMB) is an expert on cereals. Along with Italian and Turkish colleagues in 1997 he determined that Karacadağ could be the original home of the cultivated form of einkorn.
He’s returned time and again ever since.
“It feels great being there. This is a mountainous area − Karacadağ has an elevation of over 1,900 metres. But it doesn’t look like a high mountain, it’s more like a Norwegian mountain plateau,” says Heun.
The people who currently dwell in the region are stationary Kurds and Turks as well as nomadic Arabs who making a living off herding sheep, cows and goats.
The primal wheat
View of site and excavation at Göbekli Tepe (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Evidence indicates that einkorn is our first cereal. It’s a kind of wheat which is much older than spelt, the grain so many health-conscious people now swear by.
Einkorn was essential for humanity for several millennia but is now only commercially grown a few places in the world.
The cultivated or domesticated variety of einkorn stems from a wild einkorn that still grows in mountain areas of the Middle East.
We say a species of grain has been domesticated when it has undergone changes due to human influence.
Domestication is a key term that unites archaeologists and geneticists who are striving to find the origin of agriculture.
Professor Manfred Heun at UMB thinks he located the site where human beings initially cultivated einkorn wheat in 1997. Now he has pioneered his own einkorn beer, probably being drunk for the first time in Norway since the Bronze Age. (Photo: Asle Rønning)
Just as the dog evolved from the wolf, and pigs evolved from boars, our cereals have been significantly altered by human cultivation.
Silent witnesses
These changes can be detected and read in the genes of modern crops as tales linked to the first farmers’ experiments. They are witnesses that speak to us nonverbally.
In addition to einkorn, emmer wheat and barley are two major cereals that were domesticated very early in the Middle East. They share a primitive and natural trait: when mature the grain of the wild varieties falls to the ground so it can be spread with the winds.
Those who wish to harvest these grains either have to tediously pick up the grains one by one after they fall to the ground or cut the stem with a scythe before it ripens.
Mutations
However, in wild populations now and then a natural mutation occurs in individual plants: the straw that supports the cereal doesn’t bend and break when the grain is mature.
The cradle of agriculture could be placed in southeastern Turkey, 10,000 years ago (Map: Per Byrhing)
Damien Mackey’s comment: The cradle of agriculture after the Flood, that is.
The original cradle of agriculture was in the Garden of Eden (site of Old Jerusalem), a good millennium and a half earlier than the SE Turkey initiatives.
The article continues:
If someone is careful to only use these specimens as seed grain they can pass this genetic trait on to new generations of the plant. This is exactly what the first farmers have done.
Other preferable traits were large grains, an evenly distributed ripening period and a reduction of the inedible chaff that protects the seed kernels. Any set of these and other preferable traits tells us that we are dealing with a domesticated variety of cereal.
Archaeologists look for these indications of domestication when they find cereals during excavations of Stone Age settlements in the region.
Like CSI
The task that Heun and his colleagues assigned themselves was to find out where einkorn was originally domesticated. The region where wild einkorn wheat grows is large, covering parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. Wild einkorn is also genetically diverse.
The challenge was to make a genetic match between different varieties of einkorn and today’s domesticated variety. Heun says this is somewhat akin to the work of forensic medical experts on CSI.
Wild einkorn, Karadag, central Turkey (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
The difference is that they weren’t looking for a murderer, but rather a “crime scene” that was 10,000 years old.
Help received from immigrants
The results were achieved after cultivating an einkorn from seed samples and investigating the DNA from no less than 1,362 wild varieties that came from large areas of the Middle East and Europe.
At this point Heun was working at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne and the team hung up a giant map of Turkey and the Middle East with the origins of the enormous number of einkorn varieties marked off.
Many of the cleaners at the institute were immigrants from the region and they enjoyed finding their home birthplaces on the map. They also helped the scientists now and then when they were having trouble figuring out where to pin the grain types to spots on the map.
“They often helped us by locating their towns,” says Heun.
The grain varieties seemed to home in on the area around Karacadağ. This conclusion prevails today even though arguments can be made that einkorn developed at more than one spot; so the debate continues in international research circles.
Three grains of rye
After the einkorn study was published the origin of emmer wheat has also been traced to the same area.
The lab results from geneticists are confirmed by archaeologists, who have found the oldest specimens of domesticated einkorn and emmer wheat from this very area, dated at 10,200 – 10,500 years ago. These can be traces of the earliest cultivation of cereals in the world.
A settlement site at Abu Hureyra in Syria previously gained plenty of attention because of a discovery of a domesticated rye, dated at 12,000 to 13,000 years old. But the archaeological evidence for this site is rather skimpy – just three grains of rye – and in any case there is no proof that a tradition of rye cultivation occurred here.
Might disappear
When Heun visited Karacadağ the first time he found wild einkorn plants. The last time he was there he found none. He thinks overgrazing of sheep could be the problem and fears that precious stocks of wild grains might disappear forever because nomads run their livestock there.
“The nomads are poor – nobody can blame them. But the Turkish State ought to do something to preserve the area,” says the UMB professor.
Karacadağ is near Diyarbakir, which is the largest city in the Kurdish dominated southeastern region of Anatolia in Turkey. It’s close to the borders of Syria and Iraq.
….
Mystical figures
But the area has a much older history. In 1994 Göbekli Tepe was discovered. Its multi-tonne T-shaped pillars and megaliths decorated with mystical animal figures including, lions, hyenas and spiders are still being excavated from the sands. The oldest finds there are estimated to be 11,000 years old, from the time just prior to the Neolithic Revolution – the start of agriculture.
This baffles the researchers, who cannot explain exactly what kind of place this was.
But it’s believed that it was a large religious temple complex in use for hundreds of years, before it for reasons unknown were deliberately buried.
However, new discoveries, which haven’t been published yet, link the cultivation of einkorn at Karacadağ more closely to the puzzling place.
Maybe there is a common denominator between why the stone pillars were built and why the cultivation of einkorn commenced. Perhaps the answer is beer.
Come on over for some beer?
Erecting the Göbekli Tepe megaliths demanded an enormous amount of work. But what do you do if you want to get several hundred people to work together for weeks and months at a time, cutting, carving, dragging and lifting tonnes of rock?
But of course, you offer them beer! Beer would probably have been a prestigious and rare commodity, both nutritious and healthy.
In one of the archaeological layers at Göbekli Tepe, from a period designated as PPNB, tubs have been found that could have been used for making malt and brewing beer.
“Tubs have been found that could have held 150 litres of water. These probably weren’t used for storing grain,” says Heun.
Beer can only be made from grain and to be ensured access to such cereal it’s a good idea to plant a field of it. This could have been a motivation for growing cereals instead of finding them in the wild.
These new findings correspond in time to domesticated grain species. But no discoveries of cultivated grain have been made in the oldest and best known parts of Göbekli Tepe. So hunter-gatherers are still thought to have first built and used the site.
Garden of Eden?
Whatever their initial impulse, the first farmers in the Middle East developed a package of plant species and domesticated animals that had an enormous impact and formed the basis of agriculture in Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Indus Valley in Pakistan.
The gift of agriculture was passed on to the great civilizations in the fertile river valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile and the Indus from barren areas of the same region.
The most important plant species were einkorn and emmer wheat, barley, chickpeas (garbanzos), peas and lentils. Tubers were also domesticated just like the cereals.
If one were to search for a single spot where all the wild varieties of all these domesticated plant species grew, the place to go would be just here – in southeastern Turkey and northern Syria. ….
Fastest changes in genetic traits
Now we have a lot more data from excavations further north. We cannot be certain that agriculture in the Middle East originated in just one place. Some propose that people in settlements all over the region tried out local plant species and hence, there were multiple cradles of agriculture in this part of the world.
Some scientists stress that a lot of time would pass from the initial cultivation of wild grains until noticeable genetic changes start turning up.
Manfred Heun disagrees. He points out that einkorn is self-pollinating.
This makes it much easier for new genetic traits to pass from one generation to the next. On the other hand it is less likely to regress back to the initial wild traits than it is for species that are cross-pollinating.
Found edible plants in nature
Heun thinks that 20-30 years of cultivation could have been enough to establish the essential trait of stems that don’t break when the grain is ripe. So the first farmer could have experienced the results of his or her genetic selection efforts in the course of a lifetime.
Damien Mackey’s comment: Especially if that “first farmer” was, who the first farmer actually was, the long-lived Noah!
With all of the incessant rain-flooding in Sydney at present (around 21st August, 2025), BOM declaring a La Nina alert, it is not hard to harken back to the great Deluge in the days of Noah.
Now, turning our attention to Karaca Dağ’s near neighbour, Göbekli Tepe, we read the following by Christoper Eames:
https://armstronginstitute.org/304-g-ouml-bekli-tepe-stone-age-zoo-in-the-book-of-genesis
somewhat similar to what Jim Corsetti has been on about:
Could Gobekli Tepe Be Noah’s Altar? The Hidden Link to the Flood Myth - Joe Rogan & Jimmy Corsetti
Göbekli Tepe, ‘Stone Age Zoo,’ in the Book of Genesis
A ‘Stone Age zoo,’ Aboriginal Australians, booze and worldwide calamity at the earliest temple ever found—discoveries at this fantastical Turkish site parallel a peculiar early biblical setting.
By Christopher Eames • January 2, 2021
Sumer is often noted as man’s “first civilization,” situated on the Mesopotamian plains at the edge of the Persian Gulf. This location, and the cities that emerged from it, are a perfect match for the biblical Shinar (a parallel name), described in the biblical account as the first civilization to emerge following the Flood. Genesis 11:1-2 state:
And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
Damien Mackey’s comment: No, no, no. The sooner we dismiss Sumer:
“The Sumerian Problem” – Sumer not in Mesopotamia
(9) “The Sumerian Problem” – Sumer not in Mesopotamia
Christoper Eames now gets rather more interesting:
Göbekli Tepe
In the early 1960s, peculiar stone circles were noted in an archaeological survey in the southeastern Anatolia region of Turkey. They were initially dismissed as unimportant, until German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt began excavating the site, known as Göbekli Tepe (“Potbelly Hill”) in 1995. What he uncovered was utterly unexpected.
….
The circular, 20-acre site was evidently of a religious nature. It was made up of several layers, the earliest of which were carbon-dated as far back as circa 10,000 b.c.e. (more on this dating further down). This shocking date put the creation of the site during the so-called Paleolithic, hunter-gatherer era—long before mankind was supposed to have settled into established, pastoral communities. Mankind wasn’t supposed to have been united and able to construct such monuments for thousands of years.
Indeed, no evidence was discovered of a settled community. Yet this giant cultic area, sporting the world’s oldest-known megaliths (up to 60 tons in weight), had been built by the region’s inhabitants.
What’s more, the builders of Göbekli Tepe exhibited an understanding of geometry—three of the main stone circles at the site were arranged in a precise equilateral triangle (a stunning discovery to scientists—a “grand geometric plan” that was only realized earlier this year).
One of the standout things about Göbekli Tepe has to be the animals. It boasts numerous carvings of different animals. It also has the remains of multiple dozens of different species.
Animals depicted on the stone pillars include snakes, foxes, boars, cranes, aurochs, sheep, donkeys, gazelles, leopards, lions, bears, spiders, scorpions, various insects, vultures and numerous other bird species—to name a few. Nearly 100 animals are depicted on the largest of the monoliths alone. And among the identifiable animals, there were numerous other unidentifiable creatures.
The animal remains include the bones of various deer species, sheep, cattle, goats, donkeys, boars, wolves, foxes, leopards and various other wildcats, weasels, badgers, hamsters, hedgehogs, numerous gerbils and various other rodents, and dozens of bird species including geese, owls, magpies, eagles, quails, ducks and thrushes. One study examined some 40,000 animal remains. As Schmidt described it, this truly was a “Stone Age zoo.”
Conversely, among the thousands of animal remains and depictions, only two fish were discovered. Not two sets of species—just two fish (a catfish and an unidentifiable cyprinid).
And bizarrely, adorning some of the megaliths were a number of peculiar designs closely matching those found among the Aboriginal Australian community, as well as parallel objects at the site and depictions of Australian animals—leading to a flurry of articles speculating on some kind of Aboriginal connection to this location.
Finally (as if the site couldn’t be any more odd), certain carvings at Göbekli Tepe apparently depict “massive global climate shifts,” according to a paper by University of Edinburgh researchers. They described a “cataclysmic event” related to the end of the Ice Age period. Among some of the carvings appeared to be observations of comets.
What on Earth was this site? What were humans doing here?
….
The Bible describes Noah, after leaving the ark, building “an altar” and sacrificing “of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl” on the altar. Göbekli Tepe stands testament to a form of ritual worship in relation to a multitude of animals.
“First came the temple, then the city,” quipped Schmidt. Such is the account presented by archaeology—and such is the account presented in the Bible.
….
Of Predators and Men
As for the specific cultic function of Göbekli Tepe, scientists are left to speculate. A high proportion of the animals carved into the megalithic stones are predatory—as such, it has been wondered if these were some kind of religious talisman-gargoyle equivalent to ward off predators.
A peculiar predator hunts his prey, as carved onto one of the Göbekli Tepe megaliths.
Here again is a match for the pre-Shinar account. Nimrod is the infamous early leader and tyrant of the Bible, who brought together the early post-Flood civilization in Shinar. “He was a mighty hunter before [in place of] the Lord” (Genesis 10:9). Extra-biblical traditions assert that before gathering together in Shinar, mankind had been scattered and vulnerable among the wild animals—at the mercy of vicious predators.
Among them, Nimrod became a “savior”—a “mighty hunter” who defended the population and rose up as a “mighty one in the earth” (verse 8), eventually gathering mankind together as one civilization in the plains of Shinar.
This assessment, then, of an early mankind especially plagued by wild animals (a prevalence of different creatures that had survived aboard the ark) would fit the picture of Göbekli Tepe—a religious effort by the earliest, scattered communal generations to ward off wild animals.
Another Parallel
Another parallel between ancient Göbekli Tepe and the post-Flood-yet-pre-Shinar biblical account is that the earliest traces of an alcoholic beverage have been discovered at the site. Researchers in 2012 discovered what appeared to be chemical traces of beer being produced in limestone basins—demonstrating just how far back our thirst for grog goes.
The same is also described in the Bible: The earliest account of alcohol is found in Genesis 9, which describes wine-making and overindulgence, and an ensuing incident related to drunkenness.
….
Karaca Dağ and Göbekli Tepe provide us with a perfect landscape for the Ark landing, the earliest worship, the menagerie of animals, the first agriculture and viniculture, this being the very cradle of post-Flood civilisation from whence humankind would set forth to fill the entire world.
There are many more biblical riches to be uncovered in the region if the WEF gets right out of the way.
