An equilateral triangle at Gobekli Tepe?



A recent paper by Hacklay and Gopher claims to have found evidence of geometric planning in the construction of Gobekli Tepe’s enclosures. Their paper received a lot of media attention, and seems to have gone relatively unchallenged, at least so far.

Their central claim is this: that three of the circular enclosures uncovered so far at Gobekli Tepe were deliberately planned to form an equilateral triangle with a preferred orientation. The above illustration shows nicely what they mean.

Now this is published in a top archaeological journal – the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, so it must be right. Right? Wrong. Its actually pure speculation. Let’s see what they really did.

They locate the position of the centre of each pillar around the three circular enclosures, B, C and D, and then use a mathematical technique to work out the geometric centre of each enclosure. The method is this. They work out the distance from the assumed centre point of the enclosure and each pillar, and move the centre point until this set of distances has the least variation.


Now this is fine, and it certainly is one way of defining the centre of each enclosure. But its not the only way. Its not unique. In fact there are an infinite number of ways of defining a centre for each enclosure. So there is a lot of arbitrariness in their definition. And I’m even ignoring the arbitrariness in deciding the centre point of each pillar around the enclosure, which adds further uncertainty to their calculations. Nevertheless, their method is reasonable.

Next, they point out that the three centre points defined by their method, for enclosures B, C and D form a nearly exact equilateral triangle. Now, of course, it obvious to anyone that when you put three similarly-sized circles together so they are nearly touching, their centres will automatically form something close to an equilateral triangle. So how can we know whether these three enclosures were deliberately constructed to form an equilateral triangle or not?

The only way to decide this is to use a statistical argument - this is how science works. They have a hypothesis, that these enclosure centres were deliberately placed to form an equilateral triangle. So now they need to test that hypothesis using a statistical method. But what do they do instead? They simply say...

This precision with a distortion of less than 1.5 per cent is less likely to be coincidental, nor the result of a self-organization process.

In other words, in their view its unlikely to be due simply to putting circles together. Really? Who says. Where’s the calculation. There isn’t one. So their suggestion is pure speculation.

Now, to be clear, I have no problem with these enclosures being deliberately planned to form an equilateral triangle. It’s a reasonable hypothesis – I have no doubt the builders were smart to enough to do this if they wanted. But from this paper we have no way of knowing this, and this is where the authors go wrong. They considerably overstate their confidence in their conclusion;

In our opinion, these findings provide strong support to our conclusion that Enclosures B–D originated as a single project.

Okay, so my advice is we should take their claim with a massive dose of salt. Maybe these enclosures were planned to form an equilateral triangle, maybe they weren’t. There’s no way of knowing from this. Frankly, there's probably more chance the pyramids at Giza were deliberately planned to represent Orion's belt, which is EXACTLY the same problem, than these enclosures were deliberately planned to reproduce an equilateral triangle. Yet, of course, that kind of speculation about the pyramids is not allowed. Why? I have no idea - ask an archaeologist.

Furthermore, when we look at the unexcavated portion of the Gobekli Tepe using ground penetrating radar (see an earlier blog post), we see that there is no indication that this pattern is repeated elsewhere. It also isn’t repeated for the excavated enclosure A. So, my view is that probably their result is pure chance. Probably, there was no plan to enclosures B C and D to form an equilateral triangle. Its probably just a chance that they do, which isn’t surprising given they are nearly touching similarly sized circles.

Comments

  1. https://phys.org/news/2020-05-geometry-earliest-temple-built-years.html i found this article today on phys.org another study that shows the same information about the age and alignement

    ReplyDelete
  2. Congratulations, Mr. Sweatman
    Your deduction that the animals on Gobekli Tepe's pillar 13 as constellations is remarkable.
    I would like to make a humble contribution about this decoding:
    Everybody pays attention to the solstices/constellations, but I have not seen any comment about a significant relief on the pillar.
    Below the three solstice symbols, above the vulture and the scorpion, there are 12 little squares of different sizes lined between wavy patterns that are different up and down the line of squares.
    There are two similar wavy patterns, one at the top of the pillar, above the solstices, and other above the squares, so it possibly indicates the sky.
    But the pattern below the squares appears to indicate a type of precipitation, like a rain of stones...
    Couldn't it be that the squares are a description of a Cheliabinsky/Tunguska type event pictured on the pillar? Showing its magnitude across the constellations in the sky?
    And the two "gym dumbbells" at the right could be a description of mushroom clouds resulting from the final impact seen by the inhabitants. The upmost wavy pattern starts before the little squares, which size increases from left to right, resulting in the mushroom clouds at Abu Hureyra... just a theory.
    It is interesting to note the perfect alignment between Abu Hureyra, Hiawatha crater recently found in Greenland and Willamette meteorite (despite it was found down the original impact, as carried by glaciers), as well as the nearby Nechako impact proposed by Randall Carlson.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Also in Greenland, threre is the Cape York meteorite, the largest one registered. Its chemical composition is identical to that of Willamette meteorite.
      All these events are estimated to have occurred around Younger Dryas episode. And aligned with all them, between Hiawatha crater and Cape York meteorite, there is the second crater found in Greenland, not dated yet. Such an alignment is too much a coincidence.
      Sincerely,
      Jefferson Wagner Dessordi

      Delete
    2. See my recent blogpost which contains a recently submitted manuscript concerns g the v-symbols and squares you mention. Turns out, it's very likely a calendar, of the lunisolar type. And their purpose appears to be to reinforce the notion that the eagle/vulture represents the summer solstice constellation.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Debunking YouTube's archaeoastronomy skeptics

Holliday et al.'s (2023) Gish Gallop: timing of the Younger-Dryas onset and Greenland platinum spike

Gobekli Tepe's Pillars