Göbekli Tepe served ritual burial purposes, not habitation or farming

Evidence

Though archaeologists found no signs of human habitation or cultivation at Göbekli Tepe, they did unearth human bones mingled with the remains of vulture wings. (Vultures were particularly prominent among the animal carvings.) The bones were coated in red ochre and appeared to be the remnants of ritual burials. Diggers also found an engraving of a naked woman and another of a decapitated corpse surrounded by vultures. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 319

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s past interest in ritual sacrifice as stabilizing structures; excavation monuments built around death rites.
• ADDENDUM: Supports the ‘sacrifice as anchor for stratified societies’ argument in the third article — a pre-agricultural monumental ritual site is an even earlier data point.

Related

• Death-related religious monuments predated and may have stimulated agriculture (similarity 0.85)
• Death-linked monumental projects predate and probably triggered settled agriculture (similarity 0.83)
• Elaborate 28,000-year-old burials show death awareness predates complex civilization (similarity 0.80)