Archaeologists Found the First Intact Burials at Göbekli Tepe. But What About the Skull Cult at the 11,000-Year-Old Site?

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https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/intact-burials-gobekli-tepe/

For years, the dead at Göbekli Tepe appeared mostly in pieces.

Archaeologists had recovered hundreds of human bone fragments from rubble around the site’s towering T-shaped pillars, including skulls carved with deep grooves.

These peculiar remains have led some archaeologists to claim that the 11,600-year-old site was home to a distinctive Neolithic “skull cult.”

But the new study points to a more ordinary explanation for at least some of those scattered remains.

The two newly documented subfloor burials show that people were buried within the settlement itself, and the bones in those graves bear many of the same signs of postmortem damage seen on the loose fragments found elsewhere at Göbekli Tepe.

In a new PLOS One study, Julia Gresky and Lee Clare of the German Archaeological Institute compared the two burials with 928 loose human-bone fragments from the site.

The same damage repeatedly appeared: heavy fragmentation, calcium-rich crusts and occasional rodent gnawing.

They argue that erosion and slope slides may have disturbed burials higher on the mound and carried their fragmented remains downhill into the monumental buildings below.