What I find to MORE interesting is this: In order to be fundamentally skilled in the art of stone masonry to such a degree that one can create such magnificent structures over a 90 acre facility he would first need to be trained and have the background in arts that would supply him with the vision needed to depict, accurately, animals and celestial events in stone. In order for all these things to have happened he would need to have been part of a large village/ group where agriculture was well established so that he would be spared the daily grind of farming, hunting, gathering and building. Not just the one mason, but scores of them, it's 90 ACRES of stonework. So, knowing all of that, and winding backwards the "clock", you can see that this "civilization" would have to have been prospering for many thousands of years. Now, remember, this site is 12,500 years old. That puts it at the tail end of the Younger Dryas mini ice age. So, these people were around, and thriving BEFORE the Younger Dryas, because they knew enough about celestial mechanics to depict the comet impact and the devastation from it.
So, they would have been around at the end of the actual previous Ice Age, the big one. But for how long back? How did they survive the Younger Dryas?
Remember, those stones are 16 feet tall and weigh 50 TONS. How many millennia would a civilization need to be around before the technologies to move such stones would be discovered or developed?
Now to REALLY mess with the mind consider this: Where, and from whom, did these peoples LEARN to do these things?
It took European civilization a long time to come up with the wheel, and stone cutting/ masonry. All the way from the Stone Age to at least 4500BC when the Pyramids were "Supposedly" built. So, if, and it appears that they MUST have done, they learned to do these things from some OTHER civilization, who were they? How far back into antiquity do THEY go?
Stone Age is said to be from 2.6 million years ago to around 3300BC at the start of the Bronze Age.
The Sumerians started around 2900BC and had stone masonry.
As you can see, even Egyptian beginnings are only at 4500BC when they would have had building skills at the end of the Stone Age.
Nobody will EVER convince me that the Egyptians had complex mathematical skills, masonry skills, engineering skills, and design build skills including the skills needed to assemble and field a gigantic workforce every season for a minimum of 20 seasons to build those Pyramids during the STONE AGE! I mean, the base of the Great Pyramid covers a full 16 acres of bedrock that has been ground down and dressed to within 1/4" deviance from dead level over the whole area from any angle! It's well settled science and history that the Sumerians gave us writing and mathematics, BEFORE the Egyptians were even a force to be reckoned with.
Side note: see where the red printing is in the upper right corner? "Anthropogenic Global Warming Hysteria"...lol...gotta love that. That point represents the mean temp globally of 15C or around 59F. You can see that it became MUCH hotter globally at around 6000BC at over 16.5*C globally. You can clearly see that it has happened before... and not just once before, but at least 5 - 6 times. Those 5 or 6 warm spots are why it's said that WE are the 7th civilization on Earth. The formers having all been ground into mud beneath ice. This is an old chart, 2014 was supposed to be the start of the new Ice Age....
You can see that the Gobekli Tepe site was built, at least ending, well into the, and before the end of the, last Glacial Ice Age period. A thousand years before the end. It took God knows how many years to build it all from the beginning.
You can see that from the Today line backwards to around 25,000 yrs ago was a period of coming OUT of the glacial Ice Age and around 12,500 years ago before the mean temps reached a steady 30*F. So, even if the builders of Gobekli Tepe began building it , let's say 100 years before 12,500 years ago, they would have been fighting below freezing weather the whole time. and for millennia before that too.
Lots to consider.......many other mundane things need to have occurred before they would have been able to build this place.