Why You Cannot Carbon Date the Oldest Room in Turkey

A chamber cut into bedrock in southeastern Turkey is dated to eleven thousand years ago. Nobody has dated the carving, because nobody can. The room lies forty kilometres east of Gobekli Tepe and was carved directly into limestone, with eleven upright shafts left standing where the rock was not removed. You cannot radiocarbon date limestone, because limestone was never alive. The dates come from charcoal and bone in the rubble that people deliberately packed into these rooms at the end of their use. That tells you when the filling happened. The building is older than the fill by an amount nobody can measure. The claim that Karahan Tepe was built before agriculture is roughly true and often overstated, and the site is not alone. A dozen sites nearby share the same architecture. Chapters 0:00 A ridge nobody stopped at 1:05 The site that waited twenty two years 2:02 Cut out of the rock, not built 2:32 The head on the wall 3:26 Where the number comes from 4:00 Why you cannot date limestone 4:46 What the fill can and cannot say 6:32 Built before agriculture 7:36 Not one hill but a landscape 8:11 What is still in the ground Sources Karul, N. (2021), on the Karahan Tepe excavations and the Tas Tepeler programme Parfitt et al. and the wider Pre Pottery Neolithic sequence for the regional chronology Schmidt, K., on Gobekli Tepe, the dated comparison site for this architecture Subscribe for more sites where the evidence is thinner than the headline.