Open Veils · Answer
What does Randall Carlson say about Anatolia?
Randall Carlson treats Anatolia not as a starting point for civilization but as a survivor landscape — a region that preserves encoded memory of a catastrophic civilizational reset at the Younger Dryas boundary, circa 12,900–11,600 years ago. The sophistication of Göbekli Tepe, appearing fully formed with no detectable developmental phase, is for Carlson a signal that something came before. Anatolia's megasite record isn't the beginning of the story — it's the remnant of a much older one.
Evidence
- Carlson also connects Anatolia to his broader pattern-of-repeating-catastrophe thesis, documented in a May 2026 presentation: incipient civilizations rise across the Holocene, then something interrupts them.
- Martin Sweatman of the University of Edinburgh, whose work Carlson has cited approvingly, published analysis of Göbekli Tepe's Pillar 43 ('Vulture Stone') arguing it encodes a cometary impact date near 10,950 BCE — squarely within the Younger Dryas onset.
- It terminated an incipient global civilization, and Anatolia preserves some of the clearest evidence of what survived.
- Carlson points out that the site, dated to roughly 11,600–9,000 BCE by mainstream archaeology, appears at the precise temporal boundary where he places civilizational collapse and partial recovery.
- The absence of a detectable proto-phase — no simpler precursor architecture — suggests to Carlson that the builders inherited, rather than invented, their astronomical and geometric knowledge.