The Oldest Solstice Alignment on the Planet

On the morning of December 20th, 2021, Hugh Newman and JJ Ainsworth arrived at Karahan Tepe in southeast Turkey at sunrise. The site was about to be covered for winter and they had one opportunity. What they witnessed stopped them both. A narrow blade of light was moving across the carved stone head in the pillar shrine - a structure cut directly out of bedrock, estimated to date to around 9400 BC. The light was entering through a porthole stone, also carved from bedrock, and tracking precisely across the face of the head over the course of approximately 45 minutes after sunrise. The eyes of the carved head face toward the porthole stone. The mouth is open. The alignment works on no other day of the year. When Hugh and a team returned in 2022 with astronomer Rodney Hale and researcher Andrew Collins to model the site against Stellarium at 9400 BC, they found the alignment worked even more precisely at the time of construction - the obliquity of the ecliptic placing the sunrise slightly further south, allowing the light to fully cover the face before tracking around to the other side. Howard Crowhurst's subsequent geometric analysis found that the exact point of winter solstice sunrise at that latitude also marks a 1.618 to 1 golden rectangle on the landscape of the site itself. Hugh's conclusion is that this is possibly the oldest intentional solstice alignment on the planet - deliberately engineered into bedrock by hunter gatherers nearly 11,500 years ago, and only discovered because two researchers arrived at the right place at the right time on the shortest morning of the year.