How Significant Is the Pillar 43 Sky Map? A Statistical Decomposition of the Göbekli Tepe Archaeoastronomy Claim

Independent statistical decomposition of the Sweatman & Tsikritsis (2017) claim that animal carvings on Pillar 43 at Göbekli Tepe encode star constellations dating to ~10,950 BC. Across 13 analyses, we find: (1) the date coincidence is not rare — 43% of the 20,000–5,000 BC window lies within ±250 years of a notable paleoclimatic event; (2) the visual similarity is genuinely unusual (P ≈ 1 in 391,000) but overwhelmingly carried by three of six mappings; (3) the reported significance varies by two orders of magnitude across defensible analyst choices. The statistical case depends primarily on three self-scored visual similarity rankings that have never been independently validated. Code, data, run log, and all figures included.