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

Key Points

• To evaluate the statistical validity of the claim that animal carvings on Pillar 43 encode star constellations from approximately 10,950 BC.
• Conducted 13 independent statistical analyses of the correlations between carvings and star constellations.
• Assessed the rarity of date coincidences and visual similarities related to carvings.
• Utilized self-scored visual similarity rankings, with results compared across different analytic choices.
• Date coincidences show that 43% of the timeline from 20,000–5,000 BC lies within ±250 years of paleoclimatic events.
• Visual similarity found to be highly unusual with a probability of approximately 1 in 391,000, primarily driven by three mappings.
• Significance of findings varies greatly depending on analyst choices, with some results differing by two orders of magnitude.