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https://escholarship.org/uc/jac/submissionguidelines Cover letter to editor: This paper has not and will not be submitted anywhere else at this time.

compelling visual evidence: numerous sites across France, Spain (e.g., Chauvet, El Castillo, Maltravieso), and Argentina (e.g., Cueva de las Manos) feature "negative" hand stencils. These stencils were typically created by placing the non-dominant hand against the cave wall and spraying pigment around it, leaving its outline. The overwhelming majority of these stenciled hands are left hands—for instance, 829 left hands compared to 31 right hands at Cueva de las Manos—strongly implying that the artists were predominantly right-handed. Even some of the oldest known stencils, such as those in Maltravieso cave (Spain) dated to over 64,000 years ago (potentially Neanderthal-made) and early Homo sapiens stencils around 40,000 years old, exhibit this prevalence of left hands, indicating a deep-rooted right-handed bias in ancient populations. Despite the monumental scale and evident sophistication of Göbekli Tepe, peer-reviewed academic literature on its astronomical alignments remains virtually absent. While some speculative or non-peer-reviewed works have attempted to assign celestial azimuths, they often rely on imprecise methodologies or present limited, unverified findings. This paper aims to fill this significant void by presenting a comprehensive analysis of lunisolar alignments at the site. The historical difficulty in deciphering Göbekli Tepe's potential astronomical functions has stemmed, in part, from the ambiguity surrounding the intended “centre” of each enclosure—a crucial reference point for accurate celestial plotting. Beyond this, researchers have faced other site-specific challenges: some pillars have been moved from their original positions, others are broken, some were leaning a little during radar scans, and certain large pillars are angled, deviating from a radial pattern to the central pair. However, these complexities can be overcome when a consistent and empirically derived measuring point is established. This paper proposes a novel and consistent approach to identifying the functional “centres” of Göbekli Tepe's enclosures: defining two distinct centres, one for each of the central pillars within an enclosure. Critically, these centers are consistently measured from the front-right corner of their respective bedrock bases. This precise measuring point, rooted in the pervasive dominance of right-handedness observed throughout human prehistory, provides a consistent reference that transcends the aforementioned site complexities. The two bases below (Figure 1), are the two oldest central pillars (enclosure D), and they illustrate this concept perfectly. To find the correct measuring point, as noted by Dr. Clare, floor features within this enclosure that might appear broken are integral to their original design; they thought there would be burials under the broken bedrock on the base and the floor (Figure 1a), which was carefully swept clean before the enclosure was buried. The consistent measuring point is precisely located at this front-right corner. Similarly, the base of the other central pillar (Figure 1b) shows small anthropomorphic carvings or "duckie things", which may serve more than one purpose, but here, seemingly pointing towards this very corner, further suggesting its deliberate ritual significance. We’ll start 2

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