If excarnation was practiced at Göbekli Tepe, the site may have served as a location where the recently dead were brought for processing, and where the bones of ancestors were curated or venerated.

The vulture imagery would then make specific symbolic sense: the vultures were not simply generic images of dangerous predators but were specifically associated with the actual process of death transformation taking place at the site.

This interpretation is intriguing and consistent with multiple lines of evidence, but it remains incompletely confirmed.

Not all researchers accept the excarnation hypothesis, and alternative explanations for the presence of scattered human bone — including secondary burial, accidental incorporation of bone into fill from earlier occupation surfaces, or the special treatment of specific individuals’ remains for reasons unrelated to excarnation — have been proposed.

What the human bone evidence does firmly establish is that the site had some relationship to the human dead.