Gobekli Tepe and others in it's surroundings are surely a great archeological discovery that brings the date of what we call civilization back some thousand years. Anyway let's not forget that Jericho is 11k years old or even older and probably there are many many other ancient cities buried deep under the thousands of tells in the Near East.

(those that follow are just wild conjectures)

A thing that I always thought is that around that era the sea level was rising since some thousand years and kept rising for some thousands more [1] to a total of 130 meters. Humans always tried to live near the sea, fishing was easier, we need iodine to be healthy, better and more stable climate, etc... so my take is that our first settlements will never be found, they are 100 meters underwater, eroded and covered by sand.

The cities we find are the ones that humans built after they got pissed of by the ever rising sea and one day decided "fuck it, I'm going way up now". So those ancient fellas already had lot of experience building cities by then.

[1] https://sealevel.nasa.gov/faq/13/how-long-have-sea-levels-be...