The digs revealed evidence of houses and year-round settlement, suggesting that Gobekli Tepe wasn't an isolated temple visited on special occasions but a rather a thriving village with large special buildings at its centre.
And once again, such was the case of the Mississippian Culture as well.
But it is still lacking the things that make a collection of groups a "civilization".
Even in pre-Columbian America we had both. Both civilizations like the Aztecs, but it also takes a unification into a singular group. We know the Mississippians were on the way, but imploded before they got there. And from the evidence at Gobekli Tepe they probably hit the same barrier. Getting close, but for some reason never crossing over into a unified body.
One thing about anthropology, there are many examples over and over of groups getting close, but not quite making the next step. Sometimes it is in writing, or math, or even creating a stable government that survives past a single ruler or dynasty. Buildings do not make a "civilization", it may be no more than one or two members of each tribal group that remain with those to support them to maintain the location year round. Maybe priests, or something different.
Once again, we have seen this in various rendezvous in North America. Sometimes returning to the same location year after year after year, sometimes moving each year. Some of them even becoming "permanent settlements", but still never advancing beyond hunter-gatherers and a handful of different groups simply returning for trade and other reasons before departing again.
Without agriculture, that is all it would ever be. Different scattered groups that are always on the move, and never unifying into a single settled community. We could see this first hand in the Mississippians, because when the culture imploded it dissolved right back into the various groups that it had formed from a century or so before. Most of them resuming a nomadic existence, many even becoming little more than tribes of raiders that started to migrate across the continent.
What I would love to have them discover at Gobekli Tepe would be enough various fragments so we could get a DNA profile of these groups. That could tell us a lot more. Like where they ended up after that site was abandoned.
But in this same general region and era we had many other cultures. The Natufian for example, as well as the Kebaran, Mushabian, and Nemrikian cultures. Each of which did later spawn civilizations however. The Natufian may have been the seed that both the Semitic and Egyptian civilizations rose from (there is much DNA evidence to support this), and the Nemrikian spawned the Chaldean and Neo-Babylonian Civilizations. Which by the way is different than the Babylonian Civilization.
Anthropologists are still trying to piece together all the various migrations that humans were making in the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras. And even though "communities" were appearing as early as the Upper Paleolithic (including structures), none appear to have ever really been "permanent". Most likely only inhabited for a handful of years until the local environment was largely stripped, then packing up and moving on again.