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.
We do tend to build near sources of water, but rivers and lakes have always been popular. I see no reason to believe they would have been less popular back then than at later periods.
Obviously there’s a good chance a lot of significant sites were flooded by rising sea levels, but no reason to expect all of them were.
If we keep digging tells (or other areas of interest) we will find one of those lucky cities you are referring to, I really hope to witness this one day :)
edit: by the way it is even harder since, of those rivers and lakes, most dried up or changed course, especially in the Near East.
So yeah one hypothesis is there was an advanced pre-historic culture that's now buried under the Persian Gulf and the fairly rapid filling of the Persian Gulf dislocated and drove dissemination of culture and common mythological elements we see in many cultures today in all directions.
Ephesus is far more recent, anyway it is now inland because of river silting. The sea didn't went nor up nor down, it was pushed further away over the centuries.
(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...