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The article is a bit confusing because this is a guy who was studying medieval frescoes at a monastery and stumbled upon an area with these corbeled structures and stone rings. On this he, the journalist and other "experts" summoned within, speculate quite a bit.
The dates mentioned are totally speculative also.
One thing is clear: no dolmens anywhere, so this is not your typical Western Megalithism finding in late migration towards the East, as happens in the Caucasus or in Ethiopia-Arabia.
The corbeled structures are also somewhat unsurprising, considering that the oldest tholoi (same technique just that false dome instead of just false arch) are from Syrian Kurdistan (Tell Halaf) and then from Cyprus - however they were probably not used as tombs but as homes/chapels. Usage of tholoi as tombs may have begun at the Iberian peninsula in the 3rd millenium in fact.
Stone circles
What is most intriguing is that each of these structures seems to have a small stone circle besides them with a diameter of c. 2 meters.
I say that this is most intriguing because AFAIK, stone circles in Britain and North Africa are much larger and seem to have an astronomical purpose mainly. These small stone circles are known in Europe only (again AFAIK) in two different contexts:
1. Boleraz group of the Mid-Danubian plain, considered to have kick-started the more important Baden culture, the last meaningful "Danubian" (LBK) culture. c. 3000 BCE. These people (Boleraz, not Baden) buried their dead in small stone rings of 1-3 m. diameters after cremation, with some grave goods: jar and cup, flint axes and shell beads typically.
2. Pyrenean stone circles (usually "cromlech(s)" in the French and Spanish language literature, "harrobil(ak)" in Basque), with similar diameters and cremation burials (but no grave goods) but more than 2000 years after Boleraz, in the Iron Age.
In this sense these Syrian structures, which is mentioned at the bottom of the article that have also been detected in other areas (now desertic) might provide a clue for these otherwise similar but also likely unrelated (because of the timeline) "minimalist" stone circles of the Danub and the Pyrenees.
I await further research intrigued.
