Göbekli Tepe: The Temple Older Than Farming That Rewrote the Story of Humankind
On a windswept ridge in southeastern Turkey, overlooking a vast and ancient plain, there rises a low hill that the local people once knew simply as the hill with a navel. Beneath its surface lay something that no one suspected and that, when it was finally uncovered, forced the whole story of human civilization to be rewritten. Buried in that hill were rings of enormous carved stone pillars — great T-shaped megaliths, some of them taller than a person and weighing many tons, arranged in circles and decorated with vivid reliefs of wild and dangerous animals. This was a monument of astonishing sophistication. And it was old — almost unbelievably old. Göbekli Tepe was raised some eleven or twelve thousand years ago, before the invention of writing, before the wheel, before metal, before pottery, and, most staggering of all, before the coming of agriculture itself. It was built by hunter-gatherers, by people with no farms and no cities and no domesticated animals, and it is the oldest kno...