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Description
Location: Sanliurfa Turkey

GOBEKLI TEPE

Atop a limestone plateau six miles from Urfa called Gobekli Tepe, Turkish for "Belly Hill", were discovered more than 20 circular stone enclosures. The largest was 20m across, a circle of stone with two elaborately carved pillars 5.5m tall at its centre. The carved stone pillars – eerie, stylised human figures with folded hands and fox-pelt belts – weighed up to 10 tons.

Carving and erecting them must have been a tremendous technical challenge for people who hadn't yet domesticated animals or invented pottery, let alone metal tools. The structures were 11,000 years old, or more, making them humanity's oldest known monumental structures, built not for shelter but for some other purpose. It is thought that small, nomadic bands from across the region were motivated by their beliefs to join forces on the hilltop for periodic building projects, hold great feasts and then scatter again. The site was a ritual centre, perhaps some sort of burial or death cult complex, rather than a settlement.

That was a big claim. Archaeologists had long thought complex ritual and organised religion were luxuries that societies developed only once they began domesticating crops and animals, a transition known as the Neolithic. Once they had a food surplus, the thinking went, they could devote their extra resources to rituals and monuments. Gobekli Tepe, turned that timeline upside down. The stone tools at the site, backed up by radiocarbon dates, placed it firmly in the pre-Neolithic era. There is still no evidence for domesticated plants or animals.

If that was true, it showed that complex ritual and social organisation actually came before settlement and agriculture. Over the course of 1,000 years, the demands of gathering nomadic bands together in one place to carve and move huge T-pillars and build the circular enclosures prompted people to take the next step: to regularly host large gatherings, people needed to make food supplies more predictable and dependable by domesticating plants and animals. Ritual and religion, it seemed, launched the Neolithic Revolution

Description
Location: Sanliurfa Turkey

GOBEKLI TEPE

Atop a limestone plateau six miles from Urfa called Gobekli Tepe, Turkish for "Belly Hill", were discovered more than 20 circular stone enclosures. The largest was 20m across, a circle of stone with two elaborately carved pillars 5.5m tall at its centre. The carved stone pillars – eerie, stylised human figures with folded hands and fox-pelt belts – weighed up to 10 tons.

Carving and erecting them must have been a tremendous technical challenge for people who hadn't yet domesticated animals or invented pottery, let alone metal tools. The structures were 11,000 years old, or more, making them humanity's oldest known monumental structures, built not for shelter but for some other purpose. It is thought that small, nomadic bands from across the region were motivated by their beliefs to join forces on the hilltop for periodic building projects, hold great feasts and then scatter again. The site was a ritual centre, perhaps some sort of burial or death cult complex, rather than a settlement.

That was a big claim. Archaeologists had long thought complex ritual and organised religion were luxuries that societies developed only once they began domesticating crops and animals, a transition known as the Neolithic. Once they had a food surplus, the thinking went, they could devote their extra resources to rituals and monuments. Gobekli Tepe, turned that timeline upside down. The stone tools at the site, backed up by radiocarbon dates, placed it firmly in the pre-Neolithic era. There is still no evidence for domesticated plants or animals.

If that was true, it showed that complex ritual and social organisation actually came before settlement and agriculture. Over the course of 1,000 years, the demands of gathering nomadic bands together in one place to carve and move huge T-pillars and build the circular enclosures prompted people to take the next step: to regularly host large gatherings, people needed to make food supplies more predictable and dependable by domesticating plants and animals. Ritual and religion, it seemed, launched the Neolithic Revolution