Let us travel back in time to a very important period of human history

Can we turn our understanding of it on its head? Göbekli Tape will leave us with more questions than when we began.

The site

You’ll find Göbekli Tepe in what we know today as Turkey, and it is considered one of the most important archaeological sites that we’ve found so far.

When this place was discovered in the not too distant 1990s, shock waves made their way through the archaeological and historical worlds, some even thought it could be the mysterious Garden of Eden. Spoiler Alert: It wasn’t.

Göbekli Tepe turned out to be an archaeological site full of wonder and intrigue, with so many things to discover that we’re still figuring it out. And all this from hunter-gatherers living back in the 10th or 11th millennium BC. But if they built this terrific and surprisingly complex place, how did a prehistoric people manage it before pottery, writing, metallurgy, the wheel and even agriculture were invented? If this is the order of events, then our understanding of how we evolved into the species and civilisation we are today could be flipped on its head.

Ian Hodder, an anthropologist out of Stanford University, says this about the fantastic find:

Göbekli changes everything…It’s elaborate, it’s complex, and it is pre-agricultural. That fact alone makes the site one of the most important archaeological finds in a very long time.

So let’s get a bit of an idea about what Göbekli Tepe looks like and how it could have possibly been constructed, with what little knowledge we possess about this mysterious place.

We know through all sorts of dating that Göbekli Tepe was built around 12 000 years ago, but some parts of it could be even older than that, there seems to be a tiered evolution to the place. We know that 12 000 years ago was pre-agriculture, and therefore pre-modern civilisation. The fact that this place was built pre-agriculture is a sticking point we’ll keep coming back to throughout our exploration of this destination.

But let’s put some context around this place. So when we think hunter-gatherers started constructing Göbekli Tepe, we think that the Northern Hemisphere was still largely just Ice Age glaciers. The construction of Göbekli Tepe is before the Egyptian Pyramids, which are about 4500 years old, and it’s before Stonehenge, which we know to be about 6-5000 years old. And some archaeologists even theorise that the place might have been around 14 000 to 15 000 years ago. So this place is pretty bloody old. Considering its significant age, it is quite an anomaly that it’s discovery my modern people is surprisingly recent. 1994 recent. But we’ll get stuck into that in a little bit.

Once you’re in southern Turkey, you can find Göbekli Tepe, which is the Turkish for ‘hill of the naval’, on the top of a mountain range just northeast from Urfa. Göbekli Tepe itself is roughly 300 metres across and is made up of what we can see to be four groupings of monolithic pillars. The pillars are linked to each other by dry stone walls that form circular or oval structures. You can also see two larger pillars that sit in the centre of each circle or oval, and it’s these that archaeologists think held up the roof. Each oval or circle is a different size some as large as 30 metres across and the smaller ones just 10 metres across.

There have been 43 of the pillars found so far. These megaliths are limestone shaped into a T and can be up to 5 metres tall. Surveys of the hill that Göbekli Tepe sits on shows that there could be so many more T-shaped pillars hiding underground, some think over 250 based on the scans. This would mean that there could be another 16 circular or oval structures at the site, on top of the ones already excavated. Sounds like Göbekli Tepe used to be a busy place.

The T-shaped pillars are of great interest though, because while some of them are your average blank pillar others have quite intricate and beautiful artwork engraved on them. You can see carved representations of scorpions, wild boars, foxes, spiders, lions, vultures, bulls, snakes, insects and birds as well as some abstract shapes.

The meaning of the pictograms that have been found are a bit of a mystery. While those in the know don’t think they were used as an early form of writing, there is a possibility that they were seen as sacred symbols that had specific meanings that have been lost to us, but were important to the people who put them there. For instance, depictions of vultures is known to have significance to people living in other parts of Anatolia and the Near East.

Klaus Schmidt, the one who led the discovery of Göbekli Tepe, has his own thoughts on what Göbekli Tepe meant to the people who built it.

This is the first human-built holy place…This area was like a paradise.

And while it doesn’t look like much now, back in the day it would have been pretty lush and green. Sitting on the northern edge of what is known as the Fertile Crescent, which is basically a bit of land that extends from the Persian Gulf to Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and Egypt with a nice mild climate, and would have been a lovely place to sit down and relax for a while.

And the surrounding rock would have been soft for those prehistoric masons to cut out their T-shaped pillars. In fact the limestone would have been soft enough that they could cut out their pillars with their regular flint tools, no speciality metal tools needed. Here’s what UNESCO reckons:

The monolithic T-shaped pillars were carved from the adjacent limestone plateau and attest to new levels of architectural and engineering technology…They are believed to bear witness to the presence of specialised craftsmen, and possibly the emergence of more hierarchical forms of human society.

UNESCO’s not wrong. If the dating is correct, then possibly the people who built Göbekli Tepe were the first to build anything of significance that has lasted into the modern era, and the feat of them cutting pillars from the rock, moving and then righting these pillars to create what can only be assumed to be rooms, is a level of ingenuity and intelligence that we don’t often associate with hunter-gatherer groups. It does make you wonder, accompanied with the marvel that is Stonehenge, that we may just be severely underestimating the intelligence and ability of hunter-gatherers, some of them were clearly thinkers.

But Göbekli Tepe doesn’t give up its secrets that easily. What Schmidt discovered was that once a ring of pillars was finished, it was then covered over with dirt, and a new ring of pillars built on top of it. Now if the builders of the second layer are the same as the builders of the first layer there’s no way to tell the reasoning behind this, but this continual backfilling is pretty much the reason why it’s been preserved so well over the millennia. As we move forward throughout the centuries to the present day excavations, we can see distinct layers of these pillar rings.

Dating of the layered rings has so far given us a few clues as to when building would have taken place. We know from radio-carbon dating that the last time Göbekli Tepe was built would have been around 8000 BC. But as to when the first layer of Göbekli Tepe was built, is as good as a guess. Excavators are yet to excavate to that depth, so the structures themselves are yet to be properly dated, but it’s estimated that the first stone circle would have been constructed around 11 000 BC or possibly even earlier. So well before our friend Stonehenge.

Discoveries

While we know that discoveries made when excavating Göbekli Tepe could have the result of changing how we believe we evolved into a complex society, first let’s take a step back to how we first stumbled across Göbekli Tepe in its forgotten state.

In 1963, the hill where we know Göbekli Tepe sits was first surveyed as part of the ‘Southeast Anatolia Region Research Project’, a project put together by those at the University of Istanbul and the University of Chicago. Those first researchers didn’t think much of the area, it looked like any other hill, with a couple of broken limestone slabs, nothing really out of the ordinary, and the concentration of limestone was put down to an abandoned medieval complex of some sort, possibly a cemetery.

But if we fast forward a couple of decades til we find ourselves in 1994, then we come across Klaus Schmidt, working as part of the German Archaeological Institute, carrying out his own surveys of the area. Schmidt decided to do a pass over and take another look at the hilltop that we know so well today. What Schmidt saw in the broken slabs of limestone was recognition of similar elements to a nearby Stone Age settlement he had previously worked on. And so Schmidt’s excavation and analysis of this particular hilltop began.

And what Schmidt found was staggeringly fantastic. The entire hill, the one that they didn’t think anything of, was entirely made by humans. And the results that Schmidt and his team have found to date are amazing considering that only about 5% of what’s thought to be the overall site has been excavated. That’s a whole lot of history and fascination still to uncover.

Schmidt, who worked on the site for over a decade, and was convinced that it could be the world’s oldest temple had this to say about his find:

Only man could have created something like this. It was clear right away this was a gigantic Stone Age site.

After his initial discovery, Schmidt returned the next year with five colleagues to start the serious excavations, and almost immediately they found the first megaliths, reportedly they were buried so close to the surface that they had been scarred by ploughs. The deeper the excavation went, the more circular the pillars appeared to be laid.

Schmidt went about mapping the entire site with ground-penetrating radar and geomagnetic surveys. He charted 16 other pillar circles across 22 acres of hillside. With so many of these circles still buried, the archaeologists and excavators have really only scratched the surface of what Göbekli Tepe could offer.

The stone tools that Schmidt and his team found at the site shows that the ones who erected the T-shaped pillars must be hunter-gatherers. And oddly enough thousands of animal bones have also been found. Such a high concentration of animal bones in one place is a mystery in itself, especially because this is before domestication. And so the questions start to gather.

A particular pillar that has garnered a lot of attention and speculation is the megalith known as T-shaped Pillar 43. While it’s unlikely that we’ll know what its intricate carvings mean, since those that made it are long gone, we also must remember that it isn’t the only carved pillar at the site.

While other pillars seem to have just the one animal, what’s different about Pillar 43 is that its carvings seem to be the most prominent with a large vulture, birds, a scorpion and some abstract symbols thrown in. While we don’t know what the meaning is behind any of the symbols, the intricacy and skill does imply a trained craftsman who knows what they’re doing.

Even though the importance of Pillar 43 may be a mystery, Schmidt and his team do think that the unique T-shape in the pillars could be as a stylised human form. Here’s Schmidt speaking at a Göbekli Tepe Research Symposium in 2012:

This T-form is really some unique phenomenon of this culture of Göbekli Tepe and the surrounding settlements, and it’s not repeated anywhere else on our Earth and in any other culture.

So quite the unique architectural design. Perhaps this could mean that the meaning behind Göbekli Tepe lies in the shape of these pillars? Another question to add to the pile.

What seems to have shocked the historical community the most was that this site could not have been built by farmers. And now we return to the sticking point. Farming didn’t exist at the time of Göbekli Tepe’s construction. And with only rudimentary stone tools, and no domesticated animals to help with the build, it really does seem that those hunter-gatherer people who got to work on Göbekli Tepe must have had a mind for engineering. For only having crude tools and pure man-power, they did a pretty decent job.

What’s most interesting about Göbekli Tepe is that Schmidt and his team found no evidence of a settlement. No houses, no evidence of cooking, no evidence of waste or refuse pits. So where did the people live who built the place? Another day, another question.

In 1998, along came Joris Peters, an archaeozoologist from the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich to give the thousands of animal remains found at the site a good analysing. Peters examined over 100 000 bone fragments and he found that a whole lot of them had cut marks and splintered edges. Clear signs that they had been butchered and cooked. So at least we know the people were eating something.

Among the bones, Peters found gazelle, boar, sheep, red deer, and even some birds, vultures, ducks, geese and cranes. The fact that all the animals Peters analysed are wild game, is a clear indication that none of them were domesticated or being farmed. Here’s Peters, talking about the analysis:

The first year, we went through 15 000 pieces of animal bone, all of them wild. It was pretty clear we were dealing with a hunter-gatherer site. It’s been the same every year since.

Okay, so by multiple conclusions, it was definitely hunter-gatherers who built Göbekli Tepe. But why? That part still remains a mystery.

Over the many excavations that his team has carried out, every now and then Schmidt and his team would find fragments of human bone in the layers of Göbekli Tepe. Schmidt was sure that the answer to the question ‘What is Göbekli Tepe?’ would be found as they dug further into the site.

If the site was used as a burial ground then perhaps the scenic location of Göbekli Tepe was chosen for a reason, as Schmidt says:

From here the dead are looking out at the ideal view. They’re looking out over a hunter’s dream.

Theories

The mystery of Göbekli Tepe has intrigued the public for the decades we’ve been aware of it. And of course it’s been subject to countless theories about its origins, much like the theories for Stonehenge, they range from the fantastical to the feasible. Naturally we’ve got aliens and technologically advanced civilisations.

We’ve already heard a little about the Garden of Eden theory, but there are some, surprisingly those not involved in the excavation, who have raised the theory of Göbekli Tepe being the first astronomical observatory. Yet somehow, there is minimal evidence that points in that direction.

Mostly because Schmidt and his team found no evidence of any kind of permanent settlement in or around Göbekli Tepe, Schmidt was under the impression that the site could have been a place of worship, possibly humanity’s first ‘cathedral’.

Both Peters and Schmidt believed that the people using Göbekli Tepe for whatever they were using it for were on the edge of a major change to their way of life. Here’s Schmidt:

They had wild sheep, wild grains that could be domesticated – and the people with the potential to do it.

So it seems that farming was right around the corner on their civil evolution. And it seems that they may be right. Research carried out in other parts of the region show that less than 1000 years later, there was domesticated livestock like sheep, cattle, pigs and evidence of permanent settlements with domesticated grains.

And so Schmidt and his team were naturally leaning towards their theory of early farmers creating Göbekli Tepe, but because nothing was found that one would usually associate with early farmers, then it just didn’t seem to make sense. So Schmidt sat down and posed a new theory. And here we get stuck on that point again.

For quite a while, we’ve been under the impression that it was only after those early people settled into a farming lifestyle with settled communities, did temples and complex social structures come about. But Göbekli Tepe suggests that perhaps it was the other way around, and Schmidt is a believer of this.

It would have taken immense teamwork and coordination between several groups to build the expansive and intricate Göbekli Tepe, and this kind of communication could have been the start of complex societies as we known them today, with our fancy internet and connectivity.

So it’s Schmidt’s theory that instead of hunter-gatherers moving into a farming lifestyle and the intricacies of wider communities with religion and drama forming out of living in close proximity to each other. It was different hunter-gatherer bands being part of a wider society coming together, possibly for the purpose of worship or religion, and then farming and more complex societies growing from the constant presence of each other. And with the area around Göbekli Tepe showing evidence of being some of the first in the world to start with the agriculture, Schmidt may not be wrong.

Here’s what Ian Hodder thinks about the whole thing, he was the one who excavated Catalhoyuk, a prehistoric settlement found not far from Göbekli Tepe:

This shows sociocultural changes came first, agriculture comes later. You can make a good case this area is the real origin of complex Neolithic societies.

Schmidt’s thought was that the small nomadic hunter-gatherer bands would come together to build the place, have a feast, share some gossip and then go their separate ways again. So kind of like the big family Christmas lunch.

Schmidt was convinced that Göbekli Tepe was like a ritual centre, not a true settlement, because the evidence found doesn’t support that, but more a place to farewell the dead and hold burials. Göbekli Tepe could have been akin to a pilgrimage destination, a place to bring your dead for the appropriate death rituals. The only problem was that initially no human remains had been found. But then as the years went on and the team dug deeper, they did find pieces of buried human bones near the pillars, so perhaps Schmidt wasn’t far off.

There is one Schmidt theory floating around that

…the bones show that corpses were brought into the ritual areas demarcated by the engraved T-shaped stone, where they were then laid out and left to be stripped of their soft tissue by wild animals.

This theory could be an explanation for the specific engravings we find on the pillars, and vultures are scavenger animals, so that kind of makes sense. But alas, it is but a theory. I’m not sure if we’ll ever really know the reason for Göbekli Tepe without talking to someone who helped create it. And when the time that separates us from them is almost something we’re unable to conceive, perhaps we’ll never know. It’s that age old loss of context that really has kept us in the dark when it comes to Göbekli Tepe’s meaning.

Now we get into the farfetched theories. One particular one that seems to do the rounds every now and then is the celestial theory. 2017 saw a pair of chemical engineers, an interesting profession for this site and theory, claim that they were able to link the animal carvings on the pillars to groups of stars that would have been visible at the height of Göbekli Tepe. Here’s a quote from Martin Sweatman, from the University of Edinburgh and the study’s lead author:

It appears Göbekli Tepe was, among other things, an observatory for monitoring the night sky… One of its pillars seems to have served as a memorial to this devastating event – probably the worst day in history since the end of the Ice Age.

The ‘worst day’ he’s referring to is the date of a catastrophic comet strike some 13 000 years ago. It’s Sweatman’s idea that Pillar 43 and the vulture carving was a ‘date stamp’ or memorial for the event. At the time this got a fair bit of media attention, but as with all good things, that died down fairly quickly. Not to mention the archaeologists actually on the ground excavating Göbekli Tepe weren’t all that pleased with this out of the box, minimal evidence, theory.

In a rebuttal to the media friendly theory, the archaeologists wrote:

Assuming such a long tradition of knowledge relating to an unconfirmed (ancient) cosmic event appears extremely far-fetched… The assumption that asterisms [familiar star patterns] are stable across time and cultures is not convincing…It is highly unlikely that early Neolithic hunters in Upper Mesopotamia recognised the exact same celestial constellations as described by ancient Egyptian, Arabian, and Greek scholars, which still populate our imagination today.

So again, we’re seeing a lack of context surrounding the society building Göbekli Tepe stop us in our tracks. And an excellent and concise rebuttal from those on the ground and in the thick of it.

And that isn’t mentioning the movement and recycling of pillars. To date the team have tried their best to return the pillars to their original upright locations, but the original layout of the site is really up for debate, not to mention the more obvious limitations to the place being a celestial observatory. Here’s the research team talking about the astronomical claims once more:

There is the significant possibility that we are dealing with roofed structures; this fact would pose limitations to a function as sky observatories.

Ceilings do seem like a pretty big barrier for observing the stars. And yet the wild claims about those who built Göbekli Tepe just keep coming.

The best one yet is Graham Hancock’s, what can only be described as fictional, book Fingerprints of the Gods. It’s definitely pseudoscience, and without any sort of evidence, proposes that an ancient culture believed that tracking the stars was so important they put a series of specific and important numbers into stories so that this great knowledge would be passed down through the generations. Hancock calls it a

…ghostly fingerprint of an advanced scientific knowledge impressed on the oldest myths and traditions of our planet.

Naturally Hancock was a guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast and called Göbekli Tepe a

…profoundly astronomical site.

And yet, there’s still doubt if that’s what it is at all. Hancock has many fantastical ideas that have helped fuel the interest in Göbekli Tepe and the belief that it’s an ancient observatory, and of course this media attention naturally gives Hancock attention, which might be great for Hancock but poor Göbekli Tepe is having its image tainted by what

…mainstream archaeologists want the public to believe.

Meanwhile, good old Klaus Schmidt, the one who started us on this great journey, passed away in 2014. Despite this massive loss to Göbekli Tepe, his team has continued their focus in finding the purpose of the site and evidence of those who built it.

Because only a tiny part of Göbekli Tepe has been fully excavated, we are still fairly in the dark about everything to do with the place. And while work carried out in the future will no doubt shed more light and answer more questions, Göbekli Tepe seems to be holding onto some fascinating secrets.

A tourist attraction with continued discoveries

Naturally after Schmidt published his first reports on what he found, tourists started to flock to the site to see the place for themselves. And within the decade the place was practically transformed.

Unfortunately the media attention that Göbekli Tepe has been getting hasn’t been all good for the place, especially when art thieves and illegal antiquity dealers start dropping by.

In September of 2010 one of the engraved T-shaped pillars went missing, taken from the site. Security cameras and locked gates have since been installed but it’s a bit too late for the stolen pillar.

Although the civil war in nearby Syria in 2012 did see tourists practically stop, which may have been a blessing in disguise as the number of tourists crowding around the open excavation trenches was making it difficult for the archaeologists and excavators to move around and carry out their important work.

When Schimdt first started excavating the only way to get to Göbekli Tepe was through a bumpy dirt road, and even though the journey may have not been pleasant, before his death in 2014 you may just have been lucky enough to have been shown around the place by Schmidt himself. Unfortunately Schmidt wasn’t able to live long enough to see the place’s transformation from a dusty mountaintop to major tourist attraction with all the modernity, including roads, car parks and a visitors centre for ample comfort.

In 2017, the corrugated steel sheds that were previously being used were replaced by an ingenious fabric and steel shelter big enough to cover the main part of the site. Making things a little bit more comfortable for excavators and tourists alike.

But the discoveries didn’t stop with Schmidt. When working on the foundations for the new fabric canopy, archaeologists had the opportunity to dig deeper than Schmidt had ever managed to do. Schmidt’s successor, Lee Clare, an archaeologist from the same German Archaeological Institute led the team in digging some ‘keyhole’ trenches into the bedrock. And what the team found may just be what Schmidt was looking for all along.

And what did they find? None other than evidence of houses and year-round settlement. Meaning that perhaps Göbekli Tepe wasn’t an occasionally visited temple or religious site as previously thought but a thriving village with large central buildings. And not only that, evidence of water catchment and usage and cooking with grain was also found. Here’s Clare:

Göbekli Tepe is still a unique, special site, but the new insights fit better with what we know from other sites. It was a fully-fledged settlement with permanent occupation. It’s changed our whole understanding of the site.

That it has, and the recent discoveries don’t stop there. Turkish archaeologists have also uncovered at least a dozen hill-top sites very similar to Göbekli Tepe, with T-shaped pillars and everything. Here’s a quote from Barbara Horejs, an Austrian Archaeological Institute researcher who wasn’t part of the recent excavation but is an expert on the Neolithic:

[Göbekli Tepe] is not a unique temple… that makes the story much more interesting and exciting.

While Schmidt believed Göbekli Tepe to be a ridiculously long building project that helped inspire those into the farming lifestyle, Clare and his team now think that the place was an attempt at those new farmers clinging to their old lifestyle, just not ready to change with the world around them. While this might seem like an undoing of all of Schmidt’s work, here’s Horejs to clear it up for us:

The new work isn’t destroying Klaus Schmidt’s thesis; it stands on his shoulders. There’s been a huge gain of knowledge, in my view. The interpretation is changing, but that’s what science is about.

And the discoveries just keep coming. In 2017 human skulls were found at Göbekli Tepe, intricately carved skulls. Here’s Julia Gresky, another archaeologist out of the German Archaeological Institute to give us the run down:

The carvings are very deep lines in the bone and are definitely intended. It’s the first evidence we have for carved human skulls anywhere.

While it seems like Göbekli Tepe is just unveiling its secrets, the answers to the questions remain well hidden. What do the skulls mean?

After studying the skulls Lee Clare reckons that they could be a representation of Göbekli Tepe’s importance in our history. His theory is that if the temple was the reason hunter-gatherer groups were coming together, then this focus on skulls could have helped to bind them and provide them with an identity.

It definitely seems like our time excavating and studying Göbekli Tepe is far from over. And our wonder at the complexity and expansiveness of the site continues. Here’s what UNESCO says about the site, after it was added to the UNESCO World Heritage register in 2018:

The communities that built the monumental megalithic structures of Göbekli Tepe lived during one which took us from hunter-gatherer lifeways to the first farming communities … Göbekli Tepe is one of the first manifestations of human-made monumental architecture.

And Turkey doesn’t want to be left out either, 2019 was declared by Turkish tourism officials as the ‘Year of the Göbekli Tepe’ giving the site a global promotional campaign. With further tourism boosts planned, tour buses can be unloading hundreds of people each day to see the excavation in progress. And new funding from Turkish tourism and media companies will go a long way in building new and impressive facilities for the growing hoards of visitors.

Even though we’ve learnt a lot from Göbekli Tepe and no doubt have plenty still to learn, it’s clear that with each new thing we find, our perception and understanding of human civilisation is set to continue to change.

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