History in the RemakingNewsweek: A temple complex in Turkey that predates even the pyramids is rewriting the story of human evolution...
[Archaeologist Klaus] Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built... The temple was built 11,500 years ago... The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture... Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became... the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.
Göbekli Tepe -- the name in Turkish for 'potbelly hill' -- lays art and religion squarely at the start of that journey... Schmidt has uncovered what he thinks is definitive proof that a huge ceremonial site flourished here... He has found carved and polished circles of stone, with terrazzo flooring and double benches. All the circles feature massive T-shaped pillars... including two that are not just the biggest yet, but, according to carbon dating, are the oldest monumental artworks in the world...
Schmidt's thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city...
Religion now appears so early in civilized life -- earlier than civilized life, if Schmidt is correct -- that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it... Schmidt speculates that nomadic bands... were already gathering here for rituals, feasting, and initiation rites before the first stones were cut...
Unlike most discoveries from the ancient world, Göbekli Tepe was found intact, the stones upright... Most startling is the elaborate carving found on about half of the 50 pillars... graceful, naturalistic sculptures and bas-reliefs of the animals that were central to the imagination of hunter-gatherers... Many of the biggest pillars are carved with arms, including shoulders, elbows, and jointed fingers...
The temples thus offer unexpected proof that mankind emerged from the 140,000-year reign of hunter-gatherers with a ready vocabulary of spiritual imagery, and capable of huge logistical, economic, and political efforts... Whatever mysterious rituals were conducted in the temples, they ended abruptly before 8000 BC, when the entire site was buried, deliberately and all at once.
