Göbekli Tepe
The account
A megalithic temple older than agriculture would be proof of a forgotten advanced civilization.
What investigators found
Pillars up to 5.5 meters tall carved by hunter-gatherers, about 6,000 years before Stonehenge. It changed what we knew about the origins of life in society.
The story
On a hill in southeastern Turkey, near Şanlıurfa, researchers in the 1960s saw a few broken stones and assumed it was a medieval cemetery. Only in 1995 did the German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt realize what was really there.
Beneath the earth were circles of T-shaped limestone pillars, some more than 5 meters tall, decorated with foxes, wild boars, snakes and vultures. Dating points to around 9600 BC: more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge, at a time when no one was farming yet.
Göbekli Tepe was built by hunter-gatherers. The discovery turned upside down the idea that agriculture came first and temples only later. To some, it would be the work of a lost civilization. To science, it is proof that the urge to gather and celebrate may have come before cities.