Off-Topic - The Beginning of the End for Hunter-Gatherers

Sprawled before us today in the thirsty mid-morning heat of early September are dozens of megalithic monuments two to three meters high (6½-10'), arranged Stonehenge-like in four separate circles 10 to 30 meters (33-100') across. In the center of each stand two taller monoliths, their flat and faceless heads staring southeast over the vast Mesopotamian plain, where, it is generally accepted, the planet’s first agriculture bloomed. Sculpted onto most of the monuments are effigies of foxes, bulls, vultures, snakes, boars and spiders; one bears a highly artistic rendering of a feline resembling a lion. Chair-high rock benches link most of the standing stones and there are bowl-sized depressions in front of a few of the stones, possibly for offerings.

What is truly remarkable —and eminently arguable —is that these limestone pillars and their artwork may have been created by hunting-and-gathering peoples around 11,600 years ago, before the first fields of domesticated crops were planted anywhere in the world. However, no settlements that old have been found near the mound. Compounding the intrigue, the megaliths were intentionally—and perhaps ritually—buried under tons of fill 1500 years later, about the time the agricultural revolution was radically altering millennia-old ways of life in southeastern Anatolia.

Klaus Schmidt, a German archeologist who has been leading excavation work at Göbekli Tepe for 15 years, believes that what’s been uncovered here represents the world’s earliest known temple and its earliest known monumental art, neither of which has been previously associated with a hunter-gatherer way of life. Many prominent archeologists argue that only a settled farming culture could have mustered the resources and the large, organized work crews necessary to build the temple, but Schmidt thinks otherwise. “They were hunter-gatherers,” he contradicts affably. Schmidt, 53 years old and dressed in a long-sleeved shirt over loose jeans and dusty sandals, has been project director here since 1993, when he discovered what Howe had overlooked 30 years before. Affiliated with the University of Heidelberg and the German Archaeological Institute, he speaks about the place with an understated passion.