Ancient History Just Got Older

For years, the beginnings of farming and civilization have had a set date. Farming suddenly sprouts up across the globe, and agricultural living begins--life on the farm, in the village of tightly knit families. Several archaeologists have settled for that, going further to say that religion begins after farming appears: a common belief goes far to help a bunch of humans in the middle of nowhere stay together, and gets a real sense of community going.
But something recently discovered in southern Turkey has challenged all of that.
Gobekli Tepe (Turkish for Potbelly Hill) predates Stonehenge by six thousand years--at a time when the people of Turkey were still hunter-gatherers. Oops.
According to Marxist V. Gordon Childe, religion could only appear after civilization was well rooted. He and fellow researchers of his time all believed that Sumer had been the start of both agricultural and religious cultures.
That all changed when 17 years ago, Klaus Schmidt found a brief record of a site on Potbelly Hill, Turkey. He and a team funded by the German Archaeological Insititute and the Sanliurfa Museum went to check it out.
What they found was astonishing--a temple-like structure that predates everything they had known.
The very oldest parts of the structure were the best in design and decoration. Animals (most of them deadly, such as scorpions, charging boars, and lions) are depicted in great skill on the limestone columns. Inside the outer ring is an inner ring, of the same material, and these T-shaped stones look like stylized human figures. A few archaeologists likened the columns to a ring of people dancing while the animals were there to guard the dancers, are totems, or are there to appease the spirits of the animals themselves.
There is something a little odd about the columns though. The oldest is the finest in skill, though not perfect, while further construction from later dates slowly degrades in quality. The last of about twenty rings of limestone columns are sloppily made, with poor designs etched on the surfaces.
A further strange point--the rings were regularly disposed of every few decades. The outer ring of pillars were buried and a new ring inside that was created. A few have as many as three rings, one inside the other, but then they are all filled with debris, and a new circle begun nearby. As time passed, the pillars were made shorter, simpler, and placed without care. By 8200 B.C.E., the construction of the pillars suddenly ceases altogether.
Such structures and dedication would require hundreds of skilled people coming together to shape these stones and put them in place. But there is no evidence of any form of shelter near the site. No evidence of cook fires, or mess kitchens, and no agricultural development. The closest stream is three miles away.
The only thing that lets us know people actually stayed there are the bones of thousands of gazelles and aurochs littered about the place, suggesting that the workers were fed on food brought in from hunts conducted elsewhere.
Scientists now think that the center of agricultural activity, within walking distance of the Gobekli site, came about at the height of the pillars' construction. There is a good possibility that the construction of the site actually caused the boom in agriculture and farming lifestyle--the demand for food for the workers created the situation that changed humankind's lives so drastically from hunting to domesticating the grains and animals around them. And about 20 miles away from the Gobekli site is the Nevali Cori settlement. Some of the very first evidence of plant domestication comes from this second settlement, though much has been lost due to its being flooded to provide electricity and water for the people in the region. Apart from the settlement's work with plants and grains, circular structures of pillars had been discovered, in the same shapes and decorated with the same animals. Such structures and designs have been found as far as one hundred miles away from Gobekli in various Pre-Pottery Neolithic sites.
These sites seemed to have been purely ceremonial, though archaeologists had thought the sustaining of a class of separate priests and craft workers was impossible on a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. It seems somebody managed to do so, after all...