The Incredible Human Journey (48 page)

Klaus led me to the top of the hill and showed me a stone circle. I was bowled over by it. Archaeologists were busy with a small crane, moving a large fragment of one standing stone from where
it had fallen. There was an engraved figure of a person on the narrow outer side of one of the standing stones, at the edge of the circle.
There were other stone walls at the top of the hill, which Klaus thought might have enclosed smaller sanctuaries. Rather
strangely, there was no sign of habitation, such as hearths, up on the hill: it appeared to have been exclusively a sacred
site rather than a settlement.

As we walked down the other side of the hill, I suddenly saw more stone circles, even more impressive than the first one at
the top of the hill. The circles were wider and the standing stones taller – and more elaborately decorated. On the sides
of the stones there were beautiful, low-relief carvings of foxes, boar, birds, scorpions and spiders. On the inner edge of
one stone there was a full-relief, 3D carving of an animal, perhaps a dog or a wolf. It had been carved from the stone in
one piece. While I was there, Turkish archaeologists uncovered an animal head sticking out, gargoyle-like, with formidable
fangs, from the wall enclosing one of the stone circles.

There seemed to be several phases of building at Göbekli Tepe. The lower, older and more impressive stone circles appeared
originally to have been put up as just that: a ring of large standing stones. Then stone walls had been added, creating inner
and outer circles. In some places, there were slabs laid on the standing stones as though the ring had originally been covered
with a corbelled roof.

The architecture and stone sculpture at Göbekli Tepe is remarkable. But what made it even more arresting was the date. ‘It’s been here, buried in this hill, for 12,000 years,’ said Klaus.

So Göbekli Tepe appeared to be a temple site – built by hunter-gatherers. It challenged paradigms of the origins of the Neolithic.
Based on previous evidence, archaeologists have suggested that the emergence of the Neolithic involved a sequence of developments
that goes something like this: population pressure led to increased need for food, led to the adoption of agriculture, led
to stratified societies and new power structures, led to organised religion. What Göbekli Tepe seemed to show, though, was
a complex, hierarchical society – where stonemasons could be tasked with building temples – and organised religion, in the
context of a hunter-gatherer society.

It’s difficult to know how to categorise Göbekli Tepe. As a site representing something somewhere between the Upper Palaeolithic
and the Neolithic, Klaus thought that perhaps the best label would be ‘Mesolithic’, but then this would have been a very different Mesolithic from the nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle, further north in Europe. Having said that, the stone toolkit
at Göbekli Tepe was similar to some of the tanged point cultures of central Europe, in the late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic. But other archaeologists, too, talk about a transition straight from the hunter-gathering Palaeolithic to the agricultural
Neolithic in the Levant, missing out the Mesolithic. The first step towards this new way of life began around 14,500 years ago, with the appearance of the Natufian culture in the Levant.
¹
Hunter-gatherers began to do a new thing: they settled down in villages, in which they stayed all year round. At this point, the development of agriculture seems almost inevitable. The appearance of grinding stones, mortars and pestles at archaeological sites suggests that wild cereals were important in
the Natufian diet. There are also dog burials from this time: it seems that man’s best friend had arrived.
¹

Klaus suggested that this may have been because gazelle hunters in Turkey required similar technology to the reindeer hunters
further north, but also that perhaps there was some kind of connection or communication between the societies of Turkey and
those around the Black Sea and the Crimea. However, the complex society and ritual suggested by the stone-circle temples was
something else entirely. There was nothing even vaguely like it in Europe – with this scale of monumental architecture – until
well into the Neolithic. So, instead, then, Göbekli Tepe is called ‘early Neolithic’, with the implicit understanding that
many of the classic features of the Neolithic, like pottery – and in particular, farming – were yet to come.

What sort of rituals were taking place at Göbekli Tepe? The symbolism there seemed to be dominated by animals: snakes were
the most common, sometimes appearing singly, or stacked up like waves. Wild boar and foxes are also common motifs, along with leopard-like creatures and stylised aurochs heads. Birds were also
depicted: perhaps geese or ducks. The images didn’t seem to relate directly to animals that were being hunted, as boar and
snake bones are very rare in the rubbly backfill at Göbekli Tepe. Gazelles were an important food animal, but only one carving
of a gazelle has been found at the site so far. This is a bit like the Ice Age caves of France, where one of the most commonly
hunted animals, reindeer, is rarely depicted.
²
Perhaps the various animals represented different ‘clans’ that came to the temples?

Weirdly, the large T-shaped standing stones appeared to have arms, bent at the elbows, with hands clasped at the front. They
had no faces, no eyes, nose or mouth, but Klaus thought the stones represented immense, abstract human figures.

‘Who are these beings made of stone?’ he asked, rhetorically. ‘They are the first deities depicted in history.’

He suggested that the animal motifs carved into the sides of these giant ‘figures’ might be guardians or protectors of the
megaliths, but in some cases carefully grouped animals suggested that their meaning went further: perhaps they were representing
stories or myths.
²

‘Maybe these are pre-hieroglyphic messages,’ Klaus suggested.

Where the sex of the animals could be discerned, they always appeared to be male, and a small ‘ithyphallic’ figure with an
out-of-proportion semi-erect penis had also been discovered at the site. This was very different from the famous, much later
site of Çatal Hüyük in Turkey, where female imagery was common – although inside houses rather than temples. Çatal Hüyük also
contained many depictions of vultures, which seemed to be associated with death. There were no pictures of vultures at Göbekli
Tepe – but there were many snakes, and objects decorated with snakes have been found among grave goods at other sites of almost
the same age.
²
To Klaus, the predominance of ‘aggressive’ animals, snakes, and absence of female/fertility symbols suggested that Göbekli
Tepe might be a burial site – or at least a place dedicated to a cult of the dead.

The monumental architecture and the clustering of the stone circles certainly seemed similar to complexes of burial mounds
found in the (much later) megalithic cultures of Neolithic Brittany and the UK. But Klaus hadn’t, as yet, found any evidence
of burials at the site. He was just about to excavate part of one of the higher stone circles where he thought that a large,
flat stone might just be covering a burial.

Klaus’s team had also found large quantities of stone tools in various stages of production, including nodules, half- and
fully-prepared cores, and blades. Evidence of flint-working usually occurs in occupation sites, but here it was in what seemed
to be a purely ritual space. Klaus thought that the flint-knapping was somehow part of the rituals that had been carried out
there. But it was difficult to draw conclusions about how Göbekli Tepe fitted into the lives of the people who had constructed
it, given that no settlements or any kind of camps of the same age have yet been found in the area around the hill.

However, other archaeological sites in the area give us an insight into how life was changing for the hunter-gatherer societies
of the Levant. Archaeologists now see the Neolithic as emerging in stages: first, hunter-gatherers became more settled, with more complex
social structures; then plant cultivation appeared, and then we see the appearance of large villages and intensive food production.
³
So it appears that social change came first – followed by agriculture. Göbekli Tepe fits into the early stage of this transition,
as a pre-agricultural, pre-pottery site, demonstrating the existence of a complex society. For Klaus, the social changes may
have been the impetus for the development of farming – perhaps to provide feasts to honour the gods. ‘For them it would have
been a logical step, to manage Nature and get more food for themselves,’ he said. ‘Religion created the pressure to invent
agriculture.

‘It’s very clear we must change our ideas,’ he continued. ‘Hunter-gatherers don’t usually work in the way we understand work.’
But, from the scale of construction at Göbekli Tepe, it was clear that people here had jobs: specific things to do which weren’t
immediately about obtaining food, water or shelter, but were nevertheless important to society.

‘They started to work in quarries. They started to have engineers to work out how to transport and erect the stones. There
were specialists in stone-working, whose job was to produce sculptures and pillars from stone,’ said Klaus. It appeared that
the society that produced Göbekli Tepe could support both a workforce and professional artists.

Klaus also believed that the transition to agriculture might have led to the abandonment of Göbekli Tepe and its gods. His
team of archaeologists were digging down through rubble that appeared to have been deliberately piled on top of the stone
circles to cover them up. So, social changes may have driven the development of farming, but subsequent changes in society,
and the emergence of new religions, had then been disastrous for Göbekli Tepe.

‘The hunter-gatherer societies were on the threshold of inventing a new way of life, of becoming farming communities. And
by the ninth millennium bc this process was successful and this new way of life was developing in this region. The old spiritual
world of the hunters was without any use, and so this site was abandoned. This world was completely forgotten, completely
lost, never repeated.’

I found this story, of the rise and fall of the old hunter-gatherer gods, very compelling. But in fact it is very difficult
to rule out farming entirely at Göbekli Tepe, as the earliest farmers would have been planting wild foods. It’s also very difficult to pinpoint that transition from collecting wild-growing plants to intentional planting. And, of
course, the first planted crops would have been wild varieties: domesticated varieties would have emerged later as farmers
selected particular characteristics. For hunter-gatherers for whom wild varieties of cereals and legumes were already staple
foods, it may only have been a short step from gathering them to intentional planting and cultivation.
⁴
Klaus thought that feasting, or at least the formation of more settled communities, may have prompted this step, but there
may also have been climatic reasons for the adoption of agriculture. Around 14,600 years ago, and again around 11,600 years
ago, there was a period of increased temperature and rainfall, each lasting only one or two decades. During each of these
warm, wet phases, cereals and legumes would have flourished – providing humans with plenty of easily exploitable resources.
³
Between these two wet, warm periods was the cold, dry snap of the Younger Dryas. The effects of this may have been over-emphasised,
but for people getting used to living on plentiful cereals and legumes, a period of worsening climate may have encouraged
them to start cultivating crops. This climate explanation echoes what I had discovered from reading about the origins of agriculture
in China, and I find it very persuasive. Because, at almost exactly the same time, on opposite sides of the globe, people
were inventing agriculture. It may not be such a coincidence: both populations were living in environments affected by global
climate change.