Scottish Indiana Jones uncovering secrets at world's most mysterious Stone Age site

WHAT on Earth is Göbekli Tepe? The world’s first temple? The first city? The place where the first “king” was crowned? The Stone Age site where agriculture was “discovered”? Even the location where “civilisation” first put down roots? Or is Göbekli Tepe something stranger, more mysterious, something so lost in our ancient past that we’ll never fully understand it?

What we know for sure is that this monumental Neolithic complex of astonishing stone buildings in Turkey, just over the border from war-torn Syria, is 11,500 years old, meaning construction started around 9500BC. To put that in perspective, work on the main structure at Stonehenge began around 2400BC. The earliest Egyptian pyramids went up about 2600BC.

What makes Göbekli Tepe (which means “Potbelly Hill”) even more remarkable is that the people who built it were hunter-gatherers. They hadn’t “invented” agriculture or cities or kings and queens, or any of what we’d today crudely define as “civilisation”. Göbekli Tepe, therefore, turns everything we know about human history upside down. Until its discovery, we assumed ancient humans invented agriculture first and then settled down, building villages, towns and eventually cities. Göbekli Tepe, however, was built well before the invention of agriculture. So, why was it created? If our ancient hunter-gather ancestors had no need to settle down, as they were still chasing game across the landscape and foraging for wild fruits, grains and vegetables, what possible use could they have had for this complex of buildings, containing remarkably advanced artwork?

Scottish archaeologist Dr Bill Finlayson is an expert in Göbekli Tepe. He is director of Oxford University’s Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa project. His work at the mysterious site – now on the route for refugees fleeing Syria – has given him unique insights into what may have been happening at Göbekli Tepe all those millennia ago.

When The Herald on Sunday caught up with Finlayson, who has spent a lot of time living with Bedouin tribes, he was recovering from a nasty bug picked up during his latest Middle Eastern adventures.

What we know

GÖBEKLI Tepe is a series of strange, ancient stone structures, discovered on a remote Turkish hill. There is a number of unique buildings filled with massive stone pillars – megaliths 5.5 metres high (almost 20 feet). The pillars are T-shaped and seem designed as abstract faceless people, covered in elaborate, three-dimensional artwork of animals, rendered in exquisite detail. Beyond these buildings there is a series of other, more plain structures which some have speculated could be homes, granaries, or stores.

All of this rewrites human history. How did Stone Age people have the time to invest in building such a place 11,500 years ago – especially as they were hunter-gatherers continually on the move?

Finlayson points out that Stonehenge and the pyramids “are closer to us in time than they are to Göbekli Tepe – it’s a long way back”.

The site remained in use for 1,500 years, he explains, until it was mysteriously abandoned and eventually buried beneath the earth. Stone Age people began work on Göbekli Tepe “just after the last Ice Age”. The discovery of agriculture, which arose in the near east, “overlaps” with the time when Göbekli Tepe was inhabited. This has led to speculation that Neolithic life at Göbekli Tepe somehow triggered the rise of farming, one of the first and most important steps towards “civilisation”.

Other similar sites are now being found nearby. “We don’t yet know if they’re as spectacular as Göbekli Tepe,” Finlayson says, “but certainly we’re finding T-shaped pillars, and lots of stone carving.”

Stone Age revolution

Although the people who built Göbekli Tepe lived in a completely different world to us – a world without our notions of science for a start – “they were just like us”. We’re not more intelligent than them or different.

Even though the builders of Göbekli Tepe were hunter-gatherers living at a time before farming, it was nevertheless a period of “huge social change”, Finlayson says. “There’s something going on around this period.

“There’s an explosion of ‘material symbols’, people are making a lot more ‘stuff’ – ornamented, decorated, artistic. People are beginning to use more symbolic arts. One of the things about this site is the amount of effort and energy that’s gone into it, which is remarkable on any measurement.

“That’s one of the big questions: why are they investing time in this?” Trying to answer that question “can take us down several different paths”.

The first temple?

THE initial theory was that Göbekli Tepe was the world’s first temple, “a ceremonial centre”. That might explain the many years that scores of people would have taken to construct and carve the buildings. So, one argument is that “ritual had become much more important” to our hunter-gatherer ancestors and they built a “church” to celebrate.

“Population pressure”, Finlayson explains, is often suggested as a cause for this rise in the importance of ritual. Ritual helps bring people together.

There are eery echoes of Göbekli Tepe in some hunter-gatherer societies which existed into the modern era, like tribes in northwestern America, who, says Finlayson, “had very elaborate lifestyles – and were home to the classic totem pole”. These tribes also had “Big Houses” – buildings for society to meet.

Like totem poles, the symbolism on the T-shaped megaliths at Göbekli Tepe represent “the natural world just as much as the human world. The pillars may well be people, with loincloths, belts and arms on some of them, but what’s carved on them is mostly animals or insects”. That unity of the human and natural world “makes sense as they’re hunter-gatherers”.

Some have thought the pillars may represent gods. All these ideas feed into the theory that Göbekli Tepe “was a big ritual centre”. Finlayson adds: “Clearly, there’s some sort of ritual aspect”. But was it really a temple?

Some archaeologists have speculated the site represented “the start of religion”. This theory “switched the old idea of the Neolithic being a farming revolution” to one of the era being a revolution in religion, symbolism, “and the way we think”. The theory suggests that before Göbekli Tepe people just worshipped spirits in nature, but then switched to some more formal religion which needed a permanent site. “A lot of early interpretation began to see these monumental structure as temples in some way,” Finlayson explains.

However, current thinking is “shifting away from that”, he says. Today, “we don’t think these are temples or there’s any formal religion going on here”. It’s more likely a “new expression of ideas that already existed. It may well be ceremonial, it may well be ritual, but it’s probably more about people than it is about abstract religious concepts”.

A new society?

The “main line of thought” now is that Göbekli Tepe was “to do with the way society tried to organise itself”.

Some currently believe that Göbekli Tepe is “indicative of something like a whole series of separate clan houses. It is different groups coming together; they’re maintaining social structures, they’ve got clan totems, and they’re maintaining their distinct lineages”.

This notion gets tied into the argument about the way human society was “transitioning”. People were beginning, it’s thought, to develop, “ideas of property and lineage – inheritance starts to matter more”. This became turbo-charged with the soon-to-be-invented skill of agriculture, as farming meant “possessions”.

So, is it a case of human beings teetering on the edge of discovering farming, and starting to develop a site which allowed them to show off wealth? It sounds quite macho and swaggering. In fact, a lot of the architecture is phallic with all those thrusting megaliths. There is speculation that the buildings could be “clan men’s houses, because the symbology is mostly male, and there’s lots of fierce animals”.

Is it a city?

THAT may explain the elaborate buildings with carved T-shaped pillars, but what accounts for the other stone structures? “Right from the earliest days, there was much more ordinary habitation,” Finlayson says. These may have been temporary homes. Most archaeologists, though, don’t believe people were “full-time residents” at Göbekli Tepe. They were only semi-settled, probably travelling much of the year hunting and gathering.

Initially, these more “ordinary” buildings were circular but then became rectangular structures. “The explanation is fairly functional,” Finlayson says. “You can pack rectangular structures in more closely than round ones and it’s also easier to build upper floors.”

Despite the “homes”, however, this wasn’t a city, or even a village, in any way we would recognise. The “invention” of the town “takes many thousands of years more to appear”. Göbekli Tepe had a small population of no more than a few hundred who “come and go” – they don’t live there the way we live in our villages, towns and cities.

Ancient highways

THIS was a good landscape to live in, with plenty of resources and warm weather. Unlike the dry surrounding terrain today it would have been lush in 11,500BC. This would have meant a rise in population in the area. So, Göbekli Tepe could have been some central gathering point for the growing number of people in this fertile, ancient land.

Game was abundant and ancient humans found remarkable ways of hunting. There’s been the discovery of a series of manmade “walls” running hundreds of miles all the way from Jordan into Saudi Arabia which were used to hem in game and funnel animals towards kill points.

It has long been known that Stone Age people used the natural landscape for hunting, forcing game into narrow ravines to trap and kill them. But, says Finlayson, these stone walls were built to “run all the way up and down the Middle East”.

Archaeologists only worked out what the walls were for when, during excavations at a neolithic settlement, they discovered a model of the walls, built by a Stone Age hunter, revealing them as kill traps. These hunting highways were built 9,000 years ago, around 7000BC, and followed the migration routes of gazelle.

Although farming had been invented by 7000BC, it’s thought most animals were kept for milk – that meat was still sourced by catching game, thus these stones walls were a form of industrialised hunting.

Neolithic loneliness

THE truth about what led to the building of Göbekli Tepe is probably found in the very human need to simply be together in a group, more than anything else.

Finlayson says that the people of Göbekli Tepe “seem to be developing ways of living with each other. It doesn’t matter if you’re a hunter-gatherer or a farmer – one of the things you have to do if you become more sedentary is to find ways of getting on with your neighbour”. He points out that “highly mobile hunter-gatherers in times of stress or argument just walk off and go to live somewhere else. Once you start special buildings, though – once you’ve done elaborate carving and got blisters – you don’t want to do that. You need to address how you can stay together.”

So, could Göbekli Tepe have been a testing ground for humanity learning how to be together after hundreds of thousands of years living in small bands?

Other sites across the near east dated to around the same time show a similar step toward socialisation. In Syria, “there’s none of this huge stone stuff”, Finlayson says, but there are dwellings made of mud bricks. So, humans are experimenting with this semi-sedentary life in many places. Perhaps something changed in us that simply meant we wanted to increasingly stay in larger groups?

First farmers

“I THINK agriculture is one of the things which comes out of that,” Finlayson adds. “Agriculture was driven by that. It’s people wanting to stay in one place that makes farming an obvious choice.” Humans had long “developed huge amounts of knowledge about plants” so the shift to settled farming wouldn’t have been an impossible step once hunter-gatherers began staying in one place for longer periods and built these epic structures.

Göbekli Tepe would have helped cement the idea of a wider society. Hunter-gatherers knew hundreds of people but operated in groups of about 25. So, when they do come together, they need to “find ways of making sure they’re nice to each other”. Ritual may well have helped that considerably.

Being in one place would also have meant sharing resources. Hunter-gatherers had complex rules for making sure everyone “pulled their weigh and didn’t game the system”. How to maintain this “sharing ethos” in a less mobile world? Perhaps that explains, Finlayson suggests, the construction of the “ordinary” stone buildings at Göbekli Tepe. Could they be granaries, for instance?

“One idea is that these are public stores, in the sense that everybody can see who’s putting stuff in and taking stuff out – it belongs to the community, not you and me. So, hunter-gatherers are continuing to share but it’s changing and making sure you can see what’s happening.” It may also indicate that humans are finding themselves with surplus resources for the first time.

Rise of kings?

SUCH economic changes – the creation of surplus – tend to lead to communities which are more hierarchical, as someone comes to dominate all that extra “stuff”. There have been suggestions that Göbekli Tepe represents members of “some sort of segmented clan community trying to become chiefs, or big men”.

It could have been a place where aspiring rulers or wannabe first “kings” erected lavish buildings and held feasts to “build their status”. Each special building with its carved pillars may represent these ambitious leaders. It’s a “perfectly reasonable interpretation”, says Finlayson, but the lack of any evidence around some great figure suggests it might not be the case. There are no lavish burials, for instance, and the T-shaped pillars are faceless. “They don’t look like they’re reflecting an individual. So, we’re probably not looking at an aggrandising society.”

There is possibly no single explanation. Like us, many forces were working on our ancient ancestors: belief, economics, social needs, ambition, kinship. “It’s part of an interconnected web,” says Finlayson, of forces “feeding off each other”. Aside from the fact that it’s a mystery, the only sure thing about Göbekli Tepe is that it has caused a complete rethink about the timing of humanity’s move from “hunter-gatherers to farmers”.

Spooky commies

AN average day at Göbekli Tepe, Finlayson believes, would have been “pretty egalitarian”. Everyone chipped in as best they could building the site, and it’s unlikely there would have been special castes of people of vastly higher rank.

To us, though, it would have been “spooky”. There were certainly heads hung from those strange pillars but that was a sign of respect for the dead rather than evidence of a brutal cult. Stone Age people lived with the constant presence of death. Some of the art is frightening – with poisonous insects, or animals with rictus grins of fear. Finlayson feels it was “more a place of celebration” rather than “dark and Gothic”. Hunter-gatherers would “just have got up and walked” if Göbekli Tepe was “a really negative place” of fear or control.

Nor, however, was it a place solely for huge festivities like Stonehenge and Neolithic Orkney are now thought to have been. “What you’re looking at is not a grand night out,” Finlayson adds. There is no evidence of great feasting events.

We’ll probably never really uncover the truth behind Göbekli Tepe, as we’ll never truly be able to understand the worldview of our ancient ancestors. At best, we know that “hunter-gatherer society relates to the world in kinship terms – even animals are kin of some sort, the dead are kin. There isn’t a world of life and a world of death – there’s just a world and it’s all linked.

“At the same time, they’re not that far away from us. They’re addressing the same issues, coming up with solutions and being very human. Among them were probably our ancestors. It’s a reminder that we’re all part of this huge continuum of human culture and that makes the petty differences we might argue over remarkably small.”