To find a new site, Schmidt surveyed other prehistoric remains in the region. He came across a 15-metre-high mound in the foothills of the Taurus Mountains just 60 kilometres from Nevalı Çori, called Göbekli Tepe – ‘Potbelly Hill’ – because of its curves. The hill was strewn with Neolithic flint tools and broken limestone slabs. Archaeologists who spotted the slabs in the 1960s had dismissed them as belonging to a medieval cemetery, but Schmidt realised that they matched the T-shaped pillars in the cult buildings at Nevalı Çori. Except that these were gigantic, made from great blocks of stone several metres high. ‘Within a minute of first seeing it, I knew I had two choices,’ he later said. ‘Go away and tell nobody, or spend the rest of my life working here.’ He chose the second.
Through excavations and geophysical surveys over the next two decades, Schmidt and his team found that the hill is packed with buried pillars and enclosures. There are square chambers similar to those at Nevalı Çori and also dating to the ninth millennium BC. But beneath them is an older layer of much larger circles, up to 20 metres across, dating to the tenth millennium BC. Up to twelve T-shaped pillars around the edge of each space were connected by a stone bench. Two more giant pillars – up to 5.5 metres high and each weighing several tonnes – stood parallel in the centre, with traces of carved arms, belts and loincloths made of animal skins. Other stones are covered in carvings of animals: spiders, scorpions, vultures, foxes, boar, gazelles. The archaeologist and prehistorian Steven Mithen has said that Göbekli Tepe is ‘an amalgamation of Lascaux cave and Stonehenge’, and in time, too, it is a stepping stone, falling roughly midway between the two.
The discovery of huge stone monuments at such an early date – 12,000 years old – was astounding. It takes colossal effort and organisation to erect constructions like this, with hundreds of people working together; other sites on such an enormous scale aren’t known until thousands of years later. Archaeologists had assumed that hunter-gatherers simply weren’t capable of doing it. They figured that the conversion to agriculture, perhaps triggered by climate change or growing populations, eventually made such monuments possible by providing the resources for large, permanent settlements. This led to a more complex society, as well as changes in religious belief, which together produced both the ability and the motivation to create giant symphonies in stone.
There were dissenters. The French archaeologist Jacques Cauvin argued in the 1990s that cultural or religious changes must have come first. From a technical point of view, early humans could have started farming long before, ‘but neither the idea nor the desire ever came to them’. Something must have happened, he suggested, to change how they viewed the natural world. But there was little hard evidence for what that shift might have been, or how it happened.
What Schmidt found, however, suggested that Cauvin was right. Here was clear evidence of a complex, organised society, with some form of religion, or at the very least sophisticated mythology, all before the invention of farming. What’s more, the pillars of Göbekli Tepe were erected at precisely the place where farming was about to originate.
Biologists have pinpointed this small region, between the upper reaches of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, as the only place where all seven Neolithic founder crops (chickpea, einkorn wheat, emmer wheat, barley, lentil, pea and bitter vetch) grew together, while genetic studies of hundreds of einkorn and emmer wheat strains have concluded that domesticated versions of both likely originated from wild strains that grew in the Karacadag Mountains, just 30 kilometres from Göbekli Tepe.
Large numbers of people, maybe hundreds, would have had to congregate on the hilltop to build Göbekli Tepe. Simply having to feed them all may have created pressure to develop new and more predictable food sources. Mithen has suggested that gathering and processing wild grain at or near the site could have led to fallen grain springing up and being gathered again, leading over time to domesticated strains. Rather than being a response to climate change, he concluded, the domestication of wheat ‘may have been a by-product of the ideology that drove hunter-gatherers to carve and erect massive pillars of stone on a hilltop in southern Turkey’.
But the connection might run deeper than that. German archaeologist Jens Notroff and his colleagues, who have continued excavating Göbekli Tepe since Schmidt’s death in 2014, see clear evidence of a shifting relationship to the natural world, as suggested by Cauvin. In the cave art of the Palaeolithic, people are rarely represented; it’s the animals that take centre stage. By contrast, the foxes, snakes and scorpions of Göbekli Tepe are reduced to smaller attributes or decorations on those huge anthropomorphic pillars. As the team put it in 2015, ‘humans are no longer depicted as a coequal part of nature, but are clearly more prominent and “raised” above the animal world’. The art shows, they argue, that people had already begun exerting power over nature: a ‘mental control’ that led to the subsequent physical control of domestication.
Another striking aspect of Göbekli Tepe is an apparent obsession with death. The art here features multiple images of headless people, as well as statues of heads apparently broken from larger statues. Among animal remains found in the sediment – thought to be the debris from lavish feasts – are hundreds of pieces of human bones. Anthropologists reported in 2017 that most of these are from skulls, and that some are carved with grooves and holes in a way that suggests intact skulls were once hung up for display.
Schmidt interpreted the abstract T-shaped statues as beings from a ‘transcendent sphere’ (naturalistic statues found at this site and elsewhere show that the builders could depict realistic humans when they wanted to). And, intriguingly, the circular enclosures appear to have been accessed not via doors or gateways but through small openings in ‘porthole stones’. One of these stones is decorated with a boar lying on its back. The circles, Schmidt suggested, represented the realm of the dead, which could only be entered by crawling through the hole.
In fact, a preoccupation with death and particularly skulls emerges across the region at this time and in the centuries following, with human remains commonly buried inside people’s houses. At sites such as Jericho and ’Ain Ghazal in Jordan, dating to the tenth and ninth millennia BC, selected skulls were removed after death and given faces made of plaster, with shells for eyes, before being placed under the floor. At Çayönü, southern Turkey, archaeologists found a building that they called the ‘House of the Dead’, dating to around 8000 BC, with 66 skulls beneath the floor and the remains of a further 400 people. It also held a large, flat stone like an altar, with traces of human and animal blood.
A particularly bizarre example is Çatalhöyük, a 20-metre-high mound on Turkey’s Konya Plain, a few hundred kilometres from Göbekli Tepe. The mound contains mud-brick houses from a settlement that housed thousands of people at its height in around 7000 BC. The closely packed houses were dug down into the ground, and entered by climbing down a ladder through a hatch in the roof. Inside, the houses were richly decorated with paintings, as well as sculptures of animals that burst out of the walls. There were no doors; to move between rooms, inhabitants had to crawl through portholes. The small chambers were further subdivided into sections, just a metre square, which occupied different vertical levels, with their edges marked or guarded by bulls’ heads. Human bones were found buried beneath these platforms and in the walls, including a stillborn foetus enclosed in a brick.
The residents seem to have found the walls of their houses highly significant. As well as embedding objects in them, some had small, undecorated alcoves just big enough for a single person to crouch within. And wall sculptures of animals such as leopards and bulls were repeatedly replastered, up to a hundred times.
It seems a crazy way to live: cramped, dark and difficult to move around. Ian Hodder, an archaeologist at Stanford University who has been excavating the site since 1993, has concluded that for the residents of Çatalhöyük, the physical structure of their houses was entwined with their mythical beliefs: ‘The world was replete with substances that flowed and transformed, and with surfaces that could be passed through.’
Archaeologist and rock-art expert David Lewis-Williams goes further. He believes that people here were deliberately mimicking the experience of crawling through limestone caves.