NARRATOR: Sanliurfa,
Turkey, October 1994. While plowing his field,
shepherd Safak Yildiz spots a strangely shaped stone
protruding from the ground. After brushing away the dirt,
he realizes that it may be part of a much larger object. Shortly after contacting the
local museum with his find, he is visited by Klaus
Schmidt from the German Archaeological Institute. HUGH NEWMAN: It wasn't
until German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt visited the site
and began digging they realized what was really at the site. WILLIAM HENRY: What he
discovered was mind blowing. After discovering the
first t-shaped pillar buried at the site,
he soon found more of these massive structures. NARRATOR: During the intensive
dig, Schmidt and his team begin to unearth dozens
of additional giant, stone monoliths covered
in intricate carvings. Some weighing as
much as 20 tons. PAUL BAHN: The site
of Gobekli Tepe is a series of
circular enclosures, but then in the center
of each enclosure you have two particularly
big, t-shaped pillars of limestone sort
of facing each other. Now many of these pillars have
remarkable carvings on them, wonderful carvings and
bas-reliefs of animals, birds, insects, all
kinds of things. So to fashion those
and carve them and set them up in
these structures was just absolutely amazing. NARRATOR: Archaeologists
estimate that it would have taken a team of 50 men
an entire week to move just one of the
monolithic pillars from the limestone quarry
to the top of the hill where they stand today,
and over 300 hours to carve the bas-reliefs. At this rate, each of
the five stone circles unearthed so far
would have required a full year to be completed. But why such a monumental site
was built in the first place remains a mystery. PAUL BAHN: It's very
difficult to know what the purpose of something
like Gobekli Tepe could be. And certainly Klaus
Schmidt had not reached any conclusions
except that it's clearly not a settlement. It's not a village. There is absolutely
no domestic refuge. Schmidt always hoped
that it was funerary and that there would be
burials underneath the walls or underneath some of
the pillars or so on. But so far, they
have not yet found any human remains at the site. There were no domestic
plants in the site. There are only
wild animal bones. Inevitably in archeology
if we don't know what something is for we think
of ritual, but really it's pure speculation. NARRATOR: Intrigued by evidence
that the structure might go back to a Neolithic
period, Klaus Schmidt has the sediment layers
of the site radiocarbon dated. The results indicated that
the stone structures could be as much as 12,000
years old, more than 5,000 years older than mankind's
first known civilization in Mesopotamia. More than that, it would place
the construction of Gobekli Tepe to a time when
mainstream scholars suggest humans were roaming
the earth as hunter gatherers. PAUL BAHN: Well, the
site of Gobekli Tepe really did send shockwaves
through the whole world of early prehistory because
we'd never before known or imagined even
that simple hunter gatherers could produce
such spectacular monumental structures. Now in archeology,
really since it began, we've always assumed that
hunter gatherers were capable of producing wonderful
works of art-- rock art, cave art, and things like that. But we never imagined that
they could come together in sufficient numbers to
make monumental constructions like Gobekli Tepe. NARRATOR: But if the currently
accepted timeline for mankind's advancement is correct, is it
possible that primitive hunter gatherers could have
built such sophisticated, megalithic structures? Ancient astronaut
theorists say, no. And instead, suggest that
Gobekli Tepe was built by the survivors
of a lost society, one that was almost
entirely wiped out by a worldwide cataclysm. And to support their claim,
they point to recent evidence of a catastrophic event, which
many mainstream scientists believe occurred at the
very end of the last ice age, which is believed to have
lasted from roughly 108,000 BC. until nearly 10,000 BC.
