Göbekli Tepe: The Dawn of Civilization

out among the foothills of southeast turkey not far from the syrian border lies a site so old as to be literally unbelievable before quebec tepe was discovered in 1994 it was thought no structure so complex could possibly have been created by hunter-gatherers the standard story was that our distant ancestors had first learned agriculture then settled down and only then started building the grand monuments but then along came quebecois tepe and it blew that theory totally out of the water dating back to at least 10 000 bc and possibly further quebec tepe turned our understanding of history on its head here was a grand awe-inspiring sight of clear religious importance the sort of thing you normally wouldn't expect to see so far back and yet it had been built by people who had never domesticated animals never learned to plant seeds and never made the transition to what we would call civilization but who were these mysterious ancient people and what was their greatest sight really for well today geographics is heading back to the dawn of time to witness the beginning of human culture [Music] among all the great ancient sites like stonehenge newgrange and the pyramids perhaps none has quite so unromantic name as gobekli tepe that's because quebecois tepe translates not as the place of ancient treasures or anything similarly atmospheric but rather as belly hill because apparently it looks like a fat old man lying on his back his saggy beer gut pointing at the sky but make no mistake while flabby dude hill may not sound all that ancient and mysterious the reality is that this may be the most ancient and most mysterious site of all it was here in the shadows of the mountains of southern turkey that humanity's first great construction project was born the story of quebecois tepe begins so far back in the distant past that it's effectively impossible to imagine normally in these kinds of videos we'd like to try and give you some reference point like how newgrange is so old that for the guys who built stonehenge it was already as ancient as machu picchu is for you but quebec tepe is so ancient that this simply won't work the great pyramid of giza for example was constructed around 2550 bc pause for a moment and think just how much humanity has fitted into four and a half millennia since then ancient greece alexander the great the roman empire the bible the koran colonization of the new world the discovery of electricity the nuclear bomb it's been a pact for centuries now know this the span of centuries separating you from quebec like tepe's construction is well three times longer where human time scales are involved there's old then there's ancients and then there's gobeklotepe the origin of this absolutely ancient monument begins roughly 15 000 years ago in 13000 bc so far back that our world looked completely alien vast ice sheets covered the northern hemisphere woolly mammoths and sabretooth tigers roamed the plains this was a world without metal without writing no pottery a world in which stonehenge wasn't even some caveman's idol daydream at this time humans mostly lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers surviving as the term hunter-gatherers might suggest by hunting animals and gathering wild growing crops shocker but while we typically imagine these tribes living in caves or maybe nifty ancient tents that could be easily moved that was all about to change as the year 13000 bc dawned the fertile crescent was about to undergo a transformation stretching from modern-day egypt all the way into southeast turkey before plunging back down into syria and iraq the fertile crescent was a strip of livable land sandwiched between extremes today astronomers searching for distant planets talk about the goldelock zone the magical place where conditions are not too hot and not too cold to support life well the fertile crescent was basically the goldilocks zone of prehistory surrounded by desert and arid plain it was just temperate enough to allow humans to thrive when the glaciers in the north finally started to retreat parts of the fertile crescent witnessed a remarkable phenomenon from 13000 bc on hunter-gatherers in the levant region started settling in villages known as natufian villages they featured communal living and were designed to be permanent but the one thing they didn't feature was what we once thought drove humans to urban living farming the villagers were all sustained purely by foraging now the natufian villages had mostly been abandoned by the time quebec tepe was built victims of a mini ice age that temporarily left the fertile crescent feeling like the hostile crescent but they are important to our story because they show that the concept of a settled pre-farming culture already existed it could be done it was this spark of human ingenuity that would lead to one of the most amazing structures in history one of the most remarkable things about quebec tepe is how little we still know about it although discovered in the mid-1990s only a small fraction has been properly examined so don't be surprised at the vague timeline in the section if you want to know the whole truth you'll have to wait another couple of decades anyway there are hints that early construction may have begun as far back as 12000 bc while this is uncertain it could show that quebec tepe was already important when the real work began around 10 000 bc at that time the region would have looked very different rather than dry brown earth fields of wild wheat would have swept away dotted with trees bearing fruits and nuts there would have been herds of gazelles rivers that tumbled across the landscape a veritable eden which may explain why the site was chosen frustratingly we know little of the wares and whys of building but what we can say is that at the dawn of the pre-pottery neolithic or ppn a bunch of dudes all started hauling heavy stones hundreds of meters to make standing circles here the heaviest of these blocks weighed close to 16 tons that to be chopped from the ground using only standard issue neolithic flints naturally this wasn't something some random band of hunter-gatherers could do while chilling out on a sunday they would have needed hundreds of people plus ways to feed them plus some kind of social hierarchy to organize everything remarkably there are no signs of this hierarchy at the site itself in fact there are no signs of habitation period no halfs no living spaces there's not even water the closest source is nearly five kilometers away what we do have though is evidence of nearby agriculture unlike an ancient sumer where farming and the need to tint crops seem to have sparked settled civilization the former lead archaeologist at quebec tepe suggested that the opposite happened here as the site went up cultivation of wild cereals began nearby presumably to feed the workforce and what a workforce this must have been while many ancient sites went through periods of rebuilding stonehenge for example had at least three distinct phases few did so often as quebec tepe before a century had passed the builders had buried the first circle of standing stones and erected a second circle within it a few decades after that they'd done the same again making a third circle jump forward another few decades and then buried the whole lot and started again from scratch with a brand new primary stone circle they did this again and again a 2003 geomagnetic survey revealed at least 20 separate rings buried in the hill so now you might wonder why did this happen and the answer is we simply don't know nor do we know why their building style evolved or rather should that be devolved starting in the 9th millennium bc the builders switched from making stone circles to making rectangles curiously they got worse at their jobs according to national geographic the greatest most artistic monuments at quebec tepe the stones placed there by the best engineers are the oldest ones as you come up through the later layers the skill behind them gets lesser and lesser until they look like something homer simpson might accidentally knock up while trying to assemble a barbecue finally some 1 800 years after construction began around the year 8200 bc buildings simply stopped at some long forgotten points in the dim and distant past the guys building this great monument decided they'd had enough and walked away never to return what exactly did they leave behind and well why should we care about it well for that let's take a detailed look at the site itself [Music] if you were an ancient hunter-gatherer what would you have witnessed if you journeyed to quebec tepe what would it have looked like well the first thing we should note is that it may have been covered although the excavated circles are all open air today the dig team thinks they may have once been roofed structures if that were the case then the interior was likely a dark mysterious place one perhaps lit by the eerie flickering of torches depending on the number of people inside it may have also been cramped each circle is a mere 10 to 20 meters in diameter not bad for an nyc studio apartment but less than great for a mass gathering but it's doubtful you'd spend too long worrying about this almost immediately your eyes would be drawn to the great stone pillars each circle at quebec tepe consisted of these limestone giants some shaped like spikes but most shaped like giant versions of the letter t blow stone walls connected these strange pillars strange for being so thin yet so wide in between them in the middle of each stone circle stood two pillars that were bigger and taller than all the others in fact these last pillars were a little too tall for the technology of the day the biggest is over five meters as a result the shallow grooves in the floor designed to hold them up were simply not enough leading some to suspect that they were supported with wooden posts yet there was more to these pillars than simple size each t-shaped pillar is home to a veritable safari park of carved animals these are carved boars roaring lions hissing snakes there are scorpions foxes and gazelle alongside a host of abstract artistic shapes the quality of these carved animals varies from well i guess it's kind of impressive for the time to holy crap were these done by time traveling michelangelo but they will have one thing in common they are nearly invariably male why that should be is something we just can't answer but whenever a carving chooses to depict an animal's gender it is always male the one female relief so far found seems to have been added at a much later date the animals are also nearly always dangerous while there are a few non-threatening creatures carved here such as the adorable ducklings at the feet of one pillar they mostly seem to be animals those who built the site likely feared are they there to be worshipped are they meant to guard this sacred site all we can do is sort of shrug however the reliefs at quebec tepe don't stop at animals those t-shaped pillars well the dig team thinks they're intended to resemble men certainly if you have sculpted arms or hands or appear to be wearing sculpted loincloths many of them are also incredibly ethophallic a wonderful euphemism archaeologists use to politely describe a statue carved with a massive penis the only thing these pillar men are lacking aside from the ability to outwit joseph joestar is heads and as we'll soon see there might be a good reason for that the last crucial thing to note about the site is the sheer number of bones that have been uncovered mostly belonging to gazelles and oryx basically a big-ass wild cow that's now extinct these bones seem to indicate that great feasts or sacrifices may have taken place here but the question remains what was it all for why did these long dead guys all suddenly band together to build what may have been the biggest man-made structure in existence and the answer is well there isn't a definitive answer but that doesn't mean we don't have plenty of theories [Music] by far the most mainstream theory on quebecois tepe's origin suggests that it was an ancient religious center as we mentioned earlier there was no water source and no signs of habitation so it's unlikely the site was occupied year round that might suggest a place people met only for specific feasts or festivals festivals that could range from worshipping certain gods to allowing young people from the surrounding communities to choose a partner one of the best pieces of evidence we have for this theory is the existence of smaller quebec tepes we found ancient settlements up to 200 kilometers away that have their own pillars carved in a similar style with similar images albeit on a much much smaller scale this led the original dig team leader klaus schmidt to theorize that these were the ancient churches of a long bygone religion with gobekli tepe being their equivalent of a cathedral thanks to the animal carvings it's been suggested that this religion could have been a form of animism but there are other theories one is that the people at quebecois tepe worshiped human skulls in 2017 three skull fragments were found at the site that had clearly been carved and modified after their owners died this is interesting because skull cults are known to have been a feature of ancient turkey with plenty of bygone churches exhuming dead ancestors long after burial in order to display their skulls it could be that a form of skull worship took place in quebec tepe this may even be why the pillar men have no heads yet not everyone is convinced that the site was a place of worship another leading theory although we should stress that this isn't accepted by the actual dig team working on the site is that gobekli tepe's purpose was astronomical the pillars are aligned with the night sky in such a way that they would have framed the rising of sirius the dog star at various points in time interestingly sirius one of the brightest objects in the night sky would have only become visible at this latitude in 9300 bc as proponents of this theory note the arrival of a new bright star may have been enough to kick-start a new astronomy-based religion but this is just the tip of the space claims others think the animal carvings on the pillars represent constellations that would have been visible when the site was constructed and one pillar may even record an ancient comet impact it's been theorized that a massive comet hit greenland around this time triggering a mini ice age and ushering in the era known as the younger dryers proponents of this theory believe that pillar 43 of quebecois tepe shows the devastating aftermath of this impact there are animals carved there which could represent constellations visible as the comet hit alongside them is a headless human figure perhaps symbolizing catastrophic loss of life in other words parts of quebecois tepe could be an ancient memorial to a forgotten cataclysm that being said we do need to point out that all of this is theoretical we still don't know for certain that a comet strike really occurred at this time just as we don't know whether gobekli tepe's founders really worship skulls or sirius or something else entirely short of inventing a time machine and going back in time and asking them all we'll ever have is educated guesswork but to be honest it's a miracle that we have even that without the chance occurrence of some seriously unlikely events we'd never have rediscovered gobekli tape at all at the time work stopped on gobekli tepe around 8200 bc the world as we know it was still unimaginable eons away the civilization we usually credit with being the first ancient sumer wouldn't rear its head for another 4 thousand years or about twice as long as the distance separating you from julius caesar so when we say gabeclotepo was lost we don't mean it in the mealy-mouthed eurocentric way that people might say that machu picchu was lost we mean that it totally vanished disappeared from local memory as effectively as it did from the global consciousness by the time any sort of record starts back up in the region it was just a curious hill-shaped mound that if you squinted looked a little bit like a big old beer belly pointing at the sky that's the way things stayed for thousands of years and they could have stayed that way for thousands more if it hadn't been for one enthusiastic german in 1983 the newly graduated klaus schmidt was in turkey to cut his teeth on his first post-doctorate dig the site was navali cory a stone age village in the country's southeast that was being hurriedly excavated before a reservoir submerged it forever schmidt spent several years at the dig on and off until finally the waters covered it in 1991 but rather than return to germany schmidt decided to stay on in turkey over the next couple of years he roved around the region taking part in minor digs here and there at some point in this period he finally read about potbelly hill 30 years earlier in 1963 archaeologists from the university of chicago had been surveying turkey's southeast and briefly paid gebekli teppy a visit however they concluded it was nothing more than an old byzantine military outpost one that had perhaps a graveyard dug a topper during the middle ages that meant that when the survey report was finally published it contained barely anything on gobekli tape beyond two or three dismissive sentences somehow klaus schmidt read this report and somehow he decided that this unexciting mound the archaeological equivalent of a weekend in delaware was worth a visit and that was how in 1994 schmidt found himself stood atop the ancient buried monument on the verge of a life-changing discovery the first thing that became apparent to schmidt was that this was no mere byzantine graveyard their ground was covered with flint fragments uncountable numbers alter schmidt's trained eye remnants of a stone age work site to see neolithic flints on such a scale was staggering enough that schmidt managed to convince the german archaeological institute to fund a dig in 1995 he and his team got to work and immediately struck the mother lode below mere centimeters of dirt were the tops of the great standing pillars that gobekli tepe is now famous for as schmidt's team dug deeper they eventually uncovered a full ring of ancient carved stones and then another and then another in no time at all schmidt realized he was looking at a discovery that wouldn't just make him famous in his field it might also rewrite everything we thought we knew about the dawn of civilization from that point on schmidt and his team watched as the world slowly woke up to the importance of their work in 2003 a geomagnetic survey revealed the full extent of the site for the first time the 20 separate rings that we mentioned earlier even today only the smallest fraction of these have been dug up and yet that has been enough for us to recognize the site's importance in 2018 unesco finally added abekle tape to their world heritage list placing it alongside other ancient venerable sites like the pyramids and petra sadly klaus schmidt was no longer around to witness this acknowledgement schmidt died of a heart attack on july 20 2014 while back home in his native germany in the end he devoted nearly his entire professional life to this one incredible site in southeast turkey today gobekli tepe's story is still a work in progress with so much more to uncover it's doubtless that awe-inspiring new discoveries will be made but fascinating new ruins will come to light as such we can't really call this the end of our video i mean sure it's the end for today but with so much still to be learned it's impossible to pretend this is anything like a definitive account yet it's amazing we're able to know even the little that we do now the rediscovery of quebec tepe was by no means a certain event just think about how much luck was needed to get klaus schmidt to potbelly hill the reservoir that flooded his previous excavation site the decision he made to look for a new dig in turkey rather than return home the fact schmidt read the one small paragraph ever written on gobekli tape and didn't just shrug and go nothing to see there the fact that he was trained to recognize those flint fragments when he saw them and realized their importance take out any of those tiny things and suddenly go back to tepe is just some hill that supposedly looks like a belly a place hiding a world-changing discovery that humans will never see it makes you wonder doesn't it what else might be out there hidden beneath the sands what other great discoveries may be abiding their time waiting to upend everything that we thought we knew in the end the discovery of gobekli tepe wasn't just good luck it was a transformative event one that in an instant broadened our perceptions of an entire era in prehistory and it may soon do so again it seems that quebecois tepe will continue to spill its secrets for a very long time so i really hope you found that video interesting if you did please do hit that thumbs up button below don't forget to subscribe and thank you for watching

Channel: Geographics

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Length: 21min 11sec (1271 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 19 2020