Was Gobekli Tepe the World’s First Temple?

Many people may not be aware of an incredible archaeological discovery in Turkey that is turning upside down our conception of how the first cities were created. In 1994, Klaus Schmidt, a German archaeologist with a specialization in the Paleolithic and early Neolithic periods, visited a remote location in southwestern Turkey not far from the border with Syria. It was a stone-littered, gently rounded hill (locally known as Gobekli Tepe) that rose 50 feet above the surrounding flat landscape. Anthropologists from the University of Chicago and Istanbul University had toured the site in the 1960s and wrote it up it as nothing more than an abandoned medieval cemetery. As soon as Schmidt saw the hill its shape stood in stark contrast to the rugged plateaus nearby. He immediately recognized the hill as human-made and thought it just might be a gigantic Stone Age site. Since Schmidt was in the region to do a detailed archeological survey of prehistoric sites he was determined to find out if the hill had any significance and organized an exploratory dig for the following year.

In that 1995 excavation, Schmidt and five fellow archeologists unearthed huge stone megaliths buried so close to the surface they had been nicked and scarred by the plows of farmers who had lived in the area. After digging a little deeper, with great excitement they discovered large, T-shaped stone pillars, 16 feet tall and weighing between seven and ten tons, arranged in circles or rings of slightly smaller stones facing inward. The largest ring found at this point in the excavation, early 2012, is 65 feet in diameter.

In the years since that first excavation, Schmidt has been busy supervising a team of more than a dozen German archaeologists, gangs of local laborers, and many dozens of wide-eyed graduate and undergraduate students. One of his most important achievements is the mapping of the entire summit of Gobekli Tepe using ground-penetrating radar and geomagnetic surveys, plotting the locations of 16 other megalith rings that are still buried on the summit’s 22 acres.

But what surprised the archeological team was what they did not find: no artifacts that would indicate permanent settlement, no middens (deposits of detritus containing shells, animal bones, and other refuse that demonstrated human occupance), no evidence of charcoal or scorched rock that would indicate cooking, no structures that could have served as dwellings. Nor did they find any clay fertility figurines that typically litter sites in the surrounding region that are about the same age. But signs of tool use, including stone hammers and blades, were nearly everywhere, especially in the form of reliefs carved into the sides of the stone pillars. Those tools closely resembled others found in nearby sites that previously had been carbon-dated to about 9000 B.C.E. Therefore, Schmidt and his colleagues estimated that Gobekli Tepe's stone structures are the same age, somewhere around 12,000 years old. The limited carbon-14 dating Schmidt had done at the site confirmed that assessment.

A 14-year analysis of more than 100,000 bone fragments found at Gobekli Tepe has determined that the bones were from native wildlife, including gazelles, boar, sheep, red deer, cranes, ducks, geese, and even vultures. Many of the bone fragments have cut marks and splintered edges, indicating the animals were butchered and probably cooked, perhaps as sacrificial offerings. The site contains no evidence of domesticated animals or grains, indicating to Schmidt that the people who built Gobekli Tepe were hunter-gatherers who had located around the site to build the “temple” and were not sedentary farmers.

Okay, so what does all that mean? First, if the dating is accurate then Gobekli Tepe pre-dates Stonehenge by about 6,000 years, which in itself is drop-jaw amazing. Second, the massive carved stones and rings-circles were created and assembled as large-scale structures with symbolic meaning by prehistoric people who had no metal tools and had not developed pottery. Third, if Schmidt has interpreted the structures correctly, the site may be the world's oldest designed and constructed place of religious worship, a “cathedral” on a hill built by a prehistoric hunter-gatherer people about whom next to nothing is known. Fourth, again if Schmidt has interpreted the structures correctly, Gobekli Tepe may indicate that the previous theories about cities being created first by sedentary farmers with the temples coming later may have it exactly backwards.

In other words, Schmidt believes Gobekli Tepe was constructed before the domestication of plants and animals, before people settled in large-scale sedentary agrarian-based communities, and before the rise of some kind of fairly widespread social stratification or differentiation. Schmidt’s argument is that the extensive effort to build places of religious worship literally laid the foundations for the development of what, for lack of a better word, we call civilization. It’s a provocative theory that historians, archeologists, and anthropologists will likely debate for decades.

Disappearing Nature

Many Westerners and most Americans tend to think of the future in a time span that seldom exceeds two or three years at the outside. We have a genuine blind spot that seems to prevent us from contemplating a future that’s more than a few years distant. Most people would say that’s simply part of our cultural make-up but I actually believe it may be a fundamental aspect of human nature that we’re reluctant to examine. We focus on the here and now to the exclusion of the longer term. Why worry about food or water availability twenty or thirty years from now when we have plenty today? That’s why, eventually, all of the Earth’s natural environments are doomed. I don’t mean “eventually” in terms geologists love to use, like a giga annum, or one billion years. I mean in less than four or five generations. I can hear the outcry from here: “Four or five generations? Are you absolutely out of your mind? Who cares what’s going to happen in a hundred years?”

By this point I’ve probably lost 50 percent or more of my readers, who I know from experience are an unforgiving lot with almost zero tolerance for what they regard as yet another whacko rant. But, I ask the few more tolerant readers who may remain to stay with me for just a short while as I work through what is a difficult and vexing challenge.

As an entirely practical matter, as of early 2012 almost no natural environments remain anywhere on Earth. What we have before us today are quasi-natural, or even pseudo-natural, environments that have been altered by humans in ways that range from marginal (e.g. in ocean depths exceeding 7,000 feet and in the vast expanses of Antarctica) to substantial (the much abused Everglades) to absolute destruction, and here you better be thinking about the ecosystems that constituted Manhattan Island in the 1400s or Western Europe when the Gauls and Visigoths were trying desperately to free themselves from Rome's dominion.

Perhaps I should start with the direct impetus for this latest discourse, which was an article published on 2-5-12 in the Los Angeles Times about how a number of environmental organizations I once greatly admired and respected have abandoned the environment for will-o-the-wisp energy gains. I’m specifically referring to organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, and the Center for Biological Diversity that are in the process of sacrificing huge tracts of desert for solar power.

What is happening is both simple and enormously chilling. A number of nationally prominent environmental organizations, such as the ones mentioned above, have jumped into bed with the federal government to allow and encourage the solar power industry to engage in industrial-scale solar development on 21 million acres of arid and semi-arid public lands in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. That public acreage is more than the federal government has opened for oil and gas exploration over the last ten plus years. In other words, instead of acting as advocates for the protection of public lands and working to reduce our current patterns of energy and resource consumption, instead of leading a public outcry demanding an investigation into the adverse environmental effects of large-scale solar development on sensitive desert lands and threatened species, environmental groups have willingly and almost silently caved in and agreed to the sacrifice of thousands of square miles of desert to satisfy our ever increasing demand for more and more power.

No matter how many or how few solar projects will eventually be built, many hundred square miles of public land will be systematically altered and many thousand miles of electrical transmission corridors will be constructed through sensitive public lands. To be blunt, the environmental organizations in bed with the solar power industry are modern Judases who have betrayed the environment and those who have spent their lives advocating for the protection of the remaining sensitive quasi-natural ecosystems that remain.

That betrayal is yet another step in the eventual destruction of every large-scale natural and quasi-natural environment in America. The eastern and Midwestern forests fell to the demands of the lumber industry and agriculture more than 150 years ago. The Great American Prairie is but an almost forgotten memory now covered in pivot irrigation plots draining the Ogallala Aquifer’s lifeblood. And today environmental organizations have thrown the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts and other Western public lands under the bus to preserve our “In Growth We Trust” way of life. It is sickening and revolting.

America has willingly shackled itself to the familiar and comfortable “In Growth We Trust” development model wherein we believe we MUST continue growing or our entire way of life will almost instantly cease to exist and we and our children, grandchildren, and their children will be flushed down the veritable toilet into a new Dark Age where roving gangs of bloodthirsty bandits abound and life degenerates into one crashing wave of mindless chaos after another (which is the fantasy of many right-wingers and is why they provision their basements with a year’s supply of food and guns and ammunition). And that is why we continue to build non-sustainable cities that devour habitats, rely on non-sustainable agriculture that destroys ecosystems, and continue wiping out species after species with studied nonchalance and callous indifference as we rip the very last resource from the Earth.

We simply can’t be bothered to care or to examine what it is we are doing, much less consider ways we can change that behavior. “We did the best we could,” is the pathetic whine from all too many traitorous environmental organizations.

So, let’s all pile into our monster SUVs and head to Florida or California to play in the sun and sand like the spoiled children we are while enough gasoline is around to get us there and back. Let someone else worry about the future. We'll be too busy enjoying the good life while sucking up that great renewable solar power that will run our electric shavers, garage door openers, air conditioners, and electric tooth brushes we use three times a day to make sure our teeth are sparkling white and healthy. Too bad millions of acres of desert will have had to bite the dust, so to speak, for solar power to flourish. Oh, well, such is life.

My heartfelt belief is that there is no way to change that scenario. Absofuckinglutely none. As a species we are too indifferent, too stupid, too narcissistic, too short-sighted to change our profligate behavior. Like the Easter Islanders, we are too busy cutting trees to build monuments to our grandiose egos to see that in X number of years all the forests will have disappeared (yeah, that’s a metaphor). I’m just glad I’m in my late 60s and won’t be around to see the inevitable result.

As an aside, do most Americans ever wonder about the two and a half billion plus people in Asia who are determined to enjoy the same lifestyles upper-income Americans have today and reflect on exactly what that means in terms of resource and energy consumption? I’ll be kind enough to answer that rhetorical question for you: No, they do not and will not until crisis is right around the corner and we finally are forced to open our eyes and face reality. Once again, it’s part of human nature.

Here’s another aside: few of us recognize the cultural bias we reveal when we use the word “green” to indicate environmental values. Desert, of course, isn’t green so is therefore, in many eyes, an expendable wasteland that off-road vehicles and their brainless drivers and the solar power industry can destroy with gleeful impunity. As one idiot commenter succinctly put it to the LA Times in response to an article about developing the desert for solar energy, “It's the stinking desert, so what?"