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For a brief period of time, there was a consensus view on the history of human civilization: humans were first hunter gatherers, then developed agriculture, and finally developed religion, art, technology, and other aspects of culture.

But then, a 20th century architectural discovery threw all of this into question. Turkey’s Göbekli Tepe challenges the former understanding of the development of culture — in fact, it might even flip the previous consensus on its head..

Although Göbekli Tepe is over 12,000 years old, it still has much to teach us moderns: specifically, it helps you better understand the building blocks of culture, and how you can use that knowledge to live more fully…

Older Than Time

In the 1960s, a group of American researchers discovered an oddly-shaped hill in the southern region of Turkey. Noticing jagged chunks of limestone protruding from the hill, they dismissed it as a medieval cemetery, unworthy of serious archeological attention. 

Thirty years later, however, archeologist Klaus Schmidt visited the site and slowly came to understand the true nature of it. Over decades, Schmidt’s team revealed a bizarre find: six circular structures with concentric walls and no roofs, intricately decorated with a menagerie of carvings and statues.

Each structure held two T-shaped stone pillars, some as large as 18 feet tall. Filled with symbolic images and mysterious stones, it’s clear these buildings were part of a religious site. 

Constructed over 12,000 years ago by Neolithic peoples, these stone structures are more than twice as old as Stonehenge. In fact, they’re the oldest known works of human architecture in the world.

Buried beneath ground there are in fact 20 of these ancient rings in total — 95% of the site is yet to be excavated…

The Bedrock of Culture

Göbekli Tepe yields an incredible array of insights about prehistoric society. And when you consider that its structures are the oldest buildings known to history, the main take-away is impossible to miss: the first structures ever created by human architects were temples.

This discovery turns the traditional assumptions about human history upside-down. Historians previously assumed that prehistoric people discovered agriculture by accident. Then, once they learned to cultivate crops, they gradually shifted from a hunter-gatherer way of life to an agrarian one. 

The agricultural revolution was thought to have provided early people with an abundance of food, allowing them enough leisure time to concoct myths, create art, and build temples. In other words, we used to think that practical necessities were the basis of culture.

But Göbekli Tepe tells a different story. As the oldest structure known to history, it predates evidence of the agricultural revolution. Evidence in nearby regions shows that people settled and grew crops after the temples were constructed. This testifies to the concept that religion came before agriculture.

With today’s knowledge, historians now posit that ancient people built the temple, then developed agricultural practices so that they could permanently live near it instead of migrating to follow their prey. 

This begs the question: why did hunter-gatherers abandon their nomadic life to build the world’s first temple? 

Some researchers speculate it was built in response to the birth of the star Sirius, as the standing stones may be oriented towards the star’s path. Whether it was this or some other manifestation of the divine, the Neolithic people must have experienced an event of religious significance — so significant that they felt inspired to start work on something that would take several generations and hundreds of years to complete.

Prehistoric Lessons for Modern Day

The discovery changes our paradigm of culture. 

Modern culture is built on materialist assumptions about mankind: the belief that practical needs are more pressing than spiritual ones, and that physical reality is more “real” than metaphysical. 

As a result, we find ourselves in a culture that builds useful things instead of beautiful ones. If you’re in doubt, look around: do monolithic Walmarts, sprawling highways, and monumental gas stations meet the needs of our bodies, or our souls? 

Göbekli Tepe reminds us that we are a fundamentally religious species: meaning comes before civilization and drives practical developments — not the other way around.

True culture rises out of profound spiritual experiences and, in turn, reflects the depth of that spirituality. It’s no surprise that many of the most enduring and inspiring buildings in history are temples, chapels, and churches.

Modern culture’s obsession with practicality cuts against 12,000 years of human history.

World-spanning infrastructure allows us to communicate ideas, distribute food, and save lives in ways the ancient world never could have imagined. No matter what we’ve gained from industrialization, though, it’s not hard to perceive that, when our “standing stones” are highway overpasses and corporate skyscrapers, we’ve lost something along the way. 

First discovered almost 30 years ago, the revelation of Göbekli Tepe is only beginning to sink into our cultural consciousness. We can’t afford to ignore its insight into both our culture and ourselves. 

Art of the Week

Over 600 paintings haunt the walls of the caves in Lascaux, France. Five thousand years older than the structures at Göbekli Tepe, these paintings are a sophisticated art in their own right: the artists used the curvature of the cave walls to give the paintings dimensionality, and the graceful shapes of the depicted animals seem to set the stone in motion. 

Not only that, but the pigments used to create the paintings come from over 150 miles away from the cave site, implying that the Paleolithic artists either traveled or traded to obtain them — which is a level of complexity rarely associated with prehistoric art.

The mystery of the Lascaux images, as well as other cave paintings of the era, is their purpose. Unlike the clearly religious purpose of the Göbekli Tepe structures, it’s unclear whether the Lascaux paintings were religious, commemorative, or created for some other reason.

The ambiguity of the paintings adds to their beauty because it prevents the modern viewer from approaching them too analytically. By not knowing exactly why the ancient painters left these images, we have to focus on the images themselves — beautifully infused with the fluid grace of wild animals and the weight of millennia.