Göbekli Tepe - The First Temple On Earth? 10,000 BC // Ancient History Documentary

Foreign gods and mortals once walked the Earth, so old stories surely once told of the rituals, festivals and sacrifices of those

ancient

days. We can say little with certainty now. His people are gone. Deities thrown into the void. What really happened there. We probably were. You never know, and yet since its rediscovery by The Wider World in the 1990s, archaeologists, anthropologists and historians have done their best to weave a flimsy shell of a story to do justice to that low mound in ascent on the plains outside Eartha using a wide range of data and techniques to piece together a very basic idea of ​​what the place was and who its builders had been.

The more extravagant commentators go further by embellishing the flimsy archaeological data set with their own New Age religious leanings, preconceived ideas that they turn into concrete evidence of wild grasses, wild grains and not yet domesticated prey animals into landing zones for aliens or the Biblical Garden of Eden, wonderfully complex genuine hunter-gatherer ancestors in

ancient

super-civilizations, in reality, the secrets of Go

bekli

tepe

remain hidden for the most part, unlike other more famous discoveries in archaeological

history

, such as The Tomb of Tutankhamun or the royal cemetery of UR here there is very little to contribute about the little contemporary evidence that corroborates what happened to explain those approximately 200 monoliths arranged in 20 megalithic enclosures, some of them more than five meters high and their surfaces covered in Strangers even nightmares.

Written accounts of these creatures would not exist for another 5,000 years. In recent years, discoveries of neighboring sites with enclosures similar in scale such as Karahan Tepe have added to the already growing ranks of the so-called Stone Hills complex in the foothills of the Southern Taurus Mountains Sites such as navali chori in Shinu the mere fact of That Go

bekli

Tepe is not actually unique, but a piece in a much larger picture, makes it even more enigmatic and captivating, thus opening up seemingly endless new lines of inquiry with its origins well established. More than ten thousand years ago, perhaps its antecedents are even older, the age of this incredibly sophisticated Stone Age culture has been enough to solidify its place at the forefront of prehistoric archaeology, even venturing into the world of popular culture, it is one of the great one of the most important archaeological discoveries and the largest excavations of all time, on a par with Jericho O'Rourke and the tomb of Pakal Risas, although it was discovered much earlier, only in the decade of 1990, the impact of obekli

tepe

on the cultural Zeitgeist has already been as great as that of Lasko rock art in the 19th century only time will tell what future discoveries will be made and how they will point to evidence and research and, without However, even after putting so much time and effort into the excavation, we are still mostly adrift.

To reflect and contemplate the outrageously complicated carvings and

temple

s left behind by those people who lived so impossibly long ago, it will take many decades more, centuries, even until the mass of evidence accumulates enough that the mysteries of those ancient days can truly be revealed. and retold as of 2021, less than five percent of the site has been excavated and yet using the most recent archaeological data, historical stories, mythological and anthropological theories, this is the full story, not just of Gobekli Tepe, the world he inhabited. You are looking at the timing of

history

. As always, I'm your host, Pete Kelly, the one-man team behind the channel.

If you want to help me as I continue creating these giant monsters, don't forget to like and subscribe, leave a comment to let me know what you think. and subscribe to my free newsletter where I travel to distant lands visiting the greatest archaeological sites humanity has ever known. Please, shortly we will return to one of those rare places, the greatest of all time, one of the most mysterious of all. It has taken me well. It took more than a year to make and lasts almost three hours. First, a quick word from our sponsor, thanks to War Thunder for making this long and time-consuming project possible in the millennia after gebekli Tepe.

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Millions of liters of water were quickly converted in a torrent that floods one of the richest archaeological landscapes in the world Irreplaceable settlements and monuments that disappear under the flood, the

first

of many similar investments by the Turkish government to feed and water the tens of millions of people who live in the dry southeast from the country. Widely condemned internationally, largely by nations with abundant clean water, Turkey's government was then far from a corrupt dictatorship, as in many places in the Middle East, as a result of Ataturk's reforms some decades earlier, a genuine internal desire to carry out archaeological investigations.

Colossal construction projects to flood the ancient river valleys were followed by a series of cutting-edge excavations instigated both by Turkish teams that are now catching up with the West in terms of sophistication and by an invasion of well-funded invited researchers from around the world. To help with this unique opportunity to rescue the ancient past of the entire region, it was not long before astonishing discoveries began to be made. Four years earlier, in 1964, an American team working at the Neolithic site of Chionu had already delayed the clock in the region thousands of years under the supervision of Robert Braidwood the settlement had been discovered to date back more than 10,000 years.

Braidwood would continue working at Cherno for another 14 seasons, but it would be at navali chori where they would really make headlines. the world hid in a small side valley of the Euphrates in a region already destined for submergence under another lake that was planned to form navali chori, which translates rather ominously as the Valley of Plague. It was initially investigated in 1979 and was

first

thought to be from the Early Bronze Age in origin it turned out to be much older as Cherno navali chori was over 10,000 years old when excavations at the Early Neolithic site began in 1983.

It was a long time before an unusually complex series of huge free-standing stone buildings began to be un

earth

ed Known as the Roman burial from 1987 onwards, excavations brought up four things never before seen by modern ice. They began to un

earth

a defective terrazzo building or enclosure, elaborately constructed with layers of burnt lime and then, as they dug downwards, one of the pillars turned out to be an anthropomorphic being from an even earlier time unfortunately missing its head, Archaeologists were simply amazed when the place disappeared under the waters of the Ataturk Dam in the winter of early 1992. They were left thinking about the ancestors, gods or demons who had once called the place of origin at about the same time one of the German archaeologists who worked in navali chori used to make trips to the museum in sanlierfa his name was Klaus Schmidt and we will soon hear much more about him with a population of over a million of the great cities of world history erfa received his honorary title from Stanley , meaning honored at the dawn of the 20th century after staunch defenses against the Russians in the turmoil of that time, but long before that name Odessa of this medieval power foreign Crusader Lords had carved out a kingdom in the equally chaotic century XII the fall of the city had been the main catalyst of the Second Crusade the name itself was brought by Alexander the Great during his relentless march to the ends of the Earth in the 4th century BC, given by his soldiers to It reminds them of Odessa in his homeland of Macedonia, but even in those days the place was already an ancient foreigner situated around a series of caustic springs.

Rich irrigated farmland stretches in all directions, just as the great Taurus rain chain has done for millennia. The Anatolian mountains and plateau rise to the north at this gateway to the rolling plains of Mesopotamia. The myths and legends associated with the place are legion enough for entire libraries of scholars, although most have been lost over the millennia. The prophet Abraham, patriarch of the three religions of the book, is said to have venerated the sacred springs here abroad. How long had people lived around those ponds in the center of the city? At the time no one could tell, but one thing is always very clear: he has lived many lives.

On a fateful visit to the museum in 1994, Klaus Schmidt perused the warehouses of the influential institution as usual for a time among the countless Byzantine and Greco-Roman altars, although it seemed very ordinary. One day when everything in his life was about to change now armed with the new knowledge gained about navali chori Klaus Schmidt saw something in the urfa museum that should not have been there two naturalistic statues Cotillion in their form wrongly categorized as Byzantine Schmidt was immediately better able to recognize the similarities with the much older sites he had been working on, but how had they gotten to the museum and where had they come from?

Fortunately someone at the museum knew exactly and just a few hours later Schmidt along with two colleagues were in a taxi heading down dirt roads into the Hill Country northeast of the city to a dark plot of land on a desolate rock known as Pot Belly Hill. and, as Schmidt would soon discover, its Turkish name Gobekli Tepe was already known to archeology seven or eight years earlier, local landowner Ibrahim Yidis and his son Mahmoud had been clearing bushes on the hill. Overlooking their property when one of their swords hit something solid, strange statues were then pulled out of the ground, but there was a problem in the confusing days that followed as one of the statues clearly had a large penis showing that the two men They kept them hidden while a steady stream of villagers came to see the discovery, not wanting to be perceived as idolaters and shame their family.

Finally, the local imam came to see the foreign finds, reprimanding the men recognizing the potential significance of the finds, he encouraged the two farmers to take them to the Eartha Museum. Heading in a horse cart along the old road towards the West, once When the two men arrived, the museum director politely informed them that the pieces were unfortunately not very old or particularly significant, demoralized thinking that the trip had been in vain so they did not have to pay for another car ride home, they left the pieces in the museum. The blame for the garden must lie with the museum staff, however, nor with the farmers, because at that time nothing like it had ever been found and this was not the first time.

The importance of Gobekli Tepe had been overlooked nearly 30 years earlier, in the 1960s, during Robert Braidwood's initial work at Chiono, another American archaeologist had scoured the region for evidence of similar sites and, although his Later report, dating from 1963 to 1972, ultimately overlooked the true importance of the place. Peter Benedict had spent quite some time at Gobekli Tepe amidst a vast carpet of thousands of Flintstones glistening under the scorching sun, he found broken pieces of pottery, flint blades and stone artifacts, many of whichwhich had been piled up by farmers over the years. decades, if not centuries, and yet Gobekli Tepe was just one among thousands graced curiously in the shadow of a large mulberry tree rising from the top of the hill.

Benedict wrote about the location of a cemetery that has never been found. Islamic cemeteries are of course taboo for archaeologists, which might be why he ruled out the site for further research, it just didn't occur to Benedict's wildest imagination that virtually the entire hill could be a great tell. The remains of thousands of years of occupation Schmidt arrived in 1994. It wasn't long before he came to that same conclusion: far from a cemetery, the stones half buried at the top of the hill in the process of being gradually excavated by the locals. The farm workers had the same style of T-shaped pillars previously found at Navali Chori, but here they were everywhere you looked, with just a little testing, excavation artifacts could also be easily pulled out of the ground, such as those of the Eartha Museum, without which.

The sight may not have been found, please, when the Turkish archaeologist Murat Akman arrived at the hill, whose previous excavation experience included both chionu and navali chori under Schmidt's mentor Harold Haltman. Schmidt didn't have to say anything with little more than a glance at them both. The men intuitively knew that everything in their field was about to change. Southeastern Turkey could be a dangerous place at that time shaken by fierce fighting with Kurdish separatist groups and when local villagers saw a group of strangers wandering through their fields that day , they appeared armed and ready to eventually defend themselves through diplomatic channels. skills of a Kurdish taxi driver, the situation broke down and the People's Guards armed with AK-47s backed down.

That day, Klaus Schmidt realized that, for better or worse, his previous research plans had become completely irrelevant and he had no choice but to devote the rest of his life to it. Just a year later a huge team arrived and began one of the great excavations in world history. The farmers, already unaware in the excavation process, received compensation for their land and, despite the damage caused by the shovel and plow over decades. and centuries was large in scale and the preservation of the site was astonishing to behold. The excavation was slow and methodical using the latest in cutting-edge scientific techniques, but almost immediately a series of realizations were made, not just one area but the entire hill was covered.

In megalithic architecture, all sides were carefully worked by hand and not only that, but there were broken pieces everywhere. Many are now located in the so-called stone garden on one side of the hill. The first meticulously documented semi-subterranean navali chori enclosures in the 1980s did not. In fact, they have similar characteristics to those founded at Gobekli Tepe, dating back to the same time as carbon dating twelve thousand years ago, not long after the end of the last ice age, but they were much larger by a couple of seasons. later and Gobekli Tepe was the most famous archaeological site.

In this part of the world that extends over some 25 hectares, at least 20 stone circles were unearthed, each containing pillars up to nine feet high covered with unprecedented elaborate carvings, predating Stonehenge and the pyramids of Egypt in about 7,000 years. The evidence clearly showed that the creators of this extraordinary set of monuments are a people without the technology to create pottery and, even more surprising, similar to the early levels of contemporary navali chori, completely devoid of agriculture, only the remains of Wild animals and plants are within sight of Eartha in some way. Having avoided Discovery for all those millennia, it was once a place of immense importance and, as the seasons passed and the evidence continued to accumulate, Klaus Schmidt began to form his opinions on the place as a spiritual center for a nomadic people. wealthy in a changing time.

The world was beginning to settle and farm, but it did not yet clearly possess a complex, well-developed culture and mythology reminiscent of our Paleolithic ancestors. This was a sanctuary of profound importance on the border between hunter-gatherers and our settled world that would come about 20 years ago. Years later, excavations continue and the site, which will always get funding, becomes more and more interesting. Geophysical studies continue to show a large number of other structures still buried beneath the Earth, only five percent of the site has been excavated today. Gebekli Tepe remains one of the key sites. The sites for understanding the transition from hunters to agriculture and the birth of civilization as we know it abroad can be clearly seen on the western horizon.

Its pot-bellied silhouette is the highest point on the windswept Earth's plain at first glance, especially in the height of summer. It is considered an unforgiving place caught in the gaze of the boiling sun with no obvious source of water and yet the probable remains of a Roman watchtower lie on the hillside, clear evidence of ancient quarries around it if Inspected more closely, it is more than half a meter in diameter. The large stone rings around the site may have served as cisterns for rainwater and from the top of the hill you can see springs scattered all around, such as those at nearby Balik and perhaps more existed in the antiquity they have long since dried up.

The obvious thing about walking along Ridgeline on the pot-bellied hill is that it has a commanding view of a landscape around the Taurus Mountains to the north and the Haran Plains to the south as you approach from the south, particularly the next town of Mardin. Another famous settlement from the Crusader era can be clearly seen from a distance of 20 kilometers or more. In retrospect, it is difficult to understand how such a place was overlooked; the landscape itself seems to hint at a certain level of importance once upon a time. You know where you are looking and when the buildings finally began to be stabilized and excavated in the mid-1990s.

Sunken chambers dug deep into the hillside that opened for the first time in over 10,000 years the site became increasingly unusual were not found. No obvious chimneys or ovens or traces of domestic life of any kind, wrote Klaus Schmidt in an initial report concluding that the structures were not only roofless but ultimately unfit for human habitation, in stark contrast to the navali chori, which at least in its later phases were colonized by very early sedentary farmers who lived in permanent houses without evidence of any sedentary agriculture seemed to have a purely ceremonial character. All the excavated buildings of the second and third levels at gebekli Tepe had been houses, but of the Divine at least at the bottom. levels built not by early Neolithic farmers but by hunter-gatherers still living off the Earth's bounty, perhaps like Greek Delphi or Cuzco in Peru, the sacred seascapes of the Earth where pilgrims traveled from afar for sporadic Festival activities , including raising vast monuments to ancient gods, ancestors or demons, but who do not live on the site year-round, could have been a cult site.

A large collection of animal remains have been discovered at Gobekli Tepe, including cattle, pigs, goats and a large number of gazelles, but after intense study by some of the world's leading experts they discovered that all the animals were variants wild and undomesticated they have different bone structures, like the plant remains the wild almond pistachio and kernels found in abundance, wild variants of which still grow in the area today. The idea that made its way into the popular Zeitgeist in the late 1990s, postulated in part because of the shiny sickle blades and early forms of wild wheat found at the site, was the suggestion that Gobekli Tepe had been one of the real places where the neolithization process took place.

In other words, it began when hunter-gatherers began experimenting with agriculture; After all, when agriculture began to take hold, analysis of ancient grains appears to locate one of their points of origin in the earth. A plan. An early idea suggests the controlled use of grain and other foods were the result of overexploitation of local resources as a result of increasingly larger groups of people congregating over an extended period of time in his 2004 Masterpiece After the Ice Stephen Mithun goes further, evoking images of acolytes ritually passing seeds back and forth in some ancient lost ceremonies before moving on to other locals to spread some vital message or foreign story.

We know from other parts of the world that stone circles and megaliths are often erected in times of great upheaval and change. In 2014, Klaus Schmidt had published several articles and a detailed book on the initial finds at Gebekli Tepe and another was on the way; Only three or four percent of the site had yet been excavated, although it already makes it one of the world's top archaeological destinations, making its way into all of them. For 20 years, the ever-modest and patient Klaus Schmidt has been a helpful servant of the site, devoting all his energy to speaking tours and tourism, fighting misinformation, and spreading knowledge of archeology to the general public, always making was available even as he was publicly attacked by both fringe theorists and dogmatic archaeologists of aging, finally in 2014 it all came to an end one Sunday afternoon at a swimming pool in his native Germany.

Klaus Schmidt's heart failed at the time of his death in 2014. Klaus Schmidt had already cemented his place in the annals of archaeology, his excavation will go down as one of the most famous in all of history, completely altering our understanding of the origins of civilization as we know it, such as Troy Olympia and the great Mayan ruins of Copan. Diggs It will probably continue for another century or more, the site will never struggle to obtain funding, most surprising of all at the time, and in the years since more similar sites have been unearthed, perhaps most famously at Karahan Tepe, but it is They are digging up a lot of others. partly by a whole new generation of enthusiastic Turkish archaeologists inspired by people like Klaus Schmidt, the results are surprising and far from being an isolated phenomenon Gobekli Tepe was part of an entire culture similarly built by hunter-gatherers, many of whom They look at chienu and navali chori.

They ultimately turned to incipient agriculture at the end of the lifespan of their settlements, compared to the common pattern of early agricultural communities previously discovered in the Near East, generally located further along the Levantine coast towards the south. south, in places like Jericho, although Beckley Tepe and her sister. The sites here offer a very different point of view from that of domestic dwellings. It seems that maximum effort has been put into creating monuments of a non-utilitarian nature. Vast amounts of time and energy have been invested in creating more than 200 T-shaped pillars, the largest of which were three or four times taller than a person's height, intricately arranged in at least 20 stone circles covered in carvings that spanned about 25 acres.

The site was clearly of utmost importance to all who participated, only to be intentionally filled in around 8000 BC. Until Oblivion at the end of its life, an even bigger break from the paradigm was the fact that it was the early levels that produced some of the largest and most impressive pillars and animal carvings in complete defiance of conventional logic, the monoliths seemed to become smaller and more modest as the years go by. long away from a supposed beginning of all things, Berkeley Tepe seems curiously like an ending that hints at a great mythological tradition stretching back to the perennial Mists of the Ice Age;

It is even possible that long-lost wooden circles preceded it, similarly they once wanted monuments that rotted away. Towards oblivion, so many thousands of years ago, Claus Schmidt always lived in the hope of finding a founding cemetery beneath one of the enclosures and, in part, in the light of the arms and hands that were found adorning some of the pillars that perhaps they once represented. foreign people the site may have been a monument to revered ancestors clearly whatever its purpose this was a place built with great skill and care the seven meter long threaded pillar that still lies inits quarry on the Northern Plateau tells us much about other quarry sites found around the hill, although not only construction technologies were used here, but also logistical support networks as well developed as the mythology and ritual lives of the oldest of prehistoric societies, far from long-standing construction projects drawn up over long periods of time.

At that time, archeology suggests that each enclosure was raised in a singular event lasting weeks or months without animal power or metal tools. Schmidt hypothesized that around 500 people would be needed as a workforce, further speculating on the existence of some type of priestly class to plan the organization. and contextualize the work perhaps intentionally or inadvertently. United with a singular purpose, it had the effect of uniting the group. A form of community worship that operated as social glue. Schmidt's death. An increasingly wide range of alternative hypotheses have been discussed too far in the middle of the distant Pacific Ocean, experiments with the megaliths of Easter Island have shown that the moai there could have been created and erected by groups of people significantly smaller than Schmidt's hundreds.

In one experiment, only 12 men were able to lift a weight of 20 tons. statue in just under three weeks, it is plausible, though not definitive, that Schmidt may have exaggerated the amount of manpower needed at Quebec Tepe, only a few dozen people potentially have researched and erected the monoliths there, given the sunken nature of the enclosures and defects particularly impressive. Inside it is also possible that the megaliths once supported roofs, an artificial cave rather than a

temple

to the star-filled sky, as at Navali Chori and Shinu. The flooring found in the Gobekli Tepe enclosures was made in a style known as terrazzo.

Examples of this type are found anywhere in the world, painstakingly created by applying layers of burnt lime and clay over and over again to create a smooth, luxurious surface on navali chori and chianu; however, only one example has been found at Gobekli Tepe; appear again and again in one case, four terrazzo floors having been built directly on top of each other over the long generations, thanks to all the work of an army of scientists and scholars, of course, it remains impossible to completely reconstruct the interactions of that disappeared culture today on how the people of Gobekli interacted with Cherno navali chori karahan and the others, whether they borrowed elements from each other for their own way of life, whether they already shared the same culture and stories, however , the same themes arise again and again, most obviously in the countless baz carvings and reliefs of that March. crawling and flying over every visible surface, almost all depictions are of animals that appear so fully formed and so unfathomably old that they are difficult to understand.

It is these exceptionally artistic carvings that give us the best chance of recovering from extinction just a bit of that clearly well-developed ancient culture that gives us some insights into why this place arose, a hint of the long road to our world that may lie ahead. been forged in the process in 1993, just before the discoveries at Gebeckley Tepe. Construction workers excavating around the Balakugal area of ​​Eartha city center came across something they did not expect: ancient deep-water springs known today as the pools of Abraham. Empty, lifeless eyes stared from the foundations. Debris prominently displayed today at The Cutting Edge. new museum in the heart of the city the urfa man measures 1.8 meters tall and is around 11,000 years old.

It is the oldest life-size naturalistic sculpture ever discovered in the world and, although badly damaged by construction work over the millennia. Since its creation, when it was briefly investigated in 1997 before construction work was completed, The Earth around the statue turned out to be a pre-pottery Neolithic settlement with similarities to Quebecy Tepe, concrete evidence of the city's deep antiquity, and yet the sculptures at Gobekli Tepe are quite different even from the pre-Pottery Neolithic world. pottery, at the beginning of agriculture, theirs was a symbolic landscape populated almost entirely by wild animals. Thanks to all the excavated enclosures, particularly a b c d e and f, powerful animal forms are shown, often represented with prominent penises.

For some reason, unlike early contemporary agricultural societies, the female form is almost never depicted. Clay figures of the so-called Mother Earth are not found here, in a culture quite different from that of the South, in places like Jericho, the fierce world of hunters. It took precedence in Enclosure C, where three concentric rings of walls were successively built, one after the other, over the years, gradually decreasing the size of the interior. In this so-called House of the Wild Boars, the wild boars dominate, the wild boars show their teeth threateningly, another lies on its dead back, perhaps almost all the animals are males, there are also several representations of human skulls ranging from the smallest to the largest. , some also show prominent penises and erect unexplained holes steps and small cups are also found with suggestions of supports for small fires Delight the enclosure during the night Interpretations of the enclosure range from the house of worship of a clan that uses the wild boar as a heraldic totem to a nightmarish depiction of beasts guarding the entrance to the underworld enclosure that Klaus Schmidt affectionately referred to as the The Stone Age Zoo is a much more varied affair, a veritable smorgasbord of fauna on display as Enclosure C .The Zorro can be seen running around the other creatures.

Oh, this one has snakes coming out of where his penis should be. The long scene is particularly wise animals in later Mesopotamian myth and Beyond and with links to potentially even earlier shamanic beliefs from around the world, suggestions are often made from illusions to shape-shifting rituals and trances with the fox representing the figure of the shaman in other places gallop gallop over the stones judging by their frequency in the pillars In many of the enclosures and in the skeletal remains seem to be of particular importance. Vultures, creatures long associated with the realm of the Dead, are seen, but other birds also proliferate.

Cranes, a type of migratory waterfowl, are common, perhaps suggesting some appreciation for the particular The striking dance that these animals periodically perform among the most frequent motifs depicted at Gobekli Tepe are snake cultures around the world, often associated with the underworld. In the late 1980s, one of the most surprising finds made at Navali Chori was the so-called Snake Carrier. A larger than life statue with a poisonous viper sprouting from the back of its bald head, although unfortunately the face had been broken off long ago. It is close to the cortical crust of Tepe. Many serpentine images of this type are found too scratched on stone vessels, as well as on scorpions, another animal associated with the kingdom of the dead is also found at Gobekli Tepe similarly in the middle of the Euphrates at the important site of Jerf El akmar.

Pictograms are also seen. They are also found even as far away as Tell Caramel, to the south, in Mesopotamia, where powerful prehistoric towers like those are found. of Jericho lie too strange between Gobekli Tepe and the southern plains seem to have been a border zone of converging cultures and ideas, a melting pot of ideas and cultural trajectories different, but not isolated, the more we learn about the world around gebekli Tepe . In the void that existed in the early '90s, the more incredible the story becomes, as tempting as it is to talk about the serpent that tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Any such allusion to much later stories may well be entirely illusory, quite simply, although many would disagree with elaborate intellectual journeys of shamanic rituals and totemic creatures. For the most part, the images of Gobekli Tepe have lost their meaning. The intricate and often crowded gatherings of creatures, be they guardians, cultural heroes or symbolic representations to ensure the success of the hunt. Illustrated aids to telling fable stories that were once as famous as the ones we all know today, long before Adam and Eve, who's to say that to the ancestors they wouldn't have made much sense, no explanation needed, as the Buddha Jesus or McDonald's, current site visitors still tie. strips of cloth to a mulberry wishing tree, perhaps a remnant of a long-ago custom when visitors came to pay their respects and supplicate the Divinity for earthly favor, although we cannot say with certainty what the purpose of stone carvings.

They are still powerful. representations of a clearly elaborate mythology, the most striking example of a spectacularly profound creative explosion that took place here, at the headwaters of the Balik Valley, twelve thousand years ago. Schmidt, in particular, a high relief sculpture completely surpassed the rest. The masterpiece of a stone. by Michelangelo and, like the Earth for man, there is also an independent sculpture, although much remains in a very poor state of conservation. A colossal stone head. It may have originally been part of a totem-shaped compound also found at Navali Jory and Karahan Tepe, but of course, most famous in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, but out on the remote edge of the Pacific, Such totemic creations have lined the thresholds of both domestic homes and the houses of the gods since the death of Klaus Schmidt in 2014, another scholarly idea that has gained prominence. is the suggestion that the enclosures at Gobekli Tepe may not only have been roofed after all, but may in fact have acted as dormitories and temples, although it is entirely true that the structures at Gebeckley Tepe bear no resemblance to houses previously documented from the time before pottery.

Neolithic could be that they are simply a previously unknown example with no precedents discovered anywhere before the pre-match period. Neolithic buildings were often built with the apparent intention that they would act as focal points for rituals, feasts, initiation ceremonies and the deaths and burials of members of the community, it is not impossible to suggest that they may have acted as houses in other places as well. times or perhaps all times, Iroquois longhouses or the Mead Halls of an early medieval chief, but did the people of Gobekli Tepe really live there permanently in recent years? Klaus Schmidt Claims that no domestic activity takes place at the site have been disputed; after all, there are significant quantities of tools related to domestic activity present at the site, as well as animal remains ostentatiously drinking water. .

Cisterns and pools carved into the rock are found everywhere. over the hill and in the wetter boreal period of about 12,000 years ago, the water table may well have been considerably higher with the possibility of other water sources located nearby; Overall, it is not entirely unreasonable to suggest that a small permanent staff could have lived on the site all year round, increasing to a much larger population at certain times of the year for festive activities, perhaps including the raising of monoliths on the Ancient Egypt, for example, the act itself was sacred, but what about the people who lived and worked at Gobekli?

Human skeletal evidence from Tepe remains extremely rare, only a few hundred bone fragments have been recovered, two-thirds of which are skull fragments, some of them show evidence of decapitation and ominous deburring, three have holes drilled in them , perhaps hanging or mounting on a pole is a potentially nightmarish little window into those ancient days, although equally the fines may well represent the revered remains of much-loved ancestors, perhaps related to the so-called Skull Cult that continued in the Levant for thousands of years and even predates gebekli. Tepe at Natufian sites to the south, however, equally likely evidence at nearby chianu cannot be overlooked there in a blood-encrusted altar.

Ritual human sacrifices may have been carried out, perhaps shedding light on a darker side of the Gobekli Tepe phenomenon, although no direct, irrefutable evidence has been found. however, they come to light and new Chia finds are always open to revised interpretation around 8200 BC. C. on whether a complex hunter-gatherer community had actually lived at Gobekli Tepe in any way.Permanent or not, life at the site came to an end, reminiscent of the so-called house closing rituals of later Neolithic sites such as Chateau Hoyuk and admire cities alike. The last stone circle made up of human-shaped pillars, much smaller than its predecessors, like the previous circles, had been intentionally buried under up to three meters of water.

Although it is possible that people from Earth still came to the site in the years. After very little could now be seen above ground, it is likely that symbolically the place was dead. Many conclusions have been drawn about the end of Gobekli Tepe, ranging from violent conflict, drought, famine and zoonotic diseases to new sedentary conditions that make the ancient ritual sites of hunters irrelevant to reality. Total mystery reigns, but by examining the context of the birth of the Neolithic and how gebekli Tepe emerged in the first place, we can uncover even more clues. When the colossal ice sheets that had captivated Europe for tens of thousands of years finally began their long retreat back to the frigid deserts of the Arctic around 12,000 BC.

C., the foothills of the southern Taurus Mountains were awash in green. ever-expanding grasslands, pistachio and oak forests stretching along the open frontier to formerly arid plateaus and patches of scrub-ridden desert and into this new Eden came great herds of gazelles along with wild boars who made their homes in the forest with all kinds of goats or rocks. and the birds that roamed the hills and river banks, it was a landscape teeming with life and, to the previously isolated communities of late Paleolithic humans, often restricted to protected refuges due to the harsh climatic conditions, it must have seemed Paradise climate models constructed from prehistoric ice cores over the last 80 years or so suggest a significant increase in both precipitation and temperature after the Last Glacial Maximum of around 13,000 BC.

C., thus paving the way for the emergence of a new way of life; those peoples who still roamed the lands were beginning to establish themselves in territories. They knew it very well, more than ever. Landscapes of dangerous carnivores and poisonous reptiles, swift waterfowl and furry scavengers. This was the world inhabited by the builders of Gobekli Tepe, to the west and to the north, the snow-capped peaks of the Taurus mountain range. To the south, the Haran Plain extends into what is now Syria and Iraq. Beyond, to the northeast, stretches the great Karaka Dog Mountain, ever prominent extinct volcano, from which some of the earliest evidence of Ein cultivated corn has been found.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that in a large arch around Gebeckley Tepe some of the most important early Neolithic sites found in the world have been discovered at tell caramel Jeff El akmar and chianu to name a few, the evidence speaks of a world on the brink of agriculture, is evidence that the great prehistorian boy of the early 20th century, V Gordon, could dream when he first coined the term Neolithic Revolution in the 1930s and yet, far from being a simple image, history becomes increasingly complex 1800 BC. Late Pleistocene conditions began and lasted potentially a thousand years since their initial discovery more than a century ago.

The Younger Dryas period has loomed large in accounts of the origins of agriculture with the suspicion that many recently swollen communities would have had to change. Their lifestyles once again congregate around water supplies and possibly intensify their food production strategies. According to some theorists who in recent years have begun to experiment with sewing and tending crops and grains and, finally, with trapping and keeping animals, the picture has changed once again by recognizing that in the early years Theorists such as Child managed explain how, but not why, or perhaps more importantly, when, just in the last decade, large amounts of new empirical data have continued to accumulate, creating an increasingly precise explanation of the transition from data collection. food to agriculture. overwhelmingly suggesting not one origin but many places and often some ultimately unsuccessful attempts that took place long before Gobekli Tepe, rather than a revolution per se, raising the idea of ​​some kind of overnight transformation, the initial change from the hunter-gatherer to agriculture took place at the time. very quickly over multiple generations with countless experiments turning points failures and even regressions along the way a particularly early example of attempted plant domestication was found on the shores of the Sea of ​​Galilee in Ohio 2 the remarkable remains of a Paleolithic settlement They produced an impressive variety of sowing herbs and legumes along with the tools necessary to thresh and cultivate them.

When the first monoliths were erected in the southern foothills of the Taurus Mountains, humans had already experimented with agriculture for more than 10,000 years, as evidenced by the testimonies of This very small community detracts from the hypothesis that population pressure is the main driver of sedentism and agriculture. Animal husbandry was different, as we have not seen any domesticated animals at Gebekli Tepe and very few before that time anywhere else. In the world, the domestication process that actually changes the physiology of the animal in question is only possible with a very small number of animals, and even then, the shock and trauma of captivity very often create infertile or deformed offspring, if procreation In short, domestication of animals requires a lot of effort with very little return in the short term.

There is some indication that Gobekli's neighboring Chionu site had some success with wild boar domestication and the remains have multiple indicators of domesticity around eight or nine. C., when the place had been a permanent settlement for quite some time, the evidence that agriculture was the main cause of sedentism continues to grow smaller and smaller even in Chatal Hoyuk, a vast Neolithic protocity of at least five thousand people that was developed much later than Gobekli Tepe There is almost no evidence that hunting for domesticated animals continues to play an important role in the ritual and domestic life of the community south of Gebekli Tepe, along the Levantine coast, not far from Ohio, some of the best evidence for the origins of the so-called neolithization can also be found because here, in a surprisingly well-studied region, people seem to have truly begun to settle towards the end of the last ice age, this was the moment in which the Batufians there is incredibly good evidence here of a revolution that occurred not in agriculture Technologies, but in the mind, first discovered by pioneering archaeologist Dorothy Garrett in the early 20th century, named after the Wadi-type site al-natuf in what is now Palestine, such as Gobekli Tepe, the amazing culture of the Natufians.

May headlines around the world. They still lived a primarily hunter-gatherer existence, but they seemed a much more complex state than the groups before they lived in set areas in colonized villages where they returned to bury their dead, participated in elaborate funerary rituals, and created impressive works of art. , traits that probably reinforced the culture. identities and ties to the land perhaps one of the first complex societies found in the world, thank you So was it culture, human creativity, rather than economics, that drove the adoption of agriculture abroad? How far back does evidence of the first visible glimmers of human creativity go? in the archaeological record they appear in the southern tip of Africa up to one hundred thousand years ago in the form of ocher pigments and later in artisanal shell decorations up to one hundred thousand years after the first evidence of anatomically modern humans identical to us today. capable of complex forms of communication for the first time, but it was not until about 45,000 years ago that evidence of creative complexity began to be found in isolated pieces such as The Lion Man of Holland, in the Venus figurines scattered around Stein, and finally, in cave paintings. of the Upper Paleolithic it could be said that only with the Natufians of about 15,000 years ago and perhaps with the bastard before him, does evidence really begin for the formation of societies of larger groups of a hundred or more living permanently together in close proximity during all year.

The question of why it took so long for anatomically modern humans to develop such artistic and cultural ideas and objects has been defined by British archaeologist Colin Renfrew as the Sapient Paradox. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar has argued for a certain numerical threshold in the population that tends to occur in human groups throughout the world, at which time groups naturally tend to separate from each other, it may be that to overcome Dunbar's number of around 150 individuals would require a great leap forward in the psyche for groups of hunter-gatherers of the late Paleolithic. Collective idea driven not by biological evolution but by culture a hypothetical revolution in shared symbolism that would eventually spur dominance over nature division of labor increasingly impressive artistic achievements and population growth a revolution that began in the mind the creative explosion of the Upper Paleolithic Commonly represented by cave art and the famous Venus figures, it is well known in popular culture.

Less well known are the large quantities of worked items that accompanied them, indicating the Newfound's apparent use of a large amount of raw materials, such as bone antlers, ivory shells, and minerals, the latter being especially common in settlements. Natoofians, they were still considered hunter-gatherers who invested significant amounts of time in creating such artistic pieces, given the large amount of time and effort invested such pieces must have been immensely important, perhaps just early indicators of a shared culture To unite a people like the one so clearly and strikingly described at Gobekli Tepe, the organizational capabilities needed to cope with increasingly seasonal and changing environments in the past have long been identified as a key factor in advancing human, Robert Braidwood's work went further: Agricultural emergence as a manifestation of human ingenuity.

Our ability to improve lives through technology by creating a surplus such as can be seen in the case of the Natufians and at Gobekli Tepe, surpluses that could eventually be appropriated by people in positions of authority for individual benefit and not collective. which led to the hierarchical societies generally favored by farmers for Robert Braidwood, then this settlement process allowed for a deeper understanding of the environment than ever before and the development of technologies needed to manipulate it, allowing humans to have plants and animals under their control and yet, despite mounting evidence gathered over the last 200 years and more the Enlightenment vision of the noble savage first evoked by the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau remains the predominant vision of societies of hunter-gatherers in the popular culture of simple people who live simple lives with very little culture talk about ethnological studies of very unique groups such as the Kalahari and the Mabuti pygmies in the 1960s further complicated the picture, seeming to somehow represent all hunter-gatherer groups that have ever existed.

The reality, as we have seen, is very different and much more varied. and complex, far away in the dense heart of the Amazon rainforest, anthropologists began studying another group of hunter-gatherers that survived into the 20th century and made their home deep in the Brazilian wilderness. The Namba kawara still regularly alternate between densely populated villages during the wet season and wandering villages. There are dry bands between strict hierarchies and loose egalitarianism, depending on which particular mode best suits the current situation. The reality is that human culture is exceptionally malleable when beings are never simple. Let us now consider even earlier examples of organized community sites and complexity markers for this.

We must go back even further, to the middle of the last ice age, about 25,000 years ago. Why did an extraordinary flowering of human culture take place from what is now Spain to the open lands of Siberia in those millennia just before the last one? glacial maximum the height of the last cold period of the Ice Age was a world completely unrecognizable to today a world surprisingly full of life in the summer months, in particular, almost endless parksSeasonal floods would open along river valleys and in front of glaciers populated by vast herds of migrating bison and a wide variety of megafauna, much of which is now extinct.

Of course, one of those creatures is much more famous than the rest, the largest of all and absolutely vital to the survival of humanity in that harsh environment, as this was the land of the gigantic step and in this world it was often surprisingly lush with swift river valleys and colossal herds, some of the first evidence of human sedentism and even very early beginnings of the so-called Neolithization have been found Modest clans and tribes sheltered in the pockets full of life between the zones of tundra and forest defined for the first time by Dorothy Garrett in the 1930s the archaeological culture we know today is gravitational and lasted more than ten thousand years in that bitterly harsh environment almost as long from Quebeckley Tepe to today and yet, although today the image of a perennial struggle Because the survival of our Ice Age ancestors is fixed in the public imagination, clearly this was not always the case, gravitators expended significant amounts of energy creating art, almost all of which is lost, although The famous figures of Venus, of which more than a hundred are known, give a small clue to the lives of these people, possibly for the first time beginning to live in settled and long-lasting communities, the eastern variant of the gravitan nestled in the hills Pavlovian.

The inhabitants of South Moravia also lived sedentarily, but here they did so in vast open-air settlements, the remains of which have survived to the present, although multitudes exist in a rich archaeological landscape that extends to what are now the plains of Russia, one of the most famous. Most importantly, in today's Czech Republic its name is dolney vestanice and it is in this region that we get not only some of the first evidence of large settlements in the world, but also of burials. Niche is an impressive site in the middle of an imposing mammoth bone perimeter fence a huge bonfire burned surrounded by elaborately constructed circular structures also made of mammoth bone lightly covered with skins and leather plastering within the perimeter fence and a large number of artistic representations of humans and animals along with significant evidence of plant remains There are also remains of all types of smaller animals trapped in nets within the enclosure, along with an abundance of art and symbolism, not only are the first evidence of tissue found anywhere, but also shells originating from the distant Mediterranean, evidence of far-reaching contacts or actual itinerant voyages.

Outside the perimeter fence, slightly upstream, was a sunken structure containing a hearth and the remains of some 2,300 clay figurines, perhaps evidence of a separation between domestic life and ritual life further east in an isolated enclave. in the depths of Siberia, similar to Malta. The buret culture was also dedicated to living in huge open-air mammoth bone structures and also expending a great deal of energy creating artistic works. It is in places like this, from about 25,000 years ago, that various innovations seem to suggest a flourishing movement towards the exploitation of agriculture, the great human experiment in full force, although, as we now know, located in an environment particularly susceptible to change. environmental, the odds were against them and such gigantic structures, as we will see, could often be much larger, sometimes being Known as monumental costenki in Russia, a recently discovered example of megalithic mammoth bone architecture has been discovered.

It originated in the Oregon Nation period about 40,000 years ago. This site shows signs of an impressively long series of dwellings from then onwards. Thanks in just one. In an impressive archaeological landscape, around the year 23,000 BC. C., the remains of at least 60 mammoths had been arranged in a huge circular structure more than 12 meters in diameter. It is simply one of the most impressive Paleolithic finds ever made at another Russian site. eudenovo suggests that these so-called mammoth houses may not actually have been dwellings in the conventional sense, but rather carefully planned and built to commemorate a large hunt for mammoths whose meat, skins and bones must have created a considerable surplus for the community.

Artistic efforts and exchange of animal skins Amber and seashells over great distances raise the question of whether sites such as dolny vestanice kostenki and eudenovo have been seasonal congregation places where people gathered annually to exchange stories and feast in the safety of a winter sanctuary, perhaps even creating elaborate monuments and artistic works perhaps just an early form of Gobekli Tepe, the only constant in those days was change and before it could be fully developed, the lifestyle of the mammoth hunters was became extinct as a result of the advance of the ice sheets that descended from the north.

Until the last glacial maximum of about twenty thousand years ago, the only westerniche and many other similar sites were abandoned and its people were forced to move further and further south to escape the certain death of permafrost around 18,000 BC. C., however, permanent settlements of considerable scale were once again established. began to form in areas particularly abundant in life, but the mezin and mazarich sites in northern Ukraine are located on the banks of major river systems with the annual north-south migrations of horses, reindeer, bison and mammoths, they could easily hunt spectacular permanent mammoth bone structures again. it became the norm around 18,000 and 13,000 BC.

C. respectively. This was the time of a second heyday for the settled hunter-gatherer complex of the Giant Pass, especially in the regions of what is now the Russian Plain and Eastern Europe, again the heavy stone industry. The artistic flourishes, the separation of domestic spaces from those considered ceremonial, the carefully selected burials and the importance of plant foods, can be found, of course, most impressively, elaborately solid and very large structures built from mammoth bones . Today we call this era the epigraphetian during those millennia. From approximately sixteen thousand to ten thousand BC in a great arc from Krakow to Moscow people returned to live permanently in impressive circular houses of mammoth tusk and bone described by anthropologist Olga Sofa as public works of the Pleistocene many of them go much further of domestic needs a foray into artistically swirling rhythmic patterns, what happened inside remains a mystery, but is often theorized to be at least partly a ritual nature again we must ask the question are these the prototypes of the sunken temples of Gobekli Tepe also in Western Europe in the land of the cave painters an archaeological culture we know today as Magdalanian the world was also changing around 15,000 BC. the ice finally retained its hold on the continent forever the days of the woolly mammoth were numbered in its place came an abundance of reindeer The seasonal migrations of these subarctic animals may not seem conducive to a semi-settled way of life to those who followed them and, without However, there were places to which Los Cazadores returned year after year, megasites from the so-called Magdalanian era have been found, winter enclaves of the French Paragord and the Spanish Cantabrian coast with deep records of human activity where considerable groups of People would gather annually to take shelter in early autumn before moving out in spring, during the Magdalanian season.

Lush animals and plants flooded in to replace the baron tundra in the centuries after the last glacial maximum. Southwestern France would become one of the most densely populated areas in Europe, bolstered by the large amount of fauna available for hunting between approximately fifteen thousand and ten thousand BC, were people living complex lives with a wide variety of hunting strategies. hunting, gathering techniques and artistic and cultural activities, including, of course, the rock art found. in a large number of places, but famous in sites such as Altamira and Lusco, masterpieces of Paleolithic art in French sites such as La Madeleine and Abby Pato.

Sea shells, animal skins and significant quantities of amber speak of trade or at least exchange networks that extend across the continent. In such winter times, according to the work of archaeologist Randall White, the teeth and antlers of reindeer were studied, there is evidence of greater cultural creativity in the form of rock art carvings and ornaments and quite possibly social differentiation. It is at least possible that these winter communes gave rise to or facilitated well-known rituals and religious rights inherent to clans over the millennia. set of customs not very different from certain Inuit societies of the last 200 years to the beginning of the 20th century.

French anthropologist Marcel Mouse spent a significant amount of time studying 20th-century Inuit communities. The subarctic Americas and Eurasia found that they organized their societies in certain unique ways, very different from the settled agricultural societies that cover most of the world during the winter, a relatively authoritarian structure would form dictated and governed by brotherhoods of priests, nobles and commoners. in the spring. Individualistic egalitarianism would arise once more, people would once again disperse across the landscape to forage and hunt before the next fall, perhaps in an eternal scene that echoes through the ages; In their recent book The Dawn of Everything, anthropologist David Graber and archaeologist David Wengro argue that similarly structured societies and customs may actually have been the driving force behind the creation of the Gobekli tape phenomenon, the destruction of enclosures that are now even linked by isotopic evidence to periods. of annual superabundance, vast herds of gazelles would descend upon the Haran plane creating an immense surplus of food for the hunters who lived nearby, as we have seen time and time again, our ancestors were not only our equals in cognitive ability but also in intellect and even in philosophy. and so we return to the megaliths Builders of the Eartha Plain Despite their impressive size and the great skill of their construction, the Gobekli Tepe enclosures appear to have been used for a relatively short period of time, less, for example, than some of the Ice Age Sites discussed above that are raising and ultimately ritual deaths and burials, often within a few generations.

It may well have been the point at which hierarchies were raised to heaven only to be torn down again as part of some long-lost ceremony, perhaps it is. Festive activities at sites like these, the early beginnings of larger societies and nations began to coalesce. United by the stories and bonds fostered during those communal times, in fact, the abundance of flint fragments found throughout the surface of Gebekli Tepe, many of which were brought from afar suggests trading or exchange activities with distant groups or even full-fledged seasonal migrations, if the stones themselves were taboo for most of the year, access denied to anyone except a supposed Temple Elite, but given free access during Festival time, we can't be sure . to evoke fleeting visions of a medieval Roman Saturnalia carnival where social roles were changed, the world turned upside down, however, there is concrete evidence in the abundant remains of gazelles, goats, deer, sheep, vultures, ducks and a whole collection of birds, most animals.

As shown on the monoliths, Gobekli Tepe was most likely a place for banquet events, but what did those parties actually look like? customs of long-revered ancestors, the Quackatul people have held a mid-winter ceremony for as long as anyone can remember. Yes, people came from afar to congregate and regroup under the harsh grip of a frozen black sky as a changing ritual of the called bear dancers and fool dancers replace the usual scenes of social hierarchy reminiscent of Roman saturnalia and medieval carnival. The middle of winter is a time when the lowest of the low are elevated to the highest positions in society and vice versa, though of course they are separated by vast gulfs of distance. and with time, perhaps some small similarity can be found with those supposed festivals inthe southern tip of the Taurus Mountains so long ago, for evidence of the festivals themselves in the so-called Stone Hills culture, we can look to the sister sites of Quebec in particular. a site offering an unusually rich variety of artifacts of many types, a rare stone basin engraved on the floor of one of the houses has even been suggested to be a sacrificial altar, it was carved with an unusual sensual figure originally interpreted as a tortoise.

They have since changed to interpret the scene as a woman with dancing feet pointing downward and arms raised toward the sky. If true, this would be one of the first dance scenes in all of history, an activity very often linked to festivals and religious activities found in almost every society in history, we even have evidence of musical instruments being used. Dating back to the Paleolithic, a form of roarers, clappers, rattles and scrapers, when reconstructed and played today, recall the primordial sounds of the Travelers dancing to the rhythm of the Divine Drum. Pilgrims even come from nearby. and distant lands to sacrifice to feast and celebrate in the shadow of the obelisks.

Foreign importance extended far beyond the earthly plane. Obsidian deposits originating in Cappadocia to the northwest and beyond, perhaps brought by traveling specialists who observed the objects and themselves with power and energy for the coming year other Travelers at the dawn of sedentary life entertain us heal us narrators no evidence can be proven that it ever existed long ago having disappeared into nothingness although it can be speculated anyway since the early days of archeology and anthropology Scholars have sought an understanding of how our world became one of the most enduring and popular ideas was ominous: war was at the heart of all social complexity stimulated by fear and hatred above all, and yet in recent decades this concept has been undermined by a Thousand Cuts, again and again, new discoveries at sites like Chorale in the Americas and now at Gobekli Tepe, which are at the very beginning of sedentary societies, show no evidence of any kind of fighting;

Instead, a new theory has gained increasing importance: the concept that it could actually be a ritual that led to the adoption of agriculture and stratification and its initial development, although they had not yet reached that point, the wealthy hunters of the Stonehills culture would be soon, and perhaps they needed a revolution in the mind to do so. so, after all, a ritual and a strictly followed set of ideas are necessary for a farmer. Ideas of society that often do not provide instant gratification like that of hunters, but instead require immense amounts of work to be invested in some ill-defined and sometimes even illusory goal.

Societies needed a high level of social cohesion and management simply to motivate their people to overcome this first step. Could it be that such powerful bonds were fostered at sites like gebekli Tepe, where shared stories and myths unite people with feasting as the social ultimate? glue towards the end of the 20th century basing his ideas on a lifetime of research in the field. Anthropologist Brian Hayden took this idea further with the concept of competitive feasting. In his hypothesis, any surplus food resources could be amassed by small emerging hierarchies of Hunter-gatherers. invested to obtain labor force in a traditional skilled hunter-gatherer society Hunters can leverage immediate social capital in the form of their skill set alone the unskilled are dead weight to agriculture The actual skills of the society are less important, it is the physical capital goods that are valued above all goods that can be inherited and significant wealth can be accumulated without any skill involved, eventually, as these latter groups grew in power, everything was going to change the inherent inequality in the future.

Hayden's hypothesis continues that once competition for influence between rivals begins, experimentation in agriculture is encouraged. advances as the potential to produce a much greater surplus is realized, individuals can then seek prestige and power through favors owed to them, and yet feasts are not always competitive in nature; the norm may even have been completely opposite to Hayden's idea that the feasts were egalitarian. in nature intended to counteract the tendencies towards the formation of unequal hierarchies that drive the obligatory distribution of food, although it may well be that the festivals had little to do with the use of agriculture, after all animals and cereals were all wild, in Gobekli Tepe the origins of agriculture could We will be completely separated from that almost 12,000-year-old megalith sanctuary;

However, regardless of the origins of agriculture, it is clear that when societies knew how to organize their members effectively, they gained an evolutionary advantage: a large amount of energy was not allocated to obviously productive work. or even food production, but by formulating a sense of unity, a shared identity, an example of agriculture could then be linked to investment in ideology, a greater social good that would voluntarily allow tolerance of inequalities and hierarchy to form the same kind of feeling that some 7,000 years later would lead remote people to drive their cattle to the walls of Durrington, near Stonehenge, even later at Delphi and Cuzco, and also at modern festivals where people still go to hear news of neighbors, to meet husbands and wives, and to inadvertently spread community culture, but of course, there is often another aspect as well, as well as the opportunity to reason with the otherworldly and the divine in 1955.

Quarry workers Russian scientists digging wells about 200 kilometers east of Moscow stumbled upon something they didn't expect: the ruins of an ancient settlement buried in the clay. When the radiocarbon dates arrived, the group of experts called the Russian Academy of Sciences barely could believe that the results pronounced along five kilometers on the edge of a remote Russian riverbank from the prehistoric settlement of Sun Gear turned out to be one of the oldest on record. Sites of anatomically modern humans found anywhere in Eurasia dating between 32 and 28,000 BC. C., although they are still largely unknown in popular culture, especially in the West due to the disconnection of the Cold War, over the next 20 years of excavations, tremendously significant discoveries kept coming.

Perhaps most surprising of all, both in terms of their state of preservation and their contents, were the tombs, also some of the oldest ever found in Eurasia and, as we will see, among the most unusual, Tomb 2 consisted of a pair of teenage boys lying down. facing each other, face to face, along with an adult leg bone filled with ocher. One tomb contained an adult man similarly coated in red ochre, a substance associated with religious rights and death rituals around the world from early to today, but most surprising of all. It was the thousands upon thousands of intricate pieces of ivory beaded jewelry, clothing, and spears, among other items, that literally covered the bodies.

Some thirteen thousand beads in total were discovered, an artistic effort that would have been estimated to take 10,000 hours to produce a truly enormous investment. In addition to being considered some of the first direct evidence of religious practices in Eurasia, the Sun Gear burials are also often regarded as a particularly early example of highly developed range systems that existed deep in the Paleolithic past; It is a view further reinforced by an equally ancient find in Italy known as The Prince adorned with an incredible array of grave goods. Furthermore, further research on Paleolithic burials from the Ignatian to the Gravitan and the Magdalanian from Spain to Russia and the Levant may hint at more unusual reasons for having after all, in such ornate burials no fortifications, warehouses, palaces or any other evidence of conventional chiefs, let alone anything resembling a state we would recognize elsewhere in Eurasia during the Paleolithic.

A surprising number of burials contain individuals with unusual physical characteristics, sometimes placed in striking and unusual poses spiraling outward, crouching or lying in front of other deceased individuals. Crems in Austria. Identical twins were found with their bodies flanked by large mammoth tusks and covered in beads and ochre. In Calabria, an individual with dwarfism was discovered and in the Grimaldi Cave, an extremely tall individual with gigantism received special care. In recent decades, British archaeologist Paul Petite has argued that those who bury the dead make significant efforts to immobilize certain deceased individuals in the mouth. bones, wooden planks, stones, or large amounts of decorated ornaments that often hold bodies firmly in place rather than reverently, the evidence sometimes suggests more of a culture of fear, as in societies throughout history that It endured well into the modern era, perhaps pleading with the dead to remain in the afterlife. even taking certain precautions to prevent individuals who are different from some way, whether mentally or physically, they often have They were thought to possess unusual supernatural powers that were considered closer to the gods, perhaps the so-called princely burials could also have been different in some way, perhaps they were albino, autistic or other genetic condition that otherwise would not have been seen in the archaeological record, laden with objects to celebrate them, but also perhaps to contain their dangerous powers after death, just maybe they are evidence that some of the earliest shamans in history of humanity returned to the mammoth hunters of the Moravian hills.

Several burials were also found at the dolny vestanice site, one in particular deserving it. Special mention, absolutely covered in ocher, placed next to a powerful mammoth bone and with one hand resting on a fox, the remarkably complete skeleton of a woman of about 40 years of age was found and, like the other burials of the Paleolithic Ice Age, had several striking characteristics. In addition to her relatively advanced age, old enough to have been a grandmother since her birth, the left side of her face had very visible deformities. This so-called Vesteniche dolney Elder was considered to have been touched by the gods, as we have seen several Venuses.

Figurines were found at the site, including an isolated spot about 80 meters upstream that contained more than 2,000 clay figurines of various animals, most of them in fragments, perhaps magical objects created to be ritually broken, the most incredible of They all, however, had exactly the same facial anomalies as the Ancient One, so it is very likely that she was a model or representation, perhaps to remember her in future generations, the question arises: do all the Venus figures represent real individuals? who lived so many millennia ago, given the discovery of the Ancient One alongside a fox, an animal often associated with shape-shifting ritual trances, she is often thought to have been a shaman, perhaps The Dugout was her proto-temple, since Whether he was an early Oracle or an Ice Age Prophet, he was clearly someone to be commemorated and remembered and, perhaps most importantly, not to be brought back. to bring his wrath upon the living and there is much more evidence of shamanic activity in the Ice Age in 1939 an astonishing ivory statue was found in a German cave when the carbon-dated Lion Man stadel Stein was discovered to be as much as It has 41,000 years old, yes, although interpretations of this striking figure vary widely, one argument is that it represents a half-animal, half-man figure, perhaps in the midst of a shamanic trance.

Foreign movements are often considered an integral part of these dresses with deer antler heads. of Star Car in Northumbria which dates from around the same time as gebekli Tepe, but is also often seen as evidence of shamanic activity, as is this roughly contemporary cave painting from southern France known as The Sorcerer, which may well represent a shamanic ritual in progress, even the shreds of The evidence we have seen from the beginnings of humanity's journey in Eurasia to the end of the Ice Age and beyond over the last 50,000 years or so, it at least seems likely that the ritual and religious experience has always been part of thesocial fabric. a hypothetical creative explosion linked to the need for social cohesion in the cold North, perhaps this was how smaller family units were able to congregate into larger clans and tribes at certain times of the year, united by ties to the religious rights of ancestors ​​and perhaps even with the religious rights of the ancestors. worship of common deities The culture at that time had truly surpassed biological evolution as far as the elaborate so-called princely burials of Ice Age Europe were concerned, hereditary systems of rank seem the most unlikely interpretation of all again, this raises The question of whether there is a Missing Piece of the Puzzle at Gobekli Tepe, as in ancient Peru and Egypt, where the erection of monuments was a sacred task in itself, a form of worship dictated by a priesthood, was there a shadowy cabal moving the threads in the foothills of the plain of Eartha, not hereditary?

Chiefs but a meritocratic theocracy In the year 2000, the English translation of the work of a relatively unknown French scholar not only caused a stir in the archaeological community, but also always elusive repercussions in the realm of popular culture since the Oasis Theory of Gordon Child and similar works in the At the beginning of the 20th century, most attempts to explain the so-called Neolithic Revolution, focused on economic reasoning, geographical needs and the material circumstances that dictated the growth of agricultural societies, reach Jacques Kovan in the early 1990s, after more than 50 years of research involving excavations of some of the most important Early Neolithic sites in the Near East, Kovan made public a completely different idea about the birth of the gods and their origins. of agriculture.

Jacques Kovan suggested not material reasons for the shift from hunter-gatherer to agriculture, but a transformation that began in the mind. thanks profound cultural transformation within the human psyche from around the 13th to the 10th millennium BC. which primarily involves a shift in perspective from seeing humanity as part of nature to being outside of it, eventually with not only the potential to dominate the natural world in the right way. In other words, to become a farmer, you must first think like one, perhaps like all subsequent religions, beginning as a single creative spark rather than an economic necessity, environmental change, or even individual social advancement, the collective Epiphany expressed in new symbols and ideas with the very dawn of civilization although of course it remains completely untestable, if true at all, and could go along with other theories to some extent.

Jacques Kovan's The Birth of the Gods would resolve Colin Renfrew's Sapiente paradox of why humanity only began the path toward true social complexity around 10,000 BC. C., having been anatomically modern for three or four hundred thousand years, Kovan's death the following year, in 2001, only increased the appeal of the theory, which remains immensely influential among archaeologists today, far from of Braidwood's rigid economic reasoning. and the boy Jacques Kovan evokes distant ancestral memories of ecstatic dance under the colossal T-shaped pillars of ancient times From the early 20th century to the present day, several sociologists and anthropologists have studied the nature of religious ecstasy commonly observed around the world and in all walks of life, perhaps most notable is the work of Mercia Eliad and Emile Durkheim.

For them, the effervescence and euphoria of religious ceremony has a tendency to ferment a sense of belonging and satisfaction in a community, quite possibly in prehistoric and historical times, allowing for ever larger conglomerations. More than ever before, it sometimes results in asymmetrical power structures that begin to form an expert on world religions messiah elliard in particular spoke of the search for ecstasy as an integral part of the religious experience a transformative feeling of awe, for example, being one that goes hand in hand with musical monuments. Landscapes and nature, music and dance in particular, often induce altered trance-like states and a sense of oneness, all of which were present in Gobekli Tepe, of course, by their very nature.

Jacques Kovan's ideas remain completely uncontestable little more than hints of a shamanic council leading a social revolution a bath of mineral and ecstatic devotion built on consecrated ideas dating back tens of thousands of years in the origin imbued with newly immediacy discovered Annual festival centers apparently common in older hunting societies for verbal exchange and communication The new word is constantly growing and spreading. Thank you. It's even possible. The domestication of plants and animals ultimately emerged partly as a means of feeding increasingly larger groups of people drawn to sacred sites to build and worship domesticated plants and animals that appeared a little later. at sites such as navali chori and chianu, whose art is still very reminiscent of that found at Gobekli and karahan Tepe and in their own older levels, of course, another equally possible theory favored by Klaus Schmidt holds that religion actually prevented hunters from Gobekli Tepe will dedicate themselves to agriculture. where others in the south did, being the last stronghold of a resolute culture of hunters on the verge of new beginnings at the end of the 19th century.

The German philosopher Karl Marx, one of the most influential thinkers ever to put pen to paper, implied that religion was a conscious invention. of the elite to control the masses, the reality, as is often the case, appears to be much more complex. Religious ideas conceived until relatively recently as a form of science appear to have been completely intertwined with Humanity from the beginning. Humans are a curious species and an immensely creative species, and as French anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss first noted in the 1950s and 1960s, in prehistoric societies, mythological thinking and religion were the only ways to explain and explore the world and the most important questions. our intellectual peers possess exactly the same mental capacity we have today, only with a more basic cultural tradition and knowledge base, but no less colorful creativity to draw from a shadowy elite who control the masses as scientists and doctors of today the first shamans or protopriests.

They probably spent their days trying to help their communities intervene with the Spirits, perhaps their ancestors ultimately acted for the greater good, if they hadn't they probably wouldn't have been in their positions much longer in Greek classical times, perhaps going into psychedelic trances to draw almost impenetrable but nonetheless useful prophecies for those in need and perhaps like the Vespas at Delphi, such trances took an obvious toll on their bodies, even killing them after a while and, Of course, much more than today, death was a very important part of life in those days and sometimes, like virtually every society that ever evolved at one stage or another, the situation could be serious enough as to justify or require a sacrifice.

There is a certain Hittite ritual from the second millennium BC recorded on cuneiform tablets that can still be preserved. read today speaks of a time-honored tradition in ancient Anatolia where members of a community symbolically accumulated sources of evil and anxiety on a goat, the pitiful animal was then chased into the desert and abandoned to its fate, thus relieving the Society. of their problems for some time it has been argued that pillow one at Gobekli Tepe could indicate a similar ritual, of course the origins of the idea of ​​a scapegoat, a ritual carried out unconsciously over and over again throughout the human history in almost all societies on Earth, still very Of course, much more than a goat is metaphorically driven into the desert, as we have seen, a potential altar that may well suggest human sacrifice has been found in Chiono.

One argument is that the sacrifice of animals and sometimes people became necessary to relieve social pressure during difficult times. A placebo is sometimes effective as a morale booster or stress reliever. In fact, since its inception the act of Sacrifice appears to have been an integral part of sedentary agricultural societies perhaps a means of being able to psychologically come to terms with the strange situation of delayed gratification and occasional crop failure. Easy feeling that something must be done to mediate with the divine and, as a result, very often create a sense of unity and community, much more so if things eventually change.

Ultimately, as agriculture transformed their way of life, the recently sedentary Neolithic peoples of the Southern Taurus Mountains stopped making pilgrimages to the festive places of the ancestors that covered the circles in the ground and never returned. to see clearly, around the year 8000 BC. C., the world had changed. pillar-shaped pillars It is irrelevant in the face of new religious epiphanies whether any memory of their existence survived. Over the millennia, we can only speculate at some point along the line, many thousands of years later, in the 4th millennium BC. C., the shamans of the late Paleolithic had become priests.

Elements of a deep-rooted law of T-shaped pillars survived to those days just as they had since the Upper Paleolithic (we probably never knew), although at least removal and decoration of the skull remains possible, for example. For example, they continued in use for thousands of years after the Stonehills culture disappeared just as it had earlier with the Natufians and there are two-headed Janus figures at Gobekli Karahan and Gaziantep as they continued to exist in much later millennia and perhaps today representations of the duality of existence in the time of ancient Sumeria. in the third millennium BC. When stories first began to be recorded in writing, all manner of much older spoken tales managed to survive and found their way into the cuneiform archives of long-vanished city-states and forgotten kings. speaks of a sacred mountain Dooku, home of the ancient gods of Anora, a sacred mountain sometimes associated with the mountainous region around the Taurus and Zagros mountain range in the far north of the Mesopotamian world, is a remote possibility, but KlausSchmidt thought that At least it was possible that some shadow of the anthropomorphic pillars of Gobekli Tepe would eventually survive through the centuries passed down by individuals from one generation to another and become myth and legend, after all, what else do we have except stories?

Thanks for watching as always. I'm your host Pete Kelly, another huge thank you to War Thunder for sponsoring this video. Download the game now using my link in the description below. If you're looking for more of my story, I also have a self-titled channel where I explore. the most important archaeological sites in the world and a free newsletter, simply enter your email address and you will receive monthly stories from me about my adventures, accompanying you on the journey, thanks for watching and I will see you next time abroad.