You are looking at the oldest known human-built structure. This monolith and wall is part of a temple complex recently uncovered in Turkey that is 7,000 years older than the Pyramids, 6,000 years older than Stonehenge, and according to our current understanding of human cultural progression, older than agriculture by almost a thousand years, and older than domesticated animals by more than that.
Old.
They call it potbelly hill, after the soft, round contour of this final lookout in southeastern Turkey. To the north are forested mountains. East of the hill lies the biblical plain of Harran, and to the south is the Syrian border, visible 20 miles away, pointing toward the ancient lands of Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, the region that gave rise to human civilization. And under our feet, according to archeologist Klaus Schmidt, are the stones that mark the spot—the exact spot—where humans began that ascent.
This is completely rewriting early human history. And doing so emphatically since these constructs are far more sophisticated and abundant than any archaeologist would have imagined before stumbling across this site. There are at least 50 separate temple sites, each with its own monolith and carefully constructed walls. Many of the monoliths are exquisitely carved in a naturalist style far removed from the cave paintings known to have been done at about the same time.
This is just at the tail end of the last ice age. Just when humans were finding a world that was not a brutal fight to survive against the cold. Neanderthals roamed Europe at this time. It is possible that these temples were built before the first human city was built. In fact the archaeologist who found them theorizes that it was the building of these temples that led to the construction of cities, the cultivation of wheat and the domestication of animals. He might be right. Currently all the evidence we have is that wheat was first cultivated within a few miles of this location, and the first domesticated pigs were also traced to a short distance away.
What strikes me is how solid and clean the construction appears to be, especially the monoliths themselves. They are presumed to be carven idols of gods, and their “T” shape is thought to be an attempt to mimic the shape of the human body. If both of those presumptions are true, and they are both plausible, then that would mean that the builders of these temples contemplated gods as being similar to man.
Again, to try to put this in perspective, if these dates and conclusions are right, these 50 some odd temples with these huge monoliths (up to 17 feet tall, built with quarried rock from a nearby hill and weighing several tons each) were built by a culture that had no written language, no mathematics, no agricultural base and no domesticated animals, meaning every block was moved through pure human muscle power alone. Without even copper tools, all the stones were carved with stone tools.
I find this to be fascinating. I also doubt that we have just happened to stumble onto the oldest structures ever built. I am sure there were other, older structures, but this is undeniably old.
Interestingly, the site shows signs that it was deliberately buried some 3,000 years after it was built. To me that is just as curious as the building itself. Why would a new culture completely bury the temples of an old culture? They didn’t destroy it, they buried it. Interesting indeed.
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Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackI just find the notion that there was sufficient organization and manpower (and knowledge and time) to build such temples absent agriculture of some significant time standing.
But, that’s just me…
I think you left part of your thought out, but I think I get the gist…
So… here’s the deal. Agriculture is not necessary for leisure time if you have a ready supply of natural abundance. The article states that this location is within the “fertile crescent” and has regular migrations of wildebeest (or something) that go by even today.
Easter Island had no agriculture, and they built hundreds of multi-ton monuments and scattered them all across the island with no beasts of burden.
So it’s possible.
Heh. I noticed my thought-loss as well…
Well, not much of a loss, I suppose.
I’m just bouncing thoughts around in my brain…
I suppose it’s possible that it’s possible for there to be pockets where food is so abundant that it doesn’t run out as populations grow…
Well, maybe not. Absent some method of population control, with sufficient food just lying around so that no work was required to create it, the population would explode. The natural food supply wouldn’t be able to cope.
It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to understand that seeds make plants. It’s entirely likely that there was a degree of “agriculture” of the naturally occurring plants and likely breeding of animals (perhaps not “domesticated” but captured and bred for food) — as it’s likely that these were the beginnings of animal husbandry and agriculture to begin with.
I mean, it’s a much smaller leap to say: “Hey, let’s clear out some of these weeds and plant some more banana trees” or “Hey, if we can capture some of these rabbits and feed them grass, we can eat them” than it is to say…”Hey, let’s start growing some grain to process into something edible…”
And, I find it unlikely that any human group who live in a place for a long period of time, capable of making stone tools (and constructing temples) wouldn’t take those same skills and make, oh…I don’t know…a HOUSE to keep out the weather…or, even, a bunch of them and call it a “town” or some such.
So, again…I just don’t buy their time-line. As is the RULE, it seems that the more we dig, the more apparent it is that we really don’t have a good handle on the origins of human civilization.
The more we dig, the more we discover that what we thought we knew is incorrect or incomplete:
http://www.donsmaps.com/skydisc.html
Reminds me of the monolith in “2001.” Mysterious, ancient, deliberately buried. I’ll be waiting to see if it beams a radio signal at Jupiter on the summer solstice.
Bob, I had the same thought, and was wondering if anyone would make that connection as well. I had another thought too and the title of the post was a hint that I thought someone might pick up on, but as usual, my sense of humor is somewhat obscure, if not entirely opaque…
Drax, by the way, the existence of pockets of abundant food is actually common enough that it has an actual scientific term to describe it in anthropology, although I can’t recall the term (getting so old…). It applies to places like Easter Island, the Chesapeake Bay native Americans, the Tlinget Indians of the northwest coast, early human societies in South Africa and a host of other areas.
The interesting thing is that they do not get overpopulated as you might think. In spite of the abundance of available food, the human societies that live there managed to live there for centuries. My suspicion is that disease and regular mortality was sufficient to keep stone-age humans from overpopulating regions in most cases. Easter Island is an exception, it was actually over-populated and that led to exactly the sort of population crash that you supposed would have happened at these temples.
Just another point about the temples. This was not a city. It is on a hilltop that has no fresh water. The people who built the temple did not live on the hill, they lived in the valleys and plains nearby. They traveled to the hill for the purpose of building and (presumably) worshiping in the temples. But the temple site itself shows no signs of habitation. There are no hearths for cooking, no garbage middens, no evidence of structures built for any purpose other than the temples themselves.
The fundamental question here is whether building structures like this was first conceived of for religious purposes or if it was originally conceived of for building homes. This site seems to provide support for the theory that architecture itself was born out of religion. That’s been an area of some dispute in anthropology for many years. And it’s not settled yet, which is why this site is described as “overturning years of ‘settled’ anthropological science.”
That’s one reason why I find it so interesting.
I find it interesting as well. Much like I find the shaven mountaintops with diagrams interesting.
My point about the structures is simple. If they know how build such sophisticated temple structures (and the walls around them), then, they know how to build more simple structures such as houses.
The more important point is that these “scientists” continue to make these pronouncements about the level of human civilization time and time again even though time and time again they have been proven to be wrong. I can guarantee that it won’t be too long, as more digs are made, that this “knowledge” has to be, yet again, revised — pushing human “civilization” further back into history.
The notion that “architecture was born out of religion” is one of those areas where I just want to say to these “scientists:”
SHUT UP! YOU DON’T HAVE A FRIPPING CLUE AS TO THE ORIGINS OF ARCHITECTURE! Or the origins of civilization. Or of language. Or of anything else. You have a tiny, tiny amount of data from which to draw these conclusions. It ain’t enough. SHUT UP about your attempts to get into the minds of ancient Man!
I certainly can buy that structures were first made to honor or appease the Gods. But, I can as easily buy the notion that people first put a structure above their heads to ward off the weather before they started building temples for Gods. There ain’t no way of knowing.
Oh…just a thought.
You don’t start building structures. You start by putting two stones together, then three. Then a wall. Then a roof. Or something like that.
You don’t START by building a temple. You gotta figure out how to BUILD first. What we see here is the RESULT of those other attempts (unless there’s some argument that this is the first time out of the box…)
This is likely the HEIGHT of their architectural abilities — much like the pyramids. It was meant to last. We haven’t a clue as to their ability to build with lesser materials or on a smaller scale.
Drax, there are a lot of competing theories about the origin of architecture. Some of them have more support in the actual field evidence, some of them seem more “intuitive” and some of them have more support in terms of the spread of techniques of architecture.
I find this fascinating precisely because of the need to “get into the minds” of ancient man. It’s not as cut and dried as it might seem.
If you are talking about building houses, it is quite consistent with our anthropological and historical evidence that stone age cultures might not even see any need for permanent structures to live in. The concept may very well never occur to them because it would “root” them to a spot, when their entire lifestyle is about moving around. There are plenty of examples of cultures that survived well into modern times who absolutely knew about building permanent structures for temples, but never applied it to their own homes. Bedouins, Swahili, Apache, most of the interior of Africa, etc. These people knew about building with stone, but they lived for thousands and thousands of years without ever building permanant dwellings because their lifestyle was not consistent with such a concept. But a temple complex which drew people in from miles and miles around for important religious purposes does make sense. They don’t live there, they worship there.
On Easter Island, for example, there is obvious evidence of sophisticated stone work, but to my knowledge there is not one example of a stone building on the island. They weren’t incapable of building with stone, they just didn’t see the need to build houses.
Also as much as I am a huge proponent of giving ancient people credit for being as smart as modern man is, I also have to say that they were just as stupid as well. You can trace the evolution of architecture through thousands of years and see that very simple ideas came along only once in a great while. Even something as simple as “post and lintel” construction took thousands of years to appear, and more thousands of years before the arch appeared.
BUT, as slow as man is to come up with new ideas, we are incredibly fast at copying them.
As far as whether they started by building a temple, let me remind you that there is no evidence whatsoever in England that the Stonehenge builders ever built anything else, out of wood or stone. Mayans built hugely elaborate temples, but their homes were simple huts. The idea of building homes from stone can probably be traced back through techniques all the way to Mesopotamia.
It is plausible to me that a culture could well build temples like this as their first use of stone, and that even a non-agricultural society could have done so.
Now, I also doubt that these are truly the first stone structures ever built. But that’s a different discussion.
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