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00:13High on a hill in Turkey.
00:16One of the most important archeological discoveries of our time.
00:22We thought these are the ruins of a lost civilization.
00:27An ancient wonder.
00:3012,000 years old.
00:32Over 6,000 years older than Stonehenge.
00:36Oh my God.
00:39A mysterious collection of circular structures.
00:43Lined with massive stone pillars.
00:46Adorned with carved creatures.
00:49What were these monuments for?
00:52We never expected monumental architecture.
00:56This was totally new.
00:58Who were the people who gathered here?
01:01Human remains are special.
01:03These are the people that built the site.
01:04These are the people that lived here.
01:05Now, new discoveries are leading some archeologists.
01:09Wow.
01:10To rethink their most basic ideas about the origins of civilization.
01:16It's a very strong indicator that the settlement was permanent.
01:21Stone Age Temple Mystery.
01:22Right now.
01:24On NOVA.
01:44In Southern Turkey.
01:47Hidden beneath a modern protective canopy.
01:52A mysterious collection of stone structures.
01:57This is Gobekli Tepe.
02:01Named for the hill it stands upon.
02:06Here, towering stone pillars.
02:08Some 18 feet tall stand guard in nine circular enclosures.
02:15Up to 65 feet across.
02:19Older than the Great Pyramid of Giza.
02:23Older even than Stonehenge.
02:25For over 30 years, archeologists have been trying to solve the riddle of this enigmatic site.
02:36But now, with new technology.
02:40Unearthing new discoveries.
02:42Fantastic.
02:43We may finally have answers to the questions scientists have been asking for years.
02:50Who built this place?
02:53For what purpose?
02:56And why was it abandoned?
02:59With all traces of human settlement ending thousands of years ago?
03:16In 1994, archeologist Michael Morsh was part of a small group who set out across the landscape.
03:24In search of a rumored hilltop site.
03:29Talked of since the 1960s.
03:31But never explored.
03:34This is the road we took when we first discovered Gobekli Tepe.
03:41It was the first team to investigate the site.
03:44Led by German archeologist, Klaus Schmidt.
03:49We saw all these masses of flints on the ground.
03:53And we saw these T-shaped pillars.
03:58Knowing they'd come across something special, they returned the following year to begin the excavation.
04:08Over the next 14 years, one of the most remarkable sites ever discovered slowly emerged from the Earth.
04:18Sweeping curved stone walls lined with monolithic pillars.
04:23Some covered in reliefs of animals.
04:27And some depicting human figures.
04:32We had the feeling, this is the Neolithic gold mine.
04:36We thought, these are the ruins of a lost civilization.
04:46Using digital technology to remove modern structures, it's possible to see the hillside as those first archeologists encountered it.
04:57They uncovered four great circular buildings.
05:01Archeologists labeled them A, B, C, and D.
05:09Archeologist and architect, Moritz Kinsel, has studied the site for almost 10 years.
05:16He's trying to piece together a chronology of the structures.
05:21Inside Building B, he has identified layers of walls.
05:26What we have here is the outer wall with this niche feature.
05:30And then we have the second wall.
05:32In front of us, what looks like a bench, but it's actually a wall.
05:37And where we are now actually standing on is the third wall.
05:40And on the other side, we have the fourth wall.
05:46Radiocarbon dating of the mud mortar from the remaining walls has revealed that they were constantly being altered and renovated.
05:55The architecture at Gobekli Tepe was not built at once.
05:58It was growing over time, but inwards.
06:02So what we see here in the background is also the oldest wall of Building B.
06:07And then building faces are built inside the structures, making the buildings over time smaller.
06:17The four circular buildings were reshaped over time.
06:21The team has dated the oldest outer walls to around 9,600 BCE.
06:28With three inner walls, each constructed three to five hundred years apart.
06:37Until building appears to have stopped.
06:40We know that the buildings at Gobekli Tepe had a lifetime over 1,500 years.
06:50The dating places Gobekli Tepe right at the start of a period during the Stone Age known as the Neolithic.
07:02A time of radical change for our ancestors that saw them adapt from living in small nomadic groups and eating
07:12wild plants and animals.
07:15To settling in larger communities and experimenting with rearing livestock and cultivating crops.
07:28The question is, how does Gobekli Tepe fit into this story?
07:36Archaeologist Lee Clare is field director of the excavations.
07:41He believes there are clues in the design of these circular structures.
07:47And T-pillars.
07:49The T-pillars are depictions of the human form, albeit very stylized.
07:54We have the shaft here, which is the body, and the top of the T, of course, is the head
07:58of the individual.
07:59Without any facial features, we have on this broad side the arm coming down the forearm and, of course, the
08:06hands at the bottom resting on the stomach.
08:08This stripe here is actually the belt of the individual.
08:13And hanging down from the belt buckle, we have the loincloth made from a fox fur.
08:18So it's giving us a good indication of the clothing that was being worn at the time.
08:24Lee believes the design of this space echoes how it was used 12,000 years ago.
08:32We certainly have two very important individuals standing here in the center of the building, depicted at great height, five
08:38and a half meters tall, centrally facing towards the south.
08:43But in the surrounding walls around us, there are a dozen more pillars incorporated into that wall.
08:48And each of these was representing an individual.
08:51What we have here is actually a community sitting down, discussing.
08:56Huge numbers of animal bones found here hinted at feasting.
09:00Looks like a piece of animal horn cord.
09:02Probably a gazelle or something like that.
09:04Leading to the conclusion that these structures were communal ritual spaces.
09:11That led archaeologists to name them special buildings.
09:18But with few obvious signs of living spaces.
09:22And no apparent water supply.
09:26Researchers believed that this was a site built by nomadic hunter-gatherers.
09:31Who came together here for seasonal feasts.
09:36It was dubbed the Cathedral on the Hill.
09:41But the radiocarbon dates mean that prehistoric peoples must have constructed this vast ritual site at Gobekli Tepe.
09:50Before pottery.
09:53Metalworking.
09:55Or even the wheel.
09:58Forcing researchers to rethink what they understood about early Neolithic people.
10:04The assumption was that hunter-gatherer communities were not capable of constructing a site like Gobekli Tepe.
10:14It was thought that first you needed agriculture and organized society to have this sort of building.
10:19The received wisdom about hunters and gatherers was mobile groups.
10:28We expected shamanistic ritual.
10:32Dances in small groups.
10:35But we never expected rituals in sites with monumental architecture.
10:44This was totally new.
10:49Who were the people that built Gobekli Tepe?
10:53The age of the site points to hunter-gatherers.
10:57Yet monumental ritual spaces were thought to be tied to the development of agriculture.
11:05So were these people hunter-gatherers?
11:08Or farmers?
11:10And what did they do here?
11:14What was their purpose?
11:16Were they nomadic?
11:17What kind of lifestyle did they have?
11:19These are the things we are curious about.
11:26In 2012, ground-penetrating radar revealed the Gobekli Tepe site extended beyond these first four special buildings.
11:37Showing more solid structures underground to the north and west.
11:45Lee and his team are exploring this larger plot.
11:49Slowly exposing more stone walls.
11:55Over the past ten years, dozens of smaller stone structures have been uncovered.
12:04We have a very dense agglomeration of buildings around the slope.
12:09These aren't monumental buildings.
12:10They are much smaller.
12:12Four or five meters in diameter.
12:13Sometimes even smaller than that.
12:17Dating these buildings places their construction more than 500 years later than the earliest walls of the special buildings.
12:27Were they simply spaces for preparation for the feasting and rituals that took place in the special buildings?
12:36Or did they have some other purpose?
12:41Let me have a look.
12:43It's like a shallow bowl on the floor, doesn't it?
12:46Yeah.
12:47But that's really fantastic.
12:51In a world before pottery, any kind of containers for storage, cups or bowls, would have been made from wood,
12:59bone, or carved from solid stone.
13:03Now this space is very small, too small to actually use for habitation.
13:07But what we could be looking at here is obviously a storage area.
13:11Even after being buried for more than 10,000 years, the stone vessel could still contain clues as to what
13:18these small walled areas were for.
13:22Inside the bowl, of course, the contents seem to be preserved.
13:25I mean, of course, we'll take the contents here and send it off for analysis for flotation for various things.
13:30And look, if we can perhaps see what was inside it.
13:33Earth from the bowl and from the surrounding space is sent off for analysis.
13:40Anything of archaeological interest can be isolated, using a specially designed flotation tank.
13:49Archaeobotanist Farhan Antalin and PhD student Nuria Moreira Noguer sift through bones, flints, and plant remains.
13:58Loads of lint splitters.
14:01Yeah.
14:03The process will split the sample, washing away sediment and separating what's left by what floats and what sinks.
14:12The light fractions float into the water tank.
14:16The heavy fraction stays here with this huge mesh.
14:19And all the other sediment goes down to the bottom of the tank.
14:24There's quite a lot of charred material in the light fraction.
14:29The floating light fraction will contain prehistoric plant remains.
14:34Flints and bones will sink.
14:37Oh, look.
14:39The finger bone.
14:41The finger bone.
14:44So here is the heavy fraction.
14:48We had this finger bone here from an animal, possibly a gazelle.
14:54We also find this tarsus.
14:57So it's part of the paw of the animal.
15:02It was the discovery of large numbers of animal bones in the special buildings that led to the ritual feasting
15:10theory.
15:12For the team's zoo archaeologist Stephanie Emra, deeper analysis of bones found across the site can reveal more about what
15:21animals were being eaten.
15:24So in terms of the number of bones on the site, we've probably looked at over 100,000.
15:33Many of the fragments are poorly preserved.
15:37And the first challenge is identifying which bones came from which species.
15:42I've seen a lot of gazelle, so these little vertebra, gazelle ribs.
15:50Some of the larger stuff are from cattle to the aurochs.
15:53We found boar, sheep.
15:57While gazelle make up more than half of the identified bones, the presence of what seem like familiar farm animals,
16:05such as cattle and sheep, raises the possibility that the people of Gobekli Tepe were farming their food.
16:14Stephanie's research is trying to distinguish whether these bones are from domesticated herds or they're still wild ancestors.
16:24In a controlled herding environment, you would have more adult females and young males being killed off, and this is
16:31not something that we see.
16:32We would also see a shift in the size of the animals, so domestic animals tend to be a bit
16:38smaller than their wild counterparts.
16:42Early farm animals were mostly smaller than their wild relatives, due to poorer nutrition and being penned into enclosures, rather
16:50than running free.
16:53I have these examples. This one is from Gobekli, and this one is from a medieval site in Germany, and
17:01you can see the massive size difference.
17:05You can never really say from just one bone whether it's going to be a wild population or a domestic
17:10population, but having thousands of bone fragments, you can then get an idea of the sort of size of the
17:17animals.
17:19The animal bones found at Gobekli Tepe suggests the animals eaten here were wild.
17:28The people here didn't keep livestock, but slaughtered wild animals.
17:36In addition to the heavier bone evidence, the lighter material from the flotation tank is also filled with clues.
17:45The flotation process is essential. It's the only way we can recover a representative amount of the plant remains that
17:53are accumulated in the site.
17:57Farhan Antolin is an expert in ancient plants.
18:01Most of them are beyond one millimeter of size.
18:06Very small seeds, charcoal fragments allow us to reconstruct both the diet and the landscape around the settlement.
18:15The smallest fragments charred by ancient fires hold clues to what the people who came here ate.
18:22We are looking for charred seeds and charred pieces of wood because these are the only organic plant material that
18:31preserves in dry sites.
18:36Among the microscopic blackened plant remains, Farhan finds more fragments of one plant than any other.
18:45A kind of wheat called einkorn.
18:48It grew around Gobekli Tepe. It was probably intensively harvested by people living at the site.
18:56Since we started the new analysis in 2023, we've been able to see that einkorn is the most frequent plant
19:06that we are identifying.
19:10Einkorn was one of the world's first domesticated grains.
19:15But Farhan's research is revealing something surprising about the einkorn eaten at Gobekli Tepe.
19:23Wild plants disperse their seeds on their own. That's the goal, that their seeds just produce new plants.
19:31In wild einkorn, those seeds just fall off the ear themselves. It's called a shattering ear.
19:39This shattering ear allows seeds to spread naturally. But domesticated, farmed einkorn is different.
19:49This is the ear of domesticated einkorn and all of the spikelets are still attached to the central axis, what
19:58we call the rachis.
19:59And it means it's a non-shattering rachis.
20:04Domesticated einkorn rachis are more robust, allowing for the ears to be harvested intact.
20:11The einkorn seeds Farhan is finding at Gobekli Tepe are all from ears with shattering rachis.
20:19This is wild einkorn.
20:22The fact that we have wild einkorn at Gobekli Tepe is indicating that people were not yet cultivating the plant,
20:31but they were harvesting intensively.
20:36Until archaeologists find clear markers of early crop cultivation, like the presence of certain weeds that thrive in tilled soil.
20:45The evidence suggests that einkorn was gathered from the wild, not planted fields.
20:54When coupled with the wild animal bone evidence, it points to the people at Gobekli Tepe being hunter-gatherers, not
21:02farmers.
21:05And looking at the plant remains beyond einkorn reveals something else about the people who came here.
21:15We've been able to find different types of plant resources, such as wild cereals and legumes, which were harvested mostly
21:23in spring and early summer period.
21:27Loads of fruits and nuts that would be most typically harvested by the end of summer and autumn.
21:37The discovery is forcing researchers to rethink the traditional view of the people who visited Gobekli Tepe.
21:44That they were nomadic hunter-gatherers who camped across the surrounding plains throughout the year.
21:52Congregating here for occasional celebrations.
21:56We observe a diversification of gathered resources that would be available in different months of the year.
22:04So instead of having a mobile camp that would allow a population to follow a resource in the landscape, this
22:12population at Gobekli Tepe benefits from a number of resources that are available in different times of the year and
22:19that can be stored.
22:20This allows them to actually become sedentary.
22:26For decades, scientists thought hunter-gatherer societies always moved with the seasons, following herds of animals.
22:36But now, the finds at Gobekli Tepe are telling a story of a settled community, exploiting the abundant wild plant
22:45and animal life that surrounded them.
22:48This was a place to live.
22:53But if hunter-gatherers settled at Gobekli Tepe, where are their houses?
23:01In one of the structures clustered around the special buildings, Lee is finding evidence of daily life.
23:11This rectangular structure features numerous elements which are clearly domestic.
23:18This reminds us a bit of some modern home in a way.
23:20We have a bench here to my right, and in that bench we have actually a grinding stone.
23:25Whether this was used for actually grinding, whether it contained liquid, perhaps water, but very much like a worktop with
23:32a sink, if you like.
23:34And there's another discovery on the opposite side of the room.
23:38We've got this Stone Age cupboard, ideal for storage, with this wonderful limestone vessel.
23:44So we've got this Stone Age furniture, as it were, and very reminiscent of the Flintstones, in fact.
23:50So this would have been a household kitchen situation, perhaps a family unit, using this space to prepare meals.
23:56All this is pointing to domestic life.
24:02Lee believes many of the structures packed on the slopes were homes.
24:07Covered spaces for permanent residence.
24:11Huddled around the special buildings at the heart of Gobekli Tepe.
24:17When combined with the bone and seed discoveries, the infrastructure here, with grand ceremonial buildings,
24:24and dedicated living spaces, hints at a society in transition.
24:30Still foraging, but now more permanent.
24:36We're dealing with a very complex settlement structure, very much contrary to what people generally think when we say Neolithic
24:43or Stone Age.
24:44At its peak, if the entire area were to have been occupied, I wouldn't be surprised if we're looking at
24:49anything from 500 to over a thousand people living at Gobekli Tepe.
24:56The scale is surprising, stretching over 22 acres.
25:01Twenty monumental buildings and perhaps more, yet to be uncovered.
25:06A settlement that could have supported more than 1,000 people.
25:14It's just one of a handful of early Neolithic settlements so far discovered in the region.
25:22Jericho was big enough for over 2,000 people.
25:27Tel Abu Herrera was home to a few hundred.
25:33But if Gobekli Tepe was a settlement where people lived across 1,500 years, where are their remains?
25:45During over 30 years of excavation, only fragments of human bones had been discovered.
25:53But more recently, that has changed.
25:57Now, in one of the walled structures beyond the special buildings.
26:02Yeah, this is quite exciting to see.
26:05The researchers have found a burial site with human remains.
26:10Yeah, wow.
26:12So what we've got here, obviously, is a bit of skull, a few long bones here.
26:17So it's a burial. It's really, really exciting to have.
26:21So another individual from Gobekli Tepe.
26:24That can tell a story.
26:25Yeah.
26:29It's only the third burial to be discovered at the site.
26:33Human remains are special.
26:35I mean, these are the people that built the site.
26:37These are the people that lived here.
26:38And Lee sees something right away that could make these remains even more special.
26:44The bones, they're not fused. The skull is quite small.
26:49At the moment, we're thinking that it's probably the remains of a child.
26:54For Lee and Moritz, the placement of the body within a decorated niche inside a domestic space gives clues about
27:02the belief systems of the people that lived here.
27:06By bringing somebody's bones back into the house, it's somehow claiming ownership.
27:12So the dead and the living are living together.
27:15They are part of the same cosmos.
27:20This new discovery adds to previous analysis of skull fragments found across the site.
27:27These pictures are from the first skull I found in Gobekli Tepe.
27:331,600 miles from the dig, in her lab in Berlin, paleopathologist Julia Gresge has been examining the skull fragments.
27:44Here, we have a lot of wild cut marks.
27:49At high magnification, she has identified unnatural markings on the bone fragments.
27:56This is something you would expect when defleshing a skull.
28:00If you want to cut away the soft tissue, then you would just scrape on the surface.
28:06These incisions were done while the bone was still fresh, but you can't say that they were done during life
28:14because there are no signs of healing on this incision.
28:20The evidence suggests these skulls were stripped of flesh after death.
28:26And there are more markings.
28:28This skull has three main carvings on the frontal part.
28:33It is several repeated scratches in this big line.
28:39Julia believes these and other marks found on the skull were made intentionally.
28:47The reason is a mystery.
28:52But another clue has led her to a theory of how the skulls may have been used.
28:59We found that one of these skulls had a drilling hole.
29:05The hole was bored through the cranium.
29:08Right at the top of the skull.
29:11Maybe they were trying to fix things on the skulls or they wanted to hang them with a cord.
29:18Red marks found on some bone fragments suggest the skulls could have been decorated and put on display.
29:25The markings on these skulls, they point to some ritual tradition.
29:30So a special focus on the skull of these people.
29:35It's possible a so-called skull cult was practiced by the people of Gobekli Tepe.
29:43A skull cult is a practice of venerating dead people or memorizing important people of the own family, of the
29:52community in general.
29:55The skull from the burial shows no signs of decoration.
30:00But the practice of burying bones within living spaces here, and at later Neolithic sites, is a telling clue about
30:09how human societies were changing.
30:12Perhaps the tradition began at Gobekli Tepe.
30:17When people build communities, it's very important to have this group feeling and to belong to somebody.
30:25Ancestors played a big role in that.
30:28This really means that the dead were kept close to the living and emphasizes the importance of the dead, the
30:36ancestors in this community.
30:40The settlement structures, the sheer volume of finds, and the burials and skull remains lead many archaeologists to conclude this
30:51was a place inhabited year-round.
30:58Yet these people were hunter-gatherers who were not relying on farmed plants or animals.
31:06How were they able to survive year-round in this landscape, which is so dry and challenging today?
31:16The diversity of ancient animal and plant remains discovered here suggests a different kind of environment 12,000 years ago.
31:27The biodiversity of the landscape around Gobekli Tepe was certainly higher than what it is today.
31:37It was wetter, and it would even allow slightly denser forests nearby the settlement.
31:44So there would be parts of the landscape that would be seasonally greener.
31:50At the time of Gobekli Tepe, the climate was slightly different. It was a lot wetter, more rainfall.
31:56On the hillside, just yards from the Gobekli Tepe site,
32:01Lee has found evidence that suggests the people that lived here
32:07may have shaped the hillside to take advantage of that rainfall.
32:15This is not natural. It's artificial. It's carved into the natural plateau.
32:19It's a channel, as you can see, and it's directing the runoff rainwater from upslope down this cliff face.
32:28As Lee's team looked further, they found large, human-made holes.
32:34So as you can see here, we have a shallow pool here and a channel actually leading down.
32:40A rainwater harvesting system.
32:43We have a row of water channels which were carved into the bedrock,
32:48which are actually directing the rainwater down from the site, downslope, into systems like this.
32:57If people did settle permanently at Gobekli Tepe, a secure water supply was vital.
33:05This system may have helped provide that.
33:08These systems are really quite remarkable.
33:10I mean, it's ingenious, in fact.
33:13People were harvesting the rainwater here at Gobekli Tepe.
33:16This is something which would have been essential for the people at the time to live at this site.
33:24And there are more traces of human activity that shape the environment for survival.
33:34All this landscape you see around us really holds the clues to how hunter-gatherer people lived at Gobekli Tepe.
33:48Using satellite images, archaeologist Fatma Shahin and her team have identified something she believes could explain how such a large
33:57population fed itself.
34:00Now we're going to a place we define as an animal trap.
34:05On the ground, the structures appear as long, low stone walls.
34:11But their true scale and design becomes clearer.
34:17When seen from the air.
34:20When seen from the air.
34:44The ground was created.
34:45But now, when we flew the drone, we can see there really is a trap site there.
34:49We can see it very well preserved.
34:54Sometimes extending more than three miles, these structures are called desert kites.
35:00Named for their angular shapes when viewed from above.
35:05This one is some 24 miles from Gobekli Tepe.
35:09But structures like this are spread across the landscape.
35:13The nearest so far discovered is just a couple miles from the site.
35:20Archaeologists have determined that they were most likely made to herd, corral and ultimately trap migrating animals.
35:30They were built along animal migration routes by watering spots, stream banks and on slopes.
35:37They collected stones from the slopes and from the land all around them.
35:42Using a technique called dry stone walling, they created giant mega structures.
35:52This kite is a new discovery for Fatma and so needs deeper research.
35:58But from first impressions, examining the flint blades scattered along the walls.
36:04And the structure's similarity to other early Neolithic kites.
36:10Fatma believes this could have been constructed during the ninth millennium BCE.
36:16Perhaps when Gobekli Tepe was at its height.
36:21The scale is staggering.
36:24The traps can cover an area of 40, 50, even 100 hectares.
36:29By driving animals down the slopes, hunter-gatherers were able to trap them here and pen them in these structures.
36:38The kite suggests a radical idea.
36:42Look, it's very beautiful.
36:46Hunter-gatherers here were organized on a monumental scale, coordinating over vast landscapes.
36:54And Fatma believes these structures may have played a role in the earliest steps toward animal management.
37:02Most likely, animals caught here were seen to reproduce.
37:06Their lives were carrying on and in being confined here, the animals naturally began a process of domestication.
37:17The people who used these traps understood animals and their environment intimately.
37:23No longer small bands of hunters, but a large, organized group, digging into their landscape.
37:33While the kites themselves do not prove a sedentary population, they might explain the vast numbers of bones found at
37:41Gobekli Tepe.
37:45During hunting season, traps like these could have efficiently caught the large numbers of animals needed to feed a growing
37:53population.
37:56The wide variety of birds and small mammals found at the site, and other seasonal plants, show that people here
38:04were finding other sources of food when the migrating animals had left.
38:10It's quite evident that those communities were fully sedentary and were living full-time at Gobekli Tepe.
38:19Gobekli Tepe appears to have expanded from a place for special buildings to a year-round hub for sedentary hunter
38:27-gatherers,
38:29surviving on wild crops, rainwater harvesting, and desert kites for trapping animals.
38:39The question now is, were the people at Gobekli Tepe unique for their time?
38:45Or was this lifestyle common?
38:5318 miles west of Gobekli Tepe is Cybirch.
38:58For the last four years, a team of Turkish archaeologists and students has been excavating amongst the modern village on
39:08this limestone hilltop.
39:10They've unearthed familiar T-pillars, hidden just inches beneath the modern ground level.
39:18How many square places have been here?
39:21205.
39:22Really?
39:23It's quite large.
39:26Archaeologist Eilem Uzduan is the site director.
39:30It's possible to find numerous parallels between the structures at Gobekli Tepe and Cybirch.
39:37The T-shaped pillars appear here within smaller but distinct circular spaces, with the same motifs of wild animals.
39:49But current dating of the site places it much later than the original circular buildings and T-pillars of Gobekli
39:56Tepe.
39:58We are in a place that dates back to roughly the mid-9th millennium BCE.
40:06The construction of Cybirch appears to overlap with the period when Gobekli Tepe was expanding.
40:13But those early established symbolic ritual elements, the T-pillars, the carvings, and the circular structures, seem to have been
40:24transplanted here, almost as the heart of the settlement.
40:29Each settlement has its own distinct character, but the cultural environment here seems to be defined by very deliberate and
40:37strict rules, particularly in their art and the construction of the special buildings.
40:46The excavations here have so far uncovered a much larger residential neighborhood.
40:54And as at Gobekli Tepe, analysis of organic remains suggests only wild foods were eaten here.
41:04So much is similar at Cybirch that archaeologists believe there must have been a sharing of ideas, of ways of
41:11life, between the two sites.
41:15These were complex communities consciously choosing to live in large, settled groups, creating their own complex social environment and cultural
41:24infrastructure.
41:28And Cybirch is only one of Gobekli Tepe's new-found neighbors.
41:34More than ten T-pillar sites have been discovered in the last few years.
41:39Most dating from the period of Gobekli Tepe's expansion in the mid-ninth millennium.
41:47Each with the same animal motifs.
41:51The same monumental pillars.
41:54The same stories in stone.
42:02And this network even stretched beyond the local hillside.
42:08The early Neolithic throughout the region, all the way from Anatolia down to the southern Levant, down to Saudi today,
42:16had many different unique sites.
42:18But they all shared some aspects of common material culture.
42:21So you have a sense that there's a flow of people and ideas between them, which is maintaining some degree
42:29of cultural cohesion, while each individual site is also doing its own thing.
42:36Together, these sites form a web of communities stretching across the region.
42:42And at the heart of it, in its time, the largest yet found.
42:47Gobekli Tepe.
42:49Gobekli Tepe is having this huge influence throughout the whole landscape of Southwest Asia.
42:57There is a sense of cultural unity.
42:59There was a constant flow of people and ideas and a substantial exchange of gifts.
43:05So it's like a social network on a large scale.
43:10This wasn't just one site isolated in its culture and traditions.
43:17The evidence suggests it was the beginning of something larger.
43:22A regional identity.
43:24A shared imagination.
43:27A network of communities bound together by stone, by symbol and by story.
43:41Traditionally, we've assumed that hunter-gatherers have simple lives, maybe rather simple minds.
43:46We now know that hunter-gatherers are as sophisticated and as complex as any modern humans in so many ways.
43:55Dating the buildings and the finds, archaeologists have come to the conclusion that Gobekli Tepe was at its height during
44:04the ninth millennium BCE.
44:07New buildings were erected, old ones reworked.
44:12Then, by around 8,000 BCE, building seems to have stopped.
44:18Fewer archaeological finds from this period suggest much of the population left.
44:24So if the site was booming, why did people leave?
44:33Moritz Kinsel thinks that the size and location of the site led to increasing problems.
44:39When we look at the site, we have this very steep slope, heavy buildings resting on the slope.
44:45Heavy rain and snow in wintertime added a kind of trigger of instability to everything.
44:54These buildings, built on the dip of the hillside, have no real foundations.
44:59Meaning collapse was always a possibility.
45:04The fill of the building is comprised of limestone rubble, large numbers of flint tools, animal bone.
45:11Evidence that the special buildings at the lower part of the depression were actually inundated by collapsed buildings from the
45:18slopes.
45:18The buildings were hit over time again and again by landslide events.
45:25But cracks, tilts and fractures in the monolithic pillars are signs that the site was hit by more than just
45:33landslides.
45:35When we excavated this pillar here, we discovered that it is leaning towards the east and shows this severe crack,
45:44which suggests earthquake damage.
45:51Modern day Turkey is no stranger to devastating earthquakes.
45:57The telltale scars on the pillars are evidence that Gobekli Tepe suffered the same forces 12,000 years ago.
46:05We see here a sheer crack in the T-shaped pillar shaft that is actually leaning as well to the
46:12east.
46:12We have cracked walls, cracked pillars, leaning pillars, cracks in the floor.
46:19And what is very significant is that they're all leaning in the same direction.
46:24And what we have seen here on this pillar, we actually also see on the other pillars in the building.
46:30There were at least two seismic events, one in the very early phase of the site and one in the
46:36late phase of the site.
46:37For centuries, when disaster struck, the people had rebuilt, reinforcing walls, reshaping the enclosures.
46:48After the final earthquake, the rebuilding seems to have stopped.
46:53What we see over a long time is people moving away after these destructive events.
46:59They lacked the people to reshape certain areas.
47:05The monuments fell silent.
47:08The gathering stopped.
47:11After 15 centuries, a thriving hilltop community came to an end.
47:18But the story continued.
47:24Less than 10 miles from Gobekli Tepe, on the edge of the Haran Plain, lies another ancient site.
47:34Gurju Tepe.
47:37Gurju Tepe holds the key for what came next after Gobekli Tepe.
47:44Archaeologists digging here.
47:47Uncovered remains dating to the moment Gobekli Tepe was falling silent.
47:54What we find here is change.
47:58A change in architecture.
48:01Ritual buildings disappear.
48:03The people were more interested in functional architecture.
48:10Gone are the grand circular enclosures.
48:14In their place, compact homes.
48:18The T-shaped pillars and their animal carvings vanish too.
48:24Monumentality had disappeared.
48:26So these age-old hunter-gatherer narratives were being abandoned.
48:32This might mean a shift of the priorities of the society.
48:39And it's not only priorities that are changing.
48:43Stephanie Emra has studied animal bones from the site.
48:47So at Gobekli Tepe, we only find wild animals.
48:51Whereas at Gobekli Tepe, we're finding much, much fewer of those wild species.
48:56And it's almost entirely sheep and goat.
49:00The domestic version.
49:02That, alongside the age profiles of the animals and the sex ratio of the animals,
49:07that's a really clear indication that they're now herding animals.
49:12A new, agreed way of life, primarily dependent on domesticated crops,
49:19unherded sheep, goats and cattle,
49:22had become accepted and universal.
49:27While earthquakes and landslides might have been the driver for people to leave Gobekli Tepe,
49:33there may also have been a draw.
49:37It's quite possible that the population living at Gobekli Tepe moved down into the plain
49:42in order to have better conditions for farming.
49:45It was flat.
49:47They had enough water to plant.
49:50They had enough space and fertile land.
49:55This wasn't an isolated change.
50:00Sites across these hills were abandoned as farming on the plains took root.
50:06So what we see is the emergence of an agricultural way of life.
50:15Before the discoveries at Gobekli Tepe,
50:19many archaeologists believed that people first came together in settlements
50:24because they needed to be in one place to farm.
50:28But with the new findings here, scientists now see a different dynamic.
50:35Hunter-gatherers came together in community to express their spiritual beliefs
50:40with monumental architecture and ritual.
50:44And that process led to an entirely new way of life.
50:49The fascinating thing is having these big gatherings, that forced them to harvest wild cereals in large quantities.
50:57And by doing that, they pushed the domestication of these plants.
51:01It was this religious drive that may have actually led to the emergence of domestic egg crops and ultimately farming.
51:10This was no sudden revolution, but instead a slow transformation that unfolded over millennia.
51:20The creation of a settled society before farming even began.
51:26Gobekli Tepe is, without doubt, a turning point in human history.
51:30But it is the transition from life as a hunter-gatherer to life as a settled farmer.
51:39As archaeologists continue to make new discoveries at Gobekli Tepe,
51:44the story of our ancestors,
51:47and how they went from hunter-gatherers to settled farmers,
51:52will continue to be rewritten,
51:55revealing more about the people who lived here.
51:58They were people like us,
52:00but living in a totally different time, in a totally different culture,
52:04but just as ingenious as we are today.
52:47For some more people,
52:48100% of people were still by flax way,
52:49by myself.
52:50The tail-gatherers were justified through tissues of space.
52:54They had the stockages of the salt of the spring and the oil-gatherer,
52:57the gelesousors provided in risks,
52:57which easels02.
53:00For more people near the driving station has been piled in a way around them,
53:03and can also be inspired by them on terror they're never afraid,
53:03for more people of their vulnerable habitat.
53:13Transcription by CastingWords
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