00:0211,000 years ago, someone built a temple.
00:07But there were no cities yet.
00:09No farms, no writing, no real.
00:12Just hunters and stone.
00:21This is Gobekli Tepe, a hill in southern Turkey.
00:25For years, archaeologists walked right over it.
00:28They thought it was just a medieval graveyard.
00:31They were wrong.
00:34In 1994, a German archaeologist named Klaus Schmidt came to look closer.
00:40He found broken pieces of limestone.
00:43Then more.
00:45Then huge stone pillars buried under the dirt.
00:49Some were over five meters tall, each one carved.
00:53Foxes.
00:55Scorpions.
00:56Vultures.
00:57Snakes.
00:59Shaped like the letter T.
01:01Arranged in circles.
01:03Schmidt kept digging.
01:05He found more circles.
01:07And more.
01:08Then came the date.
01:09Carbon testing placed the site at 9600 BCE.
01:14That's 6,000 years before Stonehenge.
01:187,000 years before the pyramids.
01:20And here's the strange part.
01:22The people who built it had no farms.
01:25No livestock.
01:27No metal tools.
01:28They were hunter-gatherers.
01:31Moving with the seasons.
01:33Chasing gazelles across open plains.
01:36So how did they move stones this heavy?
01:39Some weighed 10 tons.
01:41And why would people with no permanent home build something meant to last forever?
01:48Schmidt had a theory.
01:50A bold one.
01:52Maybe the temple came first.
01:55Maybe farming came after.
01:57Not the other way around.
01:58For a century, historians believed it went like this.
02:02People settled down.
02:03Started farming.
02:05Grew food surplus.
02:06Then built temples.
02:08Gobekli Tepe flipped that order.
02:11Maybe belief built the first farms.
02:14Not the other way around.
02:15Gathering thousands of people to build this.
02:18To feed them.
02:20To organize the work.
02:21That might have pushed humans toward farming.
02:24Not survival.
02:25Faith.
02:27Then, around 8,000 BCE, something else happened.
02:32The builders buried it.
02:35On purpose.
02:36They filled the circles with dirt and rubble.
02:39By hand.
02:40Until only a hill remained.
02:42No one knows exactly why.
02:44Maybe the old gods were retired.
02:48Maybe the meaning had run its course.
02:51Whatever the reason, the burial protected it.
02:55That's the only reason it survived 11,000 years.
03:00Today, less than 5% of Gobekli Tepe has been excavated.
03:05Ground penetrating radar shows more circles still buried.
03:08Waiting.
03:10The oldest temple on earth still has secrets left to give up.
03:17Let us know what competitors to save us,
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