Gobekli Tepe
Hunter-gatherers raise carved megalithic enclosures 6,000 years before Stonehenge.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 1.3 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 200 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
On a limestone ridge in southeastern Anatolia, from around 9500 BCE, people quarry and erect T-shaped pillars up to 5.5 metres and 10 tonnes, carved in relief with foxes, boars, snakes, scorpions and vultures, arranged in circular enclosures — and then deliberately backfill them. The builders were foragers, not farmers. That inverts the expected order: monumental communal construction here precedes agriculture rather than following from its surplus, and may even have helped drive it.