Graham Hancock

But what is becoming clear is that this is a period before the foundation of Gobekli Tepe. As far as we know, that date of 11,600 years ago is the oldest date for Gobekli Tepe. But of course, there's a lot of Gobekli Tepe still underground. So we can't say for sure that that's the oldest, but it's the oldest so far excavated.

What we're seeing is that in that whole region around there, something was in motion, and it began to go into motion round about the beginning of the Younger Dryas. And this is where these two dates are really important. The Younger Dryas, I'll round the figures off, begins around 12,800 years ago, and it ends around 11,600 years ago. So Gobekli Tepe's construction date, if it is

11,600 years ago, if they don't find older materials, marks the end of the Younger Dryas. But the beginning of the Younger Dryas, we're already seeing the stirrings of the kind of culture that manifests in full form at Gobekli Tepe. And After the construction of Gobekli Tepe, in fact, even during the construction of Gobekli Tepe, we see agriculture beginning to be adopted.

The people who created Gobekli Tepe were all hunter-foragers at the beginning. But by the time Gobekli Tepe was finished, and it was definitely deliberately finished, closed off, closed down, deliberately buried, covered with earth, covered with rubble, and then topped off with a hill, Which is why Gobekli Tepe is called what it is. Gobekli Tepe means pot-bellied hill or the hill of the naval.

For a long time, Gobekli Tepe was thought to be just a hill that looked a bit like a pot belly.

Well, Gobekli Tepe is, first of all, the oldest fossil. fully elaborated megalithic site that we know of anywhere in the world. It doesn't mean the older ones won't be found, but it is the oldest so far found. The part of the site that's been excavated, which is a tiny percentage of the whole site, we do know.

My first visit to Gobekli Tepe was in 2013, and Dr. Klaus Schmidt, the late Dr. Klaus Schmidt, who died a year later, was very generous to me and showed me around the site for over a period of three days. And he He explained to me that they've already used ground-penetrating radar on the site, and they know that there's much more Gobekli Tepe still underground.

So anything is possible in terms of the dating of Gobekli Tepe. But what we have at the moment... is a series of almost circular but not quite circular enclosures which are walled with relatively small stones and then inside them you have pairs of megalithic pillars and the archetypal part of that site

is enclosure D, which contains the two largest upright megaliths, about 18 feet tall and reckoned to weigh somewhere in the range of 20 tons, if I have my memory correct. They're substantial, hefty pieces of stone. It isn't some kind of extraordinary feat to create a 20-foot tall or 20-ton megalith, nor is it an extraordinary feat to move it. There's nothing magical or really weird about that.

Human beings can do that. And always have. Besides, the quarry for the megaliths is right there. It's within 200 meters of the main enclosure. So that's not a mystery. But the mystery is why suddenly this new form of architecture, this massive structure, massive megalithic pillars appear. And the pillars, one of the things that interests me about the pillars is their alignment.

And there is good work that's been done which suggests that enclosure D aligns to the rising of the star Sirius. And the rising points of the star Sirius appear to be mapped by the other enclosures, which are all oriented in slightly different directions.

It was the work entirely of hunter-foragers, but by the time Göbekli Tepe was completed, agriculture was being introduced and was taking place there. Now you asked how Gobekli Tepe was found. The answer to that is that there was a survey of that pot-bellied hill in the 1960s by some American archaeologists.

And they were looking, absolutely looking for Stone Age material, for material from the Paleolithic area. And they had found some Paleolithic flints, Upper Paleolithic flints around there, so it looked like a good place to look. But then they noticed, sticking out of the side of the hill, some very finely cut stone, bits of very large and very finely cut stone.

And looking at that, the workmanship was so good that those archaeologists were confident that it had nothing to do with the Stone Age. And they thought they were looking at perhaps some Byzantine remains. And they abandoned the site and never looked at it further.

And it wasn't until the German Archaeological Institute got involved, and particularly Klaus Schmidt, who I think was a genius, had real insight into this and started to dig at Gobekli Tepe that they realized what they'd found, that they'd found potentially the oldest megalithic site in the world.

And they'd found it at a place where agriculture, according to the established historical timeline, that's where agriculture at any rate in Europe and Western Asia begins. It begins in Anatolia, in Turkey, and then it gradually disseminates westward from there.

It was created by hunter-gatherers, yeah. There was no agriculture 11,600 years ago in Gobekli Tepe. But by the time Gobekli Tepe was decommissioned, and I use that word deliberately, was closed down and buried, agriculture was all around it. And this was agriculture of people who knew how to cultivate plants.

Is it around that similar time? It stood from roughly 11,600 years ago to about 10,400 years ago, to about 8,400 BC. So around 1,200 years, it was there, and it continued to be elaborated as a site. And while it was being elaborated as a site, we see agriculture growing. I'm going to use the word being introduced. There'd been no sign of it before, and suddenly it's there.

And to me, that's another of the mysteries about Gobekli Tepe. And then with the new work that's being done, we realized that it's part of a much wider phenomenon, which spreads across an enormous distance. And the puzzling thing is that after Gobekli Tepe, there almost seems to be a decline. Things fall down again.

And then we enter this long, slow process of the Neolithic, thousands of years, gradual developments until we come to ancient Sumer and Mesopotamia. But agriculture has taken a firm route by then. Actually, one other thing, I'll just say this in passing.