More than 11,000 years ago, long before the pyramids of Egypt, long before Stonehenge, and thousands of years before the first cities of Mesopotamia, people living in southeastern Anatolia were already transforming their world. They carved human faces into limestone. They created monumental pillars. They sculpted predators. They buried their dead in unusual ways. They gathered in communal buildings. They hunted gazelle. They experimented with settled life. And they created images whose meanings have been lost for thousands of years. Today, these discoveries are emerging from a remarkable archaeological landscape in southeastern Türkiye known as Taş Tepeler , or the “Stone Hills.” The project encompasses a network of Neolithic settlements and activity areas across the Şanlıurfa region, dating broadly from the 10th to the 7th millennium BCE. Rather than treating each site as an isolated mystery, archaeologists are increasingly studying them as parts of a much larger landscape under...

For thousands of years, history taught that civilization began with farming, villages, and then temples — that only settled societies could build monumental architecture. Then Göbekli Tepe was uncovered in southeastern Turkey. Buried for nearly 12,000 years, this vast complex of massive T-shaped pillars carved with images of wild animals predates Stonehenge by 6,000 years and was built by hunter-gatherers long before the invention of pottery, writing, or the wheel. More than just the world's oldest temple, Göbekli Tepe challenges everything we thought we knew about the dawn of civilization, suggesting that it was not settlement that led to religion, but religion itself that may have driven us to settle down and build the modern world.  Introduction: A Monument That Predates Civilization Itself High on a windswept hilltop in southeastern Turkey stands a monument that should not exist. Göbekli Tepe, a sprawling complex of massive limestone pillars arranged in great circles, was built...