The Temple at Gobekli Tepe

In Turkey, there is an empty, uninhabited region overlooked by a ridge of mountains. On a hill at the base of those mountains is a temple unique in human history.

Gobekli Tepe is a series of temples, built on top of each other over time. The oldest layer of temples is more than 11,000 years old. Do you understand how old that is?

That's not just seven thousand years older than the Pyramids. Five thousand years older than the first cities in the fertile crescent. It's a thousand years before agriculture. The builders were nomads, living off of herds and foraging.

It's before writing. So the whole thing was built by people whose knowledge had to be learned entirely in their lifetime and committed to memory. Can you imagine building a house with a group of people, when there aren't any diagrams or written instructions on length or weight? And the project took more than just your lifetimes? (Okay, maybe there were measured lengths of rope or something, but still.)

So it existed almost alone on Earth, with no large permanent human settlements. Not in the middle of a city, or even near one, or at a time when our concept of "cities" even existed. There are barely signs that people even lived at the site. It indicates humans who used it lived in nomadic villages nearby and it stood mostly empty. It was unimaginably unique at the time.

We only think it was a temple because it was full of larger-than-life statues of humans and dozens of different animals. The concept of a bigger-than-life statue indicates respect and reverence, when it was believed that humans weren't sophisticated enough at the time to see themselves as gods, or worthy of worship.

We know that Gobekli Tepe was in continuous use for more than three thousand years, and then buried. Not in an avalanche, not in a fire or storm. By hand. The entire f**king complex was buried by hand. We know from the striations of earth that it was carried in from the land around and dumped. And it wasn't destroyed first, the building was intact.

Only 5% has been excavated. It's been picked at for decades because of competing claims on archeological rights. Who knows what else is in there.