How did hunter-gatherers build Göbeklitepi’s 11,000 year old stone monuments ?

Just after the end of the Ice Age, hunter-gatherers in Anatolia, Turkey built huge stone circles and megaliths. Göbeklitepi defies everything we know about how civilization evolved- or does it?

View from the top of Göbeklitepi

Far out in Anatolia,

nested between the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, lies the low rounded hilltop known as Göbeklitepi.

Göbeklitepi lies 785 meters above sea level, about half a mile up, making it the highest point in the Germuş Mountains. Here, starting around 11,500 years ago- just after the end of the last Ice Age- people built a remarkable series of stone circles. Over 1500 years, they piled stones into circular walls, and inside these walls they erected huge limestone pillars or steles. The typical arrangement is two large T-shaped steles in the middle surrounded by a ring of shorter steles. Many steles are decorated with elaborate carvings of animals- foxes, leopards, lions, boars, vultures, ibises, spiders, snakes. There are also houses where people could have lived, and cisterns to catch rainwater.

What’s truly astonishing about Gobeklitepi isn’t its size and sophistication. Stonehenge is larger, to say nothing of the pyramids of Egypt and the ziggurats of Mesopotamia. And any number of stone carvings from ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt are more elaborate and skillfully made. What’s remarkable about Göbeklitepi is the level of scale and complexity seen in the context of its extraordinary age. It’s twice as old as Stonehenge, twice as old as the Pyramids of Egypt. And it’s not just that Göbeklitepi is old, it doesn’t seem to be associated with agriculture. 

Wheat and other crops only started to be domesticated around 10,000 years ago, and there’s no evidence of farming at Gobeklitepi. Instead, people there seem to have been subsisting heavily on animals, including gazelles, and gathering wild grains.

This seems to defy the standard model for the emergence of complex societies and civilization. The thinking is typically that you first need a way to feed people, i.e. farming, to get enough people to settle down, long enough in one place to start creating monuments and large, complex permanent structures like temples, and with them, more complex political and religious systems, and more advanced technologies.

The reason is that once you do have farming, you get a lot more food in one place, and with less effort. Farming effectively transforms the local biosphere into one whose primary function is to make human food. The local ecosystem goes from producing a diversity of plants and animals that can support a few hunter-gatherers, to a farm, with the majority of the plant biomass producing edible things like wheat, barley, rye, chickpeas, lentils, and peas. By removing all those other species- trees, weeds, wildflowers- in favor of edible plants, the land can now feed a much larger number of people.

You’re also moving down the food chain- by feeding on plants, rather than animals, you’re cutting out the middleman- plant calories go straight to you. You’re becoming an herbivore, and there’s a lot of calories low on the food chain. There’s fewer calories available from herbivore meat, because lots of calories are lost transforming plant biomass into antelope, aurochs, wild sheep, and so on.

This means the basic structure of the food chain is lots of herbivores, few carnivores. As we became more herbivorous, there were more of us.

But farming also requires people to settle down- people have to be present year-round to till or burn the land to remove the weeds, to sow seeds, to weed, and to reap the harvest. And farming produces large surpluses that can help people survive through lean winters. However the need to protect these surpluses (and seed corn for the next sowing) again means that people are tied to the land. Plants forced humans to put down roots.

And last farming means that when farmers aren’t farming- and not all of them have to farm, since farming is highly productive, and once the seeds are sown it’s to a large degree a waiting game- that time can be spent creating complex and permanent structures. Things like houses made of stone and mud brick, city walls, streets, aqueducts- and religious complexes and huge monuments. So farming changes everything. It makes it both possible to be in one place long enough to create permanent structures, and useful to do so- the high investment in a house or a monument is worth it if you can use a structure for many years, even generations.

In the absence of farming, it would seem difficult for hunter-gatherers to marshall enough people to work long enough to build complex, permanent structures. They live at much lower population densities; there are just fewer of them since they’re higher up the food chain. They need to spend most of their time hunting and gathering to feed themselves, they don’t have a lot of extra time to build. And even if they did, they’re mobile, and would have to move on as soon as the animals moved or the local plants were overharvested. There’s not much benefit to making permanent things. And yet, here we seem to have hunters creating large permanent structures.

Is everything we know wrong?

The extraordinary limestone T-pillars and stone circles presumably served a religious function- there’s little sign they were ever lived in. This has been used to suggest that it was religion, rather than economics, that caused people to settle down— that civilization might have started with a more organized form of religion building religious sites, and that this is what caused people to settle down. 

I’m skeptical.

Jesus, Maslow, and Eisenhower: Man Does Not Live By Bread Alone, But Man Still Needs Bread

As Jesus Christ tells us, “man does not live by bread alone”. Humans are a curious creature in that we have needs that go far beyond the physical. We have our immediate needs- safety, warmth, water, food. If you’re familiar with the idea of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs these are at the bottom.

But then we have all these other needs- a need for community, for love, for purpose and belonging and a sense of our purpose and place in the universe- which come on top.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

That these needs go higher up doesn’t mean they’re necessarily less important, rather that they tend to be dealt with after the first needs are in place.

Lack of meaning and love can kill a man as surely as lack of food. This is what Jesus means when he says we don’t live by bread alone. Bread is important- good bread, and good food, is one of the great joys of life. To a degree its an ends in and of itself. But mostly food is a means towards other things, higher up on the hierarchy.

Another way of looking at it might be the urgency-importance matrix. It is sometimes known as the Eisenhower Matrix, after Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Supreme Allied Commander of European Forces Dwight D. Eisenhower speaking to paratroopers on D-Day

Eisenhower famously said that he had two kinds of problems- urgent problems, and important problems. He knew a few things about problems- he oversaw the Allied invasion of Normandy and the liberation of Europe, later he was President during the Cold War and faced down Stalin and Kruschev.

Eisenhower’s maxim was later developed into a related idea, the urgency-importance matrix, or sometimes the Eisenhower Matrix. It’s popular among business-school types, and it attempts to classify ideas in terms of

(i) whether they are urgent or not, and

(ii) whether they are important or not.

Maslow’s Hierarchy can be seen as related to this idea. Going up the pyramid moves you through the upper two quadrants of the Eisenhower Matrix, from urgent, short-term needs on the left toward more long-term needs on the right.

Our vital (i.e. important) needs can therefore be divided into urgent and non-urgent. Our need for water is both important and urgent, we can die in a day without it. Our need for security is urgent, if we are vulnerable to an enemy or a lion, we can be killed in a moment.

Our need for food is also urgent, if a bit less urgent than water- we can go a few weeks or months without food, at most.

Meanwhile things like love, family, community, and our purpose in life are important, but arguably less urgent. You can go days, weeks, months, years without these things… but the lack of these things can slowly kill you as surely as the lack of water or food. People can die of things like broken hearts, loneliness, and shame, or at the very least, they limp along, and fail to thrive. Our psychological needs are critical. And even in the short-term, they’re not entirely unimportant. The ability to find motivation and meaning in what you’re doing are very helpful in solving problems like getting food.

My point is that for religion to drive the evolution of Gobekli Tepi is counterintuitive because it suggests people were putting aside highly urgent needs for food for important but less urgent things like religious meaning. This seems highly unlikely to me. Yes, Jesus is right. Man does not live by bread alone. But man still needs bread. And he usually has to start there.

You need to start with the bread problem to give you to focus on other things, like meaning- or if not bread, some other form of food. We could flip it around.

Man does not live by meaning alone.

Tactics versus Logistics

It’s sometimes said in the military that “amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics”. Things like battle plans don’t matter a lot if you don’t have guns, ammunition, food, fuel, supply chains to move these.

Fundamentally there is a logistics problem with Göblekitepi that has to be solved to build it.

One must assemble enough food in one place to feed enough people, long enough that they can hew out giant monoliths from solid rock, transport them, put them upright and build a religious complex around them. That the Göbeklitepi people did this- and no hunter-gatherers ever did before- suggests they had somehow solved a logistics problem that had never been solved before.

The hunter-gatherers of Gobeklitepi aren’t entirely unique, however. We do see other places where people have created large permanent settlements and monuments without farming. Strikingly, this has happened with marine resources. People like the Alutiiq of Kodiak, Alaska built large, permanent villages. The Alutiiq were able to do this by becoming very good at hunting and fishing, focusing on salmon, which produce millions of pounds of fish every year in seasonal runs, and whales, which can produce tons of meat with a single kill.

The Tlingit of the Pacific Northwest produced permanent settlements and monuments, in the form of totem poles, which (although made of wood) are at least as impressive as the monuments of Gobeklitepi. Tlingit were capable fishermen; boats allowed them to efficiently travel long distances from home to get food.

This suggests you don’t need farming to settle down- but you do need a way to get more food, consistently. So how could the people of Göbeklitepi do this?

Desert Kites

A possible answer emerges in the form of the Desert Kite.

Desert Kites are stone structures found throughout Arabia and western Asia. The Desert Kite consists of an angular or circular ring of rock wall, and long walls extending away from this. Desert kites aren’t exclusively found in the desert despite their name. They’re just easy to find there, since there’s no vegetation to obscure them. They were discovered early in the 20th century, when airplanes were developed, and people could see them for the first time from the air.

Desert kites have a mysterious quality, like the Nazca line drawings of Peru. They look like something fashioned for the gods to look down on from heaven. But Desert Kites appear to have a much more prosaic function- they seem to have functioned to capture animals during game drives.

This worked along the lines of Native American buffalo jumps. Native Americans would use lines of branches and people dressed as wolves to spook buffalo into a stampede over a cliff, then harvest the meat. The desert kites instead seem to have been designed to funnel game into an enclosure, sometimes with pits to kill or trap them. Probably people used dogs to help herd the animals.

Once in the enclosures and pits the animals were presumably either slaughtered and processed- perhaps drying the meat to create food caches. Some might have been held alive for a period, and then slowly slaughtered, one-by-one, to create a source of fresh meat for some weeks.

My hunch, following the man-does-not-live-by-meaning-alone argument, and the “professionals think logistics” idea is that desert kites (or something like it, a hunting method that can produce a lot of game) is probably the answer to the Gobekli Tepi problem.

So I did a very difficult, complex thing to solve this problem, what I often do when I have a challenging scientific problem. I turned to Google (not even Google Scholar) and typed in “Desert Kites Turkey” and came back with something astonishing. There are Desert Kites known from Sanliurfa- the region where we find Gobeklitepi.

So they were used in the area.

This is almost too perfect- I am used to having clever ideas that are quickly shot down by inconvenient facts, but here we have something that fits rather neatly with this idea of large-scale game harvesting.

None have been found at Gobeklitepi- so far. But curiously, a desert kite is found at a nearby ritual complex at Karahan Tepi. Karahan Tepi is a site that also has the characteristic stone T-shaped pillars of Gobeklitepi, and is similar or even older in age.

Are these kite structures of Sanliurfa the right age to have been used by the Gobeklitepi people? It’s hard to date them. Stones are often dated by carbon-dating the overlying organic remains- and since desert kites are not buried under anything, we can’t use that approach. Another method, optically stimulated thermoluminescence (OSL)- doesn’t work either. OSL is able to examine mineral grains to see how long its been since they were exposed to light- again, that doesn’t work particularly well for things that aren’t buried, they’re constantly exposed to light. 

However, some of the Sanliurfa kites are described as having T-pillars- the characteristic architectural element of Gobekli Tepi and similar sites. That implies that the same people made them.

The End of Gobeklitepi - Sowing The Seeds of Your Own Destruction

People stopped occupying Gobeklitepi around 9,000 years ago, and never really went back. This pattern is strikingly similar to Catalhoyuk, a site that’s important in understanding the early emergence of agricultural settlements. Probably not a coincidence. There must be many places like Göbeklitepi and Catalhoyuk that weren’t abandoned, but if so if they’re now under layers of Hittite cities, Greek, Roman, and Ottoman ruins, and modern apartment buildings. We’ll never see them. These key sites can only be found where they’ve been abandoned and people didn’t go back. That’s probably why doing archaeology often requires going to the middle of nowhere.

But why did they abandon Göbeklitepi? I suggest that in Gobeklitepi we see the seeds of the culture’s destruction- that corraling is probably the origin of herding, and that herding then made large-scale hunting non-viable.

How did herding come about? It’s hard to know, but extrapolate beyond the initial roundup with a desert kite. You successfully round up hundreds of animals- sheep, goats, cattle. You kill a few, maybe most of them, and have a big party. Then, over the coming days, you slowly kill the remaining animals. Some meat you eat fresh. Some meat you dry, to create a food cache.

Maybe you start providing a few of the last animals with food, grasses and plants, so that you can keep your fresh meat supply alive a bit longer.

And in the process, maybe some of the females give birth to lambs, kids, and calves. They’re young and imprint on both their mothers and on people, and being herd animals, they are too afraid to run off on their own. They think humans are their herd. If you wait until they’re weaned before killing and eating the mother, you now have a food source that will follow you around. You let them get bigger before you slaughter them.

And maybe someone had the idea to let a few of these captive goats and sheep survive long enough to become pregnant and give birth to a new generation. And at this point, you don’t need to go out and round up more game to stock up on live meat. Your food source follows you around, and you cull from the herd as needed for food.

At this point its no longer necessary to depend on wild game drives. One of two things happen.

One possibility is that the Gobeklitepians realize that the old fashioned way of doing things- following and driving wild animals towards Desert Kites, killing and harvesting them- is outdated. It’s less work and more reliable to herd. Instead of following the animals, it’s better to lead them, and now you have a more consistent, reliable source of food. Perhaps young kids get into herding, while old people look on and shake their heads, and slowly the old way of life disappears, and with it the associated religious rituals. Gobeklitepi is slowly abandoned.

Or maybe new people came in from outside- herders- who competed both with the people of Gobekli Tepi, and the wild animal they hunted. Herders don’t easily coexist with hunter-gatherers. Hunters can take domestic animals for food, which then sparks conflict with their owners. And humans herding animals tend to spook wild game, and by overgrazing, herd animals compete with wild game, and can make it harder for them to survive. Either way, it’s hard for herders and hunter-gatherers to coexist. When the Maasai moved into the Serengeti in Kenya and Tanzania, for example, they seem to have displaced the Dorobo, the local hunter-gather tribes, and eventually the hunter-gatherers disappeared. A similar displacement may have occurred with the people of Gobekli Tepi.

I suspect this tells us about a curious detail of North American history- the persistence of hunter-gatherers until the late 19th century there, long after they disappeared from Europe and Asia. I argue it wasn’t exclusively, maybe not even primarily farming that drove hunter-gatherers extinct in Eurasia, since hunter-gatherers can subsist on game in areas that are difficult to farm. It was herding.

What Gobekli Tepi tells us about the Origins of Civilization

Gobekli Tepi seems at first to defy our understanding of how civilization emerges- perhaps religion and settlement happened first, before the economic transition to new ways of getting food?

In fact, on closer look it seems to confirm the standard model of the evolution of social complexity. To get many people to settle down in one spot for any length of time, people need new modes of getting food that can feed a lot of people in one place. Farming is one means. There are others. Fishing is one. Herding is another.

Following the megafaunal extinctions, our big-game focused hunter-gatherer way of life became more difficult. Eventually- perhaps spurred by the end of the Ice Age around 12,000 years ago- we started experimenting with new ways of making a living. Intensive gathering of grains, then sowing them. Fishing, then whaling. Rounding up animals, then herding them.

This created concentrations of food. Concentrations of food let us have increasingly larger, more settled populations. This led people to create more permanent structures like houses, city walls, stone circles. We see this in the farming societies of Catalhoyuk in Anatolia, and in Mesopotamia. In fishing societies like the Alutiiq and Tlingit. And perhaps in the corralling-based society of Gobeklitepi.

Catalhoyuk, one of the oldest towns in the world, consists of a series of mud-brick houses where several thousand farmers lived

If so, Gobeklitepi is the exception that proves the rule. If you want to get a large group of people settle down for any length of time and do something more than hunting and gathering, you need some way to get sufficient food to feed them.

It's not enough to give people meaning and purpose and a sense of control by invoking the gods. No matter how inspiring the religion, no matter how seductive the cult leader, no one will stick around for long if there’s nothing to eat.

Man does not live by bread alone, but man does not live by meaning and religion alone, either. Prayers to the gods will not by themselves fill your belly. The logistics matter. You can’t start with organized religion and monoliths. Those emerge from- and perhaps help organize- new ways of feeding people.