Based on everything we know, Göbekli Tepe shouldn’t exist. Located over 20 years ago on the Syrian border of Turkey its mystery remains unsolved.
Why on earth was Göbekli Tepe built?
It sits smack in the middle of the fertile crescent, where earliest humans began the agricultural revolution. Here lies ground zero for modern civilization, or as some have dubbed it, The Garden of Eden. In 2018, it was added onto UNESCO’s World Heritage List. For many reasons, it remains as one of the most baffling archeological sites on the planet.
Is Göbekli Tepe the Oldest Temple in the World? Or is it much, much more.
Göbekli Tepe is the oldest megalithic structure ever found on earth. Discovered in modern-day Turkey, and still yet to be fully excavated, it dates to a baffling 12,000 years old.
It’s not just the oldest site; it’s also the largest. Situated on a flat, barren plateau, the site is a spectacular 90,000 square meters. That’s bigger than 12 football fields. It’s 50 times larger than Stonehenge, and in the same breath, 6000 years older.
The mysterious people who built Göbekli Tepe not only went to extraordinary lengths they did it with laser-like skill. Then, they purposely buried it and left.
These peculiar facts have baffled archeologists who have spent 20 years unearthing its secrets.
Here’s the full transcript of this episode:
Steven: Welcome to The Human Origin Project where we explore The Science of You. To keep up to date, go to our iTunes channel and subscribe. And please leave a review if you enjoyed today’s show. Today we are going to be talking about one of the most fascinating archaeological sites on the planet located in Southeastern Turkey on the Syrian border.
What’s so fascinating about Göbekli Tepe is that it dates right to the period when humans were undergoing the agricultural revolution. It’s located right in the Fertile Crescent which is where we attribute modern civilization as rising out of.
Göbekli Tepe is in a huge site, 90 football fields in size and only less than 10% of that have been uncovered.
The mystery of Göbekli Tepe goes very, very deep. So this will be one of many episodes where we explore this. But today we are going to introduce it and discuss some of the implications and why Göbekli Tepe really is potentially history changing.
We hope you enjoy today’s show. If you have any ideas or research areas you feel are important to this conversation, we want to hear them. There are going to be many more discussions on this topic. We hope you enjoy today’s show on Göbekli Tepe. Hey Stef, how are you, man?
Stefan: [0:01:24] Good. How are you doing?
Steven: [0:01:27] I’m well. It’s been a busy week but I’m excited because today’s show this is a topic that really founded efforts discussions in The Human Origin Project and it’s fascinating. I mean I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of the agricultural revolution and the Fertile Crescent where our modern civilization really came from and we are talking about a site where it all really began.
Stefan: [0:01:57] Yeah, you hear about all these advances in culture and civilization, you think they sort of just pop up here and there and gradually develop. I guess it was the same discovering that there was a place where it could have potentially all happened at once is pretty mind-blowing, especially now that more information is coming out about the site and the region and everything that went on back in ancient times.
Steven: [0:02:23] Completely and I think that’s a really good kind of pretence to have your mindset in when thinking about this topic is that we are talking about the earliest lineage and the earliest evidence of our current civilization in the terms of how we live today.
We just attribute that as happening as an accident and what we are talking about today really shows that maybe there were possibilities that it didn’t and that there was stuff happening we certainly don’t understand but that maybe you show that there were earlier lines of ourselves that we’re doing something that we don’t really know about yet.
Stefan: [0:03:08] And I think the importance of the site was highlighted, I think it was last year, the Göbekli Tepe and the surrounding area was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site which is pretty high praise for a site.
And I think the more that I’ve been learning about it the more researchers books that I’ve been reading and articles that have been coming out it sort of keeps pointing back to the first signs of evidence that they’ve seen for the first signs of agriculture, the first signs of metalworking, the first signs of domesticating animals and grains are in that region of the world. It’s all just the first of everything. It’s just the starting point, almost.
Steven: [0:03:48] And these are all principles and understandings about our history that are well-known yet the discovery of Göbekli Tepe really showed a whole new level of intricate detail as to what actually happened during that period.
And whilst there’s a lot we don’t know and something about putting into perspective, how long ago this was in comparison to other archaeological sites it blows my mind how ancient the site is. It’s great to see that it’s been named a UNESCO World Heritage Site and that it’s been acknowledged this way.
But I really think the interpretation is something which is what we’ll talk about. Let’s s go into what Göbekli Tepe is. It’s located on the southeast border of Turkey on the Syrian border and it’s right in that Fertile Crescent where we know modern civilization began.
It was first discovered in the ‘70s by farmers. What they noticed was these pot belly hills and they actually ran into large stones buried in the hills. It ended up being studied archaeologist at the time who wrote it off as being a natural hill, didn’t they?
Stefan: [0:05:16] Yeah, and I think there were even examples of farmers kind of turning up these strange sorts of carved rocks in their ploughs and things like that. Archaeologists would come and look at them and just write them off as kind of Roman ruins or more modern creations.
It wasn’t until 1994 I think that the first serious look at it from an archaeologist happened by a man by the name of Klaus Schmidt who’s part of the Heidelberg University in Germany. The first time he saw the site he realized or he just had a thought that he was going to spend the rest of his life there because it was so profound to him.
Steven: [0:06:01] Yeah, it’s so interesting, Schmidt’s commitment and stories. We’ll come back to that a little bit but I thought I’d just kind of say where the site is. It’s close to the border. It’s the Southeast and totally region of Turkey, which is 12 kilometres northeast of the city, Şanlıurfa.
Göbekli Tepe actually means potbelly hill in English. There are actually other kinds of theories and ideas as to what the name means which is a long story but it’s interesting to there were those murmurings. It was the ‘60s. An archaeologist named Peter Benedict wrote it off as being a bunch of strange hills but then it took 30 years for Schmidt to come along and he’d been working at a site called Nevali Cori which was near.
And so what he recognized is in all these little carvings and the style of stones that were being uncovered in the area were very similar to these Neolithic sites he was working on. Actually, Nevali Cori was flooded by a dam and so he was looking for another site in the area and then this discovery came across. And as you said he spent the rest of his life there.
Stefan: [0:07:24] Yeah and it blows my mind thinking about how long he would have been digging around that area. I think they could only dig something like a third of the year or half the year because it’s so hot over there and when they could dig it was only for an hour or two a day, broken up into sections.
Throughout his almost 20 years or 20 plus years of excavating the site he only ended up uncovering maybe 10%, I think or a bit under 10% which is just mind-blowing to think of the scale of this site that is the oldest evidence we have any sort of metal megalithic stones working on the planet.
Steven: [0:08:05] Yeah, I think he used to arise like 3:00 or 4:00 AM in order to avoid the hot hours of the Turkish and Syrian environment. Then they would kind of take their findings for the day back to his house where they would have breakfast and kind of uncover things in the coverage of his house.
But 20 years, I was always so appreciative of that. That someone would devote so much time to painstakingly slow work such as archaeology and a site that we don’t really understand. What do you think when you are taken to a site in ’94 where we don’t know really, there’s nothing really precedent that he’s going to find anything significant there and really commit to doing something like that. Obviously, he felt there was something significant to this. He said that he was drawn to it and he knew he would spend the rest of his life there.
Stefan: [0:09:09] Yeah, it would have taken someone like Schmidt. I don’t think anyone would have been so determined to stay and work out exactly what was going on. Yeah, I can imagine. You always read about these new discoveries and archaeological finds, but to actually imagine, day by day them on their hands and knees kind of uncovering grain by grain, it’s hard to imagine. I can’t imagine myself doing that.
Steven: [0:09:36] The level of commitment is unbelievable and archaeologists do it. really, that’s how they base their careers, it’s quite remarkable. But Schmidt’s work is particularly I think pivotal because of how important Göbekli Tepe is. And so it is this collection of T-shaped rocks and this is what he found in this potbelly hill.
What he found was that the hill was not natural but it was actually a manmade series of hills that were built on top of each other. So there were these huge stone pillars that were arranged in circles with two central big T-shaped pillars up to 22 foot tall.
The different enclosures had different sized pillars and different quality of work. But the size and complexity of the carvings are really quite breathtaking when you see the pictures. On the articles and the website, we featured some of the pictures that really kind of represent how amazing this work was.
Like you said there’s only less than 10% of it underground so it’s 12 football fields and it’s 50 times larger than Stonehenge equaling 90000 square meters. Those are mindboggling.
Stefan: [0:11:09] And it’s 6000 years older than Stonehenge. You think Stonehenge is old it’s hard to imagine the context of that being built. But go back another 6000 years on top of that and that’s going Göbekli Tepe. The strange thing about it is each stone circle with a stone, T-shaped pillars, they are almost identical.
They’ve got slightly different sizings and alignments and artworks but it’s pretty much the same pattern repeated again and again and again over this huge area of land which no one can explain it and no one in my mind has come up and so a reason for why they would do this, it doesn’t really make sense to me.
Steven: [0:11:51] That’s what’s so intriguing about Göbekli Tepe is that we really don’t know what it represents and why it was put there. When you put it in the context too so these huge pillars, these come to like you say 6000 years so that’s longer from us to supposedly when Stonehenge was built so between Stonehenge and Göbekli Tepe is a longer period of time.
I think that takes a lot of perspectives to really appreciate how far in the past this is. And it really breaks our modern conception of potentially the idea of what hunter-gatherers were doing. There is also opening the door, the potential of maybe there were people in that time that weren’t hunter-gatherers and where did the ability to make these stones come from?
Stefan: [0:12:47] Yeah and I think that thinking about that is even more strange when you kind of put it in the perspective of what was happening on earth at that time. I think we spoke about that in our last podcast asked about the Younger Dryas period.
The earliest dating that goes back to Göbekli Tepe so far is to the period just after that Younger Dryas period ended. So there are all these strange questions that keep popping up the more you go into learning about Göbekli Tepe.
One of the really strange things, well the strangest thing in my mind is learning that the site itself was purposely buried about 1000 years after was finished being built. The entire 22 football fields or whatever it was, was buried, which is one of the only reasons why we still have access to it today was because it was buried underground.
Steven: [0:13:45] Well it was buried in increments, wasn’t it? That’s the amazing thing because that was such a discovery of Schmidt. It must have absolutely been a watershed moment in his career when he did the carbon dating on the soil from surrounding the stone circles and finding because you can actually determine between soil that’s been laid down by sediment and soil that has been purposely buried and have a certain type of analysis.
Stefan: [0:14:20] Yeah, there’s like a uniformity to the soil. It’s like there’s no way it could have been done naturally because it all dates to the same period and it’s all the same type of soil.
Steven: [0:14:31] So it wasn’t laid down by a period of time.
Stefan: [0:14:35] Yeah, it wasn’t hundreds of years of rain and flooding and wind and that sort of thing building up the soil. It was all in one big heap just dumped upon it.
Steven: [0:14:49] And what they would do is they would actually date the more superficial stones circles that were higher or more close to the surface as being younger and so the site looked like it was actually used over 1500 years and buried in increments. So they would actually look like they were using a circle.
They would trade it and they would bury and then build another one on top of something like that because it’s this strange arrangement where they are built roughly around each other and on top of each other. In over 1500 years or longer, they created these hills.
It’s just an added mystery like how did people in these times one, have the knowledge but then two, the purpose? It’s a very big undertaking. One thing that really kind of stuck out for me is that you don’t have the evidence of any civilization nearby.
There are probably some explanations for that too, isn’t there, especially considering the age of the site and how little we know about this time. For instance, we say that there is no evidence of workers for instance like near Stonehenge, for example, you have evidence of dwellings and the workers and the Egyptian pyramids are the same.
But near this huge site, the biggest site on the planet, the oldest site we don’t have any evidence. I wonder if that’s because the evidence has disseminated over time or whether maybe it was a gathering from surrounding communities.
Stefan: [0:16:34] Yeah, that’s one of the strange things about the excavation so far from the surrounding areas. There’s been no pottery found. There’s been no evidence of trash. If you have a culture living somewhere you usually find things that they’ve left that have been buried with the objects that they built.
There are no burial sites so it doesn’t look like anyone was living there and there are no tools. Before Göbekli Tepe existed, the oldest tools didn’t even date back as far as Göbekli Tepe that could have built it. So you kind of wonder how on earth did they build it without the tools necessary to do it.
And also it’s not near a water source. If you are trying to build the biggest megalithic site on earth you probably need to be near running water or at least a dam or something to sustain yourself, especially over that sort of undertaking. So when you put all these things together it’s sort of really bizarre. It’s really hard to imagine how it all came together.
Steven: [0:17:46] I do wonder if that was different too though because, as you said, this does border on the end of the Younger Dryas and the earth was a very different place and just gone through this turbulent period of both mass sea level rises and so forth. So maybe there was work but conventionally we can’t find the normal signposts of civilization.
Stefan: [0:18:12] Yeah. Trying to piece all this together one of the hardest things is that it’s earlier than any evidence we have writing or written language anywhere in the world. I think the earliest form of written language is something like 3000 BC or around that area, around that sort of time.
But Göbekli Tepe predates that by 9000 years or something along those lines. It’s kind of bizarre. We are just saying these numbers. It’s really hard to imagine what that means.
The only thing really that’s left to try and work it out apart from the archaeological record is myths and legends and stories and symbolism among surviving cultures and language that cultures are still using today that could be tied back to periods in history that sort of span so long ago.
Steven: [0:19:09] When you get into archaeological records where there is no written language it becomes very difficult. Of this age, this is why we know so little about it. It becomes a complete mystery because it’s so far from things we can conventionally tie to historical civilizations that we know of that the people that made Göbekli Tepe are a mystery.
This is what really fascinates me, these people are us. Whatever became modern civilization the people of Göbekli Tepe are what we would become descendants of yet we know so little about them. I think about Göbekli Tepe on a daily basis just because to me it anchors this last point of reachable evidence of where we came from in terms of soul, modern humans yet it just goes into the darkness of complete and utter mystery.
Stefan: [0:20:22] And such a strange thought thinking that it could have been buried underground forever as well. It was just by complete chance that Klaus Schmidt stumbled upon it. And I mean even if it was anyone but Klaus Schmidt I feel like they wouldn’t have given it as much importance as he did and as much time and as much research that went into it.
Steven: [0:20:42] It could have easily been missed and whilst it doesn’t have written writing, a lot of the stone pillars have symbols on them and so there are carvings of animals and certain shapes and representations of what, I guess you can call that a language too but it’s not a written language as such.
But there are many, many animals across the different enclosures that have been uncovered, which are very few. But it does seem to show that they were trying to represent something. They called this the oldest temple in the world and there was clearly as a site of some kind of ritual or understanding or some kind of bringing knowledge to the forefront and sharing it with people that we can’t connect to. But the symbols do present an interesting kind of look into what was going on there, don’t they?
Stefan: [0:21:50] Yeah they do and there are strange occurrences of these symbols popping up across different cultures across the world and similar motifs and similar carvings and imagery.
To get an idea of some of the images that are saying that go, Göbekli Tepe, they are not regular carvings that are carved into stone. I mean there are some that are carved into stone but a lot of them are what’s known as hieroglyphs carving which is instead of carving into the stone, you remove the outside of the stone and are left with an image.
At Göbekli Tepe there are images of all kinds of animals like foxes and birds, lions, snakes, scorpions, strange looking boars that look sort of prehistoric and they are there everywhere. In almost every enclosure that they’ve found so far, there’s been heavy amounts of vultures and birds of prey and things like that, things that have no explanation as of yet.
If it was a place of people coming together and sharing information and learning and teaching them, what were they learning by looking at all these animals and these symbols? They must have had some sort of importance to these cultures because they’ve sort of been carried through to other parts of the world. I have no idea what it all means.
Steven: [0:23:21] It’s so interesting though because as you said you do see kind of echoes of the concepts used in Göbekli Tepe, the symbols and the animals. But going back to the technology required so for hieroglyph carving, if you look at the pictures, if you Google Human Origin Project with Göbekli Tepe you’ll see the article.
There’s a picture of, it’s like a lizard that’s sitting and so basically it’s a lizard sitting, looking down vertically on the pillar. That’s called low relief stone carving where they actually have to carve the detail of the lizard so it actually sits on the surface of the pillar, this huge T-shaped stone pillar.
It’s basically the hardest type of stone masonry you can do because it’s so difficult with the tools you have to get for the intricate details of the nails and the head and it has to be carved on the outside of a flat pillar. To me, I can’t see how they did this with stone tools.
Stefan: [0:24:24] Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. It’s not just that they made the oldest and the largest temple ever found. They also used some of the hardest techniques of stone masonry and even the T-shaped pillars are huge. I think the biggest ones are 22-foot-tall which is—
Steven: [0:24:43] Taller than a giraffe.
Stefan: [0:24:46] Yeah. I’ve been to the zoo and I’ve seen a giraffe. I haven’t been to Göbekli Tepe but I can’t even comprehend the size. And trying to not only stand those T-shaped pillars up but making sure you didn’t drop them and crack any the carvings that you just cut into them. And I think all of the T-shaped pillars in most of the enclosures that they’ve found so far have been built upon flat bedrock.
Steven: [0:25:20] So they had to place the bedrock. Is that what that means? I’m not sure.
Stefan: [0:25:16] I think they either found a very flat piece of earth or levelled it out themselves. If they are moving 20-ton blocks of stone and they are carving hieroglyphs animals and are capable of building and burying the site I feel like they could potentially have had the capability of levelling out the ground and having a playing field that was good to go from the start.
Steven: [0:25:44] I think Schmidt covers these kinds of things because Schmidt wrote a lot of books on his working on Göbekli Tepe and he talks about these kinds of things. Shaping bedrock, for instance, that’s a very technical thing to do. It seems like a very strange occurrence for people that are supposedly coming out of being hunter-gatherers.
It just brings more of the mystery. We can’t explain it. But overall, these animals do seem to echo throughout societies later on. For instance, there’s a lot of representation of the vulture, like you said the fox is represented a lot. But then you do also see these symbols echoing throughout other cultures too.
From Göbekli Tepe we know it’s the centre of the agricultural revolution where we began to farm. You can trace all the grains. You can trace many of the images of sheep and goats and that’s really interesting. Actually, we are going to cover that at a later point.
The agricultural revolution centred around Göbekli Tepe and the evidence of that, which is fascinating, just paints a bigger picture of what’s happening. What we are stuck with and this is where what the human origins based on is to follow the evidence of what we know about these occurrences.
Really the symbols and how we can follow them through subsequent cultures and mythologies and teachings, what can we trace back as being potentially connecting to get Göbekli Tepe? They happen around the world, don’t they?
Stefan: [0:27:33] Yeah, I think it’s hard to picture for our modern-day cultures where we rely on written language and technological communications and things like that. But if we put ourselves in the mindset of these ancient cultures that for them symbolism was one of the main ways of transmitting information and that’s something we don’t really use so much.
But it pops up again and again in ancient cultures. There’s a strange connection between old sites that tie back to Göbekli Tepe through these similar images and similar symbols.
I don’t think we’ve mentioned but on the T-shaped pillars, they’ve been carved with hands, long arms sort of running down the side of them with hands at the end which is really similar to, I don’t know if anyone has seen pictures of Easter Island, the Moai statues on Easter Island.
Steven: [0:28:33] There are some on their Instagram where they dig under the platform of the Moai heads and there are actually these hands.
Stefan: [0:28:42] Yeah, I mean I always thought it was just heads but I think they’ve excavated a lot of them. They are huge standing figures with these stone heads and along the side almost identical to Göbekli Tepe, these huge statues have long arms with hands poking out the sides.
Easter Island dates thousands of years later to Göbekli Tepe, yet those symbols are almost identical. I’m not sure if anyone’s come to the conclusions as to what that means for Göbekli Tepe.
But it seems to be anthropomorphism, either remembering ancestors or celebrating ancestors or celebrating people or teachers or gods or some sort of human figure was being depicted by these huge pillars. They weren’t just standing stones as you see at Stonehenge or other stone circle sites around the world. They were purposely made to represent people.
Steven: [0:29:54] There are similar sites to this, some similar T-shaped symbolism happening. I think it’s Malta and some Spanish, I can’t remember the island now but this ancient kind of symbolism does show up. But there certainly seems to be a representation.
So you have these two bigger pillars is in the middle which is facing each other so it seems like people facing each other. And there are also symbols based on that two heads or two curved lines or figures facing each other with a division in the middle. They are all represented around this meeting of these two central points.
So whether that’s people or whether that’s, who knows, it’s so hard to place but as you say there is this connection to Easter Island. And also you actually see similar styles of carving, these figures with strange large heads, for instance, that are similar to the star. But there’s also penises carved out and other strange things and some astronomical markings too.
Stefan: [0:31:11] Yeah, I’m not too sure about the astronomical stuff. I haven’t seen too much of that but I’ve definitely seen, as you said, strange depictions of erect penises on certain pillars. I don’t know if anyone’s been to Egypt, but there’s a lot of hieroglyphs of really similar depictions of these people or animals or anything but similar symbols of—
Steven: [0:31:36] And same as you find in Indonesia, you also find it in indigenous Australian society as well where they have the foul symbol. Obviously, that’s universal to humans but there’s also a similar style of drawing of them as well too, isn’t there?
Stefan: [0:32:00] Yeah. And not only in those places but also in the Native American tribes of North America, erect totem poles. A lot of the imagery on these totem poles are very similar to the images depicted on these pillars at Göbekli Tepe.
It’s bizarre thinking that Native American cultures are still around today and they could potentially be carrying the same memory or the same traditions that were implemented or relearn or taught or whatever it was at Göbekli Tepe and carried through all of these years. It’s hard to grasp that fact that these things can potentially survive if they have.
Steven: [0:32:45] And there have been some scholars written about how the T-shaped might even be the earliest form of the cross, how you find this in the Celts?
Stefan: [0:32:58] Yeah, the Celtic tribes and the ancient Irish cross, there are lots of all the images of Irish crosses that look almost identical to the T-shaped, those at Göbekli Tepe. And then you say an agent with the ark symbol which is not quite the same but it’s a similar concept, all the way up to pre-Christian and Christian idea of the cross.
It’s all of the Neolithic UK or through Ireland and Scotland, over to France and Malta, as you said. Whether that’s just coincidence but I mean if you start bumping up against coincidence after coincidence, it starts making you go to a question if there’s something more going on.
Steven: [0:33:48] There’s no doubt something at Göbekli Tepe resonated somewhere in the world. One other thing is that there’s like a handbag style symbol and numbers of them that resembles you see things in, I think it’s Peru and certain sites around there that have the exact same symbol and you actually find that around the world too, don’t you?
Stefan: [0:34:10] Yeah. I recently read a book about New Zealand Maori which is a tribe in New Zealand who one of their myths they talk about one of their ancestors going to this sacred site and returning with three handbags of knowledge.
If you see these images at Göbekli Tepe they look just like handbags. They’ve got sort of a curved hemisphere top with a square bottom. It could also represent a sort of early attempt to squaring the circle or that ancient Egyptian concept of, as above so below trying to reconcile the heavens and the earth. There are so many avenues you can go down with these images. It’s really hard to know where to stop.
Steven: [0:34:58] It’s interesting though that when you go back this far in history the problem that we have now is that without written word and actually just on that, when you look at different hieroglyphs which are considered a language, the symbols could really be a written language that we don’t understand.
That’s kind of maybe something that could be considered. So perhaps to them, this kind of carving could have been some kind of language. But when you kind of track back in the language of both the history of for instance Ancient Egypt, they talk of times before and they talk with their timings in Tepe which might relate to the idea of Göbekli Tepe.
Stefan: [0:35:44] Yeah, it’s funny that when you don’t have any written language to go off, you’ve only got spoken word and existing symbols and existing words that were used by ancient cultures. There’s a strange connection. The Egyptians talk about the first time, quasi Tepe.
It’s like a quasi sort of mythical first time where they inherited all their knowledge and they were brought back to culture. There’s an interesting link with the word Tepe which I think in Turkish has upwards of 20 plus meanings. But it’s in the part of the world that the Egyptians talk about.
They were talking about this and people were trying to surmise where it was, and then Göbekli Tepe was found and it sort of put these sort of unsolved questions. It opened up a lot of potential areas of research for answers for these seemingly mythical storylines that have potentially been opened up.
Steven: [0:36:52] Yeah like were the Egyptians talking about Göbekli Tepe when they sensed it? Maybe they were. It’s completely reasonable for that to be actually just speaking about the time when ancestors came together and put together this, because it’s stone masonry evidence which clearly went to this kind of knowledge was projected to Egypt at a later time. That’s fascinating but you also find it elsewhere too. It’s in Buddhism as well, for instance, the use of the vulture.
Stefan: [0:37:24] Yeah, I think in ancient Buddhism it’s said that at a high mountain top sanctuary that is known as Vulture Peak that’s where knowledge was first passed down to a Buddha. We were talking before about birds of prey and vultures, and the symbolism there.
It is in the region of the world that Buddhism is thought to originate from, you know coming from the north, through India, down into China. It’s a strange concept thinking that these really profound ancient ideologies and cultures could have stemmed from the same original source which is something you don’t really hear too much about but it’s really a fascinating possibility.
Steven: [0:38:16] It’s interesting too, you can also trace a little bit so there was a matriarchal cult-like religion back then. You find these in sites in Turkey, they called carvings of very voluptuous women and seemed to worship the fertility of a curvaceous woman. This seems to go through India, is it the Shakti cult?
Stefan: [0:38:48] Yeah, the Shakti cult. There are still members of the Shakti cult in I think it’s in Arisa in India. They are a matriarchal cult that focuses on fertility and life and they are very loving and very non-aggressive. There’s no fighting or warfare.
But an interesting thing about them they symbolize this woman that almost looks pregnant which is very characteristic of Göbekli Tepe which is known as a potbelly hill. It doesn’t take too much of a stretch of the imagination to picture a potbelly hill as the stomach of a pregnant woman.
I think another description for Göbekli Tepe is the hill with a navel which kind of ties it into that human saying. There are a lot of layers to the symbolism. And you see, the idea of the navel is somewhere where ideas and information and knowledge is born out of.
Not just in Göbekli Tepe but across the world in places like Cusco in Peru, known as the navel. [0:40:02] is thought of in Australia as the navel of Australian culture, at least in the Aboriginals minds. There are sites all over the world where this navel symbolism is present and that’s tied directly into this Shakti cult.
They are so old and no one knows exactly where they originated from. But it was somewhere to the north of India, which is towards Göbekli Tepe, which is a strange thought to have all these cultures stemming out of this region of the world where Göbekli Tepe pops up.
Steven: [0:40:37] It’s funny because we already know that that’s where we come from. We scientifically say farming and the beginning of our civilization began. But these kinds of connections it’s more detailed and it just paints the pictures to how potentially complex and powerful these, whatever the knowledge was being stored at Göbekli Tepe because it was being stored too. They buried it to make sure it wasn’t either destroyed or stolen.
Stefan: [0:41:09] Yeah, it makes sense if it was a site where the first knowledge was taught and really profound information was shared that you would want to preserve it. You wouldn’t want it to be lost to time to be slowly eroded away.
The ancient culture who built it or who live there, whatever they were doing, they would have had to have a good reason to bury it. It would have taken, I don’t know, thousands and thousands of people months and months to bury that. Imagine trying to very Stonehenge right now and this site is 50 times bigger than Stonehenge.
Steven: [0:41:45] They went to massive trouble to bury it correctly to bury it in a certain way too and perfectly as well because we are literally unearthing it nearly 12000 years later in 1994. It’s crazy to think of. It sounds like a movie but this actually happened.
One thing you mentioned before too, is that we find these echoes all around the planet. But there’s a very interesting link between one of the symbols on one of the pillars to and you find that in indigenous Australia it’s very well often used in their language and it’s nearly identical. When you start drawing these language links, these are the really, really interesting lines of evidence where we came from, I think.
Stefan: [0:42:36] Yeah. I can’t really wrap my head around how that even works, how something so old there are still echoes of it today. There are potentially people out there who know and understand what these symbols mean. I guess we’ll find out.
Steven: [0:42:54] We are definitely going to find out. Göbekli Tepepy is going to be the centre of many articles for The Human Origin Project and then we are going to have many people and researchers presenting their findings and their theories too.
The article up on the website now is the baseline knowledge and that’s really what this shows about. We are going to have more discussions on this. We are going to interview people. Potentially too we are looking at getting a group to go to Göbekli Tepe. It’s one thing I definitely want to do is I want to go to the site. I have to go to the site and so that’s another thing to live and experience as well.
Stefan: [0:43:40] Yeah, I can’t wait to go, the pillars of three times, four times as big as the people that are looking at them. I can’t imagine the power that it must give to you.
And also just thinking back to the cradle of civilized and the agricultural revolution in my head it’s farmers slowly learning how to farm and slowly teaching that and slowly spreading across the land. But having a site of this complexity that potentially was the place for that to happen, having a physical place is insane.
You look at these other ancient sites in the world with cultures that were already set up and they knew how to build and I knew what to do but not knowing how these people at Göbekli Tepe went about what they did is really mindboggling.
Steven: [0:44:37] Completely mindboggling, the mindboggling problem that we are going to follow a lot and cover more so I’m really looking forward to that. For those who want to read more about Göbekli Tepe, you can go onto the website and look at the article on the oldest temple in the world.
Also, there’s a YouTube video that summarizes some of the dimensions and details, size so check that out. If you have any thoughts or areas of research you’d like us to cover please leave them in the comments of this show. Please jump on the social channels and talk about this.
I go to places where people are talking about supposedly important concepts and I think everyone should be talking about Göbekli Tepe nearly all the time because only 10% of it is uncovered. To me it’s just like, I’d want to know what’s there. So yeah, I’m sure there are other people out there who would like that too.
Stefan: [0:45:40] Yeah, and it’s great having this platform to bounce ideas off of and get as many different perspectives on it as we can to try and piece it together because it’s not just an individual archaeological site. It’s the birthplace of potentially many other ancient sites and ancient cultures. It’s really exciting to get lots of opinions, get lots of ideas, and lots of avenues of research to try and piece it all back together. It’s really exciting to be part of.
Steven: [0:46:13] It completely is. I’m really looking forward to it. All right, I think we covered, you can only really scratch the surface but I think we are going to have to bury what we’ve just done and leave it for next time. I think next week, what are we going to talk about next week?
Stefan: [0:46:30] I think, maybe you need to talk about Stonehenge.
Steven: [0:46:33] Yeah, that seems fitting. We are going to jump through these different topics that are kind of well known. We are going to go deeper and deeper into the lesser known too. There are lots and lots of research to come and lots of interesting topics. All right, Stef, we’ll see you next week.
Stefan: [0:46:50] Yeah, see you, Steve. Have a good week.
Steven: [0:46:52] Thank you for listening to today’s show. For more information, you can read the full transcript, articles and discussion on our website, humanoriginproject.com. You can visit us on social media at Human Origin Project on Facebook and The Human Origin Project on Instagram.
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