{"id":29853,"date":"2025-09-24T15:22:24","date_gmt":"2025-09-24T14:22:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=29853"},"modified":"2025-09-24T15:22:24","modified_gmt":"2025-09-24T14:22:24","slug":"ever-heard-of-gobekli-tepe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=29853","title":{"rendered":"Ever heard of Gobekli Tepe?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I’d always thought that Stonehenge in the United Kingdom was about the oldest surviving structure on the earth made by humankind. But, when I watched the BBC series “Human”<\/a>, I learned about a site that I’d never heard of before and it is around 6,000 years older than Stonehenge. It’s located in Turkey and is still being excavated, so we still have much to learn about it. But this is an edited extract from the Wikipedia page:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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G\u00f6bekli Tepe<\/strong> is a Neolithic<\/a> archaeological site<\/a> in Upper Mesopotamia<\/a> in modern-day Turkey. The settlement was inhabited from around 9500 BCE to at least 8000 BCE ,<\/a><\/sup> during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic<\/a>. It is known for its large circular structures that contain large stone pillars \u2013 among the world’s oldest known megaliths<\/a>. Many of these pillars are decorated with anthropomorphic<\/a> details, clothing, and sculptural reliefs<\/a> of wild animals, providing archaeologists insights into prehistoric religion<\/a> and the iconography of the period. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The 15 m (50 ft) high, 8 ha (20-acre) tell<\/a> is covered with ancient domestic structures and other small buildings, quarries, and stone-cut cisterns<\/a> from the Neolithic, as well as some traces of activity from later periods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The site was first noted in a 1963 archaeological survey<\/a>. German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt<\/a> recognised its significance in 1994 and began excavations there the following year. After he died in 2014, work continued as a joint project of Istanbul University<\/a>, \u015eanl\u0131urfa Museum<\/a>, and the German Archaeological Institute<\/a>, under the direction of Turkish prehistorian Necmi Karul<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
G\u00f6bekli Tepe was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site<\/a> in 2018, recognising its outstanding universal value as “one of the first manifestations of human-made monumental architecture”. As of 2021, around 10% of the site has been excavated. Additional areas were examined by geophysical surveys<\/a>, which showed the mound to contain at least 20 large enclosures.

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I’d always thought that Stonehenge in the United Kingdom was about the oldest surviving structure on the earth made by humankind. But, when I watched the BBC series “Human”, I learned about a site that I’d never heard of before and it is around 6,000 years older than Stonehenge. It’s located in Turkey and is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29853"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29861,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29853\/revisions\/29861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}