Written in stone

A T-shaped limestone pillar at Göbekli Tepe. The site has been dubbed the “zero point in time”, as the discoveries being made there are changing our understanding of how modern civilisation began

In the summer of 2023 Dr Lee Clare was standing in the sweltering heat of Göbekli Tepe, a megalithic site in south-east Turkey close to the Syrian border, when he was called over by one of the people working on the dig. Something important had been found. This wasn’t unusual – ever since the British-born, German-trained archaeologist had become the lead scientist at the site a decade earlier, he had witnessed a series of groundbreaking discoveries. This latest one, though, would prove to be particularly important.

As Clare made his way across the site, a steady stream of tourists passed overhead on a specially-constructed wooden viewing platform. They were all here to see the dozens of T-shaped limestone pillars, some six metres high, adorned with carvings and complex bas reliefs of leopards, snakes and birds.

When the dirt was cleared from the new discovery, an ornately carved life-size statue of a boar was revealed. It was 1.35 metres long, a metre high and weighed one tonne. Its mouth, teeth and back featured unmistakable flecks of black, red and white paint. It was later dated to around 8500 BC. Clare’s team had just found the oldest known painted object ever created by humans, anywhere on Earth.

“It’s the first time that we have clear evidence from Göbekli Tepe that the limestone statues were coloured,” says Clare, sitting in the Istanbul office of the German Archeological Institute, recalling the exhilaration of the discovery. “And if that’s the case for the boar, then we’re probably looking at the same thing for the T-pillars.” Painting shows a degree of sophistication in our ancient ancestors that had never been confirmed before. Not for the first time, Göbekli Tepe had changed what we thought we knew about our past.

Göbekli Tepe – ‘Potbelly Hill’ in Turkish – was thought to be unremarkable when first surveyed in the 1960s, but is now regarded as one of the modern world’s greatest archaeological finds. The reassessment began in 1994, when German archeologist Professor Klaus Schmidt revisited the area after a local farmer accidentally uncovered what turned out to be the top of a T-shaped pillar. What Schmidt went on to find has rewritten what we know about the birth of the modern world. Archaeologists believe that the series of enclosures at Göbekli Tepe were part of a ritual complex of some kind, the rocks quarried nearby and dragged into place by a local hunter-gatherer population almost 12,000 years ago. This makes Göbekli Tepe some 7,000 years older than Stonehenge’s stone circle. The site also predates Sumer in modern-day Iraq, once thought to have been the world’s first civilisation, by more than 5,000 years.

A statue of a boar featuring tiny flecks of paint that was discovered at Göbekli Tepe in July 2023. Dated to around 8500 BC, it is believed to be the oldest painted object ever discovered

When Schmidt presented his findings in an academic paper in 2000, they shocked archaeologists. Before the discovery of Göbekli Tepe it was almost universally accepted by archaeologists that the dawn of agriculture had led to human settlement. Only by going from hunter-gathering to farming and being able to grow surplus food could humans have found the time to hone the skills needed to build advanced structures and develop complex belief systems, featuring icons such as painted boars. Göbekli Tepe defied that logic. Archaeologists say that the site was proof of permanent human settlement, as well as the development of just such a belief system – but they have found no evidence of agricultural cultivation, or domestication of animals.

Göbekli Tepe’s 12,000-year-old carvings are incredibly well preserved. The site sits in the foothills of the Taurus mountains, with views south over the vast, scrubby Harran Plain. On a clear day you can see all the way to the Syrian border. Several enclosures are sunk into the hills, each ringed by T-shaped pillars with two massive columns in the centre, facing each other. Clare believes that the carvings and the T-pillars, which are thought to be representations of the human form, tell an origin story of some kind, perhaps a narrative of ancestor worship. Standing on the wooden walkway and looking down into the excavated rooms feels like entering a portal into the ancient past.

Since Schmidt’s discovery, more sites have been found in the region including Karahan Tepe, about 40 kilometres east of Göbekli Tepe. A total of 13 are now being excavated in a 100 square kilometre area around the city of Şanlıurfa. Twenty more have been found buried under the earth, with the use of sonar.

The digs are regularly unearthing mysterious artefacts. In summer 2023 alone, as well as the boar, a beautiful carved vulture was found as was a two-metre-high statue of a human, sitting down and holding his erect phallus; this is likely to be the earliest full-size human statue ever discovered. “[The catalogue of finds] didn’t fit in with our ideas of what hunter-gatherers were,” says Clare, who took over the project when Schmidt died suddenly in 2014. He explains that the new discoveries have led to the hypothesis that first came religion, and then the city – rather than the other way around. “That was something very new,” he says.

Turkish archeologists refer to this society, collectively, as the Taş Tepeler culture, meaning “stone hills” – but who were the people that built Göbekli Tepe? Without any written historical records the answer is down to the interpretation of what has been excavated. “Prehistory is everything before written history,” says Clare. “So the only thing we have are the material remains.” Interpretations of these remains can differ and it can be painstakingly slow for archaeologists to provide definitive answers, leaving a gap that is increasingly being filled by alternative theories. Some, says Clare, have a faintly comic element to them. Once a dozen members of a mother goddess cult from America arrived at Göbekli Tepe by bus, hoping to find evidence of an ancient, matriarchal civilisation. They were disappointed to see the ubiquitous phallic symbolism at the site and quickly left.

But not all alternative theories around Göbekli Tepe are as benign as those believed by the mother goddess cult. “Everyone’s entitled to their beliefs,” says Clare. “[But] the more dangerous guys are the conspiracy theorists who think we’re hiding something”. The theory that upset him the most was aired in the aftermath of the 2015 Ankara train station bombing, when 100 people were murdered by Kurdish separatists. “Someone wrote that this attack was committed by the Göbekli Tepe excavation team to draw attention away from new discoveries at the site,” he says. “That really upset me. We were close to getting lawyers involved.” But outlandish claims haven’t been limited to the fringes of society.

In 2017, a documentary produced by the Turkish TRT state broadcaster claimed that the site had been built by the prophet Abraham’s father, and that it was here that Abraham (known as Ibrahim in Islam) smashed the idols, an event detailed in an important verse in the Qur’an. “We sat there thinking, are we going to get some extremists [coming] out here to finish off the job?” says Clare. “It can be very dangerous, what’s put out there. It has changed, especially in the past two or three years.”

The more dangerous guys are the conspiracy theorists who think we’re hiding something” — Dr Lee Clare, archaeologist

If you enter ‘Göbekli Tepe’ into the search bar on TikTok or other social media, the story you will find being told about its origins is very different to that espoused by Clare and his colleagues. The site has caught the attention of the world and given rise to alternative theories from the unorthodox to the ridiculous.

After Göbekli Tepe’s discovery was announced, a whole cottage industry of books popped up, later followed by podcasts and videos, many making outlandish claims about its origins. These jumped into the mainstream when they were featured in Ancient Aliens, a hugely successful but controversial US-made History TV programme which promotes the pseudoscientific theory that aliens gave prehistoric humans the knowledge to build some of humankind’s great wonders.

The show, which airs on Netflix, takes inspiration from the 1968 book Chariots of the Gods? by Erich von Däniken, which popularised the ‘ancient astronaut’ theory. Its premise was that intelligent extra-terrestrial beings visited Earth in ancient times and made contact with prehistoric humans, teaching them how to create sites similar to Göbekli Tepe. The book claims that evidence of celestial visitation is carved into monuments across the world, and points to the appearance of astronaut-type figures in myths, legends and religious texts. The book was derided by archaeologists at the time but went on to sell more than 75 million copies worldwide.

A historic totem unearthed in Göbekli Tepe on display at Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum. ‘Pseudo-archaeologists’ suggest the 12,000-year-old artefact might depict a breeding experiment between early humans and aliens

Von Däniken is in his late eighties now and still regularly appears on Ancient Aliens. His influence has only grown in an age of alternative truths. Professor Sarah Kurnick says that his theories are highly problematic. “Von Däniken has particular trouble understanding how non-Europeans could have achieved their accomplishments,” says Kurnik, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder. “For him [Von Däniken] non-Europeans must have had outside guidance. And I think racism and xenophobia explain why.”

For me at least, pseudo-archaeological claims are often offensive” — Sarah Kurnick, professor of anthropology

Kurnik first saw Ancient Aliens in 2010 and was left confused. “I didn’t understand what the show was about or why it was on TV,” she recalls. “It seemed like a rapid succession of unrelated and generally misleading facts and questions about the human past. It also seemed like it did more to confuse than clarify.” The show was a prime example of what she refers to as ‘pseudo-archeology’. “Pseudo-archaeology is something that appears to be archaeology but isn’t, and generally involves making wild and unproven claims about the human past,” Kurnik says. “Often, pseudo-archaeologists start with their conclusion and then gather evidence to support it and ignore evidence that contradicts it. They consider artefacts and features individually and have no concern for context, and make huge, history-altering claims by presenting selective or distorted data.”

Kurnik didn’t expect that Ancient Aliens would have any enduring appeal, but the programme has been extremely popular, having run for no fewer than 20 series. When Netflix recently released data about its most-viewed shows in 2023 Ancient Aliens was on the list, with season four alone having logged 8.3 million viewer hours in the first half of the year. “For me at least, pseudo-archaeological claims are often offensive. In many cases, they sustain myths of white supremacy, disparage non-Europeans, and discredit their ancestors’ achievements,” says Kurnik. “Like other forms of racism, these claims exacerbate inequality and prevent us from appreciating and benefiting from human diversity.”

In Signs of the Gods?, his 1979 follow-up to Chariots… Von Däniken denied he was prejudiced, writing “I am not a racialist… Yet my thirst for knowledge enables me to ignore the taboo on asking racial questions simply because it is untimely and dangerous… Why are we like we are?” In the book he also asks, “Was the black race a failure and did the extraterrestrials change the genetic code by gene surgery and then programme a white or a yellow race?” He also speculates about whether there is a “chosen race”.

Von Däniken appears in the finale of series 12 of Ancient Aliens, ‘Return to Göbekli Tepe’, which presents the idea that the site was some kind of star map, pointing to the origins, in a star system 1,400 light years away, of an alien race that came to Earth and instructed the locals how to construct it. “Did the builder of Göbekli Tepe attempt to preserve important information about what happened here on Earth over 12,000 years ago?” intones the narrator at one point. “And does this include a record of the creation of mankind by extra-terrestrial beings?”

At one point, British author and journalist Andrew Collins, one of the more measured interviewees on the programme, visits the Şanlıurfa Archaeological Museum. Examining a “totem pole” with the museum’s curator, he notes that there are three figures on it, with two of the faces removed. It looks, says the museum curator, like a family group. A series of speculations follows, with contributors to the show suggesting that the “totem pole” might depict a “breeding experiment” between early humans and aliens which led to the development of modern humans. While Collins doesn’t explicitly endorse the aliens theory, he does suggest that the two central pillars at Göbekli Tepe have been set up to map the stars in some way. “Clearly there was something very important about the constellation of Cygnus,” he says on the programme. “Something that made these people want to track its course over a period of perhaps 1,500 years.”

When I speak with Collins he makes it clear that he does not believe that aliens built Göbekli Tepe. “I suspect it’s because I appear on TV shows like Ancient Aliens, which include a lot of bonkers material,” he admits via Zoom from his home in Essex in the UK. “I try to keep it real. The trouble is that you get tarred with the same brush [as the other contributors].”

Collins became interested in Göbekli Tepe after writing his first book From the Ashes of Angels in 1996, about how mythical depictions of angels and demons were based on an actual giant race. He first visited the site in 2004, shortly after it was announced to the world, and was blown away. “I saw a picture of a T-pillar with a snake down the side and I thought: ‘I’ve got to find this place’,” he says.

Collins has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Göbekli Tepe and its history, most of which Clare would agree with. But there are leaps of speculation, linking biblical and religious myths across the world with astrology and occasional forays into anthropology. He has returned to the site year after year, finessing his theory that these monolithic structures were built by a religious cult of sorts, as a response to cataclysms the world had recently experienced at the time. The priestly caste, or shamans, that imparted the knowledge of how to build the structures were, he believes, descended from a race of people travelling from what is now modern-day Siberia and Mongolia, a hybrid of modern human and Denisovan, an extinct species of ancient hominin about which very little is known, aside from the fact that a small fraction of their DNA exists in modern humans.

Collins has his own theories about this caste. “They appear to be extremely big people, possibly the size of something like a WWE wrestler, big geezers. Or an American football player. Very, very large,” he says, arguing that his ideas are gaining traction. “[Some] Turkish archaeologists are now saying exactly the same thing [as me], that the builders of Göbekli Tepe started their migrational journey as early as 30,000 years ago, in Siberia and Mongolia.”

Dr Lee Clare talks in a precise and mild-mannered way. But he becomes angrily animated when he recalls the time he met Collins at Göbekli Tepe in 2019. “He comes every year with a group of believers of his theories,” he says. “He goes on about, and this is something that really bothers me as a German-educated archaeologist, how the people of Göbekli were shown, or they were made to build these megalithic structures, by some sort of master race which is somehow related to the stars.” Clare followed Collins and his tour group around the site. “I stood sort of incognito behind, trying to listen to what they were saying. And he started harping on about this shite.”

Eventually Collins approached Clare and tried to shake his hand. The archaeologist refused. “I said: ‘I don’t like what you stand for. I don’t like what you’re writing and your pseudo-archaeology. I think you should leave.’” Clare sent the site’s guards to monitor the group, which Collins, who has written numerous bestselling books about Göbekli Tepe and its culture, later wrote amounted to “harassment”.

Still, as much as the ‘pseudo-archaeologists’ had annoyed Clare, they were, he believed, manageable when it came to preserving the rational, scientific narrative of Göbekli Tepe’s story. But then Netflix upped the ante. In November 2022, the streaming service dropped a new series called Ancient Apocalypse, presented by Graham Hancock, perhaps the loudest voice in the field of alternative archaeological theories. Like Collins, he began life as a journalist and was once The Economist’s correspondent for east Africa. But in the early 1990s he switched to writing about alternative historical theories. He has sold over five million books that contend that there was a super-advanced pre-Ice Age lost civilisation, possibly Atlantis, which was destroyed by a great cataclysm, and whose survivors travelled the world imparting their knowledge to restart civilisation.

“I saw a picture of a T-pillar with a snake down the side and thought: ‘I’ve got to find this place’” — Andrew Collins, journalist and author

His theory, that mainstream science has overlooked the truth about this lost civilisation, has found a huge audience. He appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience, the world’s most popular podcast, before Netflix knocked on his door. Ancient Apocalypse has been a ratings smash. It was one of the most watched programmes on the streamer globally, generating almost 36 million hours of views in the first half of 2023 – ranking it just one place behind perennially popular US sitcom The Office on Netflix’s mid-year chart. The show prompted a furious response from the Society for American Archaeology (SAA), which complained in an open letter to the streaming service that Hancock “devalues the archaeological profession on the basis of false claims and disinformation,” and claiming that his ‘lost civilisation’ theory “has a long-standing association with racist, white supremacist ideologies; does injustice to Indigenous peoples; and emboldens extremists.” Hancock released a punchy point-by-point rebuttal, accusing the SAA of trying to “disparage me as an individual” as part of an “ongoing highly personalised vendetta”. The claim that his theories diminish indigenous agency was dismissed as “a spurious attempt to smear by association”. In episode five, ‘Legacy of the Sages’, Hancock visited Turkey to expand his theory.

Professor Necmi Karul at Karahan Tepe. In July 2023 an 11,000-year-old sculpture, likely to be the earliest full-size human statue ever discovered, was unearthed at the site

Professor Necmi Karul offers me a cigarette before we talk. “Have you heard of Graham Hancock?” he asks as he lights up. We are sitting in his office at the University of Istanbul, where he heads the prehistoric history department and oversees the work at Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe. His cream-coloured floppy hat, used to protect himself from the intense summer heat during digs, is perched atop a pile of books.

When the Ancient Apocalypse producers first approached Karul about visiting to make a programme, he was wary but reassured that it would be a scientific exploration of the sites. And so Karul met Hancock and showed him Karahan Tepe. To get there from Göbekli Tepe you take a rough dirt road towards the Syrian border, through green and rocky hills speckled with shepherds and their flocks, past quarries and mines, before reaching the huge hill, guarded by one policeman with a pistol, under which most of Karahan Tepe is still buried.

As with Göbekli Tepe, what has been uncovered so far is extraordinary, with T-shaped pillars once again in abundance alongside statues of humans and carved heads. The most impressive feature is a pit where 11 two-metre-high phalluses have been carved from the bedrock. It is guarded by the carving of a human head, three times the size of my own, on the body of a snake. In Ancient Apocalypse Karul and Hancock talk about what mainstream science agrees on about the site – that it is maybe 100 or 200 years younger than Göbekli Tepe and marked an important shift. “In the beginning of settled life humans felt they were part of the animal cosmos,” says Karul. “But after the people come together, the human puts himself in the centre of the cosmos.” Karul believes that before this period there was no evidence of war, conflict or even of any distinct social hierarchy. “It is the end of this lifestyle, which is in peace with the other animals, geography and all this cosmos.” But when the episode came out, Karul’s evidence-based theories were, he says, lost in a melting pot of baseless conjecture. “He didn’t ask me one question about his theories,” he says of Hancock, denying him the chance to refute them. “I used this opportunity to tell him my view of this story. He didn’t use it.”

Professor Sarah Kurnick believes that Hancock’s show is even more “dangerous” than Ancient Aliens. “He is charismatic, well-spoken and writes well,” she says. “He makes essentially the same argument as von Däniken – that a now-gone group is responsible for developing and disseminating ‘civilisation’ as we know it. According to Hancock, there is no evidence of this group’s existence because they were destroyed in an ancient cataclysmic event, or apocalypse. This argument makes no sense to me. Even though a massive cataclysmic event resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, we still have plenty of evidence that dinosaurs existed.”

“My views are slightly different to those of Graham Hancock, he is more into sensationalism,”  concedes Collins, but says that the nature of prehistory makes speculation inevitable. Why, Collins argues, should his or Hancock’s ideas be considered any different from those of mainstream archeology? “How can you not speculate on who might have founded Göbekli Tepe? Or whether it might be aligned to the stars?” There is a clash of cultures, Collins says, stressing that he and Hancock are journalists rather than scientific experts. “We want to get the story out. We don’t want to wait two years until a scientific paper comes out,” he says. “If we’ve found something out that the general public should know about, we want to bring that to them.”

For Collins, Hancock and their followers, an important dynamic is at work: an educated elite thinking they know better, gatekeeping knowledge and secrets from people in an age in which information has essentially been democratised. It’s a narrative that influences how Collins recalls that meeting with Clare in 2019. “We took a tour group to Göbekli Tepe, we were hounded by the security guards and we realised it was being coordinated by Lee Clare,” recalls Collins. “He clearly resented me greatly and the sort of work that we were doing. He would not even shake my hand and said: ‘We don’t want your lies and pseudoscience here’.” Collins vowed never to return but couldn’t resist. He was at Göbekli Tepe a few days before the boar was uncovered last year. “I think there are always going to be two camps,” he says. “One camp is the gatekeepers. And the other is going to be journalism, which is going to want to reveal what’s going on at these places and to bring it to a much wider audience. I’m in the latter camp and always will be.”

In the former camp, meanwhile, both Karul and Clare are flummoxed by the traction that what they see as outlandish theories are receiving. “We have enough arguments, but not enough places to reach people,” says Karul. “People prefer to believe the unbelievable theories.” The evidence, they argue, is revealing something truly remarkable. “This [site shows when] hunter-gatherer life collapsed,” says Karul about how this chapter of human civilisation ended around 8,000 BC. “It’s a social collapse. Everything is born, lives and dies.”

We have enough arguments, but not enough places to reach people… People prefer to believe the unbelievable theories” — Professor Necmi Karul, director of Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe excavations

The history-changing boar is housed in Şanlıurfa Archeological Museum, which was closed to the public for a year following an earthquake and flood in 2023. Shortly before it reopened on 15th February 2024 I visited on a private tour. Up close you can see the flecks of paint on the boar. The detail of the carving is extraordinary, as are the consequences of its discovery, which shifts the story of human civilisation. Clare will be back on site later this year, digging for clues. Andrew Collins will also be there, traipsing around the public walkway above the monoliths as Clare toils below. He is eager finally to visit the boar and see whether it fits into his theory of the site. In April, meanwhile, Hancock promised that Göbekli Tepe would form a major part of his upcoming book.

The battle over interpretations of our distant past will continue, with archaeologists and ‘pseudo-archaeologists’ at loggerheads. “I personally think that the archaeological evidence is more interesting,” says Clare. “But of course, they’re using half-knowledge to back up their narratives. And people believe it because it’s more accessible than, say, archaeological literature. It’s easy to turn on Netflix.”

Posted on Monday, June 24th, 2024 - Categories: #54 - Jan-Mar 2024, App Issues.