Gobekli Tepe's stone temples predate Stonehenge, farming and pottery

On a hilltop in southeastern Turkey stand the oldest known monumental megaliths on Earth: rings of T-shaped limestone pillars erected by hunter-gatherers between roughly 9600 and 8200 BC. That is more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge and some 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid of Giza.

What makes Gobekli Tepe so startling is its sequence. The pillars — over 200 of them, the tallest about 5.5 metres and weighing up to 10 tonnes — were carved and raised before pottery, metallurgy, writing, the wheel and farming. The animal bones at the site all come from wild species, confirming the builders had not yet domesticated anything.

For decades scholars assumed monumental architecture required settled farming villages to support it. Gobekli Tepe, excavated from 1994 by the German Archaeological Institute, flipped that story: people built grand stone sanctuaries while still living off the wild.