Gobekli Tepe
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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and Chuck's here, and it's just us, and that's fine, and this is Stuff You Should Know. One of my favorite types of editions, the distant past, let's figure it out edition, and it's so surprising edition. Oh, man. You have always loved this stuff, huh? I certainly have. It jazzes me at least as much as earth science. Yeah. I think, you know, the age-old question, like if you could

have a real Wayback Machine and go back and go to any concert, your answer would be like, something where Tuk Tuk took bones and banged it on rocks just so I could see what was going on. Yeah, from a distance, as long as he didn't know I was there, because I assume I would get beaten to death by that same guy. You're like that in Kraftwerk's first tour. I saw Kraftwerk at the Disney...

Like concert hall in L.A. Now I'm very jealous of that show. I'll tell you about that every time. And that was a great show. Looks amazing. Yeah. They had like a 3D light display and everything. One day. Yeah. One day. They're still touring as far as I know. So, yeah, they don't get around here that much, you know. No. But when they do, go see them. No, for sure.

Also, while we're on recommendations, I watched a movie that I've just been passing over for years now that was actually worth the watch. It's a mind-bending horror movie called Triangle. I think it's Australian. Because I'm pretty sure just about everybody in it is Australian, but they're pretending to be American. Okay. But it's – you know how often mind-bending movies that mess with just –

just reality and stuff like just fall apart at some point. This one stayed tight from beginning to end. Wow. Yeah, it was a good movie. I would definitely recommend it. I mean, I don't think it won any Oscars or anything like that, but it was definitely worth watching. You know what? You can take the Oscar award and stick it right up the collective butt of the world. There you go. It's just called Triangle? Just Triangle, yes. All right.

Okay. Never heard of it. You all hang out here. You go watch it and then come back and we'll talk about it. 2009 British film is what it says. Is that possible? I thought it was like 2018. Does it look like there's a person wearing like a bag over their head in the poster? No, that's another one. Triangle. I want to say 2018. Fear comes in waves? Probably it, yes.

It looks very B-movie, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. That's what I thought, too. That can be good. I totally thought it looked B-2, and then I was like, this is really good. This movie hasn't gotten enough credit from me. Okay. All right. I'll check it out.

Okay, so all of the archaeology and anthropology fans are like, shut up and start talking about Gobekli Tepe. I don't know why that was hard. It's really actually a very easy word to say or pair of words. Yeah, I saw Tepe, actually. I don't know how specific that gets, though. That's spoken by people who raise their pinkies when they drink their tea. Yeah, but a Tepe is like a mound or a hill, correct? Mm-hmm.

And Gobekli means belly, so people take it to basically mean pot belly hill. Yeah. And this is a place in Turkey, and it is a place where a lot of archaeological digging is still going on. And it was one of these places that is – and I know you love this kind of thing more than anything, but like –

Like when an archaeological find kind of upends traditional thought of how we thought things were. And this is one of the great examples of that. Yeah, especially when it's true and not like pseudoscience. Like somebody's like, it was ancient aliens. Right. Well, where's the proof? They're like, it was ancient aliens, man. Don't harsh my mellow. Well, you want to hear something funny? What?

Part of what I watched on YouTube about this was from the show Ancient Aliens. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of like pseudo archaeology that surrounds this that you have to kind of be careful of. Yeah, for sure. This is like true. Like this truly has upended our current or yeah, I guess still basically our current understanding. And that is thus we've told the story many, many times on this podcast that

And it turns out that it's probably at least oversimplified, if not just outright incorrect.

But the whole basis of what we're talking about has to do with the Neolithic Revolution, which says that somewhere around 10,000, 11,000 years ago, people in the Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamia, started to settle down, raise crops. And as they were able to support more people, more and more people came and moved to that area. They domesticated animals. Cities sprung up. And then from the cities, hierarchies grew. And then we had kingdoms and wars and all sorts of stuff.

And also arts, culture, architecture, all that stuff developed from the people first settling down and domesticating crops, becoming sedentary, like transitioning from hunter-gatherers to farmers, essentially. And that was the start of all the other stuff that followed. Gobekli Tepe, right?

turns that on its head, essentially. That's right. And this was one of those discoveries that, like I said, really sort of upends everything that we thought to be true. The real discovery, and we'll kind of get to what had happened before this, but the big, big find was in 1994, and that's when archaeologists started really literally digging into it. It had been known to locals there for a while, obviously, because

Sort of like the Sherpa. They're like, I climb this mountain all the time. Right. There were people living nearby in Turkey in the 1960s even that were finding pretty cool stuff here. But it wasn't until 1994 that they made the big, big discovery and really, like I said, started digging in and forming opinions over. And, you know, we'll get to these because they still haven't settled on exactly what Gobekli Tepe was. Right.

No, they haven't, which explains why we haven't said what it is yet. But that 1960 survey found a bunch of slabs of limestone, but they mistook what they were. They mistook their significance. They thought they were gravestones from a medieval cemetery. And it would turn out that they were about 11,000 years older than that.

Because what Gobekli Tepe was when they started digging it up in the 90s under the leadership of a guy named Klaus Schmidt, who was the guy who saw this and was like, this is not a natural formation. This is clearly human made. Let's see what's underneath this hill. He found that this is essentially a Neolithic settlement that dates back at its earliest spot, as far as we know, to about 11,600 years before today.

Yeah. And, you know, the significance of all of this, if we haven't been clear enough, is that

Basically, they're dating this long before, like hundreds, maybe even a thousand years before what we thought was when people started settling down and becoming farmers, which led to all the, you know, modern advances eventually that we know today that I mentioned. Right. So this was a long, long time before that when we were like, no, no, no. At the time, people were just moving around, hunting and gathering and kind of just,

I don't know about struggling to survive, but subsistence living, you know, from season to season, that kind of thing. And 94, like you said, was when Schmidt came in there and he got pretty excited, like so excited that he bought a house nearby and set up camp and said, all right, this is going to be the base for me and my small team. Anytime students are coming over here, they can stay here. And this is now the official home base of this organization.

extraordinarily interesting archaeological site. Yeah, and he would go on to lead the dig at Gobekli Tepe until his death, I think at age 60 in 2014, if I'm not mistaken. Why go anywhere else, you know? Well, this was like, he was like, well, here's my career. This is what I'm doing for the rest of my life. Totally. They've been digging at Gobekli Tepe now for, what, 30 years now?

They've easily got another 50 years of excavation left unless some huge new technological advance in archaeology comes along. But using current practices, they have decades left of like exploration to do of this site. But what Schmidt found from the outset just didn't make sense because like you said, they think that they were building this before.

before people even started to settle down and start farming, which means it was thousands of years before people should have been able to create crops

Things like this, like massive structures, that it takes a lot of people in a coordinated manner to come up with a coherent plan and then build this stuff. And then also imbue it with symbolism, as we'll see. It just did not make sense. But the date, the radiocarbon dating was right. And so Klaus Schmidt was smart enough to be like, we might have this whole Neolithic revolution story wrong. Yeah, for sure. So...

Just sort of brass tacks. It is in southern Turkey. It's located at the highest point of the Germus, G-E-R-M-U-S, unfortunately named, mountain range, which is right on the edge of the Fertile Crescent there, not coincidentally. And the mound itself is about 50 feet tall, covers about 22 acres.

And it was kind of one of these things where basically he had gone there. He knew that people nearby had dug up some things that looked like tools and stuff like that. He was like, well, this is pretty interesting. And when he stood back and looked, he was like, that hill up there doesn't look like the rest of these sort of flattish plateaus. It's more rounded. And it looks like clearly formed by humans. And that's when everyone, you know, all the locals in their language said, no, duh, because

We've known this for a while. So he said, all right, you know, I'm going to set up shop here. And they got to work starting with that uppermost level, which was what did we figure? It was like 10,000 years ago. Yes. So the most recent use of it was 10,000 years ago. And Livia helps us with this. And she pointed something out that I thought is definitely worth mentioning. The Gobekli Tepe site.

was older to the people who built the pyramids at Giza and Stonehenge than the people who built the pyramids in Stonehenge are to us.

It's that ancient. That's one of those brain breakers. Yeah. Thousands and thousands of years old. That ancient. When the people started building the pyramids. It's just, yeah, like you said, it's a brain breaker. Like how old this thing was and then what they were able to do. And what they were able to do. So, by the way, no one knows what culture this is. Right.

Because, again, it's not supposed to be a culture from our understanding of people at the time. I've seen interpretations of communities at around this time, what's called the pre-pottery Neolithic, which is a specific era in the Fertile Crescent where there wasn't pottery. Pottery existed elsewhere in the world, like Japan was making amazing conch shell pottery products.

around this time. China has 20,000-year-old pottery. But just in the Fertile Crescent, they hadn't started making pottery yet. So they're called the Pre-Pottery Neolithic group, essentially. But suffice to say, this group got together and decided to build this at least as far back as 11,600 years ago. And they stopped using it about 10,000 years ago.

Yeah, so they started top-down. Like you said, the most recent use would be the stuff on top, obviously. And they started to notice, wow, there are actually buildings here with straight walls. So that means that somebody shaped those. It wasn't just by pure chance or luck that those walls ended up being straight. They found these limestone pillars that were about two meters high on this upper level. Some of them had decorations on them. These upper ones had etchings of lions on

And then they started going down. Obviously, things are getting a little bit older.

And then they said, wow, these pillars are getting a lot bigger than the ones on top. Some of these things are 15 to 18 feet high, weigh about 10 tons. And they look like they're arranged in very specific ways. There were at least 20 circles or ovals that had these that basically made up these enclosures. And there were, you know, some of them actually were shaped in such a way that they wondered like,

It's no accident that they're shaped in the form of a triangle if you connect them. Like, it might be like a Stonehenge kind of thing happening. Yeah, that's definitely one theory is that at least part of this was a cosmic observatory. And, yeah, like you said, the settlement overall, the site forms, like some of the columns form an equilateral triangle, and then the center of the site bisects that triangle perfectly. So it's just, it's not accidental. And again...

People weren't supposed to be using geometry, even rudimentary geometry at this point, for thousands of more years. And yet these people were doing it. Some of the other things that they figured out is the limestone did come from the area, but it still came from hundreds of meters away, right? So you said 16 feet, about five and a half meters, 10 tons rocked.

carved out of the limestone bedrock and then carried over to this site and then raised. That takes a lot of people, even using like logs and rollers and things like that. It still takes a lot of coordination. And yeah, it takes a lot of determination too. And to me, the fact that those columns are smaller and smaller, the more recent you get and then bigger further down,

Almost suggests that there was like a loss of enthusiasm over time. They got worn out. I think so, yeah. Over 1,300 years. They were like, hey, those inner levels look great, but do we really need that much headroom? That's right. The tallest one among us is five and a half feet. Right. Yeah, they were shorter back then, I think.

But here's the thing. Everything you mentioned there is possible. That limestone is pretty soft as stone goes. And the flint tools that they had back then could have been used to do something like this. And depending on who you talk to, some people will say, like, you know, it may have taken a few hundred very determined people to move these things. Other people, Olivia found this one guy, an archaeologist named Edward Banning from the University of Toronto that said, you know,

Nah, give me 20 grown men and I could do this even without rollers. Yeah, watch. Yeah. No one ever called us bluff. Should we take a break? Yeah, let's take a break. All right. Great setup. Everyone's on the edge of their limestone seat and we'll be right back. We'll be right back.

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Have it all in the heart of it all. Launch your search at callohiohome.com. Okay, Chuck, so one of the things that I mentioned earlier is that these people not only created these huge pillars and walls and enclosures, they also put, they carved them. There's a lot of symbols on this stuff, and essentially they're pictograms. Like they're symbols that directly represent people.

thing they are. There's not any encoded meaning to it. Like if it's a bird, it's supposed to be a bird. And there's a lot of really readable symbols like there. It's not like, wow, it's photorealistic, but you can clearly see this is a bird. This is a gazelle. This is a fox. This is a scorpion. And they started to notice that some of the enclosures were

essentially dedicated to one kind of animal. But the biggest enclosure, enclosure D, was there's a bunch of different animals on the, like scratched or carved into the different kind of pillars and walls and everything. And there's a lot of interpretation just in that stuff alone.

Yeah, for sure. Like the ones where it's just like nothing but foxes they think could have been a specific clan because it was part of the clan system, like clan of the cave bear. Yeah. It would have carved a bunch of cave bears. Yeah. So if it was a fox clan, they may have just carved foxes, but it might make sense that the biggest one, because, you know, they're still, you know, as we pointed out, guessing as to what even was going on and what all this stuff was used for and what it all meant. So, yeah.

I think it just sort of makes sense that maybe the biggest one was maybe where groupings of clans came. So they were all represented by their favorite football team. Pretty much, yeah. One of the things also that gave away that fox enclosure is that one of the carvings says fox's rule and it's F-O-X-Z.

So clearly they were pretty in the boxes. Yeah, exactly. So those pillars, too, 16 feet, five and a half meter, 10 ton pillars at the largest. If you look at them, they actually represent people, but they represent like a really nondescript population.

type of person. So these are T-shaped pillars. So at first I just assumed, well, that's like, you know, shoulders and then like the heads carved into the middle of the shoulders. Wrong. The T itself is actually the head viewed from the side so that when you look at the narrow ends on each side of that top of the T, that's the face in the back of the head. I thought that was a really strange artistic decision. Yeah. Yeah.

For sure. The other thing, too, is I don't think we mentioned that kind of one of the first theories was that or maybe we did that it was kind of ritual based, because I think when they find anything from this time, they think, well, this wasn't a permanent settlement because they didn't have those. So this was just a place where they did rituals and maybe sacrifices or whatever, prayed to whatever God. They did find things like masks that were.

maybe were ceremonial at least lent itself to the idea that that could have been going on there they did find some other images that weren't as straightforward as is the sort of clear ones that you described like birds with human legs and they speculate that could have been like maybe people in costume at a ritual or a right that we're displaying here in this little story uh

And the fun part about all this is that they seem to have been drinking beer at the time because there were beer brewing vats nearby. Like huge vats. They could brew tens and tens of gallons at a time. And that supports this idea that this was a ritual place. I mean, just the fact that they went to the trouble of making this.

And then the fact that they added these symbols to these huge monoliths that they raised. And then the fact that there was beer strongly supports that they were essentially partying in one way or another at Gobekli Tepe, right? Yeah.

But in addition to that, in those very obvious pictograms or pictographs, there's also some straight up symbols that are not immediately obvious that does suggest that there was meaning encoded in it, which would make it writing.

There's what looks like a capital I that keeps popping up here or there. There's also a capital H that's usually associated with the capital I. And they think it's possible that represented the summer solstice and the winter solstice or day and night because it's just used so repeatedly. One of the other reasons they think that is a guy named Martin Swetman, who's an engineering researcher from the University of Edinburgh University.

He analyzed one of the pillars, and there's a bunch of different markings on them, and he interpreted them as essentially a calendar that not only you could track the year with, but he took it to be like a timestamp for a potential comet impact that allegedly set off the Younger Dryas mini ice age. So if that's true—

That means that they were proto-writing 7,000 years before the Sumerians came up with what's considered the first alphabet. 7,000 years. And then in addition to that, they were able to track the precession of Earth. They were able to account for the wobble that changes the time and days throughout the year enough that they could create a lunar calendar. And they

They supposedly, if this actually is a timestamp, they were able to date things that were like major celestial events like meteor showers or, again, a potential comet strike. Yeah. And this is like, I mean, I guess we'll talk about the significance of calendars in a couple of ways here and later. But one thing to think about is like if you're

Hunter gatherers and you're not around very long. Like, what do you need a 12 month calendar for? Another way of looking at it, and this kind of kind of lends itself to some of the later theories, is that, well, maybe we'll hold on to that. That'll be a nice little teaser, actually. Even I'm teased. But we can talk about this right now, which is the fact that they found that.

remnants of bones and wild plants and things that pretty much clearly indicate that they had been butchered and cooked there. Mostly gazelle, about 60 percent were gazelle. But they also had sheep and deer and wild boar and birds like geese and ducks and cranes and things like that. Better. So they were it seems like they were eating and drinking pretty well here.

They were. This also supports, Chuck, because if they were not farmers and they were just hunter-gatherers who would come to this area, you know, occasionally, and they were making beer, that supports that idea that we've talked about before that bread was actually invented as a portable beer starter. Right.

Oh, yeah. I remember that old gem. This says that beer came before farming, then, if this is what's going on here, if we're interpreting this correctly. So that is very significant, too. The bones and the plants that they found at the site are all wild. And that strongly suggests to researchers, not just us, that...

These were hunter-gatherers. They weren't farmers at all. There was no sign of domesticated animal bones. And even more, if you look at all of the animals on any of the engravings or carvings or sculptures, they are all wild animals too. There's not a single sheep or pig or anything like that, any domesticated animal to be found. Like even the pig is the wild boar. They're just all wild animals. And that will become a little more significant in a second. Yeah.

Yeah. The other thing, too, we didn't mention is that lends itself to the

idea that things were still very transient was they didn't find things that you normally find, at least at this point, as a permanent settlement, like trash, like big buried mounds of trash or any indication that there were homes there or like a hearth where, you know, someone might have burned a fire repeatedly over and over in the same home-like place. So they're not finding that stuff. They're finding other things that kind of contradict that.

You mentioned those human-like carvings. There were other ones.

that had like pretty clear symbolism of death, like a fully carved human sculpture where they intentionally cut off the head. So it wasn't just like, you know, hey, look, it's a person without a head. They would carve it into a person, cut off the head, and then place that head somewhere else that was significant to them. Clearly symbolization. Symbolization? Symbolizing something? Yeah. Sure. Yeah.

Yeah. So you put all that stuff together and what you have is this hypothesis that Klaus Schmidt came up with. Remember, he's the guy who essentially discovered this place and kept going until 2014. His hypothesis was this. Because there's no evidence of permanent habitation, right, like you were saying,

Because all of this stuff is wild game and wild plants that's left over. And because these structures don't appear to ever have been roofed, like these enclosures were always open air. You put all that together, this was not a permanent settlement. It was a settlement that was created for religious purposes or spiritual purposes or something like that, symbolic purposes. Right.

by hunter-gatherer groups. And every year, a couple of years, or whenever, a bunch of them from all around the area would come together and they would party, they would eat, they would drink a bunch of beer, and they would carve out these pillars and raise them. And then, weirdly, Schmidt also added, they would fill these enclosures in with rubble ceremonially.

Because when they discovered them, all the enclosures were, well, filled in with rubble. So he interpreted that to mean that that was part of the ceremony. They would cover one up and then they build another one on top. He said it was Coachella.

Did they fill things in with rubble at Coachella? No, of course not. The Indio Polo Grounds are very nice, actually. But he did sort of say like, hey, this is the kind of thing that we think they just met here occasionally over decades, maybe even hundreds of years. Maybe these rituals sort of evolved over time.

to maybe, you know, because there's clear sort of death symbolism in places to honor people that were important to the community, maybe help establish their identity somewhat as wandering tribes. And that's what he thought. You know, one of the keys to this whole thing was that to do something like this, they would have had to had, you know, even if they were hunters and gatherers, they had to have had a lot of people there,

stayed there for long enough time to get this done. Yes. And that over time, over those decades or centuries, it just attracted more and more and more people to the area. And so rather than the monumental structures and religion arising from farming, Klaus Schmidt said coming together to create this religious structure actually created

essentially trap people in the area where they became farmers. We had it totally backwards. That was Schmidt's hypothesis. Yeah, it was like a geological chicken or the egg, or I guess archaeological chicken or the egg. Yes, but the chicken came first. That's right. You know that's the answer to that question. Oh, yeah, we've covered it. Okay.

We're not going to again, though. I'll tell you that. No, heck no. Why retread something? So do you want to take another break or is it too soon? Well, let's take a break right after this, because there was one other thing that we should point out is some of the other things sort of supporting this idea of Schmidt was they didn't see a water source anywhere, which wouldn't be a good place for people to permanently be. And

What else? I already mentioned the garbage dumps and the lack of houses. So I guess the only thing I didn't mention was the water source. Right.

The thing is, Klaus Schmidt was, I think he formed this hypothesis, you know, within a couple of years of starting excavation. And it held up at least until his death. But after his death, some new evidence came to light that caused people to go back and relook at some of the original evidence, too, or some of the original artifacts and data. And they were like, we're not quite sure Klaus Schmidt had it right. And we'll talk about what they came up with, the new hypothesis, right after this.

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One person we need to shout out besides Olivia is a journalist named Andrew Curry, by the way. He's kind of the guy that has invested. He's kind of like the Schmidt on the journalism side. For decades and decades, this guy's been writing about most of the popular stories about the Kibblecki, Kibbleck, Kibbleck. Glavin. The Kibbleck.

The Schenectady Tepe. It's a big shout out. Big shout out there. But before we broke, you mentioned new ideas coming along post-Schmidt.

In 2017, his successor won Lee Clare of the German Archaeological Institute or the DAI. Don't ask. They built a – that's the German shorthand for that. They constructed a big old canopy over the whole thing so they could dig more because I don't think we mentioned for many, many years they were digging in the spring and fall because summer was too hot, winter was too wet. Yeah, just four months a year, right? Yeah.

Yeah, so they could dig more with this big canopy over it, shielding from the sun and rain. And in order to build, I mean, this is kind of one of those dumb luck kind of things that they probably would have gotten to eventually, but it expedited the situation when they realized to make this big canopy, not just like a pop-up with sandbags, they needed to like root this thing into the ground. So they dug down deeper than they ever had before to make supports and had some interesting finds down there.

Yeah, and not just, not deeper than anyone in the world ever had before. Just in this area, right? Oh, yeah. Did you think I meant they dug the deepest hole ever? Yeah, they just kept going. They're like, well, we're already this far. We might as well set a record. Wow. So they found they were able to take samples from those pillar holes. I think they went down even below the lowest layer they could possibly find. So when they took those samples, they were like,

Oh, here's all the stuff that Klaus Schmidt based his hypothesis on because they were missing. Garbage dumps, hearths, evidence of homes. We found a cistern eventually, like a 30-foot diameter cistern that held a bunch of rainwater. All the stuff you would need to support a permanent settlement. Yeah.

Yeah, I can't decide. When I read this part of the story, I immediately was like, oh, no. Like, I wonder if because Schmidt died a few years earlier. I wondered if he because at first I was like, I'm glad that he wasn't around to see that because it was kind of proved him wrong. But then I thought, no, Schmidt seems like the kind of guy that would have.

Like loved knowing that he was wrong. Well, maybe not loved it, but loved knowing that they were on the right track to getting the accurate, you know, picture there. So that's funny. I interpreted him differently. I imagined him showing up at Lee Claire's tent in the middle of the night as a ghost going, Lee, how could you betray me? Oh, maybe. I think that actually happened, too. I saw it on Ancient Aliens. Oh, OK. Perfect.

So here's the new hypothesis. They're like, okay, Klaus, he was working with what he had to work with at the time, but now that we have all this other stuff, what

What we realize is that part of this site might have actually been permanently occupied by some people. But that doesn't mean that it wasn't also like a ritual site. Like, clearly it was. This is not just how people built houses back then. People weren't even supposed to build these kind of complexes back then. One of the things that they're like, OK, Klaus definitely got this wrong, was the idea that part of the rituals were filling these enclosures in with rubble.

and then starting a new one on top. Somebody noticed that if you look uphill, the walls that are on the uphill side of the enclosure are usually damaged, whereas the walls opposite are fine, which strongly suggests landslide damage. There's also a lot of earthquakes in that area. So they're like, actually, we think that this stuff just kept getting destroyed, but the site was so important that for 1,300 years,

After an earthquake came through, they would come and rebuild. Like, that's how important the site was to them. Yeah, and this is where it gets super interesting to me. Claire and some other people, some of her colleagues and others thought, hey, maybe what this was was a –

was something created because agriculture and people settling down may have already been happening. And this was sort of created as part of the backlash against that. So people were domesticating plants and animals nearby, and they were still like, no, we want to be hunter-gatherers, but we want to have this place

Maybe where we come and meet seasonally. Yeah, or this is where we live. Like, this is our settlement, but we're not going to farm. We're still going to, you know— Hunt and gather. Exactly. And one interpretation by a guy named Thomas Zimmerman, who is an archaeologist from Bill Kent University—

He sees this as a place that was populated by staunchly conservative, male-dominated population. And there's a lot of stuff to support that, right? So first of all, if you have a group of people who are railing against

These new sweeping changes to society that's going in ways they don't like it. And they're going against that that automatically makes them conservative. And then also if you look around at the iconography and imagery, it is very male-centric. There's a lot of phalluses sticking up. There's all of the figures that are depicted are men.

I read that wherever a wild animal that's carved into one of the pillars is gendered, it's invariably male. And it makes a lot of sense. And then simultaneously, Thomas Zimmerman is like, I think that this was meant to be a place of—it was kind of an aggro place where, like, you would come and—

like put some young hunters through their scary first rites like it was not a place of peace it's a if you look at most of the animals they're snarling they're dangerous this is not it's not meant to be a calm place and thomas emmerman i hope he can unwind one day for his sake and the sake of people around him yeah he kind of described it as uh

I don't know, like the birthplace of MMA and like, you know, kind of a lot of stuff we're seeing in the news today. Yeah. The birthplace of people who watch ancient aliens. Yeah, pretty much. Here's the thing, though. We still don't know so much. I believe there like over 50 percent of it has still not been excavated. Oh, no. 90 to 95 percent is unexcavated.

Oh, I thought that was just 90% was underground and they had been doing stuff underground, no? So, yeah. So it's kind of confusing and maybe you're right. But what I saw is that the whole site is 90 to 95% unexcavated, but that the enclosures that they've been able to find, only half of them are even partially excavated. So they know that there's enclosures down there. They just haven't gotten to them yet.

Yeah. All right. I like this last theory. In 2021, there was a book called The Dawn of Everything by an anthropologist and an archaeologist, David Graber and David Wingrow, respectively. And they said, all right, here's what we think is that.

maybe it was just a non-agricultural society and maybe they were just a lot more diverse than we thought they were. We kind of had this locked in idea of,

that everyone was like this and then everyone was like this. And they were like, maybe there was just a lot more overlap and sort of a spectrum of rituals and behaviors and things that people did. And it's just not so clear that things were like this until they stopped and then they were like this. Yeah. And now I remember I got off track earlier when I was talking about the pre-pottery Neolithic group. Yeah.

That I have seen that this era of people and earlier human beings, their culture essentially likened to that of like bonobos or chimps. That that's like the level of like introspection or material culture or contributions that they they would make.

That they were that backwards. And yeah, Graeber and Wenger are like, we've got this all wrong. And so one of the things, the ways that Gobekli Tepe ties into this is the two Davids, that's what I call them. Yeah. David and David. Yeah. They looked at some current hunter-gatherer groups, which are obviously not perfect analogies. But...

What they found is that some groups have hierarchical structures during some parts of the year where they're sedentary and then in other parts of the year where not times of plenty where you have to like spread out and go find food.

They break up into smaller bands of hunter-gatherers. And they suspect that Quebec-Litepi was a place where they all came together again and enjoyed times of plenty, like where there were tons of gazelles to hunt, lots of nuts and grains and stuff just for the picking, and that they didn't have to farm, but that they were capable of being sedentary while they were also hunter-gatherers for the other part of the year.

Yeah. And not only capable of being sedentary, but capable of having a fairly complex society as they settled for that season, you know, before they went out and, you know, I love this idea because you picture them just sort of barely surviving and moving on until they find better places to hunt or a source of water. Whereas this posit's just a, just sort of a

a better way of life, uh, that anyone thought they lived to, to such that they could be like, Hey, we're going to brew beer and we're going to party and we're going to have fun because, you know, we're all doing pretty well out here, guys look around. Let's like enjoy this season of, uh,

settlement, I guess. Yeah, or plenty, right? Yeah. And there's a lot of feasting seasons still today in human culture around this time of year, around late fall, like after the harvest, say. Even through winter. Exactly. And I don't know if it was from the two Davids or somebody interpreting their work, but they were saying there's a really good chance, or at least a chance, that our

holiday seasons, right, is an ancient or a remnant of that ancient seasonality where we would come together and share in times of plenty. And then when, you know, throughout the rest of the year, we'd spread out and go do our own thing. But during those times, community is emphasized. Family is emphasized. Coming together is all very much emphasized during that time of year. And they wonder if that's just a

Like, we're just unaware that that is a really ancient tradition that we're taking part in still. We've just kind of transmuted into our own thing. You know, I really missed a great opportunity for a deep, deep cut. What? David and David joke. What? I could have said David and David looked around and they were like, hey, welcome to the boomtown. What is that? It's the only hit song by David and David. What's welcome to the boomtown?

The only hit song by David and David. Okay, well, let's hear some of it. Sing it. Sing it like Sammy Davis. I said, welcome, babe. Welcome to the boom town, man. Still don't have it. All those, what? Make such a succulent sound. Welcome to the boom town. I half suspect you're making this up as you go along.

It was a great, great one-hit wonder from back in the day. By David and David? David and David. That's what I've been talking about this whole time. And now it makes sense that you never knew what I was talking about this whole time. No, I did. It's still a good joke just because I got you to sing like Sammy Davis Jr. We all appreciate that. It's a great song. It really is. So I'm going to go listen to that. But first, there were just a couple of more things I wanted to say about this. The David and David interpretation of...

how people were way, way more complex than we give them credit for in the past.

One of the things they point to are ancient burials like 26,000, 30,000 years old where there's like grave goods and people in beaded headdresses like clearly being treated differently than other people would have been buried. So obviously are hierarchical structures like maybe they were mystics or shaman or something like that. And then there was another interpretation of Gobekli Tepe itself that I thought was worth mentioning by archaeologist Anna Fagan from the University of Melbourne.

And she was like, slow your roll, Thomas Zimmerman. I actually think that all these depictions of death and mayhem and scary animals is actually symbolic of life and death and regeneration.

And she makes some pretty good points. And I like her interpretation a little more because it doesn't alter anything else. This is still a hunter-gatherer tribe, and they could still even be railing against farming. But that doesn't mean that they have to be like aggro and, you know, want to just kill everybody essentially. Yeah.

Yeah, I love it. I do, too. Let's just keep talking about Gobekli Tepe forever. It's a good one. But now all I can think about is getting that theory officially named the Welcome to the Boomtown Theory. Okay, I think that's great. Because it fits in every way. Yeah, for sure. It really does, Chuck. I think if the two Davids hear this, they're going to be into that. You don't remember that song? Miss Christina drives a 944.

No. That's the first line? I have no idea what you're talking about. Well, I just sent it to you. It's a great song. Okay, thanks, man. Well, since Chuck sent me a song, obviously he's just triggered listener mail.

That's right. This is from Ciara, and it's about the Ford Motor Company, because Ciara works there as a Michigander. Hey, guys, one thing I thought I'd mention about that is you mentioned that the Ford Motor Company has been around since 1903 and is still standing, but I think one of the coolest things about our company is that the, what was it, the Rouge site? Mm-hmm. Rouge River, I think. Yeah, the Rouge River site that you also mentioned in the episode is still standing and today builds F-150s.

In its history, the Rouge has built the Model B, the Mercury, the Thunderbird, and multiple generations of the Mustang. The site itself has so much history in the Henry Ford Museum that the Henry Ford Museum offers a Rouge factory tour that actually takes you into one of the manufacturing buildings of the site to see the assembly line from a set of mezzanines.

One last thing you didn't mention was that he was a supporter of prohibition. And it always reminds me of this funny quote from him. If booze ever comes back to the United States, I am through with manufacturing. I wouldn't be interested in putting automobiles into the hands of a generation soggy with drink.

Thanks for all the knowledge that you share and keeping me company on my compute. And that is from Ciara. Thanks, Ciara. That's awesome. We appreciate all the extra info. And if you want to be like Ciara and show off your knowledge of extra info by sharing it with us, we would love that. Just send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

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