by Jon Lackman | 29 March 2006 | Ancient, Architecture
The Göbekli Tepe stone temple in southeast Anatolia makes the pyramids and even nearby Çatal Hüyük look rather young, reports archaeologist Klaus Schmidt. It’s now thought to be 12,000 years old. Its massive stone pillars, decorated with enigmatic animal-script ideograms (cranes, foxes, snakes, boars, gazelles) of a hunter-gatherer people, suggest that temples predated settlements in the Fertile Crescent, contrary to some conventional wisdom. (Read other reports here, here and here.)
