A Gobekli Tepe Conjecture

Gobekli Tepe is a decorative megalithic monument in what is now Turkey build about three thousand years before the Fertile Crescent Neolithic revolution facilitated sedentary lifestyles and vastly increased population densities (by a factor of perhaps 100) though the domestication of plants and animals for food and other useful purposes. It is the only pre-Neolithic structure of its kind in the world. My attention now is prompted by a recent article about it that asks more generally, if there were pre-Neolithic civilizations that were more than just wandering bands of hunter-gatherers.

The article prompts two responses.

First, that fishing based communities were the most advanced in the pre-Neolithic world, because they could advance in technology with the sedentary lifestyle this made possible in a way that wasn't possible for nomadic terrestrial hunter-gatherers. 

There is no doubt that prior to the domestication of plants and animals, that communities with fishing based food production, in part, because it could be sedentary were the most “civilized”. There were relatively “advanced” fishing based civilizations. in Pacific Northwest, on the coast of the eastern Baltic Sea, or the Jomon, or the Calusa of Southwest Florida that fit this description. For example, the earliest inventors of pottery, the Jomon of Japan and the fishing villages of coastal China fit this description.

But, second, while fishing based economies explain many of the particular advanced pre-Neolithic civilization, this doesn’t explain the singular wonder of Gobekli Tepe in the highlands of Anatolia. 

There is also rather convincing suggestive evidence (also here) from what it depicted in the carvings there, that Gobekli Tepe, at least in its final incarnation and design, memorializes an extraterrestrial impact event that gave rise to the Younger Dryas climate event (also, regarding the ET impact theory, here and here and here and here).

Now, it is true that the scale of terrestrial hunter-gather communities are usually underestimated, because pre-Neolithic terrestrial hunter-gather communities would have thrived and dominated the very most prime territory.

In contrast, the post-Neolithic Holocene era is a long secular trend of terrestrial hunter-gatherers being evicted by farmers and herders from more desirable territory to places that are of no use to farmers and marginal even for herders, like the Kalahari desert, the depths of the Congo and Amazon jungles, and the Arctic and sub-Arctic tundra and northern coasts. 

Marginal environments can only support smaller, more marginal communities of people, since hunting and gathering generates fewer calories were acre/hectare of land, and since crossing a desert or tundra by foot takes about the same amount of time as crossing a verdant meadow or game rich river basins by foot. Travel by foot set a boundary on how far away from each other people in the same community in a meaningful sense could be from each other that was the same for all terrestrial hunter-gatherers. 

But, the more fruitful the land, the more people that more or less fixed size geographic region could be. And, even places that were not truly primarily fish based food production communities may have supplemented their diets with some coastal shellfish gathering or a minor but significant contribution from riverine fish and freshwater animals (like eels, frogs, turtles and crayfish) that provided an additional food source that again increased the carrying capacity of already prime territory. There is also evidence in Natufian archaeology of proto-farming in the pre-Neolithic Near East, where desirable wild types of plants in a particular place where they were already present were encouraged to grow and tended.

So, while modern hunter-gather communities may live in bands of dozens or hundreds of people, pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherer communities might very well have included thousands or tens of thousands people in the most prime territories. These communities would have had been far less concentrated in any one place than even the most primitive Neolithic farming communities, but it doesn’t seem at all implausible that there could have been seasonal hot spots on some sort of regular circuit in the community’s territory as multiple bands of people flocked to wild berry groves when they were in season, to fish runs in rivers at spawning times, to water holes in dry seasons, to migration routes of particular animals at the appropriate times. So, even if a large community of say 10,000 people who were a walkable distance from each other was broken up into 100 primary bands of 100 people each, there might be groups of several thousand in the hottest spots several times a year in places where food was especially abundant.

Another strongly suggestive bit of evidence that communities had significant and meaningful organization above the level of the nomadic band of terrestrial hunter-gatherers is that the measurement of the genetic distinctiveness of Levantine hunter-gatherers (Natufians) from Caucasian/Iranian hunter-gatherers, was as great as that between Europeans and East Asians in modern times, despite the fact that they had geographically adjacent territories. You can’t get that kind of genetic population structure between geographically adjacent populations without either truly insurmountable geographic barriers (and there were mountains and arid areas to serve as barriers that helped divide the communities, but not that insurmountable) or strong socially enforced endogamy norms and linguistic and political identity differences. The lowland Levantine Natufians and the West Asian highland Caucasian hunter gathers (CHG) were clearly not friends, probably didn’t have much occasion to even engage in trade with each other, and genetics indicate, didn’t engage in bride exchange with each other. In political science terms, these genetic signs tell us that “nations” of co-ethnics with a shared identity far preceded governmental organizations called “states”.

Gobekli Tepe is still a puzzle, however, even if some pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherer communities were much larger and more prosperous than modern ones. It may have been in one of the most prime territory in the world at the time, at true Eden, making its community particular large and affording that community more excess resources of time and food than most. But it was surely not the only such place.

But there is just nothing else, anywhere in the world, including in communities with fishing based food production, in the pre-Neolithic world, of this scale and sophistication. There was stone working, mostly for tools, and there was cave art and there were decorative personal effects, but it really was something new under the Sun, never before seen in human history.

Why then, about 13000 BP? 

Why there, right at the epicenter of the Fertile Crescent Neolithic Revolution’s emergence three thousand years later? 

This wasn’t a community based upon food production by fishing. Analysis of the trash left behind at the site by its builders shows that a big share of their food consumption at the time it was built was wild terrestrial game, and it doesn't seem to have a long term Mesolithic permanent residential village or city associated it.

But, one hypothesis could explain its uniqueness is that this was a site of mixed seasonal proto-farming and terrestrial hunter-gatherer food production pre-Younger Dryas, on the cusp of being the first community in the world to start a first neolithic revolution. 

This prospect fizzled, however, and other potential independent neolithic revolutions failed to launch as they would three thousand years later, because the Younger Dryas event set that development in human progress back several thousand years due to climate conditions it created that were unfavorable to domestication of plants and animals.

Perhaps construction of Gobekli Tepe had begun prior to the Younger Dryas as what would have been the world’s first Neolithic megalithic structure (something that early Neolithic communities worldwide seem to independently create for astronomy purposes). But, when the Younger Dryas hit, it ended up being something that was pushed to completion anyway as a memorial to what might have been until changing climate conditions crushed the incipient neolithic breakthrough. Lots of powerful people in their community would have still had fresh visions of what was about to emerge with a Neolithic revolution that they were about to usher in, and they were literally praying that this kind of monument could recapture the civilized greatness that was slipping away from them inexorably due to the Younger Dryas. Since their proto-farming efforts collapsed, they have have made this herculean construction effort instead with periodic seasonal gathering coinciding with game migrations or abundant amounts of wild food plants to harvest in this location to achieve this, when societies that hadn't glimpsed the possibility of a neolithic revolution wouldn't have tried or bothered.

This is just speculation, of course, but it is a reasonable inference from what we know that could explain all of the available facts. 

Most other explanations about early Mesolithic civilization either fail to explain why there wasn’t something comparable to Gobekli Tepe anywhere else in the world in the pre-Neolithic era, or why Gobekli Tepe didn’t emerge in a fishing based community. If other explanations were right, we would have expected to see many such structures in the world, and we don’t. But, a first  neolithic revolution in the world (whose timing is explained by the fact that climate was first the LGM ice age, and then extremely variable on very short time scales until not long before the Younger Dryas) that was aborted suddenly by an extraterrestrial impact causing the Younger Dryas, that is arguably depicted in its engravings, does explain why this site is unique (with a location for a first in the same place where the actual first Neolithic occurred), and also explains why it happened in this one place and was then not repeated for another three thousand years.