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NARRATOR: An ancient temple is discovered in the Middle East.

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

It's thousands of years older than the Egyptian pyramids.

It dates from long before the earliest civilizations,

like the Mesopotamian, the Minoan and the Mayan.

It was built when mankind was still in the Stone Age.

MAN: This is extraordinary.

NARRATOR: But who built it, and why?

They are not from our world.

They are human-like, but they're clearly not humans.

NARRATOR: To solve the mystery, one man travels back 12,000 years

to the end of the last ice age...

long before we discovered pottery, writing or the wheel.

It's like discovering that a three-year-old child

has built the Empire State Building out of toy bricks.

NARRATOR: For millions of years, mankind evolved slowly.

We survived by hunting and gathering our food.

Then, around 12,000 years ago, something extraordinary happens.

Our development speeds up...

and in a comparatively short space of time,

we go from the Stone Age to walking on the moon.

What was it that made us change so dramatically?

Dr. Jeff Rose is an expert on early human history.

He's spent years studying this mysterious turning point

in our cultural evolution.

He's now come to Turkey to investigate an astonishing discovery

that might finally explain how and why

we took that giant step out of the Stone Age

to become who we are today.

Walking on the moon was not the greatest leap mankind ever made.

It was probably learning how to farm and produce our own food.

NARRATOR: The theory is that farming allowed us to settle down,

to develop religion and build temples.

Settlements grew into cities and then into powerful civilizations.

Without having to hunt and gather for every meal,

we had time to think, to invent and evolve out of the Stone Age.

At least, that was the theory until now.

Something pretty incredible has been found here in Turkey

that puts a whole new spin on our cultural evolution.

I cannot wait to see it.

NARRATOR: Turkey is an ancient land that bridges Europe and Asia.

It's part of the Fertile Crescent, a swathe of the Middle East and Africa

that includes modern Egypt, Israel, Syria and Iraq.

In this green belt, humans first settled,

and the world's earliest civilizations arose around 5,000 years ago...

and here is where the find has been made, at a place called Göbekli Tepe.

Göbekli Tepe means "Potbelly Hill" in Turkish.

Local people believe the hill to be sacred,

perhaps with good reason.

Professor Klaus Schmidt is a renowned German archaeologist.

In 1995, beneath this hill, he made an astonishing discovery,

and he's been excavating it ever since.

-Hi, Jeff. How are you? -Hi, Klaus.

-Welcome here to the site. -Great to meet you.

Your first visit here?

This is extraordinary.

I mean, I've never seen anything like this.

NARRATOR: What Professor Schmidt found buried under the hill

was a cluster of huge stone pillars decorated with strange carvings.

He knew he'd only uncovered a small part of the site.

To find out how big it was,

Professor Schmidt commissioned a survey with Ground-Penetrating Radar.

The survey covered close to 90,000 square meters,

nearly as big as 20 football fields.

The radar transmits radio waves into the soil,

which bounce back when they hit a buried object.

The variations in the reflected signal produce an image of what's underground.

This enables Professor Schmidt to roughly establish

the overall size of the site.

ROSE: How big is this site?

SCHMIDT: 300 by 300 meters.

-300 by 300 meters. Massive. -Roughly.

NARRATOR: With extreme care and patience, Professor Schmidt and his team

have so far excavated four huge stone circles.

Each one is surrounded by a high stone wall,

broken at intervals by large T-shaped pillars.

In the middle are two massive monoliths up to five-and-a-half meters tall.

These enclosures don't look like anything in existence today.

What could they be used for?

How do we know nobody lived here?

It's clearly not for daily life.

NARRATOR: Professor Schmidt has worked extensively

on other prehistoric sites in Turkey

and is very familiar with the kind of dwellings

Stone Age people built.

He believes Göbekli Tepe looks nothing like them.

Perhaps the key to understanding this place

lies in the impressive carvings on the pillars.

There you see a masterpiece of craftsmanship and high relief.

Most probably a leopard.

Is that all one block?

It's one block, made from one stone.

Very well done. Very naturalistic.

We can see the ribs are clearly depicted on this animal,

the nose, the mouth, the teeth and the aggressive habit.

The craftsmanship is amazing.

It looks like it could've been done yesterday.

So what is the significance of the animals here at the site?

The animals depicted in high relief seem to be more like guardians,

guardians of the T-shapes.

NARRATOR: The T-shaped pillars reveal tantalizing clues

to understanding Göbekli Tepe.

The markings on them show that they're not just stone monoliths.

SCHMIDT: They are stylized humans.

-ROSE: These are stylized humans? -SCHMIDT: Yeah.

So, seeing the T-shaping, the human head seen in profile,

the body here, and now the arm is coming down

and the hand is depicted here with its fingers

and the belt is shown below the hands.

So he's got another one here.

Yes, another one, this is a second hand here.

A belt buckle here and a loincloth hanging down, a fox skin.

So they're standing facing this way like this.

Yes, standing like this with a loincloth.

NARRATOR: But the pillars are all faceless.

There is no trace of any eyes, nose or mouth.

And this, I think, is a sign that they are not from our world.

They are coming from the spiritual life. So, they are not humans.

They are human-like, but they're clearly not humans.

NARRATOR: If they're not human, who or what do they represent?

Are these people, or are they ancestors, or deities?

Maybe they are the earliest gods depicted in mankind.

NARRATOR: Most archaeologists believe

that if a monumental building has representations of gods,

it's likely to be some kind of sanctuary.

ROSE: So would this be the oldest temple in the world?

This is the oldest temple in the world, yeah.

How old is it?

11,500 years they are standing here.

NARRATOR: Göbekli Tepe is much more sophisticated than Stonehenge

and yet it's 6,000 years older.

It's 7,000 years older than the Egyptian pyramids.

But there are more enclosures still buried beneath the hill.

Some of them might be even older than that.

What puzzles Dr. Rose is that at that time,

around 12,000 years ago, mankind is in the Stone Age.

We know how to make fire, but we haven't discovered the wheel

and we still haven't domesticated pack animals to help us.

So how could we have built something so monumental?

To build a place like this would have required

a pretty sophisticated level of organization.

You need a massive workforce of stonemasons, diggers, quarrymen,

hundreds of people to bring the stones up and set them in place.

NARRATOR: So who are these Stone Age people

who can build such a place

before we've even discovered how to make a clay pot?

What will the oldest temple in the world reveal about our distant past?

Göbekli Tepe has shocked scientists.

ROSE: Göbekli Tepe is smaller than an Egyptian pyramid,

but the people that designed and built this place

would have required a similar level of organization.

7,000 years earlier.

To carve, build, erect these pillars would have required a massive workforce,

all needing to be fed and housed.

So who were these people?

NARRATOR: Dr. Rose now goes looking for Göbekli Tepe's builders.

If he finds out who they are,

he may be able to answer the other big questions.

Why did they build it?

What was it for?

Even after 12,000 years,

there are some clues as to who the temple builders are.

A large quantity of animal bones have been found

during the temple's excavation.

Dr. Rose wants to know what they might reveal

about Göbekli Tepe's builders.

ROSE: What kind of bones do we have here?

The first important group are the gazelles

which you see here a number of bone specimens.

There is also the remains of wild boar,

you have remains of red deer, wild sheep.

Most of them represent bones from meaty parts.

So we are looking at consumption refuse.

ROSE: All of this is wild.

PETERS: All the remains pertain to wild animals.

There's no sign of domestic herbivore.

So then what does this tell us about the people at Göbekli Tepe?

It implies that we are still dealing with hunter-gatherers at Göbekli Tepe...

and that we are dealing with a pre-agricultural society.

NARRATOR: This evidence is of immense importance,

because for a long time, the theory was that

people could only build something like Göbekli Tepe

once they were living in large agricultural communities,

like the Egyptians thousands of years later.

Farming provides a surplus,

so people don't have to look for food every day.

They settle down and have the time and resources

to develop religious ideas, build temples and feed the builders.

That's the theory.

But the ancient bones at Göbekli Tepe tell a different story.

The temple builders were not farmers, they were still hunter-gatherers.

Traditionally, that means semi-nomadic people

living in small, mobile bands,

traveling light, following the seasons, going where the food is.

But in the Fertile Crescent, hunter-gatherers had started to settle

at least a thousand years before Göbekli Tepe was built.

And it wasn't due to farming.

They just reached a point when they realized

that it was of greater benefit to develop and pass on knowledge

in a large settled group than in a small nomadic one.

TREVOR WATKINS: This is the site of Jerf el-Ahmar.

It's exactly the same date as Göbekli Tepe,

the early period of Göbekli Tepe.

-So it's about 12,000 years ago. -About 12,000 years ago. Yeah.

It's a small village of clustered houses,

as you can see, but in the center,

there's this extraordinary building which is much larger.

You can see that it's got all these internal walls,

but there's no internal doors.

ROSE: So nobody lived in this structure.

No. This is the communal storage facility for the whole village.

NARRATOR: Communal storage means that these early settlements

are now harvesting and storing wild grains

and sharing them amongst the community.

With a store of food,

people now do have the time to plan and build a monumental temple.

Göbekli Tepe sits up on a hill, with no immediate access to water.

People have to carry their food and drink up there,

which means they can't stay in the temple for very long.

So where do they live?

Dr. Rose decides to investigate the largest city close to Göbekli Tepe.

It's only 15 kilometers away and is called Sanliurfa.

Its history is impressive.

Local tradition says that Abraham,

the patriarch of today's three great monotheistic religions,

was born here around 4,000 years ago.

But Dr. Rose finds evidence that the town is much older than that.

Turkish archaeologist Dr. Bahattin Çelik is an expert on Sanliurfa's distant past.

(speaking Turkish)

TRANSLATOR: Here, in the ground beneath the city,

we've found flint tools that indicate

that there was a Stone Age settlement here close to 11,000 years ago.

NARRATOR: For Dr. Rose, this is evidence

that people are living here during the construction of Göbekli Tepe.

Could they be the builders of the temple?

He then learns of an intriguing piece of evidence at the Sanliurfa museum.

This statue was unearthed during construction work in the town.

It's nearly 11,000 years old, almost as old as Göbekli Tepe.

But this figure has a well-defined face,

unlike the monoliths at the temple.

Similar statues have been found at Göbekli Tepe.

They are kept off-site to help preserve them.

This guy is fairly similar to the large statue with the black eyes.

Okay, he's a little bit smaller

and he's a little bit more heavily weathered,

but you can see he once had facial features.

So the people that built Göbekli Tepe knew how to make statues with faces on them.

They must have deliberately left facial features off those large monoliths

because they were trying to depict some kind of deity or supernatural being.

NARRATOR: These statues show that it is quite possible

that the inhabitants of Sanliurfa could have built Göbekli Tepe.

But they were Stone Age people,

and the temple shows a level of engineering skill

no one thought possible until thousands of years later.

Dr. Rose is puzzled.

So how did these people, who had not yet discovered agriculture,

how did they plan, organize and build something like this?

It's like discovering that a three-year-old child

has made the Empire State Building out of toy bricks.

How'd they do it?

NARRATOR: Could Stone Age people really have built

a place like Göbekli Tepe thousands of years before the pyramids?

Adding to this puzzle is that the engineering skills involved

must have been developed a long time before the temple is built.

The earliest enclosures are built on the bedrock

into slots only about ten centimeters deep.

They set the two central monoliths.

They're up to five-and-a-half meters tall, carved from a single piece of stone,

and weigh up to 14-and-a-half tons.

To make these huge stone pillars requires considerable skill

and some knowledge of geology.

Dr. Rose now turns to an expert in stone carving

to understand exactly how they are made.

Dave Chapman has spent years studying and replicating

the way prehistoric people worked with stone.

So all of this that we see here on this rocky landscape

is part of the quarry that was used to make the monoliths?

CHAPMAN: It would appear so.

-So this is one of the monoliths. -Yeah, this is one of the monoliths.

This is fantastic. This is about seven meters long.

So we'd think this is one of the early ones,

probably about 12,000 years old.

NARRATOR: Using hard granite picks, the Stone Age masons

roughly carve out the monolith while it is still on the ground.

And then they're likely to be using levers,

so they may well have had a fulcrum at the front

and then the levers go over the fulcrum.

ROSE: So they're just prying this giant thing up.

Yeah. I think you can see evidence for this

in the fact that they've actually broken the stone in lifting it.

-ROSE: This crack here. -CHAPMAN: Yeah.

Once they've got it pried up,

how in the world did they get it to the top of that hill?

Basically it's like rowing on land.

The levers go in and instead of sitting inside the boat,

people stand outside.

You push down on the lever,

then pull back on the lever and it goes forward.

How many people do you think it would have taken to do all this?

I think a team of 50 men could comfortably cut this

and move this across the landscape.

NARRATOR: Around the monoliths,

they then build a wall of stones and mortar nearly two meters tall.

Set into the wall are smaller T-shaped pillars

between three and five meters high and weighing up to ten tons.

Dr. Rose wants to know how long it might have taken Göbekli's builders

to make an enclosure.

So Dave Chapman begins by making a replica of one of the temple's carvings

on a slab of local limestone using the same Stone Age tools.

We're going to use stone picks and stone blades

for picking, carving and engraving.

These are tools that we're making ourselves.

We just take a flake off like that.

So you're sharpening it that way.

It gives us a very sharp, fierce cutting edge.

NARRATOR: This carving expertise is present throughout the temple,

even in the temple's doorways.

SCHMIDT: This strange object, it's a portal stone.

And we expect it was an entrance in a vertical position there in this wall.

NARRATOR: The portal is the entrance to the enclosure.

It weighs several tons

and was carved from a single piece of stone.

Earlier you had mentioned ideas about the netherworld,

going down in and being reborn.

It looks like the entrance to the netherworld.

NARRATOR: If these enclosures represent a gateway to the underworld,

then the temple must have had something to do with death.

Vital to creating this dark world are the creatures carved on the pillars.

It looks like a laborious process,

but Stone Age masons were masters of their medium.

ROSE: That is awesome!

It's incredible!

How long did it take you to do it?

It's taken about six hours, so far.

So then, if you figure there's about 20 of these in each enclosure,

how long do you think it would have taken them to do an entire enclosure?

Well, based on what we've discovered by actually creating one of the pictures,

I'd guesstimate around 300 hours, something in that region.

So then start to finish,

how long do you think it would take to make one enclosure?

Well, just running the figures back,

and based on about 60 or 70 people working on the site,

it's achievable within, say, six to 12 months, something like that.

Maybe a bit longer with a smaller crew.

NARRATOR: The finished enclosures are roughly ten to 30 meters in diameter.

But Professor Schmidt now knows there are many more than just four of them.

A map generated from the Ground-Penetrating Radar survey

shows the excavated areas in color, with the monoliths in red.

It reveals there are at least another 16 circular structures

buried beneath the hill.

That's a lot of stonework.

But the scan reveals something even more surprising.

SCHMIDT: In blue here is a phase we couldn't date for a long time.

But it looks like these structures, most probably, are the oldest one.

We expect 2,000, 3,000 years more.

That would be coming to the 12th, 13th millennium BC.

That's the end of the last ice age.

Yes, we're just at the end of the last ice age.

NARRATOR: That would imply that the structures that lie buried

under this corner of the hill were built 14-15,000 years ago.

That's nearly 5,000 years before people here began farming...

the critical event which, in theory,

made religion and temple building possible

and set us on a fast track towards the stars.

What I'd like to know is why did these people undertake

such an extraordinarily big and difficult task in the first place?

What's it all for?

NARRATOR: Dr. Rose is certain the key to understanding Göbekli Tepe

lies in the images carved on its stone pillars.

What do they mean?

To help him understand the ancient carvings,

he now travels to Istanbul to look at the symbols in another temple.

The Church of the Holy Savior in Chora was originally built some 1,600 years ago,

then rebuilt 850 years later.

The mosaics covering its walls

are an excellent example of Christian imagery.

The key to any place of worship

is that the symbols are understood by everybody that gathers there.

Its role is to unite the congregation in a common purpose

through shared beliefs in all the rituals that go with them.

If I came from a different culture and knew nothing about Christianity,

all of these images, the layout, the decor,

would be completely incomprehensible to me.

Without understanding the meaning behind the symbols,

I wouldn't have a clue what any of it meant

and how this place was used.

NARRATOR: But we know Göbekli Tepe's builders were hunter-gatherers,

which allows us to arrive at a probable explanation of why it was built.

Hunter-gatherers share their food

with a small, trusted group of family and friends.

When they settle, they have more children.

Communities grow fast.

Populations reach the hundreds, even thousands.

Now they must learn to share with strangers

and live together in peace.

This requires a moral code and a whole new level of trust.

So you need something which pulls the community together,

which shows that you share these ethical codes.

And a project like building a great facility

and having ceremonies that go with it and its use does that.

It comprises an ethical code of,

"This is how you behave if you belong in our community."

Different neighboring communities draw together an array of talents

to make their religion concrete,

so a stonemason from one group, a master builder from another,

a carver from another, and they build a temple.

(yelling)

NARRATOR: A massive project like this forces people to work together,

to rely on each other, and trust one another.

It unites people.

Something like, if I see you in my church or I see you in my synagogue, I trust you.

I may not know you very well, but I trust you.

NARRATOR: But what belief system does their temple represent?

For thousands of years before Göbekli Tepe,

it appears that people believe that everything--

animals, plants, stones, natural phenomena--

all have a spirit.

Man is only one small part of nature.

SCHMIDT: In the caves, the nature is depicted and nearly no humans,

or the humans are inferior to them.

NARRATOR: Now, human-like pillars tower above nature,

which is represented by wild and dangerous creatures.

PETERS: These central pillars may indicate

a different mentality.

All of a sudden, human beings are in the center of things.

The presence of these animals

below the head of the anthropomorphic figure

suggests that human beings, that they are superior to animals.

NARRATOR: To put ourselves above nature is a huge change

from how we see ourselves in earlier cave paintings.

SCHMIDT: In comparison to the painted caves,

this is a very, very important shift,

a very important change towards a very different spiritual world

which is now dominated by human-like beings.

NARRATOR: The large numbers of animal bones found at the site

might also suggest that people gathered for feasts at the temple.

When they had these gatherings here,

when they had the feastings here, they needed a lot of food.

So they had been now looking for a constant food supply,

and this, in simple words,

could have been the base for the idea

now to manage the nature, to be food production,

and not just hunter-gathering.

NARRATOR: Professor Schmidt's theory is radical.

If these settled hunter-gatherers are motivated to take up farming

to satisfy the temple's need of food,

then the spark that set off that giant step out of the Stone Age

was religion.

So do you think, then, that religion itself

is the impetus that pushed people or moved people toward farming?

Yes, religion is bringing people towards farming.

We always thought that organized religion developed

as people settled and started farming.

But this religion predates agriculture. So what were they trying to achieve?

NARRATOR: The new religion gives humans an enormous psychological advantage.

It places us above the animals and above nature.

It's probably that mental leap forward

which is needed to start domesticate animals and plants.

NARRATOR: It's now clear to Dr. Rose that Göbekli Tepe represents

a dramatic turning point in our development.

Its pillars and carvings depict the new way we see ourselves in nature,

but what rituals or ceremonies take place there?

Professor Schmidt has found some interesting clues.

We see the body of a human:

the shoulders, the arms, the erected penis, and clearly no head.

It's a horrifying scenario,

together with a scorpion and the snakes and the vultures and so on.

So we have maybe a depiction of the netherworld.

All these observations are strengthening our ideas

that we have here to do with burial rites.

NARRATOR: Burial rites in other settlements

of the time of Göbekli Tepe were quite strange.

Bodies are buried and later dug up

and their skulls removed to be used as relics.

Was Göbekli Tepe dedicated to death rituals?

It is not difficult to imagine Göbekli Tepe

as a temple devoted to the dead...

a portal leading into a flickering netherworld

where the skulls of the deceased are separated from their bodies

and bizarre rituals performed beneath imposing monoliths

proclaiming man's mastery over the wild beasts.

Dr. Rose realizes Göbekli Tepe has turned history on its head.

We'd always thought that it was the discovery of agriculture

that transformed scattered hunter-gatherer groups to farming communities,

and from there, to today's sophisticated societies.

But now it looks like the big cultural revolution happened before agriculture.

NARRATOR: And what motivates that cultural revolution

is the new religion in which we are superior to the beasts.

We build the temple to unite us in the new faith,

and this effort pushes us

to take that giant, evolutionary step into farming.

Göbekli Tepe suggests that it was the urge to worship that sparked civilization.

And then Dr. Rose learns something bizarre.

(shouting)

After the huge effort to build this extraordinary place...

the people who use it then bury it.

Why?

The downfall of the oldest temple in the world

is as mysterious as the religion it serves.

For over a thousand years,

the temple occupies a central place in the cultural life of the region.

People living up to 200 kilometers away use it as a ritual center

and somewhere they can share news, ideas and discoveries.

Here, the agricultural revolution that changes the course of mankind

begins to take shape,

and as this new way of life develops, so the temple changes with the times.

Around 1,500 years after the large circular spaces

with the massive monoliths were built,

they were filled in, covered over, and smaller structures were built on top.

It looks like Göbekli Tepe was being downsized.

It was part of the program to erect such a circle,

to use it for some time, but later to back-fill it completely.

So the final appearance was not that of a building, but that of a mound.

NARRATOR: Eventually, all these mounds become one big hill.

Excavating it, Professor Schmidt has now uncovered

one of the smaller enclosures built over the older ones.

Now we are in B.

ROSE: This comes later than what we saw over there.

SCHMIDT: This is later than C and D, that's quite clear,

with, again, two central pillars, well-preserved,

but with a height of only four meters.

NARRATOR: These four-meter monoliths

are now a full one-and-a-half meters shorter than the older ones.

Later on, even smaller rectangular spaces are built on top of the previous ones.

Göbekli Tepe hangs on for another 1,000 years,

but the downsizing is dramatic.

The enclosures get smaller, the monoliths progressively shorter,

and the number of pillars in the surrounding wall dwindle

until there are none.

Finally, around 10,000 years ago, Göbekli Tepe disappears,

buried beneath a man-made hill.

But why did they so completely erase such an important place?

To find out, Dr. Rose drives over 30 kilometers from Göbekli Tepe

to investigate another settlement of that time.

When the the Euphrates River was dammed in 1990,

over 800 square kilometers were flooded.

Beneath these deep waters lies one of the possible reasons

for the downfall of Göbekli Tepe.

Dr. Rose has come to see some photographs taken before the flooding

of the ruins of a Stone Age village called Nevali Çori.

It was inhabited at the time of Göbekli Tepe.

The pictures show that around 10,000 years ago,

something new appears in the village:

another kind of communal space.

It's a small, square enclosure with 13 stone pillars in its walls,

and two faceless monoliths in the center,

with arms and hands carved on them.

It's a smaller, localized version of the grand cathedral at Göbekli Tepe,

like a village church.

ROSE: These kind of sacred spaces show up in a number of settlements at that time

and coincide with the downsizing of Göbekli Tepe.

Local communities had started to build their own sacred spaces,

maybe because they didn't want to hike up to the big temple at the top of the hill.

Göbekli Tepe had started to lose its importance.

In a sense, it's a victim of its own success.

That unifying faith had taken root all throughout the local communities.

NARRATOR: But there may also be another explanation

for the abandonment of the temple.

The descendants of Göbekli's builders were no longer hunter-gatherers.

They were farmers...

and they weren't interested in the ways of their ancestors.

SCHMIDT: When the people became farmers, they didn't need anymore

the place of their ancestors where they worshipped the spirits

or the gods of the hunter-gatherers' society.

NARRATOR: The new generation of farmers are looking to the future,

and the customs and beliefs of their forefathers fall out of fashion.

Dr. Rose can see that the cultural revolution is now complete.

Farming is our new way of life

and Göbekli Tepe must vanish with the past.

But he is astonished to find

that some of its beliefs are still with us today.

They are at the root

of one of the deepest doctrines of the Christian faith:

the mystery of the resurrection.

Dr. Rose has learned many things

on his journey through our prehistoric past,

but there's still one piece of the puzzle he wants to understand.

When Göbekli Tepe is buried around 10,000 years ago...

what happens to the powerful beliefs that created it?

Dr. Rose now travels over 400 kilometers west

to search for traces of the religious ideas

that built the world's oldest temple.

Çatalhüyük is over 9,000 years old.

Some believe it's the world's earliest town.

Up to 8,000 people are known to have lived here.

They were farmers.

Dr. Tristan Carter has worked on the excavation

and discovered a number of links with Göbekli Tepe.

ROSE: So you're seeing the same imagery here

that we saw at Göbekli Tepe.

We've got wild bulls, we've got leopards, we've got wild boars,

and it ties in with this very deep set of beliefs

that goes back to at least 2,500 years to Göbekli Tepe.

A belief system, a moral code

that's maybe come out of a hunter-gatherer world

is still essentially the basis of a community of farmers

many hundreds of kilometers, many thousands of years later.

NARRATOR: So the burial of Göbekli Tepe is not the end of its story.

Its seeds, both spiritual and physical, were spread far and wide.

Whatever the meaning of its symbolism,

the same imagery is found at later sites all throughout the region.

NARRATOR: Dr. Rose finds the same symbols he saw at Göbekli

now brought into the home 2,000 years later.

What do you think the significance of having this inside the house is?

The bull is obviously this incredibly important symbol to them,

whether it represents a specific deity, a specific god,

or is symbolic for something deeper in terms of ritual.

NARRATOR: This is a small reproduction.

Prehistoric wild cattle, called aurochs,

would have stood over two meters tall at the shoulder,

with horns spanning three meters.

These are large, scary killing beasts,

so to bring that power, that violence, and domesticate it in here,

it's a celebration of the hunt and the prowess of the individuals.

Think today, still, of the bullfights in Iberia.

Think of the prowess and the honor associated with that.

There's a real pragmatic and very reasonable fear

of such a huge beast.

NARRATOR: The awe and respect we have for these powerful beasts,

and our desire to conquer them is still with us to this day.

This depiction of burial rites is another intriguing image

Dr. Rose finds here 2,000 years on from Göbekli Tepe.

It looks at first like the deceased have been left out

to be consumed by vultures.

CARTER: We now appreciate from excavations of hundreds of burials

that these characters were buried fully fleshed.

People have gone back and re-excavated the dead...

and then they very carefully removed the skulls.

NARRATOR: The skull cult is associated with ancestor worship.

A person's skull is a physical reminder of them.

Once removed from the body,

it's displayed alone or with other skulls in a house or communal space.

This is a way of bringing back to life an important person

in order to keep alive a history that binds people together.

It's a resurrection of a particular character

who's very important to this particular lineage.

NARRATOR: Dr. Rose realizes that the headless man of Göbekli Tepe

could represent a very early expression of the resurrection idea,

in which a deceased person or deity is brought back from the dead,

uniting a people in a common cause or belief.

Over the following millennia,

this resurrection idea turns up in the religions of many civilizations

including Babylon...

Egypt...

India...

and Greece.

It survives to this day in the Christian faith.

Dr. Rose now understands that although the ancient temple disappears,

the beliefs it represents have continued to shape our culture for 12,000 years.

ROSE: We might never fully understand what went on at Göbekli Tepe,

but from the clues I've gathered on this trip,

some things have become clear.

The construction of that temple represents the culmination

of a long tradition of thought and craftsmanship

that must extend back into the last ice age.

It was a social nexus that brought communities together from far and wide...

and most importantly,

it represents a quantum leap in our spiritual expression.

Instead of being just part of the natural world,

we began to see ourselves as masters of it.

By creating a temple for those giant stone deities fashioned in our image,

we opened a portal to a new way of life.

It was there, under those towering pillars,

that we gave birth to the gods.

NARRATOR: Göbekli Tepe marks what is possibly

the greatest turning point in our cultural evolution--

a point when people began to form large communities...

began to reevaluate their place in the world

and began to domesticate plants and animals--

the first giant step out of the Stone Age towards the space age.

Captioned by Pixelogic Media