Tag: technology

In Episode 5 of my documentary series Ancient Apocalypse, released on Netflix in November 2022, I speak of GobekIi Tepe in southeastern Turkey, which is reliably dated to around 11,600 years ago. I introduce it as the oldest megalithic archaeological site that has yet been discovered anywhere in the world:

“It’s an enormous site, you can’t just wake up one morning with no prior skills, no prior knowledge, no background in working with stone and create something like Gobekli Tepe. There has to be a long history behind it and that history is completely missing…

To me it very strongly speaks of a lost civilisation, transferring their technology, their skills, their knowledge to hunter gatherers…”

I’ve spent more than 30 years on a controversial quest for a lost civilization of the Ice Age. You could say it’s my obsession. Perhaps it was because I was so caught up in the search on my first visits to Gobekli Tepe in 2013 and 2014, and so impressed by the genius of its design and its monolithic T-shaped pillars with their intricate carvings, that I didn’t fully appreciate how complicated its inheritance of technology transfer had been. Nor did I grasp how much of the history of that transfer, even though it went unrecognized as such, had bit by bit begun to be revealed by archeologists. In consequence, I overlooked excellent, high-quality data, which, if I had deployed it at the time, would have strengthened my own thesis greatly.

The transfer didn’t begin with Gobekli Tepe – which is itself 7,000 years older than Stonehenge. It didn’t even begin in the Neolithic. It began millennia earlier with Late Epipalaeolithic cultures, one of which has, since the 1920s, been referred to as Natufian. Of course, we don’t know what it was called by its own people, or even if it consisted of a single culture or multiple different cultures sharing similar lifeways. Moreover, new finds are constantly challenging our understanding of it. Thus, the Natufian was initially thought to be an exclusively nomadic or semi-nomadic hunter-forager² culture typical of the period, but excavations at Ein Mallaha (also known as Eynan) in northern Israel, some 600 miles south of Gobekli Tepe, uncovered substantial architectural features:

Semi-subterranean curvilinear structures… made of undressed limestone characterized the site throughout its history. Their construction usually consisted of cutting into the slope and building retaining walls in order to support the surrounding sloping ground. The superstructure (roof) of these shelters [a combination of associated structures and floors] was presumed to have been made of organic material.³

As a result of these discoveries at Ain Mallaha, report archaeologists Gill Haklay and Avi Gopher of the University of Tel Aviv, “the innovation of stone construction” began to be recognised as:

“part and parcel of the Natufian repertoire. Prior to the Natufian, stone architecture, which is generally associated with sedentism, was rare and it later became a hallmark of the Neolithic period.”⁴

In 2015, deploying architectural formal analysis to study the relationships between different construction elements, Haklay and Gopher undertook a close investigation of one of Ein Mallaha’s largest buildings, “Shelter 51”. Dated to the Early Natufian around 14,300 years ago,⁵ this structure has a number of peculiar and eye-catching characteristics, in addition to its rarity as an early example of stone architecture, that seem – to my eyes at any rate – to be out of place in time. Amongst these characteristics, the most notable, distinguishing Shelter 51 from earlier structures that have been claimed as predecessors dating as far back as the early Epipalaeolithic (around 20,000 years ago),⁶ is clear evidence of the use of geometry and a pre-prepared ground plan, revealing what Haklay and Gopher describe as:

“a whole new level of architectural design… Architectural with a capital A…⁷

“Here, the designer addressed and integrated the different aspects of architectural planning, including spatial organization, structural system and spatial form, under a common geometric concept. This resulted in a standardization of the structural and spatial elements. Unlike the early Epipaleolithic brushwood huts, Shelter 51 was envisioned by its designer in its totality and in a different level of detail. Thanks to the use of geometric concepts, a shape of a floor plan could have been defined and specified prior to its marking on the ground, and an architectural design could have been shared with others and carried out with accuracy. As worded by Marx relating to human productivity: ‘A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality”.⁸

Future discoveries may force further revision of the picture, but it is beginning to look very much as though the earliest surviving evidence for the deliberate use of geometry and an architectural plan, so typical of Gobekli Tepe 11,600 years ago, comes down to us from the Natufian culture somewhere around 14,300 years ago. As Haklay and Gopher conclude:

“The Natufian level of architectural planning, an innovation made possible by the introduction of a geometric tradition, represents a turning point in human/environment relations, as the role of geometry in architectural design and its manifestation in the spatial form of the built environment were destined to become predominant…”⁹

Nor is Structure 51 the only example:

“The Natufians were also familiar with the notion of a ‘perfect’ and precise circle. It is evident, for example, from the 62cm high mortar and stone discs retrieved from the site of Eynan. These artifacts possess a strikingly high degree of symmetry, and reflect the intention and ability of producing objects of such properties.”¹⁰

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