Site, with tens of thousands of people applying each year for the privilege of standing inside when it lights up. And although his discovery was rare and unexpected at the time, we now know that Newgrange is just one of many stone monuments constructed in western Europe during the Neolithic period1 that were aligned to events in the sky.
Some are exceptional and dramatic, such as Stonehenge in England, aligned to the midsummer and midwinter solstices; or the stone circle at Callanish in the Outer Hebrides in Scotland, which captures the nineteen-year cycle of the moon. But there are many smaller examples, such as the hundreds of simple dolmen tombs in southern Europe, whose entrances face the rising sun.2
What did these stones mean to their Neolithic builders? Why did people go to such effort to build these monuments, and to relate so many of them to the sky? The answers, as far as we can glean, reveal aspects of human identity and cosmology at a transformative time in our history, perhaps the ultimate transformation, when our species first adopted agriculture.
The hunter-gatherers of the Palaeolithic had existed as an integral part of the natural world, sharing their environment on equal terms with other species. During the Neolithic revolution, people cut those ties and became farmers, controlling and exploiting the land. This shift in lifestyle and mindset changed humanity for ever, setting a trajectory of technological progress that has ultimately made us capable of reshaping not just landscapes but the entire planet.
The revolution was about more than forging a new relationship with wheat or fields or sheep. It transformed our wider cosmos; how people viewed the spirit world and the sky. In fact, there’s a case to be made that these new cosmological ideas didn’t simply reflect the shift to farming. They caused it.
It’s a story that starts not in Ireland but with humanity’s oldest known megalithic monument, built a staggering six millennia earlier than Newgrange, and thousands of miles to the east.
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In 1994, the German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt was searching for a new project. For the past decade he had been helping to excavate a site in southeast Turkey called Nevalı Çori, a hunter-gatherer settlement inhabited in the ninth and early eighth millennia BC, with houses made from limestone blocks held together with mud. The village included a series of mysterious ‘cult buildings’ (constructed on the same site over time), that were sunk a few metres down into the ground. They were shaped like rounded squares, with stone benches around the edges of the interior, interrupted by T-shaped monolithic pillars. Two further T-shaped pillars stood in the centre, decorated with carvings of human arms, like some kind of anthropomorphic beings.
The site was fascinating, a glimpse into the worldview of a society on the verge of transition: within a few centuries, farming would flourish in this region. For the first time in history, people here started to cultivate wheat and to corral sheep, pigs and goats. But in 1992, the entire settlement was flooded by the construction of the Atatürk Dam. The rest of its secrets were lost for ever.3
To find a new site, Schmidt surveyed other prehistoric remains in the region. He came across a 15-metre-high mound in the foothills of the Taurus Mountains just 60 kilometres from Nevalı Çori, called Göbekli Tepe – ‘Potbelly Hill’ – because of its curves. The hill was strewn with Neolithic flint tools and broken limestone slabs. Archaeologists who spotted the slabs in the 1960s had dismissed them as belonging to a medieval cemetery, but Schmidt realised that they matched the T-shaped pillars in the cult buildings at Nevalı Çori. Except that these were gigantic, made from great blocks of stone several metres high. ‘Within a minute of first seeing it, I knew I had two choices,’ he later said. ‘Go away and tell nobody, or spend the rest of my life working here.’ He chose the second.
Through excavations and geophysical surveys over the next two decades, Schmidt and his team found that the hill is packed with buried pillars and enclosures. There are square chambers similar to those at Nevalı Çori and also dating to the ninth millennium BC. But beneath them is an older layer of much larger circles, up to 20 metres across, dating to the tenth millennium BC. Up to twelve T-shaped pillars around the edge of each space were connected by a stone bench. Two more giant pillars – up to 5.5 metres high and each weighing several tonnes – stood parallel in the centre, with traces of carved arms, belts and loincloths made of animal skins. Other stones are covered in carvings of animals: spiders, scorpions, vultures, foxes, boar, gazelles. The archaeologist and prehistorian Steven Mithen has said that Göbekli Tepe is ‘an amalgamation of Lascaux cave and Stonehenge’, and in time, too, it is a stepping stone, falling roughly midway between the two.
The discovery of huge stone monuments at such an early date – 12,000 years old – was astounding. It takes colossal effort and organisation to erect constructions like this, with hundreds of people working together; other sites on such an enormous scale aren’t known until thousands of years later. Archaeologists had assumed that hunter-gatherers simply weren’t capable of doing it. They figured that the conversion to agriculture, perhaps triggered by climate change or growing populations, eventually made such monuments possible by providing the resources for large, permanent settlements. This led to a more complex society, as well as changes in religious belief, which together produced both the ability and the motivation to create giant symphonies in stone.
There were dissenters. The French archaeologist Jacques Cauvin argued in the 1990s that cultural or religious changes must have come first. From a technical point of view, early humans could have started farming long before, ‘but neither the idea nor the desire ever came to them’. Something must have happened, he suggested, to change how they viewed the natural world. But there was little hard evidence for what that shift might have been, or how it happened.
What Schmidt found, however, suggested that Cauvin was right. Here was clear evidence of a complex, organised society, with some form of religion, or at the very least sophisticated mythology, all before the invention of farming. What’s more, the pillars of Göbekli Tepe were erected at precisely the place where farming was about to originate.
Biologists have pinpointed this small region, between the upper reaches of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, as the only place where all seven Neolithic founder crops (chickpea, einkorn wheat, emmer wheat, barley, lentil, pea and bitter vetch) grew together, while genetic studies of hundreds of einkorn and emmer wheat strains have concluded that domesticated versions of both likely originated from wild strains that grew in the Karacadag Mountains, just 30 kilometres from Göbekli Tepe.
Large numbers of people, maybe hundreds, would have had to congregate on the hilltop to build Göbekli Tepe. Simply having to feed them all may have created pressure to develop new and more predictable food sources. Mithen has suggested that gathering and processing wild grain at or near the site could have led to fallen grain springing up and being gathered again, leading over time to domesticated strains. Rather than being a response to climate change, he concluded, the domestication of wheat ‘may have been a by-product of the ideology that drove hunter-gatherers to carve and erect massive pillars of stone on a hilltop in southern Turkey’.
But the connection might run deeper than that. German archaeologist Jens Notroff and his colleagues, who have continued excavating Göbekli Tepe since Schmidt’s death in 2014, see clear evidence of a shifting relationship to the natural world, as suggested by Cauvin. In the cave art of the Palaeolithic, people are rarely represented; it’s the animals that take centre stage. By contrast, the foxes, snakes and scorpions of Göbekli Tepe are reduced to smaller attributes or decorations on those huge anthropomorphic pillars. As the team put it in 2015, ‘humans are no longer depicted as a coequal part of nature, but are clearly more prominent and “raised” above the animal world’. The art shows, they argue, that people had already begun exerting power over nature: a ‘mental control’ that led to the subsequent physical control of domestication.
Another striking aspect of Göbekli
