Other, less direct types of evidence,
such as signs of sophisticated hunting,
or ornamentation or ‘art’, are also
important. Yet understanding the
appearance of a species as unique as our
own remains a profound challenge.
Describing how and when different
types of intelligence and behaviour
evolved is only the beginning.What is Göbekli Tepe?
Discoveries at this single site in
southeast Turkey, excavated since 1995
under the direction of Klaus Schmidt of
the German Archaeological Institute in
Berlin, appear to demolish traditional
ideas about the origins of agriculture and
civilisation. If we can explain what was
happening at Göbekli Tepe, it seems,
we can explain the roots of the modern
world.
Göbekli Tepe is a huge mound
perched on a mountain ridge not far
from the Syrian border. It grew between
11,500 and 9,500 years ago, as people
brought stone, food and other materials
to a sacred site. When the hill was
abandoned, the spaces between a dense
network of stone walls were filled with
rubble, broken artefacts and animal
bones. Prior to excavation, all that was
visible were the tops of flat stone pillars,
looking like medieval gravestones.
This infilling preserved the structures,
and left us a huge amount of material for
analysis. It has also made scientific study
painfully slow – even now, most of the
nine-hectare site remains unexcavated,
and details of chronology remain vague.
For an archaeologist, this almost adds
to the site’s appeal – a historical mystery
is compounded by methodological
challenges. And a mystery it is, whose
uncovering can be likened to the wider
world’s discovery of the statues onARCHAEOLOGY
Easter Island.
Dozens of T-shaped stone pillars, some
as big as Stonehenge megaliths, still stand- sometimes free, sometimes embedded in
walls. They are decorated with carvings
of scary animals – snakes, vultures and
scorpions. Klaus Schmidt thinks all the
buildings were temples, while some
archaeologists wonder if people also lived
there. There is no denying, however, the
monumental scale of the complex.
PHOTO: CORBISNew discoveries are challenging our assumptions
about everything from the history of the Americas
to the birth of civilisation itself, Mike Pitts revealsThe temple complex
discovered at Göbekli Tepe in
Turkey suggests that religion
emerged before agriculture;
conventional wisdom says it’s
the other way aroundWhy are we here?
Among all of life on Earth, why
did one species – very quickly on a
geological time scale – develop an
exceptional intelligence? For most of
our existence, we found the answers to
this question in myth and religion. In
the 19th Century, Darwin’s theory of
evolution explained life’s complexity,
and suggested where humans fitted
in. Fossils and stone tools supplied the
evidence, and now genetic studies are
revealing hitherto unimagined details
about our ancestral tree.
Mapping ancestry, however, does not
explain why several clever, dextrous
hominins suddenly appeared just a few
million years ago (hominins being all the
creatures that evolved on the human side
after the split from chimpanzees), or why
all but one – us – were extinct by 30,000
years ago. To answer such questions we
have to describe human intelligence in
ways that left marks in the ground.
The most direct approach has been to
look at stone tools. Until the mid-20th
Century, the very presence of tools was
taken to define humanity. Jane Goodall
then showed that chimpanzees make
tools, implying that all hominins would
also have done so. So now the quest
is to understand the varying degrees
of complex thought required to make
different types of tool.
The ideal is to find ancient workshops,
where we can literally follow trains
of thinking in stone debris. These are
extremely rare, one of the best being at
Boxgrove, West Sussex, dating to half a
million years ago. Modern experimental
tool-making is essential for research, as
are fossils – such as the newly announced
find of a hand bone from east Africa,
some 1.4 million years old, that indicates
a modern-style human grip.ARCHAEOLOGY