Michelle has posted this article in the Newsroom, about this very ancient temple complex in Turkey. It dates to 9,500 BC, which most researchers say is pre-agricultural. We've all read about this site but it hasn't had it's own thread. There is a lot of info and pics on the internet that we can add here.Compared with Stonehenge, they are humble affairs. None of the circles that have been excavated, four out of an estimated 20, is more than 100 feet across. Two of the slender, T-shaped pillars tower at least three feet above their peers.
What makes them remarkable are the carved reliefs of boars, foxes, lions, birds, snakes and scorpions that cover them, and their age. Dated at about 9500 B.C., these stones are 5,500 years older than the first cities of Mesopotamia and 7,000 years older than Stonehenge.
Nevermind wheels or writing, the people who erected them did not even have pottery or domesticated wheat. They lived in villages, but were hunters, not farmers.
"Everybody used to think only complex, hierarchical civilizations could build such monumental sites and that they only came about with the invention of agriculture," said Ian Hodder, a Stanford University anthropology professor who has directed digs at Catalhoyuk, Turkey's most-famous Neolithic site, since 1993.
These people obviously had an organized religion of sorts, and we have an opportunity to observe the earliest manifestation of human religion, which may be hard wired into our brains.
