It seems that civilization keeps getting older and older. Göbekli Tepe, an early Neolithic archaeological site in southeastern Turkey, is at present the world’s oldest ceremonial center, its numerous T-shaped megaliths predating iconic Stonehenge by some 7,000 years. In fact, the site may even be centuries older than Jericho, located in Palestine near the Dead Sea, one of the world’s earliest settlements. “Göbekli Tepe is one of the most important monuments in the world,” said Hassan Karabulut, associate curator of Turkey’s Urfa Museum, in an article of the November/December 2008 issue of Archaeology magazine.

The site’s location is hardly a surprise since Turkey is the northern arc of civilization’s Fertile Crescent, where cities sprang up some 5,000 years ago. But the antiquity of Göbekli Tepe boggles the mind. This temple, ceremonial center or shrine, goes all the way back to the post-glacial period, when metal tools and pottery had not yet been developed. Agriculture, the domestication of animals and the development of writing, three skills important to the development of civilization, hadn’t come about either. Thus the people who built Göbekli Tepe were probably nomadic hunter-gatherers dressed in animal skins who were just learning to wield stone stools for making stone-built monuments or shelters. “They had barely emerged from the most basic way of life,” Karabulut said.

However, couldn’t the creation of Göbekli Tepe mark the beginning of civilization? Webster’s II New College Dictionary describes civilization as “An advanced stage of development in the arts and sciences accompanied by corresponding political, social and cultural complexity.” This site shows complexity and artistry on a grand scale indeed. Even today, the construction of the site would require a great deal of skilled, organized and expensive work.

In the November 2008 issue of Smithsonian magazine, Klaus Schmidt, an archaeologist who has recently excavated at the site, said that some 11,000 years ago “this area was like a paradise.” Schmidt theorized that prehistoric hunter-gatherers assembled at the site - perhaps as many as 500 of them supervised by a priestly caste - built the sacred monuments, and then later founded villages in the surrounding area and began planting crops and domesticating animals, the opposite of the standard version of civilization’s early days found in text books. Simply put, most scholars think that settlements and cities were constructed before temples or shrines.

Göbekli Tepe (meaning the “hill of the navel” in Turkish, and one might wish the name were easier to spell and pronounce!) covers some 25 acres, where circles of T-shaped stone pillars, some of which of 16 feet high and weighing between seven and 10 tons, stretch across a hillside, with nearby Urfa in the background. The Neolithic people at the site carved the local limestone into numerous depictions of humans and animals, including a bare human cranium with a snake crawling up the back of it. Other depictions show boars accompanied by ostrich-like birds, a crocodile-like creature and vultures flying above a scorpion.

But why were such humans and animals incised on these megaliths? Schmidt and his team have found at the site bones of wild animals such as red deer, goats, sheep, oxen, gazelles and many species of birds. Numerous flint spearpoints have also been discovered at the site. Schmidt emphasized that we know nothing of the religious practices at Göbekli Tepe. The animal images “probably illustrate stories of hunter-gatherer religion and beliefs,” he said, “though we don’t know at the moment.”

And what about those T-shaped pillars? Schmidt likened them to human bodies with the upper part of the “T” resembling a head in profile. The pillars could have represented a meeting of stone beings.

But, given the limitations of archaeology without any kind of written record, we may never know for sure why Göbekli Tepe was constructed.

Then the site was covered with sand and abandoned about 10,000 years ago, about the time agriculture developed in the area. Schmidt hypothesized that the beginning of agriculture may have diminished the significance of the site’s importance, so that pilgrims stopped coming to the area.

Scholars have been fascinated with the Neolithic period in Turkey, or Anatolia as it is also known, since the early 1960s, when excavations at the famous location of Catalhöyük, the world’s most extensive Neolithic site, showed painted shrines built some 9,500 years ago; and a nearby contemporaneous settlement showed evidence of some of the earliest animal domestication and copper metallurgy.

Since only three to five percent of Göbekli Tepe has been excavated, more enlightening finds are almost guaranteed in the coming years. The digging at the site could last as long as 50 years, similar to other long-term digs such as Olympia in Greece.

The question remains: How old is civilization?

Please note: Journalist Tom Knox has written a novel titled, The Genesis Secret, supposedly a Da Vinci Code-like thriller with a scenario that involves the civilization at Göbekli Tepe, where the 12-foot ape Gigantopithecus rules over the cave-men, proving, somehow, that the Bible is a sham! What the heck, read it!