Paradise Found or Common Sense Lost? Göbekli Tepe’s Last Decade as a Pre-Farming Cult Centre

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Abstract

The spectacular finds at Turkey’s Göbekli Tepe have fired the imaginations of archaeologists and the general public alike. Reflecting on developments at and about the site since the 2011 publication of a critique of the site’s dominant interpretation as a hunter-gatherer cult centre, this article shows that some elements of that critique, including assertions about roofing and a residential population, have gained traction, while others have fallen on deaf ears. Göbekli Tepe has also become the locus of discussion and speculation in disciplines ranging from astronomy and religion to psychology and architectural history, while also inspiring pseudoscientific claims that associate the site with the Garden of Eden, a supposed technologically sophisticated pre-Holocene civilization or extraterrestrial visitors.

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Archaeobotanical Evidence for the Spread of Farming in the Eastern Mediterranean

James Conolly, Stephen Shennan, Sue Colledge (2004)

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The role of cult and feasting in the emergence of Neolithic communities. New evidence from Göbekli Tepe, south-eastern Turkey

Oliver Dietrich, Manfred Heun, Jens Notroff … (2012)

Göbekli Tepe is one of the most important archaeological discoveries of modern times, pushing back the origins of monumentality beyond the emergence of agriculture. We are pleased to present a summary of work in progress by the excavators of this remarkable site and their latest thoughts about its role and meaning. At the dawn of the Neolithic, hunter-gatherers congregating at Göbekli Tepe created social and ideological cohesion through the carving of decorated pillars, dancing, feasting—and, almost certainly, the drinking of beer made from fermented wild crops.

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Colloquium paper: the cognitive niche: coevolution of intelligence, sociality, and language.

Steven Pinker (2010)

Although Darwin insisted that human intelligence could be fully explained by the theory of evolution, the codiscoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, claimed that abstract intelligence was of no use to ancestral humans and could only be explained by intelligent design. Wallace's apparent paradox can be dissolved with two hypotheses about human cognition. One is that intelligence is an adaptation to a knowledge-using, socially interdependent lifestyle, the "cognitive niche." This embraces the ability to overcome the evolutionary fixed defenses of plants and animals by applications of reasoning, including weapons, traps, coordinated driving of game, and detoxification of plants. Such reasoning exploits intuitive theories about different aspects of the world, such as objects, forces, paths, places, states, substances, and other people's beliefs and desires. The theory explains many zoologically unusual traits in Homo sapiens, including our complex toolkit, wide range of habitats and diets, extended childhoods and long lives, hypersociality, complex mating, division into cultures, and language (which multiplies the benefit of knowledge because know-how is useful not only for its practical benefits but as a trade good with others, enhancing the evolution of cooperation). The second hypothesis is that humans possess an ability of metaphorical abstraction, which allows them to coopt faculties that originally evolved for physical problem-solving and social coordination, apply them to abstract subject matter, and combine them productively. These abilities can help explain the emergence of abstract cognition without supernatural or exotic evolutionary forces and are in principle testable by analyses of statistical signs of selection in the human genome.