Located in the Anatolia region of SE Turkey, this archaeological site is one of the earliest examples of human construction.
The site is a tell (or a mound created from years of human occupation to form a cone truncated with a flat top) that is 49 ft/15 m tall and 984 ft/300 m in diameter. The excavation revealed several rooms and more than 200 massive pillars in 20 different circles, many with ornate carvings.
What boggles the mind about Göbekli Tepe was that it was constructed before the development of agriculture- an estimated 10,000 years BCE. To put that in context, the Pyramids of Giza started construction in 2584 BC.
The neolithic people who constructed this site were hunter-gatherers that used flint-knapped tools to scrape and chisel the construction. As a National Geographic writer put it in an article called "The Birth of Religion":
Discovering that hunter-gatherers had constructed Göbekli Tepe was like finding that someone had built a 747 in a basement with an X-Acto knife.
