Original subtitles

[Graham] Electricity works wonders for us.

Humans have become a 24/7 species.

But our canopy of lights cuts us off

from one of the most magnificent aspects of living on this planet...

the night sky.

To the ancients,

stargazing would have been the greatest show on Earth,

the most entertaining way to pass their long, dark nights.

They'd have known every turn of the Milky Way,

every bright star cluster, every comet blazing across the sky.

It might explain why everywhere we look in the ancient world,

we find massive structures pointing our attention to the heavens.

But what if it's more than that?

Ancient pyramids and temples all around the world

connect sky to ground with precise alignments to the Sun, Moon, and stars.

Why did the builders take such care, and on such a massive scale?

Could they have been trying to tell us something?

Warn us, even, that we must, at all costs, pay close attention to the heavens.

I'm in Turkey, heading for an isolated hilltop

about 26 miles from the border with Syria.

Today, this is a troubled part of the world,

but it's been hugely significant to the story of humanity.

In southeastern Turkey, near modern-day Sanliurfa,

something remarkable happened around the end of the last Ice Age.

Our Stone Age hunter-gatherer ancestors

suddenly discovered farming and began creating settlements.

This happened throughout what would later be called the Fertile Crescent,

extending south to the Persian Gulf.

Around 6,000 years ago, the area known as Mesopotamia

would give birth to what has long been assumed

to be the world's first civilization, the Sumerians.

But that view of history now cries out to be rewritten.

In 1994, while investigating a farmer's field,

archaeologists spotted strange carved stones protruding from the ground.

Some of gigantic size.

Subsequent excavations have led to a series of stunning discoveries.

This recently excavated archaeological site

requires us to abandon all our prejudices about our Stone Age ancestors.

Far from being technological primitives,

their accomplishments here prove

that they possessed hitherto unsuspected abilities

rivaling those of much later

and supposedly much more advanced civilizations.

Beneath the modern canopy built to protect it from the elements,

this is Göbekli Tepe.

And based on everything we've been taught about prehistory,

it shouldn't exist.

Archaeologists accept that it dates back to around 11,600 years ago...

making this the oldest acknowledged monumental structure on Earth.

It's a highly sophisticated, highly advanced megalithic site

that's about 7,000 years older than Stonehenge

and about 7,000 years older than the Giza Pyramids.

And suddenly the notion that there was no culture in the world

that was capable of doing such things 12,000 years ago

is blown out of the water.

It's older even than the invention of the wheel

or the domestication of horses.

Built at a time when the Earth was just emerging from the last Ice Age,

when the locals were still supposedly

unsophisticated hunter-gatherers living in mud huts.

But if they weren't advanced enough

to design and build this megalithic wonder,

who did and why?

What is this place?

At first glance, what confronts us here can seem bewildering.

If we look closer, however, and piece together all the clues,

we can get a good idea

of how ambitious and imposing it must have been in its prime.

Perched on the side of a hill

with few traces of any human settlements nearby

are four circular enclosures, all with a similar layout.

At the center of each,

stands a pair of massive T-shaped megaliths

weighing up to ten tons

set into a polished stone floor.

Twin giant figures,

some with arms and hands carved into the rock,

and tilted heads.

They're encircled by smaller T-shaped pillars,

many intricately carved and decorated,

and all connected by ringed walls of stone and passageways.

How these massive blocks were lifted and set in place...

nobody knows.

What really mystifies all who come here,

including the archaeologists who excavated the site,

are the astonishing carvings.

Symbols of animals are to be found everywhere at Göbekli Tepe.

It's like a Noah's Ark in stone.

The creatures depicted at Göbekli Tepe are curiously arranged and stylized

as though their purpose is more symbolic than realistic.

And there's something else unusual about these megalithic structures.

When archaeologists carbon dated them,

it became clear that these four enclosures weren't built at the same time.

Enclosure D dates back to around 11,600 years ago

but the youngest, Enclosure A, was built around 10,500 years ago.

Instead of updating the building they already had,

the people here kept building new enclosures

over the course of some 1,100 years,

slightly rotating the alignment each time.

What's even more intriguing

is that the oldest original enclosure, Enclosure D,

also happens to be the largest

and the most intricately decorated of the group.

It's not something that you're a hunter-gatherer

and you wake up one morning and think, "I'm going to build

the largest megalithic site that will ever be seen in the world."

Usually, the more we practice something, the better we get at it.

Like these modern-day quarrymen

still cutting stone at the site in the hills around Göbekli Tepe today,

we assume that ancient cultures must have worked the same way,

improving their skills over time.

But Göbekli Tepe, and in particular Enclosure D,

seem to turn this assumption upside down.

How did a community of Stone Age hunter-gatherers

succeed so brilliantly

in building with megaliths at their very first attempt?

Isn't it time to consider the possibility that the great megalithic enclosures

weren't some miraculous overnight invention of hunter-gatherers,

but were a legacy

from a precociously advanced lost civilization of prehistory?

This is a notion

which mainstream archaeologists find almost offensive.

Academic scholars have got locked in to a particular framework,

that during the Ice Age,

the entire human population of the Earth was at the hunter-gatherer stage.

And yet, it turns out the builders of Göbekli Tepe

were far more ambitious than your average hunter-gatherers.

In 2003, a geophysical survey using ground-penetrating radar

detected up to 20 other stone enclosures inside the hill

and more than 200 pillars.

Most remain un-excavated.

A huge megalithic complex spread out across nine hectares,

more than 12 soccer pitches.

It's an enormous site.

You can't just wake up one morning with no prior skills,

no prior knowledge, no background in working with stone,

and create something like Göbekli Tepe.

There has to be a long history behind it and that history is completely missing.

And to me, it very strongly speaks of a lost civilization.

Transferring their technology,

their skills, their knowledge to hunter-gatherers.

Göbekli Tepe isn't the only complex dating back to the end of the last Ice Age

that's recently been discovered here.

In 2019, Turkish archaeologists began excavations at another site,

about an hour's drive east, called Karahan Tepe...

and uncovered something unexpected.

The Turkish authorities have never allowed outside camera crews to film here

until now.

Lead archaeologist, Professor Necmi Karul,

believes that this site is around the same age as Göbekli Tepe

and could be even older.

But it's quite different.

The main chamber does feature T-shaped pillars and megaliths,

but one edge is carved out of the bedrock

and it's large enough to hold dozens of people.

What do you think happened in this building?

Do you have any ideas at all?

We can interpret it as a podium for a sitting area...

- Yeah. - ...and people coming together,

- because it's a big building. - Yeah.

Karahan Tepe seems to be some sort of ritual gathering space.

The carvings on the walls

aren't as well-executed as those at Göbekli Tepe.

But we do see robed figures.

Could they represent the site's true architects?

- Lead the way, Professor. - Yeah, okay.

Professor Karul leads me into a curious side chamber,

eight meters by six meters and two meters deep.

Ten pillars resembling phalluses

have been purposefully and skillfully carved directly out of the bedrock.

With an 11th free-standing pillar in pride of place.

A snaking channel has also been cut out of the rock

to allow some form of liquid to pour into this chamber,

water or possibly blood.

And it's dominated by an imposing and mysterious sculpted head.

There's something serpent-like about that neck of that figure,

as it pushes out of the rock and overlooks these pillars

standing there in the enclosure.

It's something sinuous, and I would add, something slightly sinister about it too.

It's a very powerful face.

[Karul] It's a human head

- carved from the bedrock... - Carved out of bedrock.

...and it looks to the entrance.

Yes, the eyes are turned that way.

Quite imposing.

- [Karul] It looks like a snake's head. - Yeah.

- It behaves like a snake, I would say. - [Graham] Yes.

A human-headed snake.

Yeah, maybe.

[Graham] It's a kind of unique discovery.

- Yeah, it's fantastic. - Yeah.

There's a feeling of fear or of terror that comes with that enclosure.

I know this is not science.

[chuckles] It's just my emotional reaction to what I was seeing.

But I can't help wondering if fear and terror

were involved in the creation of it as well.

If it's expressing something that we need to know about our past.

That it's fearful for a reason.

The professor confirms that as with Göbekli Tepe,

they found no evidence of farming.

The people who built this complex were definitely still hunter-gatherers.

The notion used to be that agriculture came first,

and then it allowed people to settle and create places like this.

But if I understand you correctly, you're saying that settlement came first.

Settlements came first.

- They are hunter-gatherers. - Yeah.

And then they started to produce a different life.

They changed the buildings,

- they changed the technology, et cetera. - Yeah.

A kind of revolution in ideas.

We can call it a revolution.

So this is something which is casting new light on human history.

So far, only two chambers have been excavated at Karahan Tepe.

But ground-penetrating radar has revealed at least 20 more chambers

that have yet to be explored.

Just as at Göbekli Tepe,

both sites built at the end of the last Ice Age,

just before humans living here started farming and raising cattle.

There was no agriculture at Göbekli Tepe when it was built,

but strangely, at exactly the time that it was being created 11,600 years ago,

agriculture appears all around it.

For me, what the evidence speaks to is pretty clear.

It's a transfer of technology.

People who already knew how to create megaliths

and build a big megalithic site came to Göbekli Tepe.

They already had knowledge of agriculture,

and they used that site to mobilize a local community,

to organize them and to introduce them to agriculture.

According to the lore of ancient Mesopotamia,

that's exactly what happened.

Amongst the many flood and cataclysm myths of antiquity,

the Mesopotamian deluge tradition is of particular interest here.

It speaks of a small band of wise ancients,

the Apkallu, who taught the people here the skills of civilization.

In the beginning, before recorded history,

humanity was created by the gods to be stewards of the land and animals.

But the first humans were too lazy and too unruly to do the job,

and their numbers grew unchecked.

So the gods sent a great deluge...

[thunder rumbling]

...to wipe the slate clean and start humanity over again.

And they also sent seven sages, the Apkallu,

traditionally depicted as bearded figures in flowing robes,

to instruct the survivors.

Their leader was Oannes, said to have come from the sea,

usually depicted as a half-man, half-fish.

He walked among the people

teaching agriculture, architecture, and knowledge of the stars.

That's a list I can't help thinking

that includes many of the advances supposedly invented at Göbekli Tepe.

Oannes is yet another example of a civilizing hero.

A teacher who suddenly arrives, usually by sea,

after a time of great cataclysm,

like Quetzalcoatl in Mexico,

or like Osiris, who legend says traveled by boat

to teach humanity the ways of civilization.

And it's not just their stories that are similar across ancient cultures.

Their depictions in ancient art are remarkably similar too,

down to their robes and distinctive handbags.

I think that these are real accounts of real events.

In some cases, they may be overlaid

with symbolisms and storylines that distract us,

but fundamentally, I think we need to trust the myths.

Göbekli Tepe's circular stone wall enclosures open to the sky

also remind me a bit of Ġgantija and Malta's other temples.

Is it possible they share a common inspiration?

On Malta, Lenie Reedijk showed me

how the changing alignments of the ancient megalithic temples

track the changing rising points of a single star, Sirius,

across thousands of years.

Remarkably, we find the same phenomenon at Göbekli Tepe.

The central pillars of the three oldest enclosures

also seem to have targeted Sirius.

At around the end of the Ice Age, their differing orientations

tracking the star's differing rising points across time.

This shared focus on Sirius is, for me,

another hint that the ancient builders in both Malta and Turkey

had access to a pool of shared knowledge

concerning astronomy and megalithic construction.

Is it possible that the great building projects in both places

were directed by the survivors of a more advanced culture

who traveled the world at the end of the last Ice Age,

perhaps represented by those stone pillar giants

or Karahan Tepe's hooded figures?

People who arrived here

in the Fertile Crescent after a great flood.

If so, what were they trying to say?

Could all those animal carvings actually be telling us something?

On these recent investigations,

I've learned new information about Göbekli Tepe,

which further adds to the intriguing picture.

I've come to meet Dr. Martin Sweatman, at the nearby Sanliurfa Museum,

home to a stunning recreation of Göbekli Tepe's largest enclosure.

A trained scientist with an interest in archaeoastronomy,

much of his research has focused on Pillar 43,

also known as the Vulture Stone.

What's the significance of this for you, Martin?

[Dr. Martin] It's probably one of the most important artifacts

in the whole world, you know?

It's just incredible.

Essentially, this pillar is like our Rosetta Stone.

Right.

Dr. Sweatman believes that the symbols on the stone

might represent asterisms,

figures meant to depict bright star clusters in the night sky.

- We see directly that there is a scorpion. - Mmm-hmm.

So we can take that perhaps to be Scorpius.

[Graham] It's very tempting to conclude it's Scorpius, yeah.

Absolutely.

[Graham] Different cultures have given different names and different figures

to the constellations of the zodiac.

So it's a bonus to see one asterism we recognize on Pillar 43.

[Dr. Martin] Then above, we would expect to find Sagittarius,

and we know Sagittarius as the archer with a bow and arrow.

And so we see the vulture with the wings and they're spread in just the right angle

to represent the bow and arrow.

And then we can see that there are other animal symbols

which correspond to more constellations,

representing almost like a map in the night sky.

[Graham] This is a map of the most visible stars

in the area around what's today known as Scorpius.

Once we line up Scorpius with the Scorpion on Pillar 43,

the other nearby asterisms seem to match

some of the other figures depicted on the pillar.

- So it kind of all fits together. - Absolutely.

[Graham] But Dr. Sweatman's real breakthrough

came when he considered the suggestion

that the central circle could represent the Sun.

So what would you be trying to say if you have an image of the Sun

in a particular position relative to the constellations?

One thing that you might be trying to indicate is a date.

And a clue to that is the fact that there are three other animal symbols

at the top of the pillar

that re-cemented this idea that this was a date,

a date stamp essentially.

[Graham] Dr. Sweatman believes

that the three small animals carved atop Pillar 43

appear next to symbolic representations of three sunsets.

Taken with the Sun disc in the middle of the stone,

they could depict four key moments in the solar year,

the summer solstice, the winter solstice, and the spring and fall equinoxes.

The carvings would represent asterisms that appeared in the night sky

behind or around the setting Sun

on each of those key dates in the calendar year.

So, suddenly we have a lock of all four key moments of the year,

with the moment they really want us to focus on

- dominating the pillar. - Exactly.

[Graham] It's a brilliant and compelling idea.

A date inscribed in stone in the universal language of astronomy.

So what date is the pillar referring to?

By using computer software

designed to track changes in the night sky over thousands of years,

we can find a precise 100-year window that perfectly fits Martin's theory.

Eventually, I found that actually we could work out

it's around about 10,900 to 10,800 BC.

[Graham] But that's more than a thousand years

before construction began at Göbekli Tepe.

Why should that date have been important?

Well, we know quite a lot about that specific time in history.

Almost exactly within that time period, that short span of around 100 years,

there was a dramatic climate event, which is known as the Younger Dryas.

It completely changes their world.

[thunder rumbling]

[Graham] We've been referring to this as the Ancient Apocalypse,

but scientists call it the Younger Dryas.

It began 12,800 years ago with a cataclysm,

and it ended 11,600 years ago,

the exact date of the construction of Göbekli Tepe.

The world suffered through some kind of tremendous geological upheaval,

including immense floods,

followed by more than 1,000 years of freezing temperatures.

Life on Earth fundamentally changed.

The saber-toothed tigers and mammoths went extinct.

But humanity survived.

And around 11,600 years ago,

the freeze ended with another final immense flood

that raised sea levels around the world.

It was then, only after the Earth was calm again,

that the work on Göbekli Tepe began.

And I believe the timing was no coincidence.

That's ultimately what I came to see Göbekli Tepe as,

as a reboot of civilization

from a time when there had been an earlier civilization

that was destroyed in a great cataclysm.

It's nice to see Pillar 43 from here,

and it's amazingly well-preserved,

considering it's 11,600 years old.

It's quite amazing.

What if this mysterious complex wasn't just a place of rituals,

but also a memorial to commemorate a world-changing event?

It would make sense.

Some of our grandest buildings today are memorials too.

The Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC

or the Taj Mahal in India.

But could Göbekli Tepe be even more than that?

What if its architects sought to leave behind

a message of the greatest importance,

a message for later generations to decode?

Because when archaeologists

determined the age of the rubble covering up the site,

they got another surprise.

Sometime around 10,000 years ago,

all the structures were buried

rapidly and quite deliberately at the same time.

An enormous effort was put into burying Göbekli Tepe.

I mean, not just burying it,

but actually putting a man-made hill over the top of it.

We must envisage teams of hundreds of people

carrying baskets of rubble and pouring it into the enclosures.

But then the question arises, why did they do that?

It wasn't abandoned. It wasn't destroyed or looted.

It was carefully buried, hidden away and preserved.

And there it remained, safe for thousands of years

until its recent rediscovery.

To my mind, what we're looking at here only makes sense as a time capsule.

And like all time capsules,

its purpose was to transmit a message to the future.

At Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe too, serpents dominate the imagery.

There's something about the way

their winding, descending shapes are depicted,

as if the builders were obsessed with them,

as if these serpents were the one message

they wanted us to take away from both sites.

But are they serpents or could they represent something else?

It seems that everywhere we find traces of a forgotten episode in human history,

we also find snakes.

In Mexico, Quetzalcoatl himself is a serpent.

In Malta, one crosses into Ġgantija's inner sanctum

by stepping over a snake.

I think I know what those serpents mean, and the best example isn't here in Turkey.

It's halfway around the world in the middle of America, in Ohio,

where ancient sages crafted an earthen serpent on a gigantic scale

to serve both as a memorial and perhaps as a warning.