ShortHand: The Secrets of Göbekli Tepe
6/5/202632 min
The 1994 excavation of curious buried ruins in southeastern Turkey might have chucked a big rock through the window of archaeological history – shattering everything we thought we knew about our ancient ancestors.
With its intricate carvings, and towering megaliths built long before the wheel or even written language, Göbekli Tepe could rewrite the story of civilisation. But who built it? And why? Join us on a journey into the distant past as we attempt to find out.
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First 90 secondsSuruthi Bala· Host0:00
[rock music] Hello.
Hannah Maguire· Host0:13
Hello.
Suruthi Bala· Host0:13
Welcome to another Shorthanded episode.
Hannah Maguire· Host0:16
A very special hello to Graham Hancock.
Suruthi Bala· Host0:18
Hello, Graham, if you're listening. [laughs] So for a very long time, human history was thought to follow a very specific pattern. We started off as hunter-gatherers, foraging for plants and killing wild animals to survive. Then, slowly but surely, our ancestors started to cultivate crops, farm the land, domesticate animals, and build settlements. And this move from hunter-gatherer to farmer was logical, not only because our ancestors needed to evolve and also develop the ability to work with tools, organize themselves into social groups, produce a surplus of food, et cetera, but also due to the earth's climate. After all, the Stone Age could only come after the end of the Ice Age, when the earth's temperature rose, the ice subsided, and fertile soil was revealed.
Hannah Maguire· Host1:05
This transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer was always thought to have happened about 10,000 years ago, and it was believed that it then took thousands more years for us humans to begin building large-scale megalithic structures. For example, Stonehenge and the pyramids were both built around the same time, about