NARRATOR: Sanliurfa, Turkey, October 1994.
While plowing his field, shepherd Safak Yildiz
spots a strangely shaped stone protruding from the ground.
After brushing away the dirt, he realizes that it may be
part of a much larger object.
Shortly after contacting the local museum with his find,
he is visited by Klaus Schmidt from the German
Archaeological Institute.
HUGH NEWMAN: It wasn't until German archaeologist
Klaus Schmidt visited the site and began digging they realized
what was really at the site.
WILLIAM HENRY: What he discovered was mind blowing.
After discovering the first t-shaped pillar
buried at the site, he soon found more
of these massive structures.
NARRATOR: During the intensive dig, Schmidt and his team
begin to unearth dozens of additional giant,
stone monoliths covered in intricate carvings.
Some weighing as much as 20 tons.
PAUL BAHN: The site of Gobekli Tepe
is a series of circular enclosures,
but then in the center of each enclosure
you have two particularly big, t-shaped
pillars of limestone sort of facing each other.
Now many of these pillars have remarkable carvings on them,
wonderful carvings and bas-reliefs of animals,
birds, insects, all kinds of things.
So to fashion those and carve them
and set them up in these structures
was just absolutely amazing.
NARRATOR: Archaeologists estimate that it would have
taken a team of 50 men an entire week to move
just one of the monolithic pillars
from the limestone quarry to the top of the hill
where they stand today, and over 300 hours
to carve the bas-reliefs.
At this rate, each of the five stone circles
unearthed so far would have required
a full year to be completed.
But why such a monumental site was built in the first place
remains a mystery.
PAUL BAHN: It's very difficult to know
what the purpose of something like Gobekli Tepe could be.
And certainly Klaus Schmidt had not
reached any conclusions except that it's
clearly not a settlement.
It's not a village.
There is absolutely no domestic refuge.
Schmidt always hoped that it was funerary
and that there would be burials underneath the walls
or underneath some of the pillars or so on.
But so far, they have not yet found
any human remains at the site.
There were no domestic plants in the site.
There are only wild animal bones.
Inevitably in archeology if we don't know what
something is for we think of ritual, but really
it's pure speculation.
NARRATOR: Intrigued by evidence that the structure might go
back to a Neolithic period, Klaus
Schmidt has the sediment layers of the site radiocarbon dated.
The results indicated that the stone structures could
be as much as 12,000 years old, more than 5,000
years older than mankind's first known civilization
in Mesopotamia.
More than that, it would place the construction of Gobekli
Tepe to a time when mainstream scholars
suggest humans were roaming the earth as hunter gatherers.
PAUL BAHN: Well, the site of Gobekli Tepe
really did send shockwaves through the whole world
of early prehistory because we'd never before known
or imagined even that simple hunter
gatherers could produce such spectacular
monumental structures.
Now in archeology, really since it began,
we've always assumed that hunter gatherers were
capable of producing wonderful works of art-- rock art,
cave art, and things like that.
But we never imagined that they could come together
in sufficient numbers to make monumental constructions
like Gobekli Tepe.
NARRATOR: But if the currently accepted timeline for mankind's
advancement is correct, is it possible that primitive hunter
gatherers could have built such sophisticated,
megalithic structures?
Ancient astronaut theorists say, no.
And instead, suggest that Gobekli Tepe was built
by the survivors of a lost society,
one that was almost entirely wiped
out by a worldwide cataclysm.
And to support their claim, they point to recent evidence
of a catastrophic event, which many mainstream scientists
believe occurred at the very end of the last ice
age, which is believed to have lasted from roughly 108,000 BC.
until nearly 10,000 BC.