A German archaeologist has discovered something truly awe-inspiring. In southeastern Turkey, there's a site called Gobekli Tepe -- it's a collection of standing stones on a barren hilltop. It's not buried or hidden or anything, it's sitting out plain as day. And according to Dr. Kurt Schmidt, the site's been sitting there for about 11,000 years.
That's a long time. That's a really really long time. When the Great Pyramid was built in Egypt, those stones in Turkey were older than the Pyramids are today. When those stones were carved, parts of Scandinavia were still covered by glaciers. Mammoths and Mastodons still walked the Earth. The Sahara was a grassy savannah. According to current theories, agriculture hadn't really been invented yet when humans carved the stones at Gobekli Tepe. In fact, Dr. Schmidt's hypothesis is that sacred sites like Gobekli Tepe may have led to permanent settlements, trade, and farming -- rather than the reverse, which has long been the assumption.
You could drop the entire written history of humanity from about 3,000 B.C. to the present into the gap between the building of Gobekli Tepe and the first writings in the Fertile Crescent. What happened in those long dark millennia? Were there civilizations lost to us? Cruel empires? Wise and noble states? Profound thinkers? We don't know. We think we know all there is to know about our world and our universe, but the humbling fact is that we are still utterly ignorant. We don't even know about most of our own history. It may be forever unknowable.
Inevitably, one thinks about the future. In the year A.D. 13,000, will any of our works survive? The plaques left by the first explorers on the surface of the Moon, perhaps? What will the people of that era think of us, if they bother to think of us at all?
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