He’s a modern day Indian Jones. Lee Clare from the German Archaeological Institute is revealing the secrets of the most ancient civilization known to man, hiding in the soil of Gobekli Tepe, in Turkey. In this interview, Lee explains what a discovery like this can mean for the history of human civilization, and how this realization profoundly changes our understanding of a crucial stage in the development of human society and mankind. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
You have the two central teplas in the middle, large important individuals, and around them in the walls you have many other teplas, you know, several or a dozen, which are also obviously depictions of humans.
And they appear to be sitting around in a circle and looking in.
This is a meeting place, you know.
What happened?
Why did they suddenly stop?
Why didn't it become a massive city that was written about for all of known human history?
Did someone invade them?
Was there an earthquake?
I think this is one of the questions that we ask all the time.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
This past summer, Lisa and I had a life-changing experience while visiting the most ancient civilization known to man.
A place called Yerbekli Tepe, which means Potbelly Hill, in Turkey, where my family's from, incidentally.
UNESCO added this site to its World Heritage List this year, and it was excavated only in the past two decades after a local villager named Shafak Yildiz found a large erect stone penis.
That's right, you heard right.
It was a phallic symbol while plowing his land.
Through this, we were able to determine...
That this was a religious center.
Archaeologists have identified this center as being three times older than our prior estimates for great civilization.
So, what does a discovery of this mean for the history of human civilization, for our thought process, and how does this realization profoundly change the understanding of a crucial stage in the development of human society and mankind?
I'm not overstating it.
This stuff is big.
So I've asked an archaeologist, the lead archaeologist of this project, who's actually in Turkey as we speak.
He's a modern-day Indiana Jones, Lee Clare.
He's from the German Archaeological Institute to join us.
Lee, thank you for being with us.
Thank you for having me.
So let's go through this.
When we visited the site over the summer, you helped Lisa and me gain an appreciation of its rich history.
What do we need to know about Göbekli Tepe, about Potbelly Hill?
There's so much.
I really don't know where to start.
I mean, of course, you know, let's approach the site as you would as a visitor, perhaps.
You know, you arrive at the site, you go up the hill, and you have this most spectacular view, don't you?
Do you remember?
Oh, vividly, yes.
Yeah, I mean, the site itself is located on a limestone plateau about 770 metres above sea level, and from there you can look down On to the Haran Plain to the south and you have views on a good day with good visibility of up to 50-60 kilometres and you can see really the Syrian-Turkish border on the horizon.
And if you turn the other way, you can see the modern city of Shanluofa.
If you turn the other way, you can see another sort of mountain range called the Tek Tek Mountains.
And if you have a very good day and look to the north, then you can actually see on the horizon, you know, the Taurus Mountains.
And in the spring, you know, there's snow covered and it's a most fantastic setting.
And of course, this setting wasn't, you know, some sort of fluke.
You know, this setting was chosen by the people at that time for the monuments, I think, that were erected at Gopectitepe.
So, the site itself has a very, very long history.
It goes back into prehistory, of course, and this is what we're talking about.
We're talking about a site which was founded by the people at the time some 11,000, 11,500 years ago.
So, these were hunter-gatherers.
These were people that weren't even practicing farming yet.
They were hunting wild animals.
They were gathering wild animals.
Crops, wild grasses, vegetables, fruits, and that's how they were living.
They were not farming, they had no domesticated animals, they had no cows, they had no sheep or goats.
They were so wild, they hadn't been domesticated.
And so it's a completely different setting to today and even to later prehistory.
So hunter-gatherers came together at Göbekli Tepe and they built these monumental buildings.
And it was never thought before Göbekli Tepe was discovered that this could have actually happened, you know, that these hunter-gatherer societies were capable of erecting such monumental buildings.
And this is the thing that Klaus Schmidt, my predecessor at the site, from the German Archological Institute, who passed away in 2014, this was his discovery.
This was the fact, you know, he said, look, these people can do this.
Even though we don't expect them to be able to.
I mean, they thought at the time, you know, the academics, the archaeologists thought that, you know, this sort of thing was only possible after agriculture had been invented in a way.
But this turned the whole thing on its head.
And then all of a sudden we realize perhaps the ritual, the cult, and as Klaus put it, the religion came first.
And after that, the civilization.
So, when you start to get into the larger scope of what happened, how it actually is a very different evolution of human history than I was taught when I was growing up, a couple questions come to mind.
First off, why southeastern Turkey?
Why was that a point of interest?
Maybe it's because of Gebekah Tepe, but Abraham lived in the area or grew up in the area.
It's not just something 12,000 years ago.
It seems to have been a hotbed for human faith for the ensuing period of human history.
Yeah, I mean, the region itself is a very important region.
It's a corridor.
The whole of the Levant is a corridor between Africa and Europe and Turkey.
It's an important thoroughfare.
And, of course, southeastern Turkey, back in what we call the Neolithic, so the period when people were becoming sedentary and becoming first farmers, this was an important area where really the first animals and first crops were being domesticated.
You've heard perhaps the term Fertile Crescent.
And this is an area which at the time, 11,000 years ago, would have given the basics, the fundamental elements necessary to become farmers.
The wild predecessors of the animals and the crops that were domesticated were living wild in this area.
And talking about ritual, I mean, of course, in later times, We have all the major religions sort of, you know, conglomerating in this sort of area.
And perhaps that's no coincidence.
But the thing is, of course, for us looking at the Neolithic, it's the fact that the fundamental elements, as I said, the wild predecessors of the plants and animals which were then domesticated were living in this area.
But, of course, the whole of the so-called Neolithicization process was a long, drawn-out affair.
It wasn't something that happened overnight.
So, you know, to become Neolithic and to become modern, as it were, you need certain things.
You know, certain things were invented along the way.
It started off with people becoming sedentary and living in one place in a small village.
Then you had the domestication of animals and plants.
Then the wheel was invented and pottery.
And all of these things came along at different times.
And it's a long time span of several thousand years that And Gobekli Tepe is one sort of component within that process.
And it's quite at the beginning of that process.
But what's important at Gobekli Tepe for the first time at this time, when Gobekli Tepe was being built, when it was founded, people were for the first time living in small groups, sedentary.
These groups, of course, when you become sedentary, your numbers expand, you have more children.
For that reason, of course, there was population growth.
This is one of the factors that also led to the dispersal of these innovations.
The whole region is such an important area.
It's been referred to as We have lots more questions to get to, But first, let's take a quick break.
I was informed that there was one other interesting reality, which was, and I like your opinion on this, the Ice Age 13,000 years ago had the Ice Age 13,000 years ago had forced some humans living in Northern Europe, Russia, to move south.
especially as it began to change human behavior.
And these people had learned how to live in caves and they learned how to deal with rock and carve into rock in order to survive.
On this hill, the Gobekah Temple, you have these massive 17-foot statues.
And I'm curious, is it possible that part of the reason this place became so special is because humans with different skill sets in a relatively short period of time did come together.
So you could have a group of people who had a faith that they could speak to the gods with a bunch of people who could create statues to those gods being able to build what we have.
I mean, there are a few important points here that you mentioned.
I mean, you mentioned about the end of the ice age and the movement of people.
I mean, at the moment, for the area of Gobekli Tepe, we have very little evidence about what was going on before the site was founded.
We have very little evidence of the so-called epipaleolithic people.
So those people...
And, you know, there are a few sites we know of, or we have a few flint tools scattered, etc.
But no more than that.
So we have no predecessor so far for Quebec City.
Another important point is the people that were living and building Gebekiteba, they were just like you and me.
You know, they were modern Homo sapiens.
They weren't Neanderthals.
They weren't cavemen.
I think this is a bit of a false sort of, it's a bit of a misconception.
The people that lived there, that were working, building there, they were just like you and me.
They were Homo sapiens sapiens.
And, you know, the only difference being is that they were born into a different culture at a different Today, you know, they'll be walking around with a mobile phone and, you know, Instagramming and various things.
So they are the same as us.
So that's an important thing to remember as well.
But where the tea pillars came from and how that happened, we just don't know at the moment because, as I say, we have not the predecessor settlements there.
We do know there are other sites in the region.
Especially the Shanawurfa region, which do have these T pillars too.
I mean, there are a dozen or so sites known from surface survey.
As an archaeologist, you walk around the landscape looking for new sites, and sometimes you discover on the surface sort of hints at archaeological or prehistoric sites, such as flint scatters, you know, scatters of flint, or work flint, pieces of pottery, and various things.
So that's how we look for sites.
And we know of a dozen or so sites in the Urfa region Where we have remains also of these T-pillars.
So Gobekli Tepe is perhaps, you know, the site we know of best because it's excavated.
There's one further site called Nevali Chori, which also had T-pillars at which Gauss Schmidt was working with Howard Hauptmann.
They also went then to Gobekli Tepe after that.
But there are other sites as well with these T-pillars, known from Service Survey.
So it wasn't alone.
It was one of a group of sites.
But somehow these people went from not having statues to having statues.
So someone taught them how to carve rocks, these statues, out of these big rock structures.
Again, we have to be careful because we don't know whether perhaps in an earlier phase they were carving things in wood.
Of course, wood isn't preserved.
So they could have had wooden statues, wooden pillars, which are no longer preserved because of the hot and dry conditions in the region.
This material isn't preserved in the archaeological excavations.
So we just don't know.
I mean, they would have, I think, would have had a very highly skilled wood collection.
Woodworking specialists, which would have been able to do all of these things in wood as well.
But of course, stone is a different matter.
And the question is, why did they change to stone?
And I think that's the most important thing.
These stone monuments, these pillars that you see within the buildings are really quite magnificent.
The tallest ones being five and a half meters in height.
And if you imagine five and a half meter tall T-pillars, you're standing next to them, you know what they're like.
You stand next to them, it's like, wow, even for us today.
But at the time, in the prehistoric time, these guys have been looking at this, it would have been their Empire State Building, it would have been a skyscraper.
It still does testify to a very highly skilled group of craftsmen who were able to craft stone, who were able to make these wonderful depictions on the stone.
So we're dealing with a very highly complex society because also these T figures, these T symbols, these pillars, the buildings themselves do testify to a very complex society.
They're not our cavemen.
These are highly complex people just like you and me in our societies today.
And this is three times older than the pyramids in Egypt.
That's right.
Not as big as the pyramids in Egypt, but the thought that we could have been as close to being able to build those pyramids as these people were.
And then something happened to them.
And I want to touch on that for a second because it sort of stunned me.
I don't know if it has to do with their religion.
So maybe we'll start with that and then sort of take us through.
Because I'm trying to make sure that everyone listening right now realizes we're not talking about an interesting archaeological find.
We're talking about the foundation of our...
Of our human belief systems, the way we deal with hierarchies, things that even today we struggle with.
So, first off, am I correct in saying that, from the evidence at Göbekli Tepe, that archaeologists are getting more comfortable saying that maybe we weren't agricultural communities, we were hunter-gatherers when these large temples were made?
That's right, we were hunter-gatherers.
Evident from the finds we have from the site.
We have a lot of animal bone recovered from the excavations, and all of this animal bone stems from wild animals.
The most important animal that was being hunted at the time of Göbekli Tepe was the gazelle.
So if you look at the landscape today, it's very barren with lots of fields, hardly any trees.
This is a cultural landscape.
Back in 11,000 years ago, this landscape would have been a lot different.
We would have had an open woodland with lots of grasses.
There would have been almond trees and wild almond oak.
And it would have been pistachio.
It would have been a very different landscape to today.
And in that landscape, we would have had the gazelle herds moving through.
So that was the main source of meat for the people at the time.
But they were also hunting things like wild boar.
They were hunting things like aurochs and wild cattle.
And all of these animals have been moving around the landscape at this time.
And of course, we have other indications as well, because on the pillars we have the carvings of the animals as well, the animals that would have been in the landscape at the time.
And we have everything from snakes through vultures to eagles.
Right, so it's a rich environment, different from what most of us envision today.
That part I'm clear on, but what's incredibly interesting to me is the possibility that because they were able to be so successful as hunters, You know, planting large crops of grains, although we know they had wild wheat there, right?
Which is very different from today's wheat.
But they were able to build these...
Something stimulated to build temples to talk to the gods.
And because they could talk to the gods, I guess, they felt they could begin to harness nature, which God gave them, or gods gave them.
So they began to industrialize the process, you know, planting crops, domesticating animals.
What happened in these temples is what's fascinating to me.
There's a belief...
That unified them, that allowed them to do stuff, to hunt them, because they had to hunt in big parties to catch all these animals, right?
They would chase them into little caverns and set traps up and this and that.
You couldn't do that with you and two buddies.
That's right.
I mean, obviously, in an organized society, they would have been hunting in groups.
And of course, because they had specialists living at home doing perhaps the work on the buildings, the very presence of specialists also implies that they were looking after groups that couldn't go to hunt.
So there was this differentiation within society.
I mean, we had this incipient clerarchization at the time, I think you could call it, where for the first time we're having sort of different sectors of society developing.
When you think about hunters and gatherers, you generally think, you know, egalitarian and very equal in many ways.
But at this time, I think we're seeing an increase in this hierarchisation of society.
We're seeing perhaps a development of a system where we have specialists, where we have perhaps even more important individuals and less important individuals.
And this social hierarchisation, I think, is testified indirectly by the buildings we're seeing because, of course, you need to have a boss, you know, you have to say, right, you move that stone over there, you move that stone here.
This is how we do it.
And for that reason, you know, things were changing.
And this is one of the things that people were dealing with at the time.
The whole process of neutralisation, this whole transition from hunting and gathering to food domestication and becoming farmers brought with it lots and lots of challenges.
And one of those was the social challenges that came along with it because of changing society.
And of course the question is, how would you cope with this change in society, these new challenges?
You know, you have populations expanding, you have people saying, okay, that's my...
Area floor for hunting.
That's my water.
So you had stress on local resources.
You had high degrees of territoriality going on.
So there were clashes.
There was potential for conflict for the first time.
And you have to ask, we have no evidence for that in the archaeology.
I mean, just because we're having the archaeology doesn't mean it wasn't existing.
But at the moment, we have no indication that there were violent clashes between groups.
There was no warfare at that time, as far as we can see.
And for that reason, you have to ask yourself, why was that?
And I think Gobekli Tepe is the answer, because at Gobekli Tepe, we have these wonderful pictures on the T-pillars.
And these pictures on the T-pillars aren't just pictures of the animals that we saw and are seeing in the landscape.
They're in fact narratives.
They're telling stories.
They're foundation myths, for example.
You know, if you've seen the pillars, you have these wonderful depictions, different animals in different sort of settings, in different contexts.
And you can see it's not just a depiction of what they were seeing in the landscape.
It's telling a story.
And this story is something that kept them together.
So if you can imagine going to Gobekli Tepe and seeing a T pillar with a certain depiction, for example, if we went today, if I went there today and I saw, for example, a little girl with a red cape and a wolf next to her, I would say, ah, that's a story of Little Red Riding Hood.
They went there and they saw similar things.
They knew exactly which stories were meant.
So this narrative, this common narrative and the story that was being told, Around these buildings, we're keeping the communities that were living in the region and also coming to the site together in a way and mitigating conflict and helping them cope with these challenges of this long process of becoming farmers.
We have a lot more to talk about, but first, let's take a quick break.
So what would actually happen in the temple?
So they have these narratives, these stories they're telling that depict their oral tradition.
Do we have any evidence that they were...
I mean, would you think they were probably using hallucinogens for spiritual experiences?
As a physician, I'm curious...
About the role of medicine during this period.
Do you think there was a role of healers?
They would help with depression or anxiety.
We know in modern medicine we're starting to use a lot of these hallucinogens, ayahuasca as an example, some synthetically created ones that we have now, but they had older ones there.
They had magic mushroom maybe or something that they could have relied on.
We know that actually helps people get past the alcoholism, depression, Post-traumatic stress disorder is so effectively being treated in the military that there are significant groups of the military who are advocating for it to help their soldiers.
Well, I certainly think they knew their landscape very well, and they knew everything that was growing in that landscape.
They would have had a quite different attachment to the landscape than us today than us city dwellers, in a way.
They knew exactly where to go for certain things.
And of course they were using a lot of these plants and everything that was growing in the landscape.
So yes, I'm sure they were using hallucinogenic.
I mean, you know, I have no proof, no hard archaeological proof, but I would imagine they were using this sort of thing to enhance experiences.
Ritual experiences, for example.
And of course, don't forget as well, they were using, they probably had drums, they were using music to get into a truck.
I mean, all of this we know from sort of ethnographic studies of traditional societies, more recent traditional societies.
And for that reason, I think it will be perfectly legitimate to suggest that also for our prehistoric groups back 11,000 years ago.
Coming back to the buildings themselves, I mean, you refer to them as temples.
I'm a little more cautious.
I don't call them temples.
Although, in the media, the buildings at Gobekli Tempo are always sort of discussed as being the world's first temples.
I call them more neutral buildings or monumental.
They are the first monumental buildings in the world, as far as we know at the moment.
And these buildings had multifunctions, in my opinion.
They were ritual buildings.
But I wouldn't call them temples because at this time it was too early for religion.
When we say religion, it implies an organized religion.
It implies one of the major religions we know today.
It implies priests.
It implies a temple economy, which means an economic relationship between the monumental ritual buildings and a domestic setting.
That doesn't happen until much later, in the Bronze Age, 3,000-4,000 years later.
What we have here are multifunctional buildings.
One of the functions that they have is, of course, the ritual component.
I think they were practicing rituals in these buildings.
But on the other hand, if you look at them, the tipilers themselves are actually depictions of human beings.
Now, the shaft of the T pillar is the body, and the top of the T is the head.
And there are two pillars in building D, which we went down into, if you remember, that have the arms engraved, and they have belts, and they have a loincloth, and they have a pendant around the neck.
And they are certainly, you know, without any shadow or doubt, they are depictions of humans.
Now, if you look at the way the buildings are designed, you have the two central T pillars in the middle, the two central, large, important individuals, and around them in the round walls, round-shaped building, You have many other tepulas, several or a dozen, which are also obviously depictions of humans in anthropogenic form.
They appear to be sitting around in a circle and looking in.
Now, this is what you'd refer to as a meeting.
This is a meeting place.
It has a social component.
So it's not just the ritual that's going on.
It's a social component.
It's bringing people together with the narratives to actually, as I said, to help them navigate the challenges at the time of these changing societies, the social hierarchization that's going on, the mitigation.
All of this is so important.
And of course, there's also the added sort of interpretation proposed by Clark Schmitt, that they also had something to do with the dead, that they were places for the dead, although he never found any burials at the site.
He always said that the depictions could also imply that it had some relation to the way the dead were treated at that time.
You know, it's fascinating to understand how people can take this experience and try to interpret it and obviously fit it into their own society.
And there's two examples I want to touch on.
One, arguments I'm hearing on the web that these are conspiracy theories involving aliens or other major cataclysmic events.
I mean, how do you respond to these?
But also as an archaeologist, what happened?
Why did they suddenly stop?
Why didn't it become a massive city that was written about for all of known human history?
I mean, this is one of the questions that we ask all the time, you know, not about the aliens.
Of course, the aliens is something that we can totally, you know, that we have never found any form of alien archaeology or, you know, no UFOs buried underneath the mound.
This is really just fantasy.
And the data, you know, we are archaeologists, we go there, we excavate, and we believe in our archaeological data.
And the data that we collate is what we use to make our interpretations.
And although we have, you know, educated guesswork, sometimes science-like, because, of course, there is so much to interpret that cannot be explained by the data.
We still stay put on the ground, and it's nothing, I assure you, nothing to do with aliens.
One day they seem to just sort of close up shop, dump some stuff in there.
Did someone invade them?
Was there an earthquake?
A flood?
What happened?
Well, you know, as I said, many archaeologists ask the same for all of the sites.
Why were sites abandoned?
Why did cultures disappear and others appear?
With the case of Gobekli Tefer, it's also not so clear cut, but it's interesting to note that the abandonment of the site It appears to correlate with the appearance of the first sort of domesticated animals and crops.
So I would suggest that at the time this happened, you know, the setting of Gobekli Tepe is not a very agricultural setting.
It's not somewhere where you can farm easily and feed animals.
Of course, it is possible, but I think the conditions for that are a lot better in the plain below.
Of course, at Gobekli Tepe, there's no flowing water, you know, there's no river, there's no, because we're on a limestone plateau well above the That may be the cause, but it is sort of interesting.
I guess as an archaeologist, this is my last little thought, is that they sort of closed up shop and they stopped going there to worship even.
And I would have thought they sort of leave it there and keep it maintained.
So it does make me think something else went down.
Maybe they changed religion.
They didn't want to believe in those afterlives.
Good.
I mean, we do have indications, you know, I mean, obviously they didn't take their T-pillars with them because in the later settlements we don't have that.
The whole monumental architecture disappears for, you know, a couple of thousand years, you know, until the Bronze Age, in fact, with the first temples there.
But, yeah, I think you're totally right.
Something happened, something changed.
They no longer needed this site, although you can't actually rule out that they weren't, people weren't visiting it occasionally as pilgrimages in later times.
I mean, it was still visited recently, up into modern times, people go there because there are graves at the top of the mound, there's a wish tree, so it's still very much part of local religious beliefs.
Lee, I want to thank you very much.
I want to let everyone know also, we've made a video with Lee for my visit in Quebec, Tepe, and we're going to put that up on YouTube and dros.com so you'll be able to find a visual history that we've crafted to match these wonderful insights.
But I think this is such an important archaeological evaluation, not just because it tells us about our past, but it tells us about our present.
So God bless you and thanks for what you and your colleagues are doing.
