This is an I-Heart podcast.

Welcome to Brain Stuff, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, Brain Stuff, Lauren Vologbaum here.

It's perhaps obvious to say that 11,000 years ago, the world looked very different.

Lush forests existed where there are now deserts, coral reefs where there are now grasslands,

and humans hadn't yet begun building very many things.

Of course, we can't ever really know exactly what our ancestors were up to so long ago

because no one had invented

writing yet. But places like the archaeological site, Gabi-Tepe, can give us a few clues.

Gebeckli-Tepi is a monumental site situated in the mountains of southeastern Turkey. It's along the

lines of Stonehenge, but about 6,000 years older.

The name roughly means Pop Belly Hill in Turkish, which is a pretty good descriptor for the site.

It was discovered by a team of American and Turkish archaeologists in the 1960s, but their

discovery of limestone slabs and flint artifacts wasn't recognized for what it was until

1994 when a German archaeologist by the name of Klaus Schmidt realized its significance.

It's a mysterious site to this day, partly because we can make so few assumptions about the people who built it.

For the article this episode is based on, House Tough Works spoke via email with

Jens Natroff back in 2020. He's an archaeologist who at the time had been working on the

Gebeckli Tepe project for some 14 years. He said, monuments, generally speaking, are a particular example of architecture

standing out due to their size and or the effort necessary to create them.

Gebeckli-tepe is a noteworthy example in this context, since the monuments there mark the first

yet known example of monumental architecture,

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