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In southeastern Turkey in 1994, German archaeologist,

Claus Schmidt, decided to take a closer look at what was thought to be a medieval cemetery,

initially discovered in the 1960s, but dismissed at the time as insignificant.

Schmidt proceeded to unearth one of the most startling finds in human history,

when his dig exposed an 11,500-year-old temple that we now call,

Gobekli Tepe. It is the first temple ever built by humanity, with no equal in the world when

it was constructed, and it has rewritten early human history. The temple contains a multitude of

T-shaped pillars, some 18 feet tall and weighing over 16 tons. All of this, 7,000 years before

Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza. Six thousand years before the invention of the wheel,

or riding, who built it, and why did it wind up abandoned just 3,000 years later,

sitting unused for another 9,000 after that? Gobekli Tepe lies in the heart of the cradle of

civilization, the fertile crescent. When it was built, the now-arid plateau would have been

surrounded by lush lands with huge, slow-moving rivers, herds of gazelles, flocks of geese and ducks,

stands of fruit and nut-bearing trees, and most importantly, fields of wheat. Wheat,

that all wheat today is descended from. Gobekli Tepe is not a settlement, there is no water at the

site. No evidence of long-term habitation. What it is is the world's oldest temple,

and its very existence suggests that hunter-gatherers defied current archaeological schools of thought

and somehow got organized on a large scale to not only build, but use and maintain this temple.

In 2008, Klaus Schmidt told Smithsonian Magazine, this was the world's first cathedral out of hill.

But what did they worship? Could the gods they believed in have been the inspiration for the

...