Carbon dating shows that the complex is 12 ka old. Stonehenge was built around 2000–2500 BC. Gobekli Tepe hails from a part of human history that is unimaginably distant, right back in our hunter-gatherer past.

There is no doubt gobekli tepe is an enormously important archaeological discovery: at 12 ka, it is far far older than any other advanced manmade structure. together with evidence that the first grains are from the same area, this may well be the birth of civilization.

Göbekli Tepe suggests a reversal of that scenario: The construction of a massive temple by a group of foragers is evidence that organized religion could have come before the rise of agriculture and other aspects of civilization. It suggests that the human impulse to gather for sacred rituals arose as humans shifted from seeing themselves as part of the natural world to seeking mastery over it. When foragers began settling down in villages, they unavoidably created a divide between the human realm—a fixed huddle of homes with 100s of inhabitants—and the dangerous land beyond the campfire, populated by lethal beasts.

2022-05-20: The area might be even older and is far more widespread:

Archaeologists in southeastern Turkey are digging up a wild, grand, artistically coherent, implausibly strange, hitherto-unknown-to-us religious civilization, which has been buried in Mesopotamia for 10 ka. And it was all buried deliberately. Karahan Tepe is stupefyingly big. ‘So far We have dug up maybe 1% of the site. That’s probably another megalith right there, waiting to be excavated. I reckon there are probably 1000s more of them, all around us. We are only at the beginning. And there could be 10s more Tas Tepeler we have not yet found, spread over 100s of kilometres.’