The place: a top a hill near Syria among the Kurds in S.E.Anatolia, a site now called Goebekli Tepe rises up in the midst of a great plateau. The people: hunter-gatherers rather than farmers, the Goebekli Tepe people lived off the land, just as humans and their ancestors had all through the millennia. If only we could time-travel back to view the actions of those people, we would encounter an expression of the human religious imagination different from anything before it, for at Goebekli Tepe, people worshiped at a monumental temple. Two things are central to undertanding Goebekli Tepe: the scale of its structures and the variety of its art.Apparently ten thousand years B.C. ("vor 12.000 Jahren"), fifty-ton blocks of stone were moved around at Goebekli Tepe , a dead giveaway that its inhabitants worked cooperatively. People hauled huge stones up the hill with no domesticated animals to help with the back-breaking labor. Buildings set into the ground, almost under the ground, were supported by enormous T-shaped columns probably representing humans (ancestors?) adorned with animal figures.
Given the manpower involved in ancient times people flocked to Goebekli Tepe from the surrounding region to participate in religious ritual. This is the conclusion embraced by archaeologists, and it seems as certain a conclusion as could be reached in the absence of written records. The temple worship at Goebekli Tepe is situated in time precisely halfway between the religious-oriented behavior at for example Lascaux (and also N.Russia) and that in ancient Egypt: 6,000 years after Ice Age. But that the Goebekli Tepe people were heavily invested in religious expression so long ago is a significant and the oldest such find todate in regards to human religious imagination.
Last year the German Magazine Der Spiegel even published an over-imaginative map, claiming "Adam and Eve" lived on Goebekli Tepe. To say the least (although geneticly the Kurds are related to the Jews of ancient -'Israel'); we have not seen any evidence of Adam at Karlsruhe Castle. (For the map see 1.)
Other more usual, disclaimers apply: the sedentism-first, farming-second conclusion is not accepted without debate. Nonetheless, the latest evidence suggests that the hunting-and-gathering way of life, the on-themove nomadism that had dominated the globe throughout human evolution, began to give way about 14,000 years ago. People no longer continuously roamed the land in pursuit of game, and no longer inhabited caves or huts on a seasonal basis. The dawn of our cities was at hand; people began to settle in permanent communities and, before long, to work the land surrounding those settlements.
Although sedentism and agriculture are best decoupled in our thinking, from an evolutionary perspective they originated at points extremely close in time. And with these changes, much about the expression of the human religious imagination began to shift too. Food is stockpiled now, and members of society with greater wealth and power are distinguished from others. Belongingness, stronger than ever before, incorporates a new element of rank and status. Public buildings are graced with symbols and filled with the sights and sounds of ritual practice. Clusters of permanent settlements dot a wide region, and people travel to specific locations to worship. During this era, with China, Greece, India, and Israel gripped by upheaval and violence, the world's religions changed dramatically in character.
Then more recently, there is the gene debate; for example Evelyn Fox Keller claims that the gene is part of an ever-changing system in the cell, as much constrained by its environment as capable of influencing its environment. Or as she writes; the very existence of a gene "is often both transitory and contingent, depending critically on the functional dynamics of the entire organism." (Fox Keller, The Century of the Gene, Harvard University Press, 2000, 71). To show how heated the gene-centered discourse to date has been, another scientist termed Keller's book "a jihad against our notion of the gene." (Jerry Coyne, "The Gene Is Dead; Long Live the Gene;' Nature 408, 2000: 26-27).
According to Lee Kirkpatrick humans evolved first as meaning-makers in emotional relation with each other is a message grounded in the evolutionary perspective, and in hope. Thus according to Kirkpatrick when belongingness runs amok, it can become xenophobia, and people may begin to act out of fear and hatred of others. Yet the power of belongingness amounts to the power to base our lives, the lives of all humans who are intertwined in a globe-sized web of belongingness, on an understanding that we all come from the same roots. We evolved as primates; as ancestral hominids in Africa; as settlers of all the corners of our world; and finally as people who act in relation to sacred beings. We are primates still, able to embrace the expression of different faiths, or no faith at all, as we continue to make meaning through belongingness. (Kirkpatrick, Attachment, Evolution and the Psychology of Religion, 2005).
In the future, scientists will certainly learn more from direct archaeological research about hominid belongingness, symbolic ritual, and spirituality. Testability and falsifiability will continue to be the primary goals. But for now, for what is shown about Göbekli Tepe in Karlsruhe today; humans evolved as primates; as ancestral hominids in Africa; as settlers in other places of the world; and finally as people who act in relation to sacred beings. We are primates still, able to embrace the expression of different faiths, or no faith at all, as we continue to make meaning through belongingness?
