Göbekli Tepe

People in the Neolithic Levant were mobile and opportunistic but built Göbekli Tepe, a seasonal gathering place on the high ground of a grassy steppe. They dug into the limestone bedrock beneath the settlement to capture rainwater during the monsoons. They hunted gazelles in their season, roasted them over pistachio wood and held feasts. When the gazelle were gone they gathered einkorn wheat from the steppe but eventually reassembled into bands and scattered again until the next year. In Göbekli Tepe they didn’t live very long. They left walls covered with images of animals but no people.

Our religion hinges on the values and practices of people subject to the natural world to a degree we cannot imagine. While Gobekli Tepe expanded, to the west Jericho was growing from a hunting ground into a great walled city. A skull cult is suspected, but it’s hard to say. Six thousand years later the Book of Wisdom in the Old Testament warned against nature worship. For them nature was not a park or managed woodland. It was lions just beyond the campfire’s light, famine, and an endless onslaught of infectious disease. Infectious diseases have shaped human history and genetics more than any other factor.