https://vo.rs/tags/prehistory/Latest from the Prehistory desk at vo.rs.Hugo -- gohugo.ioenThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.Wed, 23 Apr 2025 09:00:00 +0000https://vo.rs/unravelled/gobekli-tepe-and-the-lost-civilisation-argument/<p>In 1963, a survey team walked a limestone hilltop near Şanlıurfa in south-eastern Turkey, noted some broken slabs poking out of the ground, filed the mound under &ldquo;probably a medieval cemetery,&rdquo; and moved on. It took another three decades and a German archaeologist named Klaus Schmidt to look at the same stones and understand that the surveyors had misread something on the scale of the pyramids. What came out of that hillside after 1994 didn&rsquo;t just add a site to the map. It moved the starting line of civilisation itself, and it did so with such force that a whole cottage industry of lost-civilisation theorising grew up in its shadow. The theorising deserves a fair hearing before it gets a fair rebuttal, because the honest version of this story is stranger and better than the myth.</p>Wed, 23 Apr 2025 09:00:00 +0000