RedHanded - ShortHand: The Secrets of Göbekli Tepe

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

The 1994 excavation of curious buried ruins in southeastern Turkey might have chucked a big rock through the window of archaeological history – shattering everything we thought we knew about our ancient ancestors.With its intricate carvings, and towering megaliths built long before the wheel or even written language, Göbekli Tepe could rewrite the story of civilisation. But who built it? And why? Join us on a journey into the distant past as we attempt to find out.--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

Hello. Hello. Welcome to another short house. A very special hello to Graham Hang up. Hello, Graham, if you're listening. So for a very long time, human history was thought to follow a very specific pattern. We started off as hunter-gatherers, foraging for plants and killing wild animals to survive. Then, slowly but surely, our ancestors started to cultivate crops, farm the land, domesticate animals and build settlements. and this move from hunter-gatherer to farmer was logical, not only because our ancestors needed to evolve

and also develop the ability to work with tools, organize themselves into social groups, produce a surplus of food, etc., but also due to the Earth's climate. After all, the Stone Age could only come after the end of the Ice Age, when the Earth's temperature rose, the ice subsided, and fertile soil was revealed. This transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer, was always thought to have happened about 10,000 years ago.

And it was believed that it then took thousands more years for us humans to begin building large-scale megalithic structures. For example, Stonehenge and the pyramids were both built around the same time, about 5,000 years ago. Gigantia in modern-day Malta was built, we think, about 6,000 years ago. The walls of Jericho in the Jordan Valley, which was believed to be the world's most ancient monumental structure, was built roughly 9,000 years ago. And all of this makes sense. You don't start building giant structures until you've nailed farming and social organisation.

So basically, until you have a large enough population, a surefire endless supply of food, and the necessary specialisation of skills to build things. So, when Gavecli-Tepi was discovered, a colossal sprawling, highly complex megalithic site, built at least 11,600 years ago, and we don't know exactly how old it truly is because so much of it still remains unexcavated. This discovery changed everything. We thought we knew about human history. It's so fucking cool, man. I love it so much. So what the hell was going on? Who built this structure?

how and crucially why, this is the shorthand. So, let's start with the basics. Gebekli Tepe translates to pot belly hill in Turkish, because it looked like a fat man lying on his back with his belly in the air. And for thousands of years, it wasn't thought of as much more than that, Fat Man Hill. It was a moderate-sized hill in the southeastern Anatolia region of Turkey, on which local farmers used to graze their sheep. The truth of what lay beneath people's feet had been lost for generations.

But there was something drawing Kurdish people to this pop-belly hill. The story goes that there was a single tree which stood on top of the hill, and Kurdish people would go up there at the spring equinox and perform ceremonies. But it wouldn't be until 1994 that the reality of the secrets under that belly were finally revealed to the world. The first survey of Gebekletepe was in 1963 by archaeologists from the University of Chicago, and it was concluded by them that it was probably a series of small cemeteries dating from the Byzantine Empire, with fragments of carved limestone that they spotted being thought to be medieval tombstones.

So yeah, historical, old, but ultimately it was deemed to be of little interest. It would be three decades before an intrepid German-armes, archaeologist called Klaus Schmidt would visit the site. This happened in 1994. And he immediately understood that the flinch shards that he felt crunching under his feet had been shaped not by medieval peoples, but by Neolithic hands. And look, I feel like we're throwing a lot of numbers around, right, in this episode, we're going to continue to do so. I just want to explain. The Romans were like 2,000 years ago, right? And we think of that as old. We think of that as ancient. This is a 12,000 years ago we are talking about.

Like, that is six times further back in history from us than the Romans were. I don't know what the word for this is. It's beyond ancient. So that's just, I just want to, you know, contextualize it a little bit. So Schmidt had spent much of the previous decade working at a site called Navali Cori, a nearby settlement from 9,000 BC. there he had seen these T-shaped pillars

and here they were again under Potbelly Hill and just to be clear it wasn't excavated but he can like see the tops of them emerging through the hill and he can tell because he's seen them before if we excavated down the same pillars would be here and Schmidt said quote within a minute of first seeing it meaning the T-shaped pillars

I knew I had two choices go away and tell nobody or spend the rest of my life working here. He went with the latter. Pretty soon Schmidt had started excavating and carbon testing confirmed everything he had hoped for. The time period in which the construction of this structure had started was, as Siru said, beyond ancient. It's known as the Neolithic pre-pottery era, 12,000 BC.

So yes, they find Gebeckli-Tepi. It is at least 11,600 years old. That place is it a millennia and a half before it was believed that our ancestors were engaging in agriculture and this kind of thing wasn't thought to have been possible. This structure, Gebeckley-Tepi, was built by people who didn't have a written language, hadn't yet, like I said, started farming or domesticating animals, and who didn't yet have metal or pottery. And they've been, they built. Delta at a time when woolly mammoths and saber-tooth tigers still roamed the earth. I am becoming more and more convinced that I'm actually a reincarnated whale. But I saw a really great meme of a shark, which you all enjoy.

And you know the RSPCA have that like a Dogs for Life Not Just for Christmas campaign. Yeah. And it's this shark and he's like, I'm not a birthday present. I'm not a Christmas present. I'm a 400 year come in. The discovery of Gubeckli-Tepi pushed back the timings of which we believed our ancestors were capable of building such structures by nearly six millennia. This is what I mean is such a hard feel to be in archaeology where you're like, let's build an entire theory about human history based on what we have yet discovered. There is so much that is yet to be discovered.

Like I get it, science is the same, but it does blow my mind that you. you could have been in the pursuit of this theory of what hunter-gatherers were capable of, the way in which human history evolved, Gobekliatee comes along, pushes it by six millennia, and you're like, all right, okay, well, I guess hunter-gatherers were capable of much more than we knew. But is that it? Is that enough of a change of discourse? Mm.

And I do genuinely think, and I probably am being unfair, but it's dark and I'm sad. I suppose that element of it is that, you know, if they accept this rhetoric, their entire careers have been wrong. And again, it's like, is that detrimental to your career or have you just based it upon something that was shaped around previously existing knowledge? You know, I just feel like if it's science, then, yeah, you made these theories based on what you knew.

Now you've discovered something else, let's change it up. And I think maybe we'll just need to be a bit more open-minded. This drives me up the wall, even just in day-to-day interactions with people. It's okay to change your mind. That's fine. That's better. actually because it means that you're constantly analyzing. It just...

Anyway, because there's such a big gap between the previously discovered ancient megalithic sites on the same scale and Gubeckley-Tepi, and also because there's a lack of evidence at the moment, it might come of the evolution of hunter-gatherers to point that they could build something like Gbeckley-Tepi. It makes some people, like Big G. Hancock,

question where this number, knowledge came from. How did a bunch of hunter-gatherers seemingly out of nowhere build something as big as Quebec Leapie? This is one of the key things. It's like when you're looking at the evolution of animals, you're looking for the fossils that denote that evolution. And then when people, you can always keep pulling it out and they'll be like, where's the missing link? Where's that link between apes and us? You know, where is that that that's missing? Here, it kind of feels the same way. and this is where I do, you know, not take issue with Graham Hancock, but question what he's saying is like, he's saying because there's such a big gap between things like Gigantia and Gabli-Tepi and no evolution

of that kind of set of skills needed to build something like Gebeckley-Tepi during those millennia, how could these people just one day wake up out of nowhere and learn how to do agriculture, which, you know, people like Graham Hancock do think that there was agriculture happening around Gebeckley-Tepi, it may or may not be true. And the ability to build that. That knowledge must have come from somewhere else. Some other group of people must have come into that area. He's not saying aliens, just to be clear.

Some other group of people must have come into that area and shared that information with this group because they couldn't have just spontaneously realized how to do it. I know Graham isn't saying this, but I'm absolutely saying aliens. Now, obviously, like I said, we have not discovered everything there is yet to be discovered out there, archaeologically speaking. In recent years, a site even older than Gebekli-Tepi

has already been found just a few miles away from it. Karahan Tepe, which is already 300 years older, but it's not nearly as complex as Gebekli Tepe. Making Gebeckli Tepe still hands down one of the most important archaeological discoveries of all time. For many archaeologists and ancient historians, the site represents the beginning of human culture itself. And, as far as we know, right now anyway, the first ever great construction project in human history. construction on Quebec Leitepe and the surrounding sites ended around 8,000 BC. So, not only was this structure nearly 12,000 years old, it was also a multi-generational project. So given that the average life expectancy back then was about 35 years, I'm dead next year,

and this would have been a highly labour-intensive build, it's safe to say that these people were seriously committed to Quebec-Lepti's construction and pass significant knowledge and information down to their children and their children's children, all without any form of writing. So it must have been really important. But why? Especially since early evidence seemed to suggest that the people who built it hadn't actually lived at Quebec-le-Tepi. Most people think that it wasn't really a settlement but rather a seasonal meeting point.

But again, why is it so important? And again, just to cover our arses, there are our bodies. people who believed that people did live at Quebecli-TEPI. It's so hard to know because so much of it remains unexcavated like we said. I mean, it looks like a temple. Yeah. I'm like, danger, danger, danger, change it using these words. Like people are going to come for us. Like, I get it. It's so hard for us to know what the right word is to use for this, which is why we're going to use the word site, ceremonial site, maybe even. Yeah, it's really tricky to know what it is because people say, obviously nobody lived here. It wasn't a settlement because there's no rubbish.

There's no, you know, this, that and the other. They would indicate a long habitation of this space. But people have also said when they've started excavating further down, though the Turkish government has stopped that. That's a big, like, conspiracy theory in our self, which we can't get into today. People are saying that there is evidence people live there. I'm also like, this would have taken so long to build.

Some people must have been living there. But anyway, before we get into the why, why was this so important, why did they build it? Let's first talk about the what. What does Gebeckley-Tepi as a structure look like? Now, I'm going to be honest, we are slightly hampered here by being an audio-only format. And we don't often say this, but I am going to suggest that if you are able to, right now, please give Gebeckley-T-P-E a quick Google image search.

I'll spell it for you, G-O-B-L-E-K-I, space, T-E-P-E-P-E. Thank you. I was trying to spell Gwyneth Poutro the other day, and I couldn't do it. I hate it. And I just asked producer Alex, I was like, can you just spell it for me? me and he spelled it wrong multiple times and I just turned to him and I was like Alex I love you with my whole heart but I am so dyslexic and you are firing letters at me and I'm going to have a stroke no Google copy and paste is the only way so yes hopefully you have an image of

gobekletepe in front of you and if you don't don't worry I will explain it the best I can the site is made up of these circular enclosures of various sizes layered on top of of each other. The bottom layer, obviously, being the oldest, and that's why we don't know how old it is, because I think it's like, of what has been excavated, almost 50 times that is still under the earth. So if you haven't got to that bottom layer of this big lasagna of pre-ancient, whatever, how could we possibly know how old it is? But these enclosures that you see are made up of these standing stones. And these stones are all in the shape of teas. And, and, you know, and so are called the tea stones or tea pillars.

And if you look at them, they're very wide across, but also very, very thin to the side. And there are hundreds of them, over 200 make-up Quebecletepe. And these tea stones are made from local limestone, which would have been mined, maybe just like 100 metres or so, away from the site, and then dragged into place. The tea stones around the edge of the enclosure are about a metre or so tall, which would have been difficult to move into the circles that you see in Quebec-Cetepi. Especially given the level of technology that people would have had at the time, they didn't even have metal yet.

But each enclosure also has two very large T-stones at the centre. They're five metres tall. That's huge. And the stones are incredibly heavy. So yes, it would have been hard to move these stones, but not impossible. And yet again, the much more interesting question, is why? The sight screams of ceremony. I think it's very hard to get away from that fact, or that idea, I should say.

And so this immediately set those archaeological and historical bells ringing. The very idea that this could be some sort of religious monument built by hunter-gatherers completely goes against everything we thought we knew about religious monuments and about hunter-gatherers. Until the discovery of Gebeckley-Tepi, hunter-gatherers were thought to have lacked the sort of complex symbolic systems, social hierarchies, and the division of labour needed to build something like this. Three very important things you need before you can build a giant megalithic ceremonial site like this. And as for formal religion, it had been previously theorised that this had only developed after agriculture, when hierarchical social structures required an other-worldly story in order to keep

order and keep people bonded together in a community. But excitingly, what archaeologists found at Gebeckley-Tepi suggests that we may have got this entirely the wrong way round. And that perhaps our ancestors need to build sacred sites was what first compelled hunter-gatherers to organize themselves, specialize in skills, and also secure a stable food supply, to be able to spend long periods of time in one place building structures to their gods. So yeah, which came first, the chicken or the egg. We can never say for sure. But the discovery of Gebekli-Tepi and this kind of ceremonial site that wasn't purely a settlement,

whether people lived there or not, is not really the point, is the fact that it wasn't built as a town or a city. Flipped our understanding. We're going to give your brains a bit of a rest and slow down a bit because this is mind-blowing stuff. Calling Gebeckley-Tepi a religious site is. quite bold because nobody knows why it's there or what it was. Some people do say, like me, that it's a temple, the oldest one we've ever discovered. Some people say it's a memorial and others

say it's a place that provides a prophetic warning. But we're going to talk about the pillars a bit more before we go into that, the five meter pillars at the heart of each enclosure. They seem, and this is so exciting, to depict people, specifically men. If you look at them closely, you can see that the pillars have belts around their midsection and the outline of loincloths and crucially hands. But if all of these teastones represent men, if we're running with that, there's one thing that's missing. They haven't got any heads.

If you haven't got the picture in front of you, the T-Stone, looks like a broad male shoulder, like a set of shoulders, tapering down into a waist, and yet they have these carvings that really look like hands around the middle. It's crazy. But yes, no heads. And this has led some people to believe that perhaps this was the ceremonial site of a skull cult. A skull cult is basically a cultural tradition that involves the veneration of human skulls, often those of ancestors. So those who practice this skull cult, would remove the heads or skulls of a member of their group after death and modify it in some way with carvings, holes and dyes. The skull would then be displayed and

honoured, and a few skulls that had been modified like this, were indeed discovered at Quebec Tepe. And we also know that skull cults were operating in and around that area at that time. So maybe at one point all the tea stones had skulls on top of them, or maybe you're a historian and archaeologist and think I'm stupid. Just a theory. We are stupid, but also there's lots of things that nobody knows. Only a tiny fraction of Gebekli Tepe has so far been excavated, and even that small bit has already changed so much of our understanding of how we got here, mainly because Gebeckle-Tepi is a hugely sophisticated structure. It has carvings, reliefs and etchings on the service of

the stone pillars, depicting all sorts of things. things, leopards, lizards, lizards, snakes, vultures and jaguars. And interestingly, all of the carvings are animals that really exist, not mythical creatures. And also, the animals are male, suggesting that this site was special to men in particular and possibly in a somewhat spiritual way. And that means, potentially, we've misjudged the timeline of the emergence of religion. We had also totally misunderstood the skills that people who lived back then possessed. Their carvings are of an incredibly high quality and they're clearly not just random people having a go. They're done by artists. Which means there were people within the group that built Quebec Tepe who were specialised.

And that's fucking mad. The idea that 12,000 years ago, we're thinking of these people as just being hunter-gatherers. They're just foraging and killing in order to survive and that's all they're doing. scrabbling about in the dirt. That is clearly not true when you look at a site like Quebecli-TEPI. The idea that there were artisans, there were artists within the group, and they had that level of division of labour and specialisation is crazy. On top of this, archaeologists have also found signs that there was maybe some crop cultivation going on around Quebec-Tepi. This is debated, some say that there was no farming of crops or animals,

as all of the remains found within the site were of wild plants and animals, while others say there were indeed clear signs. I honestly don't know. But I think it's not a stretch to say that the people at Quebec-Depi, given that they're building this enormous, multi-generational, enormous megalithic structure, were experimenting at least with crop cultivation and domesticated animals. I don't think that's a stretch,

because, yes, the remains of those plants and animals found at the site may still look wild, but it takes a long time, before plants and animals move away from their wild ancestors into like a farmed situation. It doesn't mean they weren't doing it, if you see what I mean. But whichever it is, it's mind-blowing. Because either our ancestors started farming way earlier than we thought, like two millennia earlier than we thought, in which case the people who built Quebecletepe were aren't hunter-gatherers at all.

Or they weren't farming. In which case, these people were building megalithic structures as pre-farming communities, whichever of those is true is crazy. Not if you're an archaeologist, you can just ignore it. Let's get into the weird bit. Gebekli-Tepi was buried, and it was buried, intentionally. This blows my mind. You spend all that time, all that effort, all that labour, years building it,

and then they buried it themselves. And what's also interesting is, if you look at the different enclosures, as they go up, the different layers, they get worse. they get poorer in quality as they go up, which is really interesting. It's like the older the enclosure, the older the carvings, the older the workmanship, the better it is. As it gets later and later, the workmanship gets worse and then eventually they backfill it themselves. There are theories and they vary from they buried it just because they wanted to start again to they were covering it up so it would act as a time capsule to warn us in the future of an impending catastrophe. I've gone down a real great flood rabbit fucking hole and it's plaguing me.

Some historians have also pondered that the infamous vulture stone found at the site shows an ancient cataclysm. And they suggest that Gebeckle-Tepi is a memorial to the younger Dryas Comet Strike, but that strike itself is just a theory. Yeah. The vulture stone, as, you know, the name suggests, is basically just one of the stones that is there that has. has a depiction of a vulture. And for some reason, some people have connected that with this younger dryest comet strike, but it is literally a theory. We don't even know that there was a comet strike. I think it's called the younger dryest impact theory. There's not even proof that

happened. And also how does a vulture on a stone indicate that? I think it's because there's like a circle that looks like it's falling out of the sky, but seems like a bit of a stretch. There's so much in this like pre-ancient discovery that appears to be depicting some sort of comet strike. Yes. And I want to believe. I'm open to hearing all about it. I'm open to all the theories. I love the comet theory, but we'll leave it to one side for a second. Maybe it wasn't a comet, but the people of the era would certainly have been subject to a rapidly changing climate. So maybe they built Gebekletepe and then they buried it to plead with their gods to stop fluctuating the world that they lived in. Quite possibly. Like, if you go back and look at

that part of the Earth, 11,600 years ago, and the time that passed until they stopped building in that area, the Earth's climate was going mental, absolutely mental. And perhaps it was that when they started building it, it was a bit more temperate, they were building it to their gods. Again, I say that very scaredly, in some sort of cosmic, spiritual, whatever. And then the climate gets worse and worse and worse. And maybe that explains why the workmanship gets worse and worse and worse. Maybe they're under too much stress to continue building like their forefathers had done. And then maybe they backfill it as a sacrifice of something to be like, stop fucking ruining our area.

Maybe they leave. Maybe they bury it to safeguard it because they think they can leave and come back to it one day. We don't know. It's all just theories. But it is interesting that this site and all memory of it vanished from people's minds. It was truly lost to history to the ages until Klaus Schmitt. began his excavation. The other crazy, interesting thing about Quebec-Leod-Tepi

is that it is, so far, the world's first perfectly north-south-aligned building ever discovered. Bona. And this, look, whatever you think of what these people are up to, what it actually means, the fact that it is perfectly north-south-aligned, it has to be more than just a coincidence. It strongly suggests that the people who built it

had some understanding of astronomy. 12,000 years ago. Now, the pillars are supposedly aligned in a way that they would have framed the rising of the constellation serious at various points over the year. So some have suggested that the different animals shown in the carvings represent different constellations visible at the time. I find this one hard to buy because I'm like, look,

you're like, oh, there's a scorpion, it must be scorpier. We're assuming that 12,000 years ago, they were looking at the same jumble of stars. And look, you have to admit constellations, they're very open to interpretation. It doesn't actually look like a scorpion. What are the chances of 12,000 years ago, they looked at that's a scorpion and we thought the same?

Like, that seems a bit of a stretch to me. I have heard a theory which I like much, much more. I like the theory that the images of the animals found around the site at Gebekli-Tepi make the site itself represent a calendar of sorts because seasons, much more than like a vague interpretation of the stars matching onto ours, seasons could have been mapped out by animals and birds that these people would have encountered. Because animals and birds follow very specific patterns of migration, hibernation, reproduction. Those happen at specific times of year.

Because there was one female animal added later, it looks pregnant. Like those things happen at specific times of year. So maybe it was much more a calendar of that sort. While we don't know that much about the people who built Gebeckley-Tepe or why they did it, you have to admit it has to change how we view human history. And only four enclosures have been excavated so far. 18 are still underneath Pop-Belly Hill. And while Gebeckley-Tepi remains a mystery in so many ways,

it opens up the tantalizing question. What else is out there? I fucking love this. I love this stuff so much that I've grown a dick and it's got a burner. I love it. It's super, super interesting. Love it. Here for it.

Fascinating stuff. I think it's just, you know, it's fascinating purely because there's so much we don't know. And the thought that 12,000 years ago our ancestors were capable of doing something like that is really a very humbling thought and puts you once again at that feeling of like, I'm not the center of the universe. Look at all the things that have been going on. for millennia. It's fascinating. Absolutely. Like those people who built it 12,000 years ago had hopes and dreams and fears and died at 35. Yeah, I love it. I love it so much. And like, I know people

have got problems with Graham Hancock, but like, come at me, whatever. He's not well received by the archaeological community because he's essentially saying, you know, we've got it wrong. And I think the archaeologists are like, do you know how much work? How much work? work it is going to take for us to rewrite history, Graham. Yeah, I've watched a lot of interviews, debates, etc., featuring Graham Hancock and with more mainstream archaeologists. And look, I'm not an archaeologist. Neither is Graham Hancock, and he never claims to be. No, he's an author. He says, I'm an author. Yeah, I am a journalist and I look at this. I am investigating. And I'm also not a historian,

and I know lots of people listening all out. I know history and like, you're wrong about this, that and the other. Look, my. My point is when I watched those debates, I was like, archaeology, much like other fields similar, constantly does have to rethink assumptions or theories that are made because as they discover more things, they have to shift timelines, etc. But I do wonder why they're so resistant to Graham Hancock or people like him just theorizing about other things. They say, you haven't got the evidence to back that up. But I'm like, you are making claims about hunter gatherers that you didn't have the evidence to back up. or I guess you had the evidence to back it up, but you didn't know what else you didn't know, right? Because even Giganteer, take it, they were like, this is the world's oldest monument that we know about.

Then you find one that's like two and a half thousand years older. And we don't know, Gobeckley-Tepi right now isn't even the oldest, because since that was discovered, we've discovered even older sites. We only ever know what has been discovered up until that point. So I don't personally have an issue with Graham Hancock or people like him theorizing. What is the harm? I agree. I agree. if we are dedicated to the pursuit of the truth and knowledge, which is what academics claim they are,

that's what we should be doing. And you can't just throw a strap when someone is like, but have you looked at this? Because it doesn't really line up with what you've been saying. Yeah. And all you have to say is, look, the evidence doesn't back that up right now, but, you know, we're open to spitballing. So do want to say before we move on, what we're talking about here specifically is megalithic structures. because people would be like, there were definitely settlements while people were still hunter-gatherers and pre-farming. I get that. There were pre-farming settlements. That is true. People would get together so that they could forage more easily, hunt more easily, etc. What we are talking about here is pre-agriculture, megalithic structures being built. Yeah, the big shit. Absolutely. So that's it, guys. That is our shorthand on Gebekli-Tepi.

And yeah, we'll definitely do more of these. I think, you know, Giganteer is fascinating. Jericho is fascinating. I want to do the Great Flood. There's so much we can do on these kind of ancient groups. And I feel bad because all the way through this, we've just been like the people that built Quebec-Letepi is because they don't have a name. They haven't been given a name within archaeology or history

or whoever's responsible for giving them a name. They don't have a name. So it's just the peoples of them. The olden days is. Fucking incredible pastos. So yeah, we will see you next time for another short hand. Goodbye. Goodbye in the language that they spoke.