Ancient plague helped determine genetics of the modern European, study says

[Lummy]

"It's always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That's just in human relationships." E. O. Wilson

Why is that? You mean psychologically valuable or what?

[Chris]

You'd think there'd have to be some concentration of people to build and maintain it.

This Archaeological Site Is Rewriting Our Entire Understanding of Human History

...The construction at Göbekli Tepe dates back almost 12,000 years, placing it in a time period that is generally considered to be pre-civilization. It was built right around the same time that the last ice age ended. Göbekli Tepe then went on to be an active civilization for nearly three millennia before being abandoned under mysterious circumstances around 9,000 years ago....

...The manpower, engineering, and project managing required for such an endeavor all seem unfeasible, given where human civilization was understood to be at the time. The very existence of Göbekli Tepe has forced archaeologists to re-think the dawn of civilization.

The sheer effort required to construct Göbekli Tepe made it a gigantic construction project even by modern standards. Hundreds of people would have been needed to erect the massive temples, and it would have taken them quite awhile, requiring the kind of social stability that just wasn’t expected of human life at that time. It also would have required some serious organization, which shouldn’t have been possible without a sophisticated social structure already in place....

...Humanity was only able to leave behind a life of hunting and gathering for food when the last major ice age ended. Before that, food was too scarce to allow humans to live anything but a semi-nomadic lifestyle. That’s what makes the fact that Göbekli Tepe was constructed at the time of, or before, the end of the last ice age so remarkable. Mankind was almost certainly still hunting and gathering at that time, which means that a bunch of hunter-gatherers were somehow organized and stable enough to build the massive structures at Göbekli Tepe....

Anyway, all of that is an interesting read.

[Mister D]

The first evidence for agriculture predates the structure by almost 10,000 years so I don't think we're necessarily talking about hunter gatherers. Perhaps this was a region where agriculture had already developed to some extent.

[Mister D]

We see a similar scenario around Stonehenge. People came from far and wide to both work and worship at the site. What the political relationship between the pilgrims might have been is unknown but it's possible there simply wasn't one.

[Peter1469]

The first evidence for agriculture predates the structure by almost 10,000 years so I don't think we're necessarily talking about hunter gatherers. Perhaps this was a region where agriculture had already developed to some extent.

I read an article that states evidence of wheat fields nearby dating too that era.

[Chris]

They would need some grain to sustain over years the 100s it took to build the temple.