They precede every civilization we typically invoke when we think about the ancient world.

They precede Sumer.

They precede Egypt.

They precede the Bronze Age.

They stand in a period so remote that most people’s mental picture of “ancient history” does not extend to it.

And yet they are not alien.

They are recognizably human in their forms and in what they imply about the people who made them: beings who organized themselves, who cared about symbolic meaning, who returned repeatedly to the same sacred or significant place across generations, who looked at the stone faces of the beings they had carved and understood something we can no longer access.

Eleven thousand years is a long time.