It is in the centuries immediately following the end of the Younger Dryas that the Göbekli Tepe mound begins to show evidence of major monument building.

The timing is not coincidental: the early Holocene’s improving ecological conditions, combined with the accumulated social complexity of the late Pleistocene societies that had navigated the Younger Dryas, created the conditions in which large-scale communal projects became possible.

The people who built Göbekli Tepe were not starting from nothing.

They were the inheritors of a long tradition of sophisticated social life and communal organization.

The Natufians and Their Legacy