Ethnographic parallels from many cultures around the world, including the relatively recent transport of large stones for monuments in various parts of the world, demonstrate that organized human labor can achieve extraordinary feats of stone-moving without sophisticated mechanical advantage.

The critical issue is not the specific technique of moving stones — plausible methods exist — but the social organization required to recruit, coordinate, and sustain a labor force large enough to accomplish the task.

Estimates of how many people would have been required to move a large Göbekli Tepe pillar vary, but working figures in the dozens seem reasonable.

Sustaining a workforce of that size at the site — feeding them, housing them, providing them with the tools and organization they needed — required exactly the kind of socially sophisticated coordination that the old model of hunter-gatherer life was supposed to preclude.

This is where Göbekli Tepe becomes philosophically challenging as well as archaeologically interesting.