Klaus Schmidt himself proposed a specific and provocative thesis about the relationship between Göbekli Tepe and the agricultural transition: that the massive labor requirements of building and maintaining the site, and the need to feed the large groups gathered there, created pressure toward intensifying food production that eventually contributed to the domestication of wild plants.

In this view, ritual obligation came before and helped cause agriculture, rather than agriculture coming first and enabling complex society and ritual.

This “religion before agriculture” hypothesis attracted wide attention and became part of the popular story of Göbekli Tepe.

It is an elegant and thought-provoking argument.

But it has also been critiqued by other researchers who point out that the evidence for it is circumstantial, that the timing of agricultural development in the region is not clearly and specifically linked to Göbekli Tepe, and that the relationship between the site and the agricultural transition could be understood in multiple other ways.

More recent scholarship tends to emphasize the complexity of the transition and the difficulty of assigning causal priority to any single factor.