In the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, the immediate region was probably better watered and more vegetated than it is today, following millennia of human impact on the landscape.

Wild game would have been abundant.

Wild cereals grew within easy reach of the site.

Water sources were accessible in the valleys below.

The Göbekli Tepe mound itself is artificial — built up over generations through the deliberate filling of older structures and the construction of new ones.

But the hill on which it sits is natural limestone, and the limestone would have been immediately recognizable to the people working there as the raw material for their monuments.

It fractured in predictable ways.