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On one side of the hill, archeologists discovered an area that had been used as a quarry. This is where the huge pillars that dominated Gobekli Tepe were cut from the limestone bedrock.
Here's a pillar that never made it. This is the oblong of a head and here it narrows to the shaft. For some reason we'll never know it was abandoned while still half finished in the bedrock. And here, we've got the space where another pillar was successfully extracted. It really is amazing to think that these stones were cut out of the rock and carved with images using only flint tools. Metal didn't exist. And what's also remarkable is their size. Each one of them is about 20 feet long and weighs an estimated 50 tons. That means it would have taken about 500 people just to shift them up the hill.
Even the hill itself is man-made, but what's so important about this huge effort is the effect it had on the society that built Gobekli Tepe. 12 thousand years ago, hundreds of people traveled long distances to work and worship here. And they all had to eat. Back then, people throughout the world led the lives of hunter-gatherers, hunting wild animals, gathering wild plants. This way of life had successfully supported small groups of people since human first evolved. Today though, we feed large numbers of people by farming. We grow crops and keep domesticated animals. Agriculture is the cornerstone of our modern world. Archeologists had always wondered what made us give up our hunter-gatherer existence, what caused the agricultural revolution, the greatest change in human history. Gobekli Tepe got them thinking because it was in this area that farming first started and it happened at the same time this place was being built.
Could it have been the need to feed all the people building Gobekli Tepe and worshiping there that first compelled people to start farming? There is some convincing evidence. Scientists recently sought to discover where our modern cultivated wheat came from.
words to remember:
1. quarry: An open excavation or pit from which stone is obtained by digging, cutting, or blasting.采石场
a huge resource资源 : The book is an indispensable quarry of information
to extract by long-time careful searching采集 : quarry out genology from hundreds of sources
2. bedrock:岩床
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