Over the past five years, the mountaintop on the outskirts of Urfa has been reshaped once again. Until the civil war in nearby Syria disrupted tourism in the region in 2012, work on the site often slowed to a crawl as busloads of curious tourists crowded around open excavation trenches to see what some were calling the world's first temple and made it impossible to manoeuvre wheelbarrows on the narrow paths. Within a decade, the hilltop was totally transformed. Soon, people from around the world were flocking to see Gobekli Tepe for themselves. Breathless media reports called the site the birthplace of religion the German magazine Der Spiegel compared the fertile grasslands around the site to the Garden of Eden. Schmidt's take on the site's striking T-pillars and large, round 'special buildings' captivated colleagues and journalists when they were first published in the mid-2000s. But the site still had a sleepy, forgotten feel, with excavation areas covered by makeshift corrugated steel roofs and potholed dirt roads winding up to the mountaintop dig site from the valley below. Schmidt had just published his first reports on Gobekli Tepe the year before, setting the small world of Neolithic archaeology experts abuzz. And Schmidt didn't think anyone lived at the site full-time. More than 25 years after the first excavations there, there is still no evidence for domesticated plants or animals. The stone tools at the site, backed up by radiocarbon dates, placed it firmly in the pre-Neolithic era. Gobekli Tepe, Schmidt told me, turned that timeline upside down. Once they had a food surplus, the thinking went, they could devote their extra resources to rituals and monuments. Archaeologists had long thought complex ritual and organised religion were luxuries that societies developed only once they began domesticating crops and animals, a transition known as the Neolithic. The site, Schmidt argued, was a ritual centre, perhaps some sort of burial or death cult complex, rather than a settlement. Schmidt thought that small, nomadic bands from across the region were motivated by their beliefs to join forces on the hilltop for periodic building projects, hold great feasts and then scatter again. Turkey's mysterious portal to the universe.The Maya's ingenious sercret to survival.Once a pillar was carved out, they then shifted it a few hundred metres across the hilltop, using rope, log beams and ample manpower. And because the hill's limestone formations were horizontal layers between 0.6m and 1.5m thick, archaeologists working at the site believe ancient builders just had to cut away the excess from the sides, rather than from underneath as well. Limestone is soft enough to work with the flint or even wood tools available at the time, given practice and patience. The pillars are carved from the natural limestone layers of the hill's bedrock. Carving and moving the pillars would have been a tremendous task, but perhaps not as difficult as it seems at first glance.

New findings at stonehenge