Gobekli Tepe

Newsweek has a story about Gobekli Tepe, one of archeology's big mysteries. (ht) It appears to be a temple site, but it also appears to be so old -- about 11000 years old -- that it would predate systematic agriculture in the region (and occur at the very, very beginning of the millenia that constitute Neolithic agricultural revolution). This is extraordinarily anomalous; major construction of this sort is usually thought to postdate the rise of agriculture, and to find anything remotely like it you have to go several thousand years after it. It is sufficiently strange that one worries that it has been misdated -- but it seems not to be; and assuming that it is not, it requires a rethinking of our standard Stone Age timelines. See also this article at Smithsonian magazine; and Wikipedia actually has an unusually nice article on it.