Göbekli Tepe was built around 9500 BC, 6,500 years before Stonehenge.
More time separates them than separates Stonehenge from us.
The events
- Göbekli Tepec. 9500 BC · Southeastern Turkey. Rings of T-shaped pillars up to 5 metres tall, carved with foxes, boars and snakes, were raised around 9500 BC, before pottery, writing and apparently farming. The find upended the idea that fields and villages came first and temples later: it may have been the other way round.
- Building of Stonehengec. 3000 BC–2000 BC · Salisbury Plain. Neolithic Britons began a circular sanctuary on Salisbury Plain, raising its giant sarsen stones around 2500 BC. Aligned with the solstice sunrise and sunset, it is the most famous prehistoric monument in Europe.
More amazing facts
- 9500 BC · 2560 BC The Shigir Idol from the Urals was carved about 11,500 years ago. When the Great Pyramid was built, it was already almost 7,000 years old, older than the pyramid is today.
- 5050 BC · 2560 BC Chinchorro fishermen on the Chilean coast were mummifying their dead by about 5000 BC; their mummies predate Egypt's by some two thousand years.
- 3300 BC · 3200 BC Ötzi died in the Alps around 3300 BC, about when writing appeared in Sumerian Uruk.
- 2600 BC · 2560 BC The Peruvian city of Caral, with its stepped pyramids, flourished in the same age as Egypt's pyramids — more than 4,000 years before the Incas.
- 2560 BC · 2000 BC When the Great Pyramid of Giza was built, woolly mammoths still lived on Wrangel Island — the last of them died out only around 2000 BC.
- 2560 BC · 31 BC · 1969 Cleopatra (born 69 BC) lived closer in time to the Moon landing (about 2,040 years) than to the building of the Great Pyramid (about 2,490 years).