T-shaped limestone pillars in circular enclosures, carved with lions, boars, foxes, snakes and vultures, and some with arms, hands and loincloths, so they are figures rather than posts. Built between roughly 9500 and 8000 BC, which makes it among the oldest monumental architecture anywhere and older than pottery, metal or the wheel. The reason it rewrote textbooks: the people who raised it were hunter-gatherers supplementing their diet with early domesticated cereal, so the monument came first and farming followed, not the other way round. Fragments of human skull with deliberate incisions turned up in 2017. The enclosures were deliberately buried, which is why they survived. UNESCO listed it in 2018 and roughly 10 percent has been excavated. Şanlıurfa Province, Turkey.
Şanlıurfa, Turkey
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