Archaeologists believe these Turkish ruins are a temple built at the end of the Ice Age.

Archaeologists rarely make bigger discoveries than the one that appears to have been recently made in Turkey. If educated assumptions prove correct, Klaus Schmidt and his crew may have discovered the very dawn of civilization in rock formations that were built more than 11,000 years ago. An excerpt from a Newsweek article entitled “History in the Remaking“:

“Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist [Klaus Schmidt] waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built.

The site isn’t just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization.

In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.”