The reenactors are busloads of tourists -usually Turkish, sometimes European. The buses blunder over the winding, indifferently paved road to the ridge and dock like dreadnoughts before a stone portal. Visitors flood out, fumbling with water bottles and MP3 players. Guides call out instructions and explanations. Paying no attention, the visitors straggle up the hill. When they reach the top, their mouths flop open with amazement, making a line of perfect cartoon O’s. Before them are dozens of massive stone pillars arranged into a set of rings, one mashed up against the next. Known as G6bekli Tepe, the site is vaguely reminiscent of Stonehenge, except that Gobekii Tepe was built much earlier and is made not from roughly hewn blocks but from cleanly carved limestone pillars splashed with bas-reliefs of animals -a cavalcade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and ferocious wild boars. The assemblage was built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. It contains the oldest known temple. Indeed, Grbekli Tepe is the oldest known example of monumental architecture -the first structure human beings put together that was bigger and more complicated than a hut. When these pillars were erected, so far as we know, nothing of comparable scale existed in the world. At the time of G6beldi Tepe’s construction much of the human race lived in small nomadic bands that survived by foraging for plants and hunting wild animals. Construction of the site would have required more people coming together in one place than had likely occurred before. Amazingly, the temple’s builders were able to cut, shape, and transport 16ton stones hundreds of feet despite having no wheels or beasts of burden. The pilgrims who came to Gobekli Tepe lived in a world without writing, metal, or pottery; to those approaching the temple from below, its pillars must have loomed overhead like rigid giants, the animals on the stones shivering in the firelight -emissaries from a spiritual world that the human mind may have only begun to envision. Archaeologists are still excavating Gobekli Tepe and debating its meaning. What they do know is that the site is the most significant in a volley of unexpected findings that have overturned earlier ideas about our species’ deep past. Just 20 years ago most researchers believed they knew the time, place, and rough sequence of the Neolithic Revolution -the critical transition that resulted in the birth of agriculture, taking Homo sapiens from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers to farming villages and from there to technologically sophisticated societies with great temples and towers and kings and priests who directed the labor of their subjects and recorded their feats in written form. But in recent years multiple new discoveries, Gobekli Tepe preeminent among them, have begun forcing archaeologists to reconsider. At first the Neolithic Revolution was viewed as a single event -a sudden flash of genius -that occurred in a single location, Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now southern Iraq, then spread to India, Europe, and beyond. Most archaeologists believed this sudden blossoming of civilization was driven largely by environmental changes: a gradual warming as the Ice Age ended that allowed some people to begin cultivating plants and herding animals in abundance. The new research suggests that the "revolution" was actually carried out by many hands across a huge area and over thousands of years. And it may have been driven not by the environment but by something else entirely. After a moment of stunned quiet, tourists at the site busily snap pictures with cameras and cell phones. Eleven millennia ago nobody had digital imaging equipment, of course. Yet things have changed less than one might think. Most of the world’s great religious centers, past and present, have been destinations for pilgrimages -think of the Vatican, Mecca, Jerusalem, Bodh Gaya (where Buddha was enlightened), or Cahokia (the enormous Native American complex near St. Louis). They are monuments for spiritual travelers, who often came great distances, to gawk at and be stirred by. Gobekli Tepe may be the first of all of them, the beginning of a pattern. What it suggests, at least to the archaeologists working there, is that the human sense of the sacred -and the human love of a good spectacle -may have given rise to civilization itself. The pillars of Gobekli Tepe are big -the tallest are 18 feet in height and weigh 16 tons. Swarming over their surfaces is a menagerie of animal bas-reliefs, each in a different style, some roughly rendered, a few as refined and symbolic as Byzantine art. Other parts of the hill are littered with the greatest store of ancient flint tools -a Neolithic warehouse of knives, choppers, and projectile points. Even though the stone had to be lugged from neighboring valleys, there are more flints in one little area here, a square meter or two, than many archaeologists find in entire sites. The circles follow a common design. All are made from limestone pillars shaped like giant spikes or capital T’s. Bladelike, the pillars are easily five times as wide as they are deep. They stand an arm span or more apart, interconnected by low stone walls. In the middle of each ring are two taller pillars, their thin ends mounted in shallow grooves cut into the floor. The T-shaped pillars are stylized human beings, an idea bolstered by the carved arms that angle from the shoulders of some pillars, hands reaching toward their loincloth-draped bellies. The stones face the center of the circle -as at a meeting or dance -a representation, perhaps, of a religious ritual. As for the prancing, leaping animals on the figures, they are mostly deadly creatures: stinging scorpions, charging boars, ferocious lions. The figures represented by the pillars may be guarded by them, or appeasing them, or incorporating them as totems. Bewilderingly, the people at Gobekli Tepe got steadily worse at temple building. The earliest rings are the biggest and most sophisticated, technically and artistically. As time went by, the pillars became smaller, simpler, and were mounted with less and less care. Finally the effort seems to have petered out altogether by 8200 B.C. Gobekli Tepe was all fall and no rise. As important as what the researchers found was what they did not find: any sign of habitation. Hundreds of people must have been required to carve and erect the pillars, but the site had no water source -the nearest stream was about three miles away. Those workers would have needed homes, but excavations have uncovered no sign of walls, hearths, or housesnor other buildings that archaeologists have interpreted as domestic. They would have had to be fed, but there is also no trace of agriculture. It was purely a ceremonial center. If anyone ever lived at this site, they were less its residents than its staff. To judge by the thousands of gazelle and aurochs bones found at the site, the workers seem to have been fed by constant shipments of game, brought from faraway hunts. All of this complex endeavor must have had organizers and overseers, but there is as yet no good evidence of a social hierarchy -no living area reserved for richer people, no tombs filled with elite goods, no sign of some people having better diets than others. Over time, the need to acquire sufficient food for those who worked and gathered for ceremonies at G6bekli Tepe may have led to the intensive cultivation of wild cereals and the creation of some of the first domestic strains. Indeed, scientists now believe that one center of agriculture arose in southern Turkey -well within trekking distance of Gobekli Tepe -at exactly the time the temple was at its height. Today the closest known wild ancestors of modern einkorn wheat are found on the slopes of Karaca Dag, a mountain just 60 miles northeast of Gobekli Tepe. Further research on Gobekli Tepe may change the current understanding of the site’s importance. Even its age is not clear -archaeologists are not certain they have reached the bottom layer. Two new mysteries come up for every one that has been solved. Twenty years ago everyone believed civilization was driven by ecological forces. Now Gobekli Tepe proves that civilization is a product of the human mind.According to the passage, the Gobekli Tepe site’s real importance is (). A. to prove that civilization is pushed forward not by environment but by agriculture B. Gobekli Tepe has overturned earlier ideas about our species’ deep past C. in ancient times, there was no good evidence of a social hierarchy D. the earliest rings are the biggest and most sophisticated, technically and artistically
The reenactors are busloads of tourists -usually Turkish, sometimes European. The buses blunder over the winding, indifferently paved road to the ridge and dock like dreadnoughts before a stone portal. Visitors flood out, fumbling with water bottles and MP3 players. Guides call out instructions and explanations. Paying no attention, the visitors straggle up the hill. When they reach the top, their mouths flop open with amazement, making a line of perfect cartoon O’s. Before them are dozens of massive stone pillars arranged into a set of rings, one mashed up against the next. Known as G6bekli Tepe, the site is vaguely reminiscent of Stonehenge, except that Gobekii Tepe was built much earlier and is made not from roughly hewn blocks but from cleanly carved limestone pillars splashed with bas-reliefs of animals -a cavalcade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and ferocious wild boars. The assemblage was built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. It contains the oldest known temple. Indeed, Grbekli Tepe is the oldest known example of monumental architecture -the first structure human beings put together that was bigger and more complicated than a hut. When these pillars were erected, so far as we know, nothing of comparable scale existed in the world. At the time of G6beldi Tepe’s construction much of the human race lived in small nomadic bands that survived by foraging for plants and hunting wild animals. Construction of the site would have required more people coming together in one place than had likely occurred before. Amazingly, the temple’s builders were able to cut, shape, and transport 16ton stones hundreds of feet despite having no wheels or beasts of burden. The pilgrims who came to Gobekli Tepe lived in a world without writing, metal, or pottery; to those approaching the temple from below, its pillars must have loomed overhead like rigid giants, the animals on the stones shivering in the firelight -emissaries from a spiritual world that the human mind may have only begun to envision. Archaeologists are still excavating Gobekli Tepe and debating its meaning. What they do know is that the site is the most significant in a volley of unexpected findings that have overturned earlier ideas about our species’ deep past. Just 20 years ago most researchers believed they knew the time, place, and rough sequence of the Neolithic Revolution -the critical transition that resulted in the birth of agriculture, taking Homo sapiens from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers to farming villages and from there to technologically sophisticated societies with great temples and towers and kings and priests who directed the labor of their subjects and recorded their feats in written form. But in recent years multiple new discoveries, Gobekli Tepe preeminent among them, have begun forcing archaeologists to reconsider. At first the Neolithic Revolution was viewed as a single event -a sudden flash of genius -that occurred in a single location, Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now southern Iraq, then spread to India, Europe, and beyond. Most archaeologists believed this sudden blossoming of civilization was driven largely by environmental changes: a gradual warming as the Ice Age ended that allowed some people to begin cultivating plants and herding animals in abundance. The new research suggests that the "revolution" was actually carried out by many hands across a huge area and over thousands of years. And it may have been driven not by the environment but by something else entirely. After a moment of stunned quiet, tourists at the site busily snap pictures with cameras and cell phones. Eleven millennia ago nobody had digital imaging equipment, of course. Yet things have changed less than one might think. Most of the world’s great religious centers, past and present, have been destinations for pilgrimages -think of the Vatican, Mecca, Jerusalem, Bodh Gaya (where Buddha was enlightened), or Cahokia (the enormous Native American complex near St. Louis). They are monuments for spiritual travelers, who often came great distances, to gawk at and be stirred by. Gobekli Tepe may be the first of all of them, the beginning of a pattern. What it suggests, at least to the archaeologists working there, is that the human sense of the sacred -and the human love of a good spectacle -may have given rise to civilization itself. The pillars of Gobekli Tepe are big -the tallest are 18 feet in height and weigh 16 tons. Swarming over their surfaces is a menagerie of animal bas-reliefs, each in a different style, some roughly rendered, a few as refined and symbolic as Byzantine art. Other parts of the hill are littered with the greatest store of ancient flint tools -a Neolithic warehouse of knives, choppers, and projectile points. Even though the stone had to be lugged from neighboring valleys, there are more flints in one little area here, a square meter or two, than many archaeologists find in entire sites. The circles follow a common design. All are made from limestone pillars shaped like giant spikes or capital T’s. Bladelike, the pillars are easily five times as wide as they are deep. They stand an arm span or more apart, interconnected by low stone walls. In the middle of each ring are two taller pillars, their thin ends mounted in shallow grooves cut into the floor. The T-shaped pillars are stylized human beings, an idea bolstered by the carved arms that angle from the shoulders of some pillars, hands reaching toward their loincloth-draped bellies. The stones face the center of the circle -as at a meeting or dance -a representation, perhaps, of a religious ritual. As for the prancing, leaping animals on the figures, they are mostly deadly creatures: stinging scorpions, charging boars, ferocious lions. The figures represented by the pillars may be guarded by them, or appeasing them, or incorporating them as totems. Bewilderingly, the people at Gobekli Tepe got steadily worse at temple building. The earliest rings are the biggest and most sophisticated, technically and artistically. As time went by, the pillars became smaller, simpler, and were mounted with less and less care. Finally the effort seems to have petered out altogether by 8200 B.C. Gobekli Tepe was all fall and no rise. As important as what the researchers found was what they did not find: any sign of habitation. Hundreds of people must have been required to carve and erect the pillars, but the site had no water source -the nearest stream was about three miles away. Those workers would have needed homes, but excavations have uncovered no sign of walls, hearths, or housesnor other buildings that archaeologists have interpreted as domestic. They would have had to be fed, but there is also no trace of agriculture. It was purely a ceremonial center. If anyone ever lived at this site, they were less its residents than its staff. To judge by the thousands of gazelle and aurochs bones found at the site, the workers seem to have been fed by constant shipments of game, brought from faraway hunts. All of this complex endeavor must have had organizers and overseers, but there is as yet no good evidence of a social hierarchy -no living area reserved for richer people, no tombs filled with elite goods, no sign of some people having better diets than others. Over time, the need to acquire sufficient food for those who worked and gathered for ceremonies at G6bekli Tepe may have led to the intensive cultivation of wild cereals and the creation of some of the first domestic strains. Indeed, scientists now believe that one center of agriculture arose in southern Turkey -well within trekking distance of Gobekli Tepe -at exactly the time the temple was at its height. Today the closest known wild ancestors of modern einkorn wheat are found on the slopes of Karaca Dag, a mountain just 60 miles northeast of Gobekli Tepe. Further research on Gobekli Tepe may change the current understanding of the site’s importance. Even its age is not clear -archaeologists are not certain they have reached the bottom layer. Two new mysteries come up for every one that has been solved. Twenty years ago everyone believed civilization was driven by ecological forces. Now Gobekli Tepe proves that civilization is a product of the human mind.According to the passage, the Gobekli Tepe site’s real importance is (). A. to prove that civilization is pushed forward not by environment but by agriculture B. Gobekli Tepe has overturned earlier ideas about our species’ deep past C. in ancient times, there was no good evidence of a social hierarchy D. the earliest rings are the biggest and most sophisticated, technically and artistically
题目解答
答案
A