Stonehenge is widely known as one of the oldest monumental stone structures in the world, but hunter-gatherer societies in southeastern Turkey built circles of T-shaped limestone pillars 6,000 years earlier, weighing up to 50 tonnes each and predating the

Stonehenge is widely known as one of the oldest monumental stone structures in the world, but hunter-gatherer societies in southeastern Turkey built circles of T-shaped limestone pillars 6,000 years earlier, weighing up to 50 tonnes each and predating the

In October 1994, a German archaeologist named Klaus Schmidt visited a hilltop near the city of Urfa in southeastern Turkey, in a region of rolling limestone uplands close to the Syrian border. Schmidt had been working at a nearby Neolithic site called Nevalı Çori and was searching the surrounding country for related sites that an earlier survey, conducted in 1963 by a joint team from the University of Chicago and the University of Istanbul, had …