The title of this post is a bit of an exaggeration, to say the least. There is a great discussion over at Reddit about this same article, I strongly recommend reading the highest rated comment.
This is why journalism is dying. I get a much more interesting and contextualized report from a comment on reddit (just stay away from the main page :) than I get from the article.
Synopsis is that there's a temple complex in Turkey that dates back 11,500 years, way before anything like it (6,000 years before stone henge, for example).
The earlier theories were that farming and animal domestication led to stuff like religion, since it made food more abundant and stable. This guy is saying, based on this finding, that in fact religion prompted them to build the temple complex, and the task of maintaining it prompted people to get clever about staying in one spot and supplying a population with food.
I'm not qualified to evaluate the merit of the claim, but hot damn those are old temples!
The "predates agriculture" bit is a little spun. Dates for the dawn of agriculture in the fertile crescent typically run about 12kybp. So this thing (if the dating holds -- often times new sites jump around a bit) would be contemporary. So the causality could still go either way, or you could posit a feedback situation I guess. Still a really important find.
This is a good opportunity for me to ask a question that has been bugging me for ages (eh, bad pun. :-)
How do sites like this get "buried"? I can understand how small objects might get lost and later buried in the soil, or perhaps get intentionally buried in a gravesite. I can also see how dinosaur remains might have been buried by geological processes over millions of years. But how do huge monuments or even cities get lost this way?
On the geologic scale, these things are very very recent, and I don't see how the Earth could have swallowed them up in such a short amount of time. There was another story in the news recently about an ancient road being re-discovered in Jerusalem. I never understood how such things get buried, and would appreciate it if someone could explain, thanks!
From Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage by Rathje and Murphy, a book which you have helpfully given me the chance to plug:
"The archaeologist C. W. Blegen, who dug into Bronze Age Troy during the 1950s, found that the floors of its buildings had periodically become so littered with animal bones and small artifacts that 'even the least squeamish household felt that something had to be done.' This was normally accomplished, Blegen discovered, 'not by sweeping out the offensive accumulation, but by bringing in a good supply of fresh clean clay and spreading it out thickly to cover the noxious deposit. In many a house, as demonstrated by the clearly marked stratification, this process was repeated time after time until the level of the floor rose so high that it was necessary to raise the roof and rebuild the doorway.'
"Eventually, of course, buildings had to be demolished altogether, the old mud-brick walls knocked in to serve as the foundations of new mud-brick buildings. Over time the ancient cities of the Middle East rose high above the surrounding plains on massive mounds, called tells, which contained the ascending remains of centuries, even millennia, of prior occupation. In 1973 Charles Gunnerson, a civil engineer with the U.S. Department of Commerce's Environmental Research Laboratories, calculated that the rate of elevation due to debris accumulation in Troy was about 4.7 feet per century. If the idea of a city rising above its gradually accumulating fill and debris at this rate seems extraordinary, recall... 'street level' on the island of Manhattan today is typically six to fifteen feet higher than it was when Peter Minuit lived there [circa 1600]; in some places it is as much as thirty feet higher. Nowadays, needless to say, the fill used in construction in Manhattan is not normally garbage, but Gunnerson calculated that if all of the garbage from Manhattan that is currently sent to Fresh Kills [landfill] and all the construction and demolition debris from Manhattan that is currently dumped at sea were instead spread out evenly over the island, the rate of accumulation per century would be exactly the same as that of ancient Troy."
None of this surprises a Bostonian; most of modern Boston is built on fill:
http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/b53f5/a_temple_comp...