Twelve thousand years ago, it was springtime on the planet. At the close of the last Ice Age, our forebears in Western Asia first began to outgrow their small, nomadic, hunter-gatherer, and pastoral societies. At the very dawn of village life, a settlement began to grow at a place in Upper Mesopotamia, presently southeastern Turkey. This center comprised an entire civilization, the earliest yet found. It might have remained lost and buried. But in 1995, a lone Kurdish shepherd stumbled upon finished stone poking from the dry terrain.

Over the next three decades, digging at Göbekli Tepe uncovered a Neolithic feasting site. In its first centuries, Stone Age people probably occupied the spot only seasonally, following or herding their grazing animals for the rest of the year. But later settled generations built remarkable, elaborate monumental structures. These included areas to gather and featured what may have been a “temple” complex.

Mysterious stone carvings endure from that era. These relics invite speculation. What kind of rituals transpired? How did they affect these pioneers? Without written records, though, we haven’t much to go on.

So. The mind travels. Reflexively, we imagine that the dim past also seems dismal. We're inclined to picture people in the ancient past huddled by torchlight against mortal threats—savage beasts and merciless invaders. But one discovery at Göbekli Tepe counters our inclinations. The digs uncovered stone troughs in which they found chemical remnants of fermented grain.

For the semi-settled people who first came in from the lonely wilderness, “civilization” meant “citification,” even if “cities” comprised only a few houses. People first gathered for the purposes of trading and grinding the newly mutated strains of plump nourishing grain that they........

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